Cat

TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR CAT

Standard

 

IMG_3108

[A LONG SHAGGY CAT STORY]

Ten thousand dollars is how much I spent on Sophie last spring. And she wasn’t my favorite cat.  Laying out that much money – in four installments, to be fair – was a major financial event for me. It took almost all the discretionary cash remaining in the private little slush fund I’d set aside for travel when I retired fourteen years ago. Together with frequent flyer miles, ten thousand dollars could have paid for two more modest yearly trips abroad – after which I‘d have been too old to enjoy hobbling around the world anyway.

So how could I have?  Put simply:  I couldn’t not have.

Even though she’d been a disappointment from the get go. For starters, she came with sticker shock. Sasha, my other cat — from the same breeder three and half years before — had cost $1200. Sophie’s price was $1500. Sasha had been adorable as a kitten. (She’s still gorgeous.) When ten-week Sophie arrived, she looked like a little rat. She was also a highly neurotic kitten. She’d been the runt of the litter, smaller and weaker than her seven sibling kittens. Because they’d kept her from nursing, the breeder had to feed her by hand. Safe from the killer seven with me, she was still afraid to eat. At mealtimes, she would look at her bowl longingly, lick her mouth and run away, creeping back in stealth only when she was sure Sasha  — who in any event had her own bowl and no interest in Sophie’s — wouldn’t attack her for eating.

Eventually her appearance improved. At six months, she did look like a cat. But a $1500 cat?  Candidly, no. She had a pointy chin, not typical of the breed, from which water from the drinking bowl perpetually dripped. Her head was smaller than Sasha’s, and her fur less fluffy. She had baldish spots beneath her ears. Even more distressing cosmetically, her eyes bulged. The vet shrugged off the eyes. He didn’t quite say “Suck it up.” But that’s what he meant. Moreover, her pupils were closer to the top of the eyeball than to the center, giving her a perpetually mournful look.

She did wash herself nicely, and had no accidents outside the litter boxes. But she covered her productions therein with such furious digging that litter sprayed all over the bathroom floor. (God forbid an enemy in the apartment discover her whereabouts from a whiff of her poop or pee.) She also had the unpleasant habit of taking a mouthful of wet food (when she finally worked up courage to approach a bowl) and then depositing it on the floor or rug, eating it from there in tiny bits but not entirely.

She didn’t really play, except with one cheap wand and one tunnel – ignoring all the other cat toys and equipment decorating my living quarters.  Unlike Sasha, who investigated everything, Sophie had no intellectual curiosity. She ran away when you tried to pet her. She never came for cuddles.  The one thing she truly loved in all the world was Sasha, the dominant cat of the two, who almost always graciously licked Sophie’s head and ears if they met in the apartment but otherwise kept her distance.  Whenever I came home from outside, Sasha would run to greet me at the door (if she wasn’t already waiting on the hall table). Sophie didn’t care about me. She came running because Sasha would be there.

In short, an unrewarding cat.  And not the sharpest tool in the box either. Who did she think was the food source anyway?

Because she was so standoffish, it took a few days to realize her left eye was half shut and oozing.  At first I thought the eye was partially gummed together from fluid, but whenever I tried to soften the gumming with a warm wet washcloth, she pulled away. A traveling vet came to the apartment. She said it was a corneal ulcer, “common in flat-faced breeds with pronounced eyes.” She also explained Sophie wasn’t opening her left eye because it hurt when she did. It would need to be treated with antibiotic eyedrops four times a day for ten days.

In the vet’s dreams!  I was living alone now, with no one to help. Sophie was not only skittish but had prominent and needle-thin dew claws. I was taking heavily advertised Eliquis, apparently the blood thinner par excellence for clot prevention, the one cardiologists, including mine, fly to like iron filings to a magnet. I would be bleeding non-stop all over the apartment at each attempt to bring an eyedropper near Sophie’s eye. But untreated, the infection would spread. Long story short: I was to try hiding the antibiotic in Sophie’s food, a method the vet admitted was of dubious effectiveness. And if that seemed not to be working, either because it didn’t get eaten or the eye didn’t improve, Sophie would need further treatment that Ms. Traveling Vet couldn’t provide. She gave me the name of the nearest veterinary surgical hospital – “nearest” meaning forty minutes away – and the name of the surgeon she recommended.

Whatever minimal amount of antibiotic I managed to trick picky Sophie into swallowing had no effect on the eye. An acquaintance in my building who had constructed her retirement years around adopting elderly cats with medical problems knew the back-roads way of avoiding hated Route 1 to reach North Star Vets (“Veterinary Emergency Trauma & Specialty Center”).  She offered to give up the better part of a day driving us there, waiting for the diagnosis, and then bringing me (or hopefully us, meaning me and Sophie) home again. When I protested gratefully, she explained it was actually for Sophie, not me. She really did love cats!

This was a year ago last February.  Until then I had no idea there were surgeons who performed only small-animal opthamological operations. Until then, I had no idea how much small animal surgery, and billed-by-the-day hospital recovery, would cost.  Dr. V. – the recommended surgeon – was very kind. She regretted there were no miracle shots. The infected part of Sophie’s eye would need to be surgically cleared away. (I immediately felt guilty I hadn’t brought her in sooner.) Fortunately, the infection hadn’t yet reached her cornea.

There were two ways to deal with it. The first, a keratacomy, would address the present infection but not necessarily prevent such a thing from happening again. However, it would leave her vision and her appearance unimpaired. The more extensive procedure, called “conjunctival flap surgery,” did prevent recurrence 90% of the time. It would involve lifting a flap from behind the eyeball and bringing it forward to cover the cleaned part of the eye. It would save all her vision, but there would be a slight blue haze over her eyeball, “hardly noticeable except in certain lights.”  I had to decide there, on the spot, what I wanted Dr. V. to do. I could tell she was leaning towards the more extensive procedure, despite the blue haze. But I was thinking “more extensive” meant more expensive. I was thinking we could always address future problems in the future. I was thinking why blue haze until absolutely necessary?  I asked how much a keratacomy would cost.

A line-by-line estimate was prepared while my accommodating friend in the lobby waited. It was extensive, since it also included a three-to-four week recovery period, termed “medical boarding,” during which Sophie’s eye would receive, at North Star, all the post-surgical painkillers and medications her inept owner was unable to administer. North Star overlooked no detail. In addition to her medical care, every meal of Science Diet Sophie would be offered was listed. I would also pay $12 for the surgical collar that would keep her from pawing her eye. The “low” estimate was $5,187.14. The “high” estimate was about $1,000 more. I would need to pay half the “low” estimate before Sophie could check in.

Was there an alternative?  Dr. V. looked sad. “We could remove the eye. That’s a simpler surgery, costs less, and heals faster. Cats can live long and happy lives with one eye.” We were all in the examination room together, Dr. V., Sophie curled up at one end of her carry case with the top open, and me. I looked into the carry case. Sophie hadn’t asked me to buy her and bring her home with me. She had never asked for anything, except to be licked by Sasha. Her idea of happiness might be different than mine. But she was a warm living breathing little creature entirely dependent on me for food, warmth, shelter and care. For everything really. Suddenly, despite her weeping half-shut eye, she looked beautiful. Much more beautiful than money, or another trip abroad.

I went with the keratacomy – the surgical alternative I thought might cost less and look better. As the cashier processed my credit card for half the low estimate, I did ask, “What about people without savings?  Do their animals have to be put down?” (Shame on me for even having the thought.) The cashier looked shocked. “They charge it and pay over time,” she said firmly.

Sophie came home last March.  When my cat-loving friend and I arrived at North Star to pay the balance due and collect her, the technician who brought her out exclaimed how “sweet” she was.  One of the sweetest cats they’d ever had boarding with them, she declared.  Everyone working there used to take her out of her “cat condo” – a two-story cage that invited climbing around — and pet and play with her whenever they had a little free time.  One had declared she’d adopt her in a nanosecond if she ever became available.

My Sophie, sweet?  Had she preferred medical boarding to me? Was she sweet only with others? Where there was no dominant Sasha to commandeer attention?  I resolved to make future efforts to be more fair. To divide the cookie more scrupulously into two equal halves.  (A metaphor originating in having once raised two small boys.)

A wise decision. In the next few months – strengthened in any resolve to assert herself by the unremitting favoritism she’d experienced at North Star medical boarding, and supported by increased cooing from me – Sophie became perceptibly less neurotic about hiding herself from person-produced pleasures. She stopped running away from the food she wanted to eat, and merely circled the area several times while scouting for invader cats before deigning to lower her head to the bowl. She left the expensive living-room chair where she’d formerly spent much of her life sleeping curled up on a protective towel and explored some of the nooks and crannies of the apartment. (Linen closet, open shower door, under the kitchen sink, all replete with interesting-to-the-feline-nose smells.)

She even began to spend some parts of some nights at the bottom left corner of my bed. (The right side of me was Sasha territory.) From there, she once or twice moved to my prone body and, if I were flat on my back with legs extended together,  visit my mid-section to push down regularly with her two front paws – the pumping movement very new kittens use on their mama cat to bring on the milk. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, especially with a full bladder. I nevertheless glowed with pride in the dark. I was becoming Sophie’s mama!

Alas! I’d also made a less wise decision. Driven in February by trivial concerns like money and Sophie’s appearance, I’d chosen the keratacomy over the more comprehensive surgery Dr. V. implied was the better option. In May, Sophie’s left eye returned to half-mast and began to weep again.  This time I skipped the traveling vet. My cat-loving acquaintance with back-road expertise was summoned. She was willing. (Although admittedly, when pressed, she was additionally willing to accept a bottle of expensive French sauterne by way of thanks.) Moreover, I’d been wrong that the keratacomy might save me money.  The conjunctival flap surgery – although presumably a more difficult and delicate operation — turned out to cost only $200 more, even with the anesthetic and weeks of medical boarding and antibiotics and painkillers and Science Diet and new surgical collar added in. And candidly, the so-called “blue haze” was barely visible when she came home last June; after a month it disappeared, at least to the lay eye which was mine.

There must have been even more petting, playing and favoritism during Sophie’s second stay at North Star. This time she came home a quite different cat. Almost at once she staked out her claim to being a full and equal participant in a two-cat family. The crap with the feeding bowl disappeared. Every morning she now waits at the kitchen doorstep to be served, and immediately lowers her head to what is offered.  Whenever Sasha jumps up to the kitchen counter to be brushed, Sophie scrambles up to be brushed too, and often pushes Sasha out of the way.  Whenever I sit in the center of the sofa, Sasha has always taken the left side. Sophie now takes the right. She initiates crazy running-up-and-down-the-apartment games. She accompanies Sasha along the hall with me to the Trash Room, where “we” dump garbage in the garbage chute and put recyclables in their barrels; it’s also an opportunity for her to do some delicious floor sniffing. At night, I now get time-shared. One comes to the bed, the other goes. And vice-versa. It makes for some broken nights, but also for feeling loved.

Some people look for lessons in their life experiences.  Formerly, that might have included me. But I’m not sure what the lesson is here.  Money isn’t everything? You never can tell? (Both clichés, but true. And applicable.)  The love you take is equal to the love you make?  (Thank you, John and Paul.)  Four months shy of eighty-nine, I feel it’s time to stop thinking about what life teaches and live it now.

“Now” – as I write — is coronavirus lock-up time.  Just me, Sasha, and Sophie alone together in a reasonably spacious one-bedroom apartment with den and a small outside balcony for fresh air.  So nothing to complain about. No small children to be home schooled, no working at home in an overcrowded space, no squabbles with a formerly loved one. And in these parlous times, I also have the benefit of what Sophie’s infrequent bedtime milking routine has morphed into during the ten months since her second stay at North Star.

Now, at least three times a night, she comes regularly to me from her corner at the left bottom of the bed. If I’m not on my back, I obligingly roll into that position as soon as I sense her careful approach. She may do a few exploratory paw pushes into my clitoris when she arrives on top of me. Then she settles down – tail towards my feet, little head between her paws on my upper pelvis. (With arms extended, I can just reach to stroke her silky cheeks and below her chin.) The center of her weight, all twelve pounds and two ounces of her, is right on my crotch, heavy, breathing and warm.  It’s been more than four years since there’s been anything heavy, warm and alive pressing down on that particular area of my anatomy. It feels wonderful. Sophie enjoys it, too. I hear a low rumbling purr.

Five or ten minutes, that’s all it lasts.  Then she’s had enough and jumps off, too soon for me but I know she’ll be back.

How priceless is that?

IMG_3134

 

WRITING SHORT: 50/50

Standard
[Summer heat is fading away. Although this last of my short summer posts has run before, it seems a good way to end.]

Our cat Sasha pushes back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrives at my side of the bed, miaows once to announce her presence, and waits for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful. She has a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back towards Bill and pat the mattress.  “Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She considers.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the bowls against the wall; head for the set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window, where she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — and collapses against me, at just the right spot for me to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

Then she gives a half-turn for my hand to do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me. She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please. All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She’s happy.

I’m happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other—our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

(Reblogged from November 18, 2013)

WRITING SHORT: 7/50

Standard
[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

Sasha our cat has been spending the latter part of these summer nights curled up on the desk chair in my office, nose tucked between her paws. The chair has a cool mesh seat and likely smells of me. Between eight and nine in the morning she then comes down the hall to our bedroom, whether or not we’re still sleeping, for a belly rub.

But since I began these daily shorts, I’ve been waking earlier than usual to draft a new one while the house is quiet and my mind still in touch with whatever is inside it. When I came to my desk this morning, the chair was therefore occupied. Rather than dislodge a sleeping cat, I gently rolled chair and cat away from the desk and sat myself in front of the computer on a backless, not comfortable, ergonomic “thing” usually pushed aside into a corner of the room.

Crazy cat lady? Perhaps. Except Sasha was not insensible to my largesse. As I began to type, I heard low contented purring behind me. The perfect soundtrack for blogging.

A KIND OF HEAVEN (A REBLOG)

Standard

[When TGOB was new last November, this was the fourth piece I posted. Everything in it remains true. Bill and I are now one year older than when I wrote it, but we’re still here.  Keep your fingers crossed…. ]

*****

 If I’m lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation. I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress. “Hi Sasha. Hi sweetheart. Come on. Come on up, Sosh.” I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it. She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no. This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants. Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me. Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down. Claws in, her paws manipulate me. She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher. I obey, a lover wishing only to please. All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr. She is happy.

I am happy, too. I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever. (Don’t say anything. I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours. Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

TIM KREIDER AND HIS CAT

Standard

Tim Kreider is a satirical cartoonist based in Baltimore, Maryland who gradually moved into writing essays. By now he may be mainly writing them, but that’s neither here nor there.  In August of this year, The New York Times published a Kreider piece on its Opinion Pages called “A Man and His Cat” that, as the co-owner of two cats, I thought so good I saved it to read again and again. No cat photo. No cat cartoon. Just Kreider words on the page.

Kreider is in his mid-forties and apparently, as he implies in his piece, divorced. Images on the web show him looking like what used to be my type, when I was young enough to have a type. But that’s also neither here nor there, and has not in any way influenced my opinion of “A Man and His Cat.” I had the opinion before I went hunting up the images. I acknowledge I am shirking my duties as a blogger by giving over a whole post to the words of another, words which have already appeared in print for an immeasurably larger audience than I could ever dream of reaching.  Call me lazy, or incredibly generous. I should probably also add that if you hate or even dislike cats, or are allergic to them, maybe you should leave now and come back tomorrow or the next day. The rest of you: here’s almost all of it.  Enjoy.

A Man and His Cat by Tim Kreider. August 1, 2014.

I lived with the same cat for 19 years — by far the longest relationship of my adult life.  Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm, pleasant weight of the cat on my chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it was Cat Food Time….

The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman, the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother’s ghost.

I realize that people who talk at length about their pets are tedious at best, and often pitiful or repulsive. They post photos of their pets online, tell little stories about them, speak to them in disturbing falsettos, dress them in elaborate costumes and carry them around in handbags and Baby Bjorns, have professional portraits taken of them and retouched to look like old master oil paintings.  When people over the age of 10 invite you to a cat birthday party or a funeral for a dog, you need to execute a very deft etiquette maneuver, the equivalent of an Immelmann turn or triple axel, in order to decline without acknowledging that they are, in this area, insane.

This is especially true of childless people, like me, who tend to become emotionally overinvested in their animals and to dote on them in a way that gives onlookers the creeps. Often the pet seems to be a surrogate child, a desperate focus or joint project for a relationship that’s lost any other raison d’être…. When such couples finally have a child their cats or dogs are often bewildered to find themselves unceremoniously demoted to the status of pet; instead of licking the dinner plates clean and piling into bed with Mommy and Daddy, they’re given bowls of actual dog food and tied to a metal stake in a circle of dirt.

I looked up how much Americans spend on pets annually and have concluded that you do not want to know. I could tell you what I spent on my own cat’s special kidney health cat food and kidney and thyroid medication, and periodic blood tests that cost $300 and always came back normal, but I never calculated my own annual spending, lest I be forced to confront some uncomfortable facts about me. What our mass spending on products to pamper animals who seem happiest while rolling in feces or eating the guts out of rodents — who don’t, in fact, seem significantly less happy if they lose half their limbs — tells us about ourselves as a nation is probably also something we don’t want to know. But it occurs to me that it may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn.

I’ve speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object — a child or a lover, a parent or a friend — they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book “On Aggression,” in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

Although I can clearly see this syndrome as pathological in others, I was its medical textbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I did not post photographs of my cat online or talk about her to people who couldn’t be expected to care, but at home, alone with the cat, I behaved like some sort of deranged arch-fop…..There was a litany I recited aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that began, “Who knows, Miss Cat, what fantastical adventures the two of us will have today? I had a song I sang to her when I was about to vacuum, a brassy Vegas showstopper called “That Thing You Hate (Is Happening Again). We collaborated on my foot-pedal pump organ to produce The Hideous Cat Music, in which she walked back and forth at her discretion on the keyboard while I worked the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembled the work of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with aleatory passages and unnervingly sustained tone clusters.

I never meant to become this person. My own cat turned up as a stray at my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay when I was sitting out on the deck eating leftover crabs. She was only a couple of months old then….She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling, and I gave her some cold white crab meat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat is effectively adopting that cat.

For a few weeks I was in denial about having a cat. My life at that time was not structured to accommodate the responsibility of returning home once every 24 hours to feed an animal. I posted fliers in the post office and grocery store with a drawing of the cat, hoping its owner would reclaim it. It seems significant in retrospect that I never entertained the possibility of taking the cat to the pound.

When I left for a long weekend for a wedding in another state, my friend Gabe explained to me that the cat clearly belonged to me now. I protested. This was a strictly temporary situation until I could locate a new home for the cat, I explained. I was not going to turn into some Cat Guy.

“How would you feel,” he asked me, “if you were to get home from this weekend and the cat was gone?”

I moaned and writhed in the passenger seat.

“You’re Cat Guy,” he said in disgust.

It’s amusing now to remember the strict limits I’d originally intended to place on the cat. One of the boundaries I meant to set was that the cat would not be allowed upstairs, where I slept. That edict was short-lived. It was not long before I became wounded when the cat declined to sleep with me.

“You’re in love with that cat!” my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat. People would comment on it. My friend Ken described her as “a supermodel cat,” with green eyes dramatically outlined in what he called “cat mascara” and bright pink “nose leather.” Her fur, even at age 19, was rich and soft and pleasant to touch.

Biologists call cats “exploitative captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up — by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing a single claw on my lip. She refused to drink water from a bowl, coveting what she believed was the superior-quality water I drank from a glass. I attempted to demonstrate to the cat that the water we drank was the very same water by pouring it from my glass into her bowl right in front of her, but she was utterly unmoved, like a birther being shown Obama’s long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. In the end I gave in and began serving her water in a glass tumbler, which she had to stick her whole face into to drink from.

Sometimes it would strike me that an animal was living in my house, and it seemed as surreal as if I had a raccoon or a kinkajou running loose in my house. Yet that animal and I learned, on some level, to understand each other. Although I loved to bury my nose in her fur when she came in from a winter day and inhale deeply of the Coldcat Smell, the cat did not like this one bit, and fled.  For awhile I would chase her around the house, yelling, “Gimme a little whiff!” and she would hide behind the couch from my hateful touch. Eventually I realized that this was wrong of me. I would instead let her in and pretend to have no interest whatsoever in smelling her, and, after not more than a minute or so the cat would approach me and deign to be smelled. I should really be no less impressed by this accord than if I’d successfully communicated with a Papuan tribesman, or decoded a message from the stars.

Whenever I felt embarrassed about factoring a house pet’s desires into major life decisions, some grown-up-sounding part of me told myself, it’s just a cat. It’s generally believed that animals lack what we call consciousness, although we can’t quite agree on what exactly this is, and how we can pretend to any certainty about what goes on in an animal’s head has never been made clear to me. To anyone who has spent time with an animal, the notion that they have no interior lives seems so counterintuitive, such an obdurate denial of the empathetically self-evident, as to be almost psychotic. I suspect that some of those same psychological mechanisms must have allowed people to rationalize owning other people.

Another part of me, perhaps more sentimental but also more truthful, had to acknowledge that the cat was undeniably another being in the world, experiencing her one chance at being alive, as I was…. [I]t was funny — and funny often means disquieting and true — to remind myself that there really was another ego in the room with me, with her own likes and dislikes and idiosyncrasies and exasperatingly wrongheaded notions about whose water is better….

I admit that loving a cat is a lot less complicated than loving a human being. Because animals can’t ruin our fantasies about them by talking, they’re even more helplessly susceptible to our projections than other humans. Though of course there’s a good deal of naked projection and self-delusion involved in loving other human beings, too.

I once read in a book about feng shui that keeping a pet can maintain the chi of your house or apartment when you’re not there; the very presence of an animal enlivens and charges the space. Although I suspect feng shui is high-end hooey, I learned when my cat was temporarily put up elsewhere that a house without a cat in it feels very different from a house with one. It feels truly empty, dead. Those moments gave me some foreboding of how my life would feel after she was gone.

We don’t know what goes on inside an animal’s head; we may doubt whether they have anything we’d call consciousness, and we can’t know how much they understand or what their emotions feel like. I will never know what, if anything, the cat thought of me. But I can tell you this: A man who is in a room with a cat — whatever else we might say about that man — is not alone.

Tim Kreider’s first book of essays is called “We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons.” It went on my new Kindle after I finished my second reading about his cat. If you haven’t got a Kindle, it’s also available in paperback.  Just saying….

A KIND OF HEAVEN

Standard

[Re-blogged from November 18, 2013]

If I am lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress.  ”Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me.  Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me.  She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please.  All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She is happy.

I am happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.

A KIND OF HEAVEN

Standard

If I am lucky, our cat Sasha may push back the slightly open door of our bedroom in the early morning, arrive silently at my side of the bed, miaow once to announce her presence, and wait for me to peer over the side at her. She is beautiful, with a large round head, piercing lemon-yellow eyes and a slight silver sheen to her bluish grey fur.

Silly girl. She thinks she needs an invitation.  I inch back a bit towards Bill to make more space between me and the edge, and pat the mattress.  “Hi Sasha.  Hi sweetheart.  Come on.  Come on up, Sosh.”  I use my talking-to-a-young-child voice, perfectly serviceable in another context forty-odd years later.

She thinks about it.  She might still decide to make for the litter box in the adjoining bathroom; get a drink or a snack from one of the two bowls against the wall; head for the Shaker-style set of chairs tied together to make a bench by the double window. There she can look out under the light-proof shade to the leafy street.

But no.  This time it’s me and my obliging right hand she wants.  Up she jumps into the waiting space, turns around once, twice — sometimes three times — then collapses against me.  Her head is towards the foot of the bed, but at just the right horizontal meridian for me slowly to stroke her silky forehead, deeply furred cheeks, velvet ears, and whole delicious length all the way to the thick tail extended against my cheek.

After a while she gives a half-turn so that my hand can do her belly, a paradise of angora down.  Claws in, her paws manipulate me.  She knows exactly where she wants it — up, down, between the spread legs, not quite there, a little higher.  I obey, a lover wishing only to please.  All of her vibrates with a low rumbling purr.  She is happy.

I am happy, too.  I lie on my back, eyes closed — right hand on her, left hand clasped in Bill’s — enveloped in creaturely security. I feel his even breathing along one side of me, hers along the other against my midsection — all of us warmly wrapped in quilt, conjoined, our three hearts beating steadily.

I want it to last forever.  (Don’t say anything.  I know, I know.) And sometimes, since neither Bill nor I need jump to the ring of an alarm, it does last — if not forever, at least for a couple of hours.  Sasha falls asleep, my hand stills, imperceptibly Bill and I doze off, in the comfort of a time-suspended dream.