Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Sign of a Cat



Sign of a Cat 

I didn’t grow up around people who had a great affection for cats. In Roby, cats are half wild. And more coincidental (as in “He just wandered up one day”) or utilitarian (as in “Not much to look at, but, man, she’s a good mouser”) than companionable. Nobody in my family really held cats or played with them. “House cat” was a special term applied to the odd feline who got to come inside. Sometimes. No such thing as a cat who didn’t go outside at all. I never knew anyone who had a litter box until I was grown.



When I met JB he had a black and white cat named Babe.  After Paul Bunyan’s blue ox.  Though I recognized that JB was fond of Babe, I didn’t understand it in the same way I understood love for a dog.  To tell the truth – either because of my raising or some essential shortcoming in me -- I probably really didn’t even view cats as capable of a loving relationship.  Needless to say, I didn’t forge a bond with Babe myself.  I didn’t dislike her.  It just didn’t occur to me to interact with her.  Since she apparently felt the same about me our relationship was a non-issue. 

I lived with her for twelve years though.  She remained, throughout that time, JB’s cat.  He petted her, played with her, made fun of her, talked to her, teased her.  And when she disappeared, he mourned her in a way I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even grasp.  By that time, Nick was four or so and one of the division of duties JB and I had unconsciously adopted as young parents was this:  I was in charge of children; JB was in charge of pets.  We were both pretty happy with the division.  JB was devoted to our animals – two dogs – Pecos Bill and Thalia: Babe; a tank full of fish; occasional lizards or other wild animals foolish enough to be captured by a pre-schooler.  And JB seemed perfectly happy to basically nod and say uh-huh when I obsessed over Nick’s fine motor skills or signed us up for a parenting class. 

We lost Babe and both dogs in the span of a few months.  Thalia died of old age.   Pecos Bill, who had always been as wild as his namesake, went a little wilder when she died.  He got out of the yard one day, which was a common occurrence since escape was his on-going mission in life; only that day JB never tracked him down eating garbage or chasing squirrels a few blocks away, and Pecos Bill never came back of his own accord.  A month or so later, JB was driving his pick up to work and heard a cat meowing.  He stopped at the corner of Airport and Lamar, got out, and looked to see if Babe or another cat was stowed away in the bed of the pick up.  He didn’t find any sign of a cat so he scratched his head and went on to work.  We never saw Babe again, though.  JB went back to that intersection with flyers.  He walked that neighborhood and ours searching for Babe.   He was already going to the Town Lake Animal Shelter every week to look for Pecos Bill so he started touring the cat cages there, too.  He never found either one of them.  

We went a year with no warm-blooded pets until finally for Nick’s fifth birthday JB and I decided to surprise him with a dog. We ended up choosing a beautiful two-year-old female golden retriever named Bo.  On the way home to an unsuspecting Nick with Bo panting behind us in the backseat, JB turned to me, tears brimming his eyes, and said, “I feel as if a hole in my heart has been healed.”

When JB died two years later, one of the great, uncalculated tragedies was the loss the pets endured.  I never came close to filling his shoes.  I wasn’t even doing a good job with my designated responsibility -- the child.

Bo lived for another nine years and gave birth to a litter of puppies, one of whom Nick talked me into keeping in spite of the fact that I didn’t think we were taking good care of the animals we had.  Nick named the puppy Moon.  Short for Moonstone.  The other two pups in the litter he named Garnet and Sapphire, a sweet homage to JB who was a jeweler and collected gemstones.


Moon was a goofy, galumphing puppy when I started dating Kent.  There was something so hopeful about living with a puppy.  Moon’s cheerful optimism still seems to me all wrapped up with the great blessing of falling in love with Kent who healed a hole in all our hearts.  


A few years ago, when it seemed clear that Moon was nearing the end of his life, Kent and I started talking seriously about getting another pet.  Bo had died a few years earlier.   Neither of us wanted to be without a pet.  But we weren’t sure we were ready for another dog.  Yet. Kent was coming up for a sabbatical at the end of his term as Associate Dean and we wanted to take an extended trip tacked on to the study abroad course I was scheduled to teach in Spain.  Finally we decided on a lower-maintenance pet for the immediate future.  We’d get a cat. It would be easier to arrange care for a cat while we traveled.  Then we’d think about a dog when the sabbatical was over.

So that year when my birthday was about to roll around, I told the kids that what I wanted was a cat.  Unfortunately Lana and Emily, who, like JB, love animals as much as Tony Soprano does, were both in Boston so they couldn’t participate directly in the selection, but the rest of us -- Nick , Josh, Kent and I – all went together to the Town Lake Animal Shelter on the day before my birthday to pick out a kitten.   I didn’t tell anyone, but I really wanted a black and white kitten.  Like Babe.  I didn’t tell anyone because it seemed unfair to Kent for me to want a cat that looked like my dead husband’s cat. 

 Kent remembered meeting JB at a party at Debi and Lynn’s one New Year’s Eve.   JB was reading tarot cards for people.  I didn’t meet Kent at that party; I don’t remember meeting him until years later.  I don’t think he and JB could have exchanged more than a few words.  Still Kent thought of JB as a friend.  That’s the kind of guy Kent was.  He thought of people he liked as friends even if he’d only spent moments with them.  On top of that he wasn’t jealous.  So he never seemed to view JB as a rival.  On the other hand I think he suspected that I loved JB more than I loved him.  That that young love was truer.  Stronger.

When you divorce you put away the pictures of you and your ex.  Box up the sentimental souvenirs.  Get rid of the reminders of a love that didn’t work out.  It may take a while, but everyone pretty much agrees that that’s the right thing to do.  Make a clean break with the past.  With a death, it’s different.  You keep the pictures out so that your child will remember what his father looked like.  What it looked like to be held by someone whose touch is now forgotten.  What his mother and father looked like together.  And to remember that yourself.

After I married Kent, I used to dream that JB came back.  I would be so confused in the dream, kicking myself for having forgotten I was already married to someone when I married Kent.  I didn’t know what to do.  There was no taking back that I was married to Kent.  And I didn’t want to take it back.  But there was no taking back that I was married to JB, too, and that I didn’t want to take that back either.  It was agonizing.  There was no solution.  I couldn’t choose between them.  And the thought of rejecting either of them was impossible.  There was not even relief in waking, because the only pleasure of the dream – that JB was back – would be taken away.

Friends and family who came to the house and saw the pictures of JB in my study would sometimes comment on them.  Sort of warily as though even acknowledging their presence was tricky.  They’d ask if Kent minded.  Or they’d see the altar with JB’s boots beside it and say something about how tolerant Kent was.  But I couldn’t throw those things away as though that love hadn’t worked out.  As though the marriage had failed.  As though I was angry with JB and didn’t want to have reminders of him around.  Kent never mentioned the burden himself.  He never seemed uncomfortable with the memorabilia from another marriage.  He went with Nick and me to JB’s grave every year on the anniversary of JB’s death.  If he spoke of JB, he spoke as though they regarded each other fondly.  But still it caused me confusion, and I’m sure it did Kent, too.  And it was clear that to the world it seemed odd – maybe even disrespectful to Kent -- that I would keep JB present in my life.  

The truth, waking or sleeping, though, was not that I loved Kent less than JB.  I just loved them both.  I knew that it seemed unfair or unacceptable.  That the living are not supposed to have to share with the dead.  But I couldn't help it.

So I didn’t tell Kent that I wanted a black and white cat.  I didn’t mention Babe.  I didn’t remind Nick or anyone else that Babe was black and white.  But secretly that was what I was looking for the day before my birthday at the Town Lake Animal Shelter. 
 We went through all the cat cages.  So many cute kittens it was overwhelming.  Is there really any to chaff to separate from the wheat when it comes to kittens?  We were in the last wing of the cat cages.  I had stopped to look at some kittens that were white with a few black markings -- thinking that they were sort of a mirror image of Babe, maybe not quite as blatant a replica as what I had in mind -- when Kent called to me from the caged room he was sitting in across the aisle.  I looked over to see a full-grown black and white cat rubbing up against Kent’s legs.  Kent was very purposefully not touching the cat.   Instead, he was sitting with hands at his side – proof that he wasn’t manipulating the situation -- watching attentively as the cat climbed into his lap and made himself at home.  Kent looked over at me and smiled his big smile.  Turned out the cat was an eight-year-old male named Romeo.

Romeo.  JB and I had spent hours when we were first falling in love trying to come up with an anagram that would weave our names together.  The one we finally settled on was Dickie Romano.  That’s all the letters in Moore and Kincaid rearranged. Who knows why we wanted an anagram? We were doing a lot of other foolish things at the time.  Like sitting on the same side instead of across from each other in restaurant booths.  Writing poems for each other.  Telling each other every single dream we’d had the night before.   Fixing each other breakfast in bed.  Trying to guess what color or number the other was thinking of.  The anagram was just one more labor of love and we went through dozens of other options before we settled on Dickie Romano.  I knew from that process that Romeo is an anagram for Moore.    

I can’t say that there was no discussion after we first laid eyes on Romeo because there was.  We all thought eight was too old.  The math was inescapable: he wouldn’t live that long.  No question that a kitten was a better emotional investment.  So we went home without a cat that day, but that evening Kent and I kept coming back to Romeo.  When I finally said that maybe the point in adopting a pet was not just to serve yourself, but to help an animal that no one else was going to help, that cinched it.  We both knew that an eight-year old cat was less likely to be adopted than just about any cat we’d seen that day.   So on top of getting the cat we both really wanted, we got to feel virtuous about the sacrifice we were making in taking a cat with such obvious shortcomings.  The next day, Kent and Josh and Nick went back to the Town Lake Animal Shelter where JB had searched for Babe and Pecos Bill all those years ago, filled out the paper work, and brought Romeo home to me for my birthday. 

I know that this will sound like the hysterical idolatry the living always have for the dead, but Kent and I neither one could ever have imagined how crazy we would be about Romeo.  He was without a doubt one of the most charming -- if not THE most charming -- creatures, human or otherwise, I have ever known.  And that is something that I said about him while he was living.  Kent would nod in agreement when I said it.  We were both in awe of Romeo and our own good fortune in finding such a great pet.  Romeo didn’t have the typical cat qualities that had made me doubt the psychological trustworthiness of cats my whole life.  He wasn’t aloof.  But he wasn’t needy either.  Later, when I started writing a song to memorialize him, I’d start with that.

Romeo was a good lover
He gave his heart and soul
He didn’t play hard to get
He wasn’t needy; he wasn’t cold.

Not only that, he had a sense of humor.  I’m not kidding.  He would occasionally just collapse from an upright position and fall over sideways.  Kind of like the guy on a tricycle in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.  He did it on purpose although the first few times you saw it, you’d think it was an accident or a catastrophe.  A carpenter working in the house called Kent one day at work to tell him that he was afraid something was terribly wrong with Romeo because he had just fallen down for no apparent reason.  But nothing was wrong and it wasn’t accident.  Romeo was just playing – doing something between flirtation and a prat fall.  As funny as Buster Keation.  As charming and self-deprecating as Cary Grant.  Kent was trying to train him to do it on command.  Romeo wasn’t a trick cat though.  He knew the fall worked because of the element of surprise.

A few years ago, when my old friend, Amy, met Nick for the first time since he’s grown up, I overheard her tell Nick, “your dad was wicked funny.” She was right.  JB could frame reality in a way that was spot on and unexpected and irreverent all at the same time.  Like calling Steel Magnolias "Beyond the Valley of Terms of Endearment" or referring to the God of the New Testament as The Big Muffin or interrupting the oncologist who was tactfully explaining brain cancer to us back at the beginning of JB’s diagnosis, to ask, “Are we talking drool cup, Doc?”   I am sure that if JB were alive today, he’d be doing comedy open mics around Austin.  Maybe he’d be professional.   If he were a cat, he would know how to time a prat fall.

On top of being funny, Romeo was tender.  He was not just looking for affection; he was giving it.  He would come sit in your lap and rub your chin or forehead with the top of his head.  Or he would nestle into the space between your arm and your side, hiding his head, in a way that made you feel both loving and beloved.  Or he would reach out and touch you with his paw while you were standing by the chair getting ready to go. When Moon was dying, Romeo would lie beside him, getting up occasionally to rub his head against Moon’s.

Now I’m not Juliet
But I long for a love that deep
As boundless as the ocean
As ripe for dreams as sleep.

And he was polite.  He would sit in a chair at the dinner table while we ate.  Sometimes he would put his front paws on the table, but he would never climb on the table.  It was as though he was emulating how we were positioned.  Joining us for a little fellowship around the table.

         
  
I know.  I know.  It sounds like I’m making a lot out of a little.  But Kent saw it too.  If anything, he loved Romeo more than I did.  Romeo would go to Kent as soon as he walked in the door, and Kent would walk around the house holding him.  When Kent sat down at the computer to work, Romeo would wrap himself around Kent’s shoulders.  In bed, Kent would make a space for Romeo in the crook of his arm, and Romeo would ease into the space and sleep there all night.   I’d be snuggled up to Kent on one side; Romeo on the other.

 Before Romeo got sick, Kent and I were actually talking about taking Romeo with us on a weekend getaway to the hill country in the spring.  We’d just take Romeo in a cat carrier with us to a pet-friendly b & b we knew about, set up a litter box when we got there, and hang out.  Just the three of us.  But Romeo died before spring had a chance to roll around.  It’s a mystery why.  The vet says maybe he drank some anti-freeze.  We had him for a year and a half. 

We were grief-stricken.  I curled up in the crook of Kent’s arm and cried every night when we got into bed without Romeo.

Sometimes love goes under cover
Gets poisoned or lost to war
Wish Romeo hadn’t died so young
Wish he’d lived to love some more.

When Moon died eight months earlier, it was expected.  He was old.  He was having a hard time getting around.  He was uncomfortable.  Always panting.  Always hot.  Couldn’t get up by himself sometimes.  Stumbled trying to get off the porch.  Death for him seemed like a relief from inability and discomfort.  There were no rewards in Romeo’s death.  It was unexpected and random and unfair.  My mother and father were both sick at the time, and I reflected some on how different an unexpected death is from an expected one.  On how hard it is to turn on a dime.  And how different it is to die when you’re old, when your children are grown, than it is to die when you’re young and your son is six.  Like JB, Romeo was ripped from us when we were still expecting so much more.  When we still had plans.

I told Kent that I was choosing to believe that Romeo could come back from the dead.  That I was sick of bowing to death.  I was going to keep believing that Romeo could return to us.  Who knew what things were possible? I started writing a song.  It was going to be a protest of death. 

Romeo was a true lover
His gaze was like a kiss
I pray and still hope someday
He’ll come back from the abyss.

Kent was always telling me I should write a funny song.  I was always trying to.  I think we both hoped a song about Romeo would have some humor in it.  I swear to God I have a good sense of humor, but put me to writing a song and I’m as serious as a heart attack.  Or anti-freeze.  One more thing I can’t seem to help.   The best I could do was achieve a little ironic subtext that really no one but me would get since, until today, I was the only one who knew I wasn’t just conflating my cat and the Shakespearean lover; I was weaving JB in there too, half believing that Romeo was an embodiment of JB. 

He would have kept watch from above her
Tried to touch her if he could
He would have stretched across the ether
To point the way to joy and good.

And once again the real irony is in the death I didn’t know about.  The other lover I was hiding my subtext from -- Kent -- the one who now seems the obvious subject of the lyrics.   I come up, over and over again, against my own arrogance and, over and over, I have this uncomfortable feeling that I should have been more humble.  That I shouldn’t have thought I could defy death by not believing in it.  That that was like daring a powerful opponent to squish me like a bug.  But then again isn’t it just more arrogance to think that it makes a difference what I believe or don’t believe?  Does it matter to anyone – deity or human -- that I wished JB could be reincarnated in a cat that would come live with me and Kent? 

Two and a half weeks after Kent died, Lana and Emily’s friend, Eyad, told them about a stray cat who had been visiting his backyard.  Lana and Emily were leaving the next day to go home for the first time since Kent’s death.  Once everyone was gone and the chaos of crowded rooms had died down, I would be living completely alone for the first time in 38 years.  No humans, no animals left in my house but me.  Lana and Emily wanted me to get a cat.  I wasn’t against it.  I was ambivalent.  Mostly, though, I just didn’t have the wherewithal to make something like that happen.  But they could.  And did.  Right then.  That day.  Emily, Josh, Nick, and I all went to Eyad’s and drove away with a 6 or 7-month old cat scratching inside a cardboard box on my lap.  In the driver’s seat Emily read my mind and said to me, “We could name her Juliet.”  That was the only discussion we had about the name.

Juliet is not Romeo.  She’s solid black for one thing.  But that’s okay.  I don’t feel so picky about color anymore.  And she doesn’t do prat falls or rub my forehead with hers.  But every night she gets into bed with me when I go to bed, snuggles up right next to me, and stays there all night long. 

Seems funny to me now that we almost didn’t get Romeo because he was eight years old and that meant we would only get to live with him for six or seven years give or take a few years.   Funny because once we had lived with him for a week, we would not, for all the tea in China, have taken back the decision to bring him home with us from the animal shelter even if we’d known he’d only live for a year and a half.  Before we loved him, we were arrogant enough to think that we could calculate the rewards of the relationship in terms like the number of years we’d get to spend with him. 

Still after everything, I half think I’ll just keep protesting death.  Keep refusing to believe in it.  Keep thinking that the dead will return to me.  That the veil between me and the other side is thinner than I once imagined.  And that Kent comes to me through a black cat, whose name is a synonym for love, and lies down beside me at night.

Romeo and Juliet

To hear Romeo -- the song -- click here.