by Amy Newmark
I decided to expand my search. I jumped into my car and drove up and down all the streets of my suburb for over an hour with the heater on and the window down while calling her name. She knew her name. Surely, she would come if she heard me calling it… or would she? After all, she was a cat and didn’t always answer when called. Again, no luck finding her. I could only hope that someone found her and took her in.
Back home, I decided on my next strategy. I would make signs with her picture and post them everywhere. I would go to all the animal shelters and all the veterinarians in the area the next day to see if someone had brought her in. I would also post an ad in the community newspaper and online. Fortunately, she wore a collar and a nametag imprinted with her name and my phone number.
I was too depressed to cook, so I tossed a frozen dinner in the microwave. I really wasn’t hungry anyway. As most single people do, I put the cooked dinner on a tray and took my simple supper into the living room to eat in front of the TV. My heart was broken. I desperately missed her.
It was totally dark outside, which made me even more depressed. My little Cinder was out in the frigid weather… declawed, defenseless, alone, and so tiny compared to most adult cats and other animals.
Needing some cheer, I decided to plug in the Christmas tree. My tree was so beautiful, but I missed my cat lying on her back underneath the tree, batting at the ornaments on the lower branches. Next, I plugged in the lights for the Nativity scene and stood back to admire it. I was puzzled. Why were Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, the Wise Men, and all the animals lying on the table in front of the Nativity scene? I picked up Baby Jesus to put Him back in the stable, and there lay my little Cinder… all curled up and content in the manger. She had taken all the figurines out and decided the manger was her new hiding place. It was just the right size for her. I had not seen her black fur in there. Away in a manger, no crib for her bed, my little Baby Cinder lay down her sweet head.
My heart melted as I looked into her big blue eyes.
~Diane P. Morey
My Plastic Nemesis
All of the animals except for man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
~Samuel Butler
The continuous thump, thump, thump piqued my curiosity. I peeked my head into the bathroom where I saw my black-and-white feline sprawled on the floor. “What are you doing, Grenoble?”
His right paw stretched up into the cat feeder I had placed there eight hours earlier. Catching sight of me, he grinned slyly while continuing to tap, tap, tap at the mouth of the feeder to make it drop food one piece at a time.
“Stop it,” I demanded.
He darted for the door, but stopped just outside where he sat undaunted, daintily licking the crumbs from his paw. Meanwhile, I stewed in the bathroom, staring at the “cat-proof” feeder that was anything but cat-proof. The inventor clearly had not owned an aggressively hungry cat.
I had joyfully invested fifty dollars in the gadget because it was supposed to relieve me of the twice-daily feedings I’d resorted to since Grenoble was eating himself into diabetes territory. He consistently scarfed all but a few pieces of the food before my other cat, Mykonos, could set foot in the bathroom. The most annoying part, though, was Grenoble anxiously trailing behind me all day while he cried for more food.
Staring at my plastic nemesis, I decided I needed help overcoming its flaws. I strode onto my balcony where my parents, who were visiting, sipped coffee.
“Hey, Dad, are you up for helping me fix something?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“The cat feeder. Grenoble can get it to drop food, so he’s still eating too much.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“We need to strap something across the opening so he can’t reach up inside.”
Five minutes later, we were driving to a hardware store. We brainstormed ways to use the items hanging before us. Deciding to try a ruler, we sawed the item to fit across the opening and screwed it onto the bowl. Dad and I admired our clever design.
We returned to the balcony where we discussed how different cats are from dogs. Having grown up with dogs, I was still learning about my cats’ demeanor, needs, and quirks. I had even purchased a book on the topic, but it neglected to discuss what to do if a cat is a mastermind of cat feeders.
Then I heard it. Thump, thump, thump.
“No way!” I yelled, as I ran to the bathroom where Grenoble had resumed his position, right paw extended into the feeder. He was uninhibited by the ruler. I scooped him off the floor and closed the door.
“I’m heading back to the store,” I announced to my parents as I grabbed my purse and keys.
I returned with a second ruler, which my dad installed below the first one. I carried Grenoble to the feeder and sat on the toilet to watch his reaction to the twice-altered contraption. Sensing a new challenge, he tried his prior tactic. It failed. Then he attempted to lift the bowl off the feeder with his right paw. Unsuccessful again. Victory!
Thinking the feeder issues were resolved, I was perplexed when I awoke the next morning to a loud snap. Curious, I stepped into my slippers and padded down to the bathroom to investigate. I was greeted by Grenoble happily eating from the top of the feeder. The screw-on lid lay to the side where he had carelessly abandoned it.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I growled. “Why can’t you just eat less?”
I returned the lid to its position, set Grenoble outside the door again as I closed it, got dressed and headed for my car. When I returned, I resolutely set a brick on top of the feeder.
I looked at Grenoble, who sat casually beside me, inspecting my handiwork.
“Good luck getting the food now. I think I’ve finally thwarted your efforts.”
He smiled and looked at the feeder. I saw the wheels turning as he schemed new ways to get his precious food.
I settled on the sofa so I could call my parents to inform them of the latest developments in the feeder saga. As I shared my brilliance with them, I heard a loud thump.
“Gotta go,” I said. I darted to the bathroom.
Grenoble was body slamming the feeder into the wall. Each time he hit it, food cascaded into the bowl.
“I give up,” I said. “You win.” I shuffled back to the sofa, plopped down, and sulked.
After a few more thumps, Grenoble sauntered across the floor. He leaped onto my lap and rubbed his pale pink nose against my hand. I stroked his head while mulling over his weight problem.
“I was trying to get you healthy, big guy, but you’re too stubborn.”
He responded with a rumbling purr. I gazed into his hazel eyes that exuded love. I realized Grenoble was happy and still adored me despite my efforts to limit his food intake. So what was I stressing about? I no longer had to feed the cats twice per day, and when I thought about it, his cat-feeder antics were actually hilarious.
Smiling at my feisty feline, I said, “So, Grenoble, the body slamming was pretty creative, but I think you can do better than that.”
I carried him back to the bathroom and placed him in front of the feeder as I sat on the toilet to observe.
~Heather Harshman
The First Time My Cat Died
The cat could very well be man’s best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
~Doug Larson
I wasn’t a cat person before I met Marcel. Marcel was Jennifer’s cat, and I was in love with Jennifer, so it behooved me to fall in love with Marcel. But Marcel was hard to love. He was a shorthaired black-and-white tabby with a long body and deep, almost human, brown eyes. He liked to climb into Jennifer’s lap, burrow his head into the crook of her elbow, and let her scratch him on the neck and jaw for hours. But with me, he was aloof, skittish, and quick to claw.
“He’ll come around,” Jennifer said, pressing her forehead against his and rubbing his ears. “When I adopted him, the Rescue said he’d been a stray. Someone found him in the engine of their car trying to keep warm. He’s b
een through a lot.”
“He puts me through a lot,” I groaned, showing her the scratches Marcel had made on my forearms when I sat in a chair he’d decided was his.
“You just have to be patient. When I first got him, he stayed behind the refrigerator for two weeks,” she said. “He wouldn’t let me touch him, and he refused to eat. But eventually, he came out, and now look at us. Just give it time.”
I did, but Marcel and I never quite warmed up to each other, and I had the scars to prove it.
Eventually, Jennifer and I got married. Marcel and I came to realize that since neither of us was going anywhere, we would have to form an uneasy truce. I fed him at night and stayed out of his favorite spot on the couch, and he’d occasionally rest his head on my lap when I watched TV or rub his chin on my leg when I was eating lunch.
“He loves you,” Jennifer insisted one night, grinning as we sat up in bed. Marcel was lying on my stomach, purring a low, powerful rumble.
“No way,” I protested. Almost immediately, he jumped up, clamped his teeth on my hand, and fled the room. “He loves you. He only tolerates me.”
Then, late one night, there was a knock on the door of our apartment. I answered it and was greeted by our retired neighbor, Lois, fighting tears in her nightgown and curlers.
“Marcel’s been hit by a car,” she said.
Marcel had always been an indoor/outdoor cat. In the fall, he spent most of his time walking the grounds of our complex, eyeing the birds and climbing a tall tree that reached over our building to sun himself on the roof. I’d never seen him cross the street, but apparently, this evening, he had.
I thanked Lois and went back inside to tell Jennifer the news. She broke down crying.
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling my own emotions rise but immediately tamping them down. “I’ll take care of everything.”
I walked downstairs, hoping to find nothing — a false alarm, an over-reacting neighbor — but instead found a sobbing college student standing by a black sedan, and a twisted pile of fur in the street.
It didn’t look like Marcel. It wasn’t meowing for dinner or batting at flies. It wasn’t twisted into impossibly comfortable positions in the shafts of sunlight beneath the windowsill. It wasn’t Marcel, not anymore.
I sent the college student away, insisting it was only an accident, and asked Lois to go back inside so I could take care of my wife’s cat. I wrapped his body in an old blanket and put him in a box that had contained a collection of 1950s detective novels that Jennifer had gotten me for my birthday — one of those gifts you get from a loved one that proves they know you better than you know yourself.
I carried Marcel back toward the apartment, but then I stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t take him inside because I didn’t want to traumatize Jennifer. I thought about leaving him outside or in my car, but that just seemed impossibly cruel.
As I stood at the bottom of our stairs, pondering this, Jennifer appeared, crying and clutching a Kleenex. I put the box at our feet, took her in my arms, and cried. We cried for her loss — the loss of her cat and the loss of her friend. I thought about the times they sat together and the times he let her scratch him and the times we all snuggled on lazy Sunday mornings. I realized I wasn’t only crying for her loss, but for mine as well.
And then I heard him. His purr. Deep and soothing.
I looked around, confused, and there he was — standing at our feet, rubbing his face on the box and looking up at me like, “What’s everyone crying about?”
We laughed — it was all we could do — and then raised Marcel into our arms, despite how much he loathed being carried, and laughed some more.
“It wasn’t Marcel,” I said.
“No.” Jennifer laughed through her tears. Marcel struggled to get out of her arms, pressing his paws against her chest and whining, but she wouldn’t let go.
“He’s alive,” she said. Finally, after she’d received a few scratches, she lowered him to the ground. He ran upstairs and returned to his spot beneath the windowsill.
In the morning, I took the box to the Humane Society and handed it to a teenage volunteer. I waited until she confirmed that the cat had no microchip and had not been reported missing.
“He’s most definitely a stray,” she said, “but we’ll keep him here for a bit just in case someone comes in looking for him.”
“If they do,” I replied, “tell them I’m sorry for their loss.”
“They get under your skin, huh?” she said, catching me.
“What?”
“Cats. Some of them can be real terrors, but I can tell by how you brought in this one, and how you stuck around to see if it had an owner, you’ve got one you care about pretty deeply.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling to myself. “I guess I do.”
I paused to watch her take away the cat that was not Marcel, the cat that was not my cat, and I realized for the first time just how much Marcel meant to me. Losing him for those few minutes made me see just how big a space he filled in my life, in our lives. I didn’t think about the times he scratched me, but the moments before, when he let me pet him, even though he was scared. How we formed a truce that led to acceptance, and an acceptance that turned to love. He didn’t have to try, but he did. He didn’t have to take me in, but he did. He showed me how giving my wife could be, to take in a troubled animal and never give up on it. And he showed me how brave he was to open his heart to me, even when it was hard.
I realized in that moment the gift Marcel had given us: He made us a family.
And I realized that I was a cat person.
~Josh Burnell
A Cat of My Own
My cat came out of nowhere and became my everything.
~Author Unknown
When I was a kid, my house was a cat magnet. My parents were both well known in the community and so were their passions, one of which was animal rescue. They were always adopting animals from the local shelter. At one point, we had six dogs, thirteen cats, an aquarium filled with lab rats saved from euthanasia, wild birds whose wings had broken (separated from the cat community in their own room), lizards, turtles, mice, two horses, and even a goat.
This might have been fine if we lived on a farm, but we didn’t. We had a large house — a grand 19th-century home that over time had served as a general store, a doctor’s office, a post office, and a feed depot — but even a house that large could feel small with the ever-growing menagerie of animals. Whenever someone in the neighborhood — or even the wider community — found a stray cat or dog, they knew it would find a home if they just dropped it off on the front porch of Raphael and Frances Mark.
I tell my daughter Emily these stories, and she thinks it sounds like a wonderful paradise, but it wasn’t always fun. I actually came to hate the cats because they were the most persistent presence. I’d open a kitchen cabinet in the morning for a bowl or plate, and there was a cat in there looking down at me. Going to sit down at the dining room table, I’d have to remove a cat from the chair — sometimes two. Cats on top of the TV, on the couches, on top of the refrigerator, on the stairs, under the coat rack, on the radiators — they were everywhere, like some awful vermin. My friend Betsy Jacobs, who loved cats, told me my problem wasn’t the number of cats, but that I hadn’t found my own. I had no idea what she meant.
One New Year’s Eve, we all came back from dinner to find the latest surprise on the front porch — a large black cat with enormous golden eyes and a red ribbon tied around his neck. He was in pretty poor shape. His coat was worn and dirty, and his tail was broken, twitching back and forth at an odd angle. Of course, there was no question what would happen next. My mother went to pick him up and bring him inside, but he wasn’t having it. He backed away, hissing and growling, into a corner of the porch.
The last thing I wanted was another cat, but I did want to help Ma, so I got down on the cat’s level and talked to him until he walked toward me. I picked him up and carried him inside
. I got him some food, and he calmed down a bit until my brother Jason sat down near him. Then he attacked. He grabbed at Jace’s hand, scratched furiously, and then shot under a bureau in the dining room where he glowered and hissed at us. Jace said, “That thing’s like an assassin. You ought to name him Carlos,” referring to a villain in a novel that was popular at the time. The name stuck, and the cat stuck to me.
Since I was the only one who could handle him without being mauled, he wound up in my room and became my cat. He wasn’t like the other cats in the house. He would entertain me by leaping from the top of my bookshelf to the top of my open door and do a little tightrope walk across it, back and forth, before hopping down. He was a great nuzzler and loved to sit on my lap while I read. Every night, he’d jump up on the bed when it was time to sleep and, if I stayed too long at my desk working on something, he’d hop up and knock my pen away to let me know it was getting late.
He was also an uncanny judge of people. He finally warmed up to Jace, but I learned to trust his judgment about new friends I’d have over. If Carlos liked them, they were worth the time. If he didn’t, they usually wound up being a huge mistake. He liked most of my friends, but was especially fond of Betsy. Carlos lived a life of luxury in my room and wasn’t inclined to exert himself very often, but he always got up when Betsy visited, hopped onto the little table at the end of my bed for her to pet, and sometimes even climbed up on her shoulder. I knew I liked Betsy even without Carlos’s approval, but it was still nice to have it.
Carlos liked Betsy so much that, when I got a letter from her, he would purr and sit in my lap while I read it. If I got a letter from anyone else, he either wouldn’t come near or, sometimes, would slap at it. If he didn’t like someone, he wasn’t at all shy about showing it by allowing them to come near and then latching himself onto their hand, biting and scratching. But when someone met with his approval, he was the sweetest gentleman and most caring friend. When I was sick with mono, he wouldn’t leave me, not even to eat or drink. And when I’d come home from school at the end of the day, he’d jump off the bed and trot over to greet me at the door. He liked it even better when I’d come home with Betsy, and he’d climb up on her shoulder and nuzzle her ear.