For several days now, I have been trying to live very simply. I mean that on an extremely micro scale. I haven't wanted to drive anywhere, to avoid wasting gas. I haven't wanted to go to stores, where I might spend money out of boredom. I didn't want to go to a restaurant, when I had packs of raw beef and chicken at home that could spoil if I ignored them. Simple, quiet, and cheap. I think it's a psychological holdover from the days when the girls were babies, and we were desperately broke. If I have a few days in a row when I feel like I've spent indiscriminately (such as seeing two movies and going out to eat with my friends twice in under a week), I pull back suddenly, and start behaving like the money will suddenly dry up and I'll lose everything. I'm not sure I will ever get to a place where I feel totally at ease or trust that we are financially secure. Is that what leads certain individuals far more well-off than we to hoard money the way some people hoard junk or animals? Egad, is that why I have so many pets?
By living so close to home, it leads to very little fresh material about which to write. I spent much of the day wondering what tonight's essay would cover. I watched the adult cats playing, and noticed the assimilation of the kitten is complete. They have all stopped brooding and acting bent out of shape over her appearance, so I thought perhaps it was time to tell another one of their stories. The old man has been demanding a lot of attention lately, and every time I talk to him with broad gestures, to compensate for his deafness, or pick him up and feel his thin brittleness, I fear that our time together is coming to a close. I should tell his story while he's still here to correct any discrepancies.
Eighteen years ago, we left Colorado on our first cross-country move as a family, to unfamiliar territory in North Carolina. We were as naive as we could be, for all that we imagined ourselves worldly even then. We had our original pride of three cats, one that came into my life before I'd even met my man. Within a few years we had lost one cat to a stray dog attack, picked up a trio of dogs of our own, rescued a cat who had been trapped under a vacant house for weeks, and even saved a fledgling blue jay who lived in our house for a couple weeks until he was old enough to fly away. As far as I was concerned, we had a very full house. One summer night, fifteen years ago, I had a vivid dream about a speckled angel fish who lay motionless on the bottom of a tank, until I jostled it, and it woke and became a cat who rose to the surface of the water. I thought it was so odd that I would remember the dream so clearly the next day, and I told it to my family. We joked about it being a premonition. It wasn't a week later that one of my family members looked out our back door, and saw our female hound licking a tiny white kitten who had walked into our back yard. We all went out onto the deck, to see what she had found. It turned out he wasn't solid white, but had the beginnings of gray points, like a little Siamese. The girls and their father were very excited by this surprise gift, while I resisted, insisting we had all the animals we could support, what with the recent rescue of the starved cat a few weeks earlier. While we argued, we didn't notice that a storm was rolling in. Suddenly, lightning struck a house on the street that ran behind our yard. At that moment, everyone went inside, family or not. And as the tradition is, once inside, adoption is assured.
That winter, we had moved into the first house we ever purchased. My man's frequent business trips helped pay for it, and we were alone often back then. During one such trip, I was laid out with a badly pulled muscle in my back. The half-grown kitten was climbing on things that were dumped in the converted garage that we used as an overflow room. He tipped over an eight foot tall wooden ladder onto himself, giving himself a head injury that he was lucky to survive. I had to ask a neighbor to take him to get checked out, since I was in no shape to drive. He seemed well enough, but not long after I found him in the middle of a grand mal seizure, in the middle of the night. It was one of the most terrifying things a pet parent can witness. The vet gave me a grim prognosis if the seizures continued, especially if they became more frequent, which they did. For years, they were frequent and frightening. When he was four years old, two moves later, for a brief while, he was our only pet. I was sure the seizures were bad enough that he would be the next to go. But we are just not the kind of people who can share the attention of one single cat, and two weeks after my cat from college died (my first cat to live to 15), we adopted two littermates from the local shelter, followed almost immediately by another rescue by the man. I don't know what it was about raising three kittens at once, with all the wild energy in the house, but something seemed to right in his brain, and the seizures tapered off to nothing. I am not sure he has had a single one in the last seven or eight years. And now, the kitten I didn't expect to survive to his first birthday, has now celebrated fifteen of them. He has charmed scores of our friends, the most gregarious feline I have ever known. I don't know how much longer he will be with me, but I know all of my friends and family will truly mourn when he finally does leave us.
He's a handsome boy!
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