Not long after I met and wrote about Felix—a very social cat who is also known as the Mayor of Columbia City—this spring, he experienced a terrible and unknown accident that destroyed his left front leg. His human, Sophia Arellano, decided not to put him to sleep and spent a small fortune (over $4,000) to save his life. She received help from near and far. He had a long battle with death. He slowly recovered. He now has three legs.

When I recently visited Felix, I was surprised to see that, mentally, he was still the same cat. He did not care about me, but about the world I came from, which is outside of the apartment, and has the cafes, the bars, the parks, and the other bedrooms he loved to visit. I was also surprised to see he had adjusted to three legs and moved about without much difficulty. If you had not known him with four legs, you would have thought he had spent his whole life with just three. There was nothing in his manner and mood that indicated a missing limb.

But I could tell he wanted to find a way out of his Columbia City apartment. He constantly looked outside the window, or hopped to the balcony, and looked down at the street, at the passing people. His body and spirit were totally separated. And it seemed to me that he did not know why he was stuck in the apartment. He did not blame his disability. It was instead for him some kind of trick pulled by his humans (a mother and son). For much of his life, they had struggled to make him more domestic and less social. But he would only give them a small part of his time. The rest went to Columbia City and other parts of South Seattle. The look in Felix's eyes convinced me that he blames his imprisonment, not on his missing limb, but on the possessive love of his humans.

"I have noticed female cats looking up at my apartment," explained Arellano to me, as we watched the mayor watching the street and the autumn leaves from the balcony. "They know he is up there and are wondering why he won't come out. They miss him."