Cats and their people

While the news has bled misery and tumult on a grand scale, the much more intimate woes afflicting a small cat and her beloved people have turned me introspective and a bit weepy this week.

They've also got me thinking about cats and their people.

On Wednesday, author Neil Gaiman tweeted that his blind cat, Zoe, was ill and at the vet's for an x-ray and endoscopy. By Thursday, the bad news returned that Zoe had an inoperable tumor.
Gaiman blogged about Zoe, as did photographer Kyle Cassady whose shots of Zoe reveal not only how beautiful she is, but what a sweet and gentle loving nature she has. Other members of Gaiman's extended family of artists, musicians, and magic-makers shared their memories of the cat in blogs and tweets. The much larger realm of Gaiman fans and followers (of which I am obviously one), expressed their condolences and spilled their grief as I am doing now.

"I'm wondering what it is about this small blind cat that inspires such behaviour," Gaiman writes. "I think it may be the love. Hers, once given, was yours, unconditionally and utterly."

I think there may be something to it, that notion about unconditional love in certain cats that transcend the role of pet or companion animal to become, well and truly, our familiars. As someone who has been lucky enough to have kept a few such cats (for keeping them is what we do; we never own them or master them), I marvel that some people never come to know such a cat at all. And I have been, at least once, lucky enough to have had the same cat (well, sort of the same cat) come to me twice.

In the late 1980s when I was teaching at a public university in Pennsylvania, I accepted a couple of cats from a student of mine whose landlord was averse to pets. One of the cats was a small, slender tortoise shell who bore much greater resemblance to a space alien than to a cat. She was eager and energetic and full of surprise. We called her Babette.

Her companion cat was a round and robust black shorthair with emerald eyes and the demeanor of a foreign potentate, the benevolent demi-goddess of some imagined island people who lived on milk and honey and prayed by imitating the sound of her low, gentle purr. She came to me with the unlikely name of Pumpkin, and almost immediatley communicated to me in that way cats do that her "deep and inscrutable singular Name" was Joss. Much better.

I wasn't lucky enough to keep Joss for very long, but the time I had with her was remarkable. She was the sort of cat you could have a conversation with, confess your troubles to, ask for advice. And she delivered. I swear, as will my then roommate, Jeff, that the cat could stare sense into us when we were spinning out of control. She had command. She had presence. She had gravitas.

Since she came to me as an adult, I had no way of knowing how long she would be in our lives. Sadly, it was only a couple of years before she quietly breathed her last on a soft, rag rug and we laid her to rest in the back yard behind the garage where cat bones have rested for many, many years.

I grieved her something awful, even with a handful of other cats around, including Babette, to nuzzle my chin and warm my lap.

Some 20 years later, moved to Seattle, I lost yet another great cat (Salieri, about whom much can be written). His companion cat, Stinky (who lives with me still, slowed a bit now at 19 years), keened the loss so terribly that I felt compelled to find him a new companion with all due haste.

I left work a bit early and stopped by the PAWS cat adoption center to see if they had a kitten who might make a good friend for Stinky. I checked out the dozen or so kittens and young adult cats they had on hand, but none of them seemed to want to come home with me. I was about to give up when I noticed a plump, lush black shorthair lounging on the chair behind the reception desk, acting for all the world like she was waiting for her administrative assistant to bring her a cup of coffee.

I asked Dawn, the PAWS adoption services lady, if I could walk behind the counter and say hello.

"Sure," she said. "She's a real sweetie. I'd actually be sad to see her go."

I walked around the desk and kneeled down to look into her dazzling emerald eyes. She licked my nose.

"I'll start the paperwork," Dawn said.

So, it wasn't just that she so readily and immediately accepted me as a bigger cat, a someone-to-be-groomed, that made it impossible for me to leave PAWS without her that day. It was a sense that we had already known each other for a good long time. She was truly my familiar.

And so Toots (whose name at the time was Hera) came home with me that day. She and Stinky took a whole 48 hours to get used to each other. By the end of week, they were curled up on eachother making what looked like a two-headed black cat. Here is photographic evidence of that phenomenon.

For nearly 8 years, Toots sat in my lap, slept on my head, and kept me most excellent company.

When Jeff met her, he, too, felt that sense of familiarity. We both felt lucky simply to have such a cat in our lives again.

When I started dating Damon, Toots let me know what she thought of him by climbing up behind him on the couch and licking his head. To his credit, he let her do it. I knew in that instant that I would surely love him for a good long time.

Sadly, Toots was diagnosed with kidney disease early in 2004. We fed her a special diet, hydrated her subcutaneously, and loved her as much as we possibly could for the next three years. On April 21, 2007, she breathed her last. I still mist up when I think about her.

Some cats are, indeed, like that.

Right now, Gaiman's blind cat Zoe is at the center of a widening circle of people all focused on the wonder of her love.

Right now, I'm grateful for every day that I wake up with Stinky on my head or behind my knees.

Right now, my friend Claire is sad and grateful for her cat, Spiff, who is nearing the end of his days but continues to climb onto her lap to be loved.

These cats are more than pets, more than friends, even. They get to us, they touch our softest, most human centers and remind us that love can be unconditional and healing and strong. And even though we don't get to share that love with them in this world forever, we never lose it really. We just hang on to it and pass it along.

These cats teach us that love can stay.

Comfort Books

I've been itching to write, but lacking focus, a top(ic)less dancer of sorts, whirling round the pole of my imagination, unable to pick up a rhythm, a beat I could really groove to.
Then, someone tweeted today to author Neil Gaiman, who has himself been tweeting about feeling ill this week:
RT @SOCMusic: I always re-read "Good Omens" when I'm sick. It always makes me feel better. Good chance that won't work for you, though.
I count Good Omens, which Gaiman co-wrote with Terry Pratchett, among my favorite books, and I, too, often turn to it for comfort when I'm feeling unwell or a bit too weary. That charming tale of an impending apocalypse never fails to draw me in and cheer me up.
Gaiman then tweeted about his own comfort books:
At different times of my life, my 'Comfort Book' has been Narnia, LOTR, Glory Road, Cold Comfort Farm, Psmith Journalist, Father Brown.
This simple remark spawned a cascade of tweets that is still falling as I write this post. People everywhere, well at least everywhere on Twitter, have been sharing the titles of the books they turn to when they need to feel better. The titles, not surprisingly, have included a hefty number of Gaiman's books, a load of science fiction and fantasy standards including LOTR/Hobbit, Narnia, Screwtape (for heaven's sake!) among countless others. The Harry Potter books have figured prominently, as have the Twilight novels. I've also seen a few unexpected favorites like Silence of the Lambs.
In a later tweet, Gaiman mused
Lots of people sending in their #comfortbooks. I wonder what makes a particular book a place to go when under stress.
I wonder, too.
Some of Gaiman's other followers allowed as how a "comfort book" might be a portal of sorts, a gateway to a more innocent time of childlike wonder or a sense of hopefulness that we often find sadly lackling in our day-to-day.
I think that may be part of it, but that explanation is a bit too simple. Some comfort books are less about idealism and more about the elemental pleasure of letting ourselves go, of submerging ourselves into worlds not of our own making, surrounding ourselves with friends unlike any we're likley to meet.
Like Gaiman, my comfort books have changed up over the years. As a child, I treasured the Big Little Golden Books edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court so much that reading it got me tossed out of reading class in the first grade. I followed that up with (first) the Disney version of The Jungle Book and then the original, which I liked a great deal more. A few years later, I read Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond at least a dozen times and To Kill a Mockingbird a dozen times more. And there was The Hobbit, LOTR, and anything by Roald Dahl.
All that prepared me, I suppose for high school and college and graduate school, a 10-year expedition of discovery that led me to major in English and devour books at the alarming clip of five a week. I read fast, but I read deep. I read on my walk to class. I read at meals. I read in the bar. I even read at parties, beer in hand, book in the other.
Though my reading life was eclectic, I did light on favorite themes and authors. Tom Robbins enchanted me with Still Life with Woodpecker, and I still credit him with teaching me how to make love stay, even in the 21st Century. I return, from time to time, to 28 Barbary Lane to visit with Armistead Maupin's eccentric characters from Tales of the City. And my bored and lazy hand will almost always travel to the spot on the shelf where Vanity Fair waits to entertain and amuse me.
I've been alive too long, I think, to make even an attempt at a comprehensive list of my comfort books. And I hope to live a good while longer and to find new ones along the way.
Suffice it to say that the first book I bought for my sexy new Kindle was Gaiman's Neverwhere, a book he adapted from the 1996 BBC television series he developed with Lenny Henry. This ramble started with him, and I suppose it should end in the same place. I don't know what his next book will be, but I suspect I will want to read it more than once. That troubles me, of course, because there are just so many books and so little time.

National Poetry Month: Day #5

I recall that I'd been reading Neil Gaiman a lot back when I started writing these poems. I'm not certain what effect that had on my own writing, but I do remember that this poem came straight from a dream I had after reading the story "Baywolf" in his collection Smoke and Mirrors. It's the very first one from April 1, 2000:

Familiars

We've been here before,
you and I, but then
we didn't look like this,
bottled up in sacks of pale
pink flesh
like a couple of tender
underbellies ready to be torn
apart.

I've smelled this air before,
this crisp and prickling
scent of something
frightened, vulnerable,
and delicious
cowering low
just out of sight.

You caught it too,
and pricked your ears
then twitched your bushy
tail a time or two
so I would know
your appetite.

In unison then
like currents deviating
in a stream
you swept in left on silent
paws while I, so quick,
so ravenous, descended
from the right
to seize
the prize.

After, we lay
sated and savoring success
still on our muzzles
as moonlight bathed us
blue and breezes
sang our remorseless lullaby
through the trees.

©2000 L.A. Smith.