From leighann Mon Jan 13 12:07:11 1997 To: Subject: The Fiddler's Lament for Her Cat [Please 'scuse the shotgun approach; I figure anybody who'd care, besides the individuals, is on one of the above lists.] There's something about putting someone in the ground that lets even the deepest levels of your subconscious know that they're not ever coming back. It's a beautiful day today; brittle, clear, bitter cold. In my back yard, just above the water table, my old cat is sleeping the last long sleep, curled up under the clay. She was a fine cat with an unfortunate name, but Goofus is what her first owner called her (when, presumably, she was a kitten with more ambition than grace or good sense; the same could not be said of her as an adult cat), so Goofus she stayed. She belonged to my first real boyfriend, the one I was going to marry when I got out of college, but who died of cancer the day before my Commencement. She went to live with my mom after that, and stayed in the house I grew up in -- even, at one point, all by herself, after mom went into the hospital and later died. She came to live with my then-husband and I on the day of the East Bay Firestorm; we saw the flames in a wall behind the Claremont Hotel, and knew that if the Claremont went, there'd be no stopping the fire, so we took the important papers, and the cat, and removed them to our house further west in Berkeley. After David and I broke up, she stayed with David, even though I moved back into Mom's house (the fire didn't take the Claremont, as you may know, and never even came close to our house, though we got some intriguing and sad ashfall), because it seemed as though she'd had enough moving around. But when David married a woman who was allergic to cats, Goof came back to live with me. She was pretty uncertain when she came back; she'd been living in a house with another cat with whom she hadn't gotten along at all. She acted as though she didn't recognize me, and even went so far as to attack me when I tried to handle her. I was in something of a quandry as to what to do, and my poor Epona was just beside herself at the appearance of yet another cat -- it had been a little dicey when the cat we call "piglet" came to the house, but because the Pig is deaf (white cat, blue eyes; genetic thing), she didn't respond to Epona's verbal abuse, but just went about her business in the self-absorbed way she has, and eventually Pony realized she was no threat. Not so with the Goof, and the two had really hellacious swearing and cuffing matches for about a year, until things settled down into a sort of armed truce with Goof as the top cat. (I wonder what Pony's going to do now after she realizes that the old Goof really isn't going to be around any more?) Anyway, I was finally able to get close to the Goof by remembering what her first person used to say to her, and I could hear his intonations in my own voice as I said to her, "Just *look* at that nasty cat. How is my nasty cat?" She was about the furthest thing from a nasty cat you'd ever want to meet; but she remembered that (and maybe him, though with a cat you never know) with me, and we bonded again. That old cat has been a thread running through so many hairy transitions of my life, the one constant thread in that tapestry -- a soft black one, like cashmere wool. She bound up 15 years of my life, always around somewhere, in my joy or my pain. She was a great cat. She loved to ride around on my shoulders -- a habit she picked up from Greg (the one who died). She happily accepted being flopped on her back in my lap to have her tummy rubbed. She was a complete love-sponge, friendly and affectionate even to houseguests she'd never met. She tolerated being bathed with a good grace and few complaints. In fact, grace was her trademark as an adult cat. She was much too high on her dignity to play with ferrets when she came to live with me for the last time, but in prior years she'd been a great dancer in play, and a pretty good mouser when she lived in San Francisco when I first met her. She was a beautiful cat, with long black fur and big paws with tufts of fur between each toe, all black even to the whiskers, with golden-green eyes. She was talkative, and would purr at the drop of a hat. I found a small lump under her skin when I was rubbing her belly one day last November; I had the vet over right away to look, but he said that with her bad history with anaesthesia it would probably be worse to operate than not. Then a couple of weeks ago, I noticed she'd lost weight, and by the time the vet came, she was hardly eating at all. He palpated her abdomen and found lumps everywhere. The only thing left to do was to make her comfortable for as long as it took. That afternoon, after the vet left, I lay down on the couch with her on my chest, and cuddled her until well after it got dark. I think she knew it was just time. A few days ago she stopped eating completely. She spent most of her time asleep in my computer room (the warmest one in the house these days). She was sweet and affectionate to the last; when she had lost strength in her hind legs and couldn't move around, she still had enough energy to press her head into my hand in a demand to be petted *right*there*. And she just sort of wound down. Saturday night, she was a longish time waking up when I walked in; I whistled like a California quail -- the way the first Greg used to call her to him -- and she roused up briefly; I petted her and talked to her for a while, and then went upstairs to sleep. So now the sweet black kitty who braced me up through the deaths of two of the most important people in my life has herself died. And a bunch of memories lie under earth in my back yard, watched over by the Green Man on the back fence. The shamrock-shaped sourgrass leaves were all shut tight against the cold this morning, and there were little frozen puddles here and there; but there are fresh green shoots on the plum trees against the back fence, and the hills are all green. It's going to be a beautiful spring, I think, and it's been such a wet winter that there may even be a bumper crop of plums. This year I'll eat them in rememberance. Thanks for listening, - Leigh Ann