by Amy Newmark
That was my upbringing. The family motto was to leave things, people and places better than we found them. It makes for an unusual life, but it also makes life a rich tapestry of color and emotion and creates a family everywhere one goes.
Last winter was no exception. When I arrived home from work, there was a message waiting for me: “April, your sister has found three stray kittens. It looks like someone has dumped them, and it’s getting cold. We need to catch them and figure out what to do with them.”
I was a dog person and had no idea what do to with a cat. Did I need a laundry basket? How would we attract the kittens so we could catch them? Would they come if we called them, like a dog?
A half-hour later, I drove part of the way down the mountain armed with a laundry basket, towels, a blanket, kibble, tuna, milk, and water. I figured that something had to work. I parked and listened for the faint mewling sound. Nothing. It was cold, too. Really cold. I’d parked on a patch of frozen ground about halfway down the mountain and dreaded the cold trek back up. As I began to walk toward the woods, I noticed a little flash of white. I stopped in my tracks on the empty winding road and saw a small head peer out at me. It was black and white and about the size of my palm. I said, “Come,” and out popped this little ball of fur, maybe four pounds soaking wet. She walked across the street and sat down beside my feet as if to say, “I’m ready. Let’s go.” I tried this again to reach the others, but to no avail. I decided to put this little lady in the car so I wouldn’t have to chase her around later, and when I opened the car door, she climbed in and sat primly in the front seat.
My sister managed to catch another one of the kittens that day and gave her to an elderly lady nearby who was lonely. That cat has been wearing knitted, matching dresses and bonnets ever since.
I caught the final one, the tiniest, the next day, and he went to one of my students, a little boy whose father had recently lost his fingers in an accident. The boy’s mother and I had decided that a kitten would be the perfect new companion for the boy, and that evening, I managed to get the kitten out of the drainpipe where he’d been hiding with the remains of the food and the blanket I’d left after trying to coax him out for hours the previous day.
I still had to find a place for the first kitten we rescued, the prim little miss who was now residing in my home. I pulled out my cell phone and pulled up Facebook, asking for suggestions from my friends and family. I didn’t know anything about cats and wasn’t sure where to take her. The unanimous response was, “I’m sorry, but cats are different… it sounds like you’ve been chosen.”
Over the weeks, my little cat flourished. I named her Jane (as in Jane Austen) for her pretty manners, and I trained her like a dog. (As humans, we stick to what we know.) She can sit, never scratches, doesn’t eat treats, never snarls at the vet, and likes to have conversations. She likes boxes, loves the shower, talks to the neighborhood birds, and only chews on the dogs’ tails when playing. We travel together, and she’s learning to walk on a leash. Each night, as I fall asleep, she puts one paw on each side of my hand, and reminds me that I’ve been chosen.
~April Riser
My Clever Cat
Fun fact: The brains of cats are about ninety percent similar to the brains of humans.
A Very Smart Cat
Fun fact: It’s called “dream chasing” when your cat’s leg muscles or face twitch while he sleeps.
Jo was a very good cat. His full name was Jo Jo Precious, Tiger Kitty, a name he was barely able to tolerate, much preferring the single syllable. Unlike Jo, our dog Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar, is very proud of his long name but is willing to tolerate our tendency to call him Corwin. Jo, though, was far too dignified and practical to be bothered with anything as ornamental as a lengthy and descriptive name.
Jo was far smarter than cats are generally presumed to be. I used to say that he did my taxes, but this was just a fanciful joke. Jo was smart, but he couldn’t hold a pencil or work a calculator. No opposable thumbs. Jo’s intelligence expressed itself in other ways. Jo could, for example, tell time.
I’m not saying that he knew the rhythms and patterns of our life so that he knew when it was time to eat and when it was time to go to bed, though that was all true. I’m saying that he could actually tell time.
My wife is a schoolteacher. We lived for many years in a small apartment in Studio City. Nancy’s alarm would sound at 5:00 a.m. every weekday, and she would get up and open the sliding glass door so that Jo would be free to wander the courtyard and relieve himself in the flowerboxes. If she did not get up right away, Jo would stand on her and say, “Now, now, now,” until my wife slid out of bed and opened the door.
The natural and common awareness of life’s rhythms allowed Jo, on weekends, to know when it was 5:00 without the alarm. He would announce it on Saturday morning until one of us got up to let him outside. We didn’t love that. We wanted to sleep in.
It occurred to us one Friday to tell him what was going on. He came to bed in the evening, and Nancy spoke to him about it. “Listen,” she said. “Jo… Leave the fly alone for a minute and listen to me.” He did. He was a very smart cat. “Tomorrow is Saturday. We don’t have to get up. We’d like to sleep late. So, if nobody’s up by 9:00, you can wake me up. But no earlier. Okay?” Jo slid his tail back and forth across the bedspread, looking at Nancy until he was certain she was done talking and then curled up to go to sleep.
The following morning, an odd chorus dragged me from a confusing dream about a doorway in the middle of Hollywood that led to a bright green forest. Jo was singing, “Now? Now? Now?” And Nancy was saying, “Dylan. Dylan. Seriously, Dylan, you have to see this.”
I slipped back from dream body into waking body and rolled over to find out what was so urgent. Nancy was holding up her clock for me to see. It was 9:00. I said, “Wow,” and then it was 9:01. We got up, and she let Jo outside while I made coffee.
Thereafter, we were able to tell Jo with confidence what time he could wake us and, indeed, he proved a reliable furry alarm clock on days when our needs were not so urgent that we required the security of an electronic backup. We experimented: 9:30. 8:05. 8:37. I’m not kidding. The cat could tell time.
Nancy said once that when she told him the appointed time, she would imagine the numbers so that he could see the symbols. She suspected that he didn’t actually read a clock but rather read her mind and then waited to see the shapes she had shown him. I have no idea why, but I find that far less credible than the theory that he was able to tell time.
Nancy and I both wanted a dog, but the apartment building wouldn’t allow one. For years, we imagined that some day we would have a place where we could keep a dog and that we would get a puppy so that Jo could be dominant and train it to behave respectfully toward him. We knew he was capable of using both his claws and teeth as training tools. He had very quickly trained us to keep our feet under the blankets at night and not to pet him when Jeopardy! was on TV unless it was the part where Alex questions the contestants about their personal lives. He didn’t care about the players’ anecdotal ramblings at all and frequently used the interview segment as he did the commercials, to practice his impressions of Ed Asner and other grumpy-but-kind hearted character actors.
In 2002, Nancy and I decided we were ready to own property. Jo was fourteen years old when we moved to our townhouse in Sylmar. The vet told us that moving is one of the most stressful experiences in a cat’s life, right up there with falling in a swimming pool and getting divorced. We felt we should give him a month or two to adjust to life in the new place before we confronted him with a puppy.
Six weeks after we moved in, Jo started dying. He had some sort of stroke or seizure. He couldn’t meow properly. Instead of doing impressions of Charles Durning and Walter Matthau, he began to do Marlo Thomas. We took him to an emergency vet, who kept him overnight and then told us that they didn’t know what was wrong. They charged us several hundred dollars
for the overnight visit and suggested that we have them conduct thousands of dollars worth of tests over the next few weeks to figure out what was going on with him. They implied that if we did not spend thousands of dollars on these tests, we simply didn’t love our cat enough. They admitted that there were many probable causes of the illness for which they would be able to do little or nothing.
Jo had always hated the vet. We couldn’t imagine that he would want a series of trips to the vet in his waning days. We took him home and swore that if he seemed to be in real pain at any point, we would have him put to sleep.
He ate less from then on and lost weight quickly. He never got his proper voice back. He stayed fairly near to us when we went from room to room and up and down the stairs in our new, beloved home. He grew steadily weaker and sadder. We made an appointment to have him put to sleep on a Saturday morning when we would both be able to go with him to the vet.
The night before he was to be put down, Jo told us he was done. Unable to stand up properly, he meowed at us in his sad, whispered voice. We called the vet to ask if we could bring him in right then rather than waiting for the morning appointment.
Leaving his travel crate in the garage, Nancy held Jo in her arms, wrapped in his favorite blanket as I drove us all, weeping, to the vet’s office. At the reception desk, Nancy filled out paperwork while I held Jo in my arms. We handed him off to a veterinary assistant who said she would take him to the back room, and they would bring us in momentarily when he was set up so that we could be there when they gave him the final injection. A minute later, a vet came out to tell us that the injection wouldn’t be necessary. Jo had died naturally as they set him on the table. As always, he knew when it was time. He could tell, with or without a clock.
He had held on just long enough. Nancy got to hold him lovingly and say goodbye on the car ride. I got to hold him lovingly and say goodbye at the reception desk.
Then he died without an injection, saving us fifty dollars.
Jo was a very good cat. Smart, dignified and eminently practical.
~Dylan Brody
The Switch
Fun fact: Cats can jump up to five times their height from a standing start thanks to their strong hind-leg muscles.
“Darn it! Not again!” I stomped over to the entry-hall wall and clicked on the light switch. Although Mom was nearly ninety, it still upset me when she mistakenly turned off the switch that controlled the electrical outlet for the television set.
I hadn’t mentioned anything to her about it because I understood it was merely a minor inconvenience. It was my selfish lack of patience that caused me to overreact.
Although it was only a matter of minutes, it seemed to take forever for the TV satellite box to reboot whenever the power source was interrupted.
Mom had recently suffered a stroke and had to deal with enough issues without the extra burden of knowing she was causing me anxiety.
However, on this particular day, I decided I should gently remind her about the switch. She might just need a little prompting, I reasoned, and everyone would be happy. Well, everyone being me.
“Mom, it’s no big thing, but I’ve been noticing that the light switch that controls the TV is turned off when I get up in the morning. Maybe you can be a bit more careful when you use those switches on the entry-hall wall during the night.”
I did not expect the response I received. Even though she often had problems relating thoughts because of the stroke, she came through loud and clear!
“I never touch the light switches on that wall when I get up at night. I turn on the light from the other side of the kitchen. Why would I walk all the way to the entry hall to turn on the kitchen light?”
With four light switches on the wall, I knew that it would be easy for her to get confused, and I couldn’t blame her for that. But she was right. She really had no reason to be using those particular light switches. I was baffled, to say the least.
Things did not improve in the following weeks, and I began to worry more about Mom’s mental state at night and less about having to reboot the TV in morning. I couldn’t help mentioning it to her a few more times to see if she’d remember turning off the switch, but she always gave the same response and was justly becoming agitated with my accusations.
I finally gave up questioning her altogether and chalked it up to her declining memory. There was no need to pester her further.
Then, late one night, while we were watching a scary movie, the TV suddenly shut off. We both nearly jumped out of our chairs. Mom looked at me as if to ask, “Are you going to blame me for this, too?”
Normally, things don’t scare me, but this did. I inched quietly across the carpet on my hands and knees toward where we’d heard a thud in the hallway. I poked my head ever so cautiously around the corner and stared into the large green eyes of Pumpkin, our year-old orange Tabby cat. She was sitting on the floor beneath the light switch with a smug look on her furry face.
“Pumpkin!” I giggled with relief. “You didn’t!”
But she did!
Although it took another few days for me to actually witness her awesome jumping skills, it was well worth the wait.
I was sitting in the living room with a perfect view of the entry hall when Pumpkin crept around the corner. She sat on the floor and studied the light switches above her head. After a few moments of plotting her strategy, she sprang nearly four feet straight into the air and made perfect paw contact with the switch. The TV snapped off, and my mouth flew open. It was a sight to behold!
All is finally well at home. Mom is relieved that she was proven innocent. I’m relieved that she is mentally stable. Pumpkin is happy to be out in the open with her antics and has yet to meet a light switch she can’t turn off.
~Connie Kaseweter Pullen
What in the Sam Hill…?
Fun fact: Some cat species, such as cheetahs and cougars, can purr like domesticated cats, but lions and tigers can’t purr. They roar instead.
“No more cats!” That’s what my husband Fred told the kids and me. “Three cats are more than enough.” My daughter Summer and I just looked at each other and grinned. Yeah… like you can ever have too many cats! Then again, we weren’t planning on adding any new cats just then, so the issue didn’t seem worth debating. But that was before Sam came on the scene.
My friend Denise and I had stopped for dinner at a country-western pub on the outskirts of Portland, and on our way in a black-and-white cat came flying past to perch on the hood of a nearby car.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for cats, and this one was oozing with charm. I walked right over and scratched him behind the ears. His purr kicked into high gear and he leaned against my fingers.
I wondered where he came from; there were no houses nearby, just an empty field on one side and a tree farm on the other. I picked him up and gave him a warm snuggle. The cat burrowed his face into my neck in obvious ecstasy. “It’s a shame he’s so unfriendly,” I laughed. I put him down on the sidewalk, and Denise and I went inside.
During dinner, I found myself thinking about the little guy outside in the cold, obviously hungry for attention. I asked the waitress if she knew anything about the young cat in the parking lot. She told us that someone had abandoned a mother cat and her four kittens in the field next door. The restaurant staff had fed and looked after them until the kittens were weaned, and then, one by one, the mother cat and the kittens had been adopted, except for the one outside.
He was still there when we went outside, sitting on the hood of another car. If cats could smile, he was smiling his face off, and we could hear him purring from six feet away. I scooped him up, said goodnight to Denise and headed for my van. Putting him on the passenger seat, I belted myself in and prepared for him to freak out when I started the car. He didn’t. He stretched languidly across the seat with his front paws curled beneath him and looked expectantly at me. His expression was clear. “Home, James!”
When we got to the house
, I picked him up from his comfy position and wrapped him in my coat. As I walked into the family room where the gang was watching TV, our son Aaron looked up and, seeing a tail dangling from beneath my jacket, said, “What in the Sam Hill is under your coat?” giving my hitchhiker the perfect name.
“It’s our new kitty — Sam Hill!” I announced, opening my coat with a flourish and hoping Sam’s cuteness would win Fred over.
It did. Sam grinned his irresistible cat grin, Fred groaned and muttered, but before the evening was over, he, along with the kids, became a Sam fan. The other cats hissed at him once or twice, but then, like the rest of us, fell under his spell. The kitty without a home had found a family.
The first item on Sam’s agenda was to establish his number-one rule: No closed doors! He promptly set about teaching himself to open said doors, which, fortunately for him, were equipped with latch-type handles. Within a few weeks, he had set off the burglar alarm in the house three times and shocked unsuspecting guests who were using the bathroom.
The laundry room, off the TV room, was where we kept the litter box, but when the dryer was running, it was hard to hear the television, so we always closed the door. Sam didn’t approve — he’d open it. We’d close it, he’d open it, and so on. It was through this little idiosyncrasy that we discovered another aspect of our endlessly entertaining boy: He was apparently psychic. When the other cats found the door to the laundry room closed, they would sit, staring patiently at the portal until, only minutes later, Sam, from wherever he had been sleeping in the house, would come and open the door for them. Eventually, Fred changed the handles to regular doorknobs.
All creatures, two-legged or four, were friends in Sammy’s book. People were great, cats were cool, and dogs were dandy. He didn’t even bat a whisker when I brought home a dwarf rabbit named Bunny Jean. Before a week was out, they were best buddies, chasing each other around the family room. We had a sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace. Sam would dive under it, every part of him covered except his nose, and then wait patiently until Bunny Jean came hopping by. When he pounced, the two would roll around on the carpet, wrestle and play hide-and-seek until one or the other finally collapsed into a nap. They were infinitely more captivating than most of the television shows.