As a dedicated crazy cat lady, April 9 is often a bittersweet, somber day for me. It was the birthday of the first cat I had on my own, once I left my parents' house. He has been gone more years now that he was alive, but he still holds a piece of my heart that no one else can touch. He was my "number one son," or so I told him, and I can never forget what he meant to me.
I was a sophomore in college when he was born. I was still living in the dorms, with plans to move in with a friend of mine who needed someone to sublet the rest of her roommate's lease for the summer. This friend and I were in a photography class together, and the professor of that class asked us whether anyone wanted to adopt a kitten. I was instantly interested. His cat had had babies, and they would be old enough to adopt right about the time the semester would end, when I was due to move into a house in Boulder. A day after I moved all of my stuff from the dorms to the house, my brother drove me up the canyon to my teacher's house on Lee Hill. The kittens were all underneath the teacher's bed (yeah, creepy to remember it now, but that's where mama was keeping them). I reached under, trying to catch one of the little gray babies, and the first one I got bit me on the finger, and I dropped him again. Call me weird, but that was the sign I needed that he was The One. I spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes trying to recapture that exact kitten (out of a whole lot of them -- there were at least seven or eight under there.)
The kitten I got was a dilute tuxie, meaning he was gray with white paws, belly, and muzzle. He was barely six weeks old when I adopted him, and it wasn't apparent at first that he was going to be large and fluffy. I named him Berkeley, after Berke Breathed, the artist/creator of the Bloom County comic strip. He was charming and naughty and fun and cuddly. When I ran into that photography teacher during the summer (I worked on campus), I complained about his kitteny badness, "Alex, he peed in my shoes!" To this day, we still quote the only answer I got, no matter how many things I whined about: "But he's a beautiful cat, isn't he?" He said that three or four times, and wouldn't say anything else.
Berkeley was beautiful. His fur was the softest and fuzziest I've ever encountered. It never stopped feeling like kitten fur. Not even Athena has the frizzy crinkles that Berkie had. He was enormous. When my first daughter was born, I took a picture of him standing on his hind legs, peeking in her bassinet. The woman who developed the photos (the old days) said she'd never seen a cat that big. She thought he must have been a dog. He made sure that tiny human knew he was the number one child. My favorite picture of the two of them was him curled up on my chest while my daughter was lying on my lap, while my legs were up in a recliner.
He was incredibly loyal and snuggly. I used to refer to him as Barnacle B, because he was always attached to me. At age fifteen, he developed a thyroid tumor, and it made it impossible for him to eat properly. He wasted away to nothing. He was the only cat I have ever taken to the vet to end his suffering, and it was the worst experience I could imagine. I second-guessed myself for a decade, wishing I had given him more time. I don't know how I will ever face that decision again, if slash when it comes up next.
I wish everyone could have a cat or dog friend who is as special to them as Berkeley was to me. Those fifteen years were worth the world.
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