Cat Owner Becomes Dog Dude, 2014

Prelude– My Life With A Sequence of Cats…

I have pretty much always had cats in my apartment or house, since college. Diring Junior High and High School, I grew up with Spooky and Fuzz— one a grey tiger cat we found one Hallowe’en who lasted with us, and later kept my dad company, for 19 years… and the other a beautifully ruffed female tuxedo cat who turned into the prototype Russian princess, plump and vain, wanting her belly to be rubbed whenever you passed by.  Fuzz had the softest fur I’ve ever felt on any kind of cat, and she loved to let you stroke it.

Once on my own I had twin male cats dubbed Lucius and Rufus, the latter of whom was the only feline I ever found willing to go not only on nature walks with me, but whom actually would follow when I cross-country skied, hopping in the wake of my trail.  I was crushed when each of them respectively disappeared during my early twenties, when I rented a rustic shack in Greenfield Center.  If you don’t “fix” your male cats, I learned, they are prone to taking off on their own once the dark urges strike. 

In my extended bachelor years I co-habitated with two fine and intelligent creatures named Smudge— pure white with a touch of ash on her forehead– and Ruckus, another female who was the perfect “writer’s cat”– perched Buddha-like on the edge of my desk, loving the clack of my typewriter keys, how quaint that seems now, in the age of largely quiet keyboards.  They lasted from my funky bohemian pad on the backside of a Nelson Ave. house where I rented, and made it well into my early family years on Locust Grove Road, when we sprouted a couple more children to join in with my stepson and wife, Melinda.  The cats had grudgingly relinquished, or rather shared, my devoted attentions to other people, babies and toddlers to follow, but never really forgave me for giving up our idyllic (for them, anyway) bachelor-with-cats lifestyle we enjoyed in town.  They enjoyed the 1/2 lot bordering on a farm, with its monster willow tree, great for climbing and perching… and they caught more mice and shrews and other small rodents than they ever would’ve found on the manicured eastside of Saratoga.

As with most cats, they required very little in the way of full-time maintenance– other than feeding them twice a day, giving them water and then a bit of milk now and then, and some regular petting and low-key affection on the couch while I was reading or watching hoop,
there was precious little to worry about.  I could go about my work and play, come and go all day, without “worrying what they were up to…”  It seems so easy in retrospect.

  In my apartment I had a litter box to deal with, of course, but once on the fringe of town with the bigger yard in the first home we bought, these civilized pets would just let us know when it was time to go out, and discretely conducted their business, no muss no fuss, and we never seemed to see it.  When Smudge was about a dozen years old, however, our proximity to a very busy country road caught up with her, and the squeal of brakes and a thud one day, with a subsequent knock on the door from a distraught but conscientious driver, led me to see her prone body and blue eyes glazing over in front of me, and I sobbed for most of the rest of that day as I buried her next to the blue spruce in the front yard.   Ruckus never seemed the same after that, always skittish around me and the kids, like she didn’t belong there anymore, and sadly she met the same fate, in almost the same spot, a few months later.  After that, we stopped with having cats for a spell.  We had enough to deal with on the home front with 3 boys to raise, and then a baby daughter.  Pets were a luxury we did not need at that time.

When my dad died in May of 2001, however, my sisters came up from Atlanta and Bolinas, CA respectively for the services and reception, and on a nostalgia trip down to Ravena where we had grown up, and then out in the country of Alcove and Coeymans Hollow where we’d had many friends, we came upon an old abandoned farmhouse that Kara wanted some pictures of… it was classic old clapboard, covered with vines but had the best collection of fragrant lilac bushes that late May in upstate could bring.  While cutting off a few clusters, a soul-full meow emerged from the undergrowth, and a loveable little kitten came our way– I scooped her up and named her Lilac, and she rode home with us back to Saratoga, on my shoulder, purring the whole way.  My daughter at 3 and a half was then old enough to appreciate such a pet and Lilac became a beloved part of the household for two and a half years hence.  When we moved to our new, much bigger, more distant home in Middle Grove, however, Lilac also took off into the adjacent woods and never came back, like my male cats in Greenfield Center had done, albeit this one had been neutered.   Bella’s grief was sad to behold.  A few months later, our first spring in the new home, Bella and Miles talked to me into visiting the Adirondack Save-A-Stray shelter in Corinth, “just to look.”  My wife and Daryn were off on a school trip to Boston.  Well, just looking led to the inevitable.  In a raised ranch full of about 200 fee-roaming cats vying for or ignoring our attention, there was one, in a cage, who seemed smarter and more intent on getting a new owner than all the other jaded foster pets combined.

She looked a lot like my original FUZZ cat– sleek black everywhere except for the white neck and belly, and her face had eyes that bore right into mine as we passed by, and she reached out as if to say “You gotta get me outa here, man!”  Behind her in the cage was apparently her brother, a more laid-back version, just laying there, yawning and unconcerned.  It turned out they had been unceremoniously dropped off in the driveway the night before, and had not been acclimated to the rest of the cat population yet, in this mewling cluster of unclaimed felines.  Having viewing the entire harem of furry creatures, some affectionate, some prickly, we went back and claimed the 2 we saw first as we entered, and released them from their temporary cage.  Kelsey was the female who got our attention, and Mello was the cool and casual male, and in 2004 they came home to join us, as the “two cats in the yard” that Crosby, Stills, and Nash had sung about back in the ’70’s. 

Flash forward 10 years….  Kelsey is still with us, now just as plump as Fuzz ever was, well-fed and handsomely rewarded for her audacious sales pitch back at the shelter.  Up until recently, she ruled the interior roost– adorning whatever bed or piece of furniture she wanted, lounging like a Kardshian, as if her supposed beauty entitled her to eat and sleep with impunity.

Mello was always more of an outdoor guy.  The woman who ran the shelter of course cautioned us not to let either of them roam freely outdoors when we signed the “agreement” to adopt them.   “We do not save these cats just so they can become coyote food!”  she sternly warned us.  I had lived in the city and on the edge of town and in the deep country, and my cats had always been allowed to go outside, I told her, and I wasn’t about to de-claw them and let them become effete.  That was not their nature, in my mind, and I was not an old lady.  She scolded me some more and we made our donation and left.

Mello came and went as he pleased for a good four years or so.  In a neighborhood of a few leashed dogs, he walked down the median with his tail held high, and galloped away safely if the dogs ever got loose and chased him.  He laughed at their dog nature.  He stayed out all night, and caught many vermin– mice, moles, shrews, voles, and even, much to my chagrin, chipmunks and small rabbits.  He was the top f the food chain for a while, until the day when I’d heard quite a commotion overnight and found him the next morning, in shock and not moving, under the deck, his tail dis-engaged.  Took him to the vet to find out that he’d been attacked by a fox, most likely, or a wild dog, who had yanked his tail out of his socket and caused internal injuries.  Life in the wild had caught up with him.  “National Geographic” in our own backyard, I called it.  He was never the same, and his tail never rose striaght up behind him again.  A year or two later, at a time when we’d adopted another barn cat named Mika and watched her have a quick litter, he felt a bitter jealousy that he wasn’t the alpha cat anymore, and also disappeared one night– we think in a meeting with that same fox who almost did him in the first time.  Another sad passing of one very cool cat, and perhaps the male cat I’d bonded with most closely in my life.

The barn cat Mika was a reluctantly accepted gift from a neighbor, and she was at least half-feral, so wasn’t allowed in the house much, mostly living under the back deck.  She, I swear, bred with a strange lynx I had seen briefly on the edge of the deck at twilight one evening… and when she bore a litter of four kittens, we named one female Minx, one male Binx (a gorgeous blondish-red cat), and gave the other two away before attaching names.  At one time, during the cruel recession, we were feeding five cats or more on a daily basis. 

Long story short, Minx is still with us.  Mika ran off into the wild– perhaps looking for that Lynx again?– after we spayed her, and that money was not well spent.  Binx was beloved by both my sons, but was just like Mello in that he always wanted to be outside, and never cared much for domestic affection and the life of hearth-&-home. He only lasted a year with us before succombing to the predators of the wild out back, we think.  His passing made both my sons cry, and Daryn still perpetuates his image and memory on his laptop’s screen-saver.
He could’ve been the coolest of them all, and was the most distinctive looking of any we’ve owned.  I still deeply regret not getting him neutered early on, and making a domesticated male house cat out of him– but would HE have wanted that?

So now, or at least up until May 31st of 2014, we had just the two surviving cats– Kelsey a vintage 2004 model, and Minx, born in April 2009 as the runt of the 1st litter Mika gave us.
Minx has become the closest approximation to Smudge and Ruckus I’ve had, as a cat who will camp lightly on my chest as I nap on the couch, riding the slow waves of my ribcage breathing.  Like the venerated Mello and her sorely-missed brother Binx, however, she prefers the outdoor world to the comforts of indoors, aside from thunderstorm weather, or winter blizzards.  Her fur is also just about as soft as Fuzz’s was.

Kelsey remains intelligent yet aloof.  She considers herself as entitled as any Millennial teen.  Her eyes are the most compelling of any non-human creature I’ve met, but only Daryn feels the deep bond with her as a pet– the rest of us not so much.

Which leads us to the dilemma of this past May…