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Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
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1:00 am
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For a friend... Thinking of you.
Ode To Pookat
Diamonds was my very first kitty cat ever, and she was--and I say this without restraint or hesitation--the absolute love of my life. I started writing hours ago, and it's taken me a very long time to whittle this story down to something more manageable and less insane. There are innumerable stories I can tell about my cat and I could write chapters worth of every exquisite detail of how perfect she was and how much she meant to me. It's hard to put that into words. It's even harder to put that into less than a million words.
I was born with a cat-shaped hole in my heart and knew from the get-go that I would have to have a kitty. My parents were able to resist my pleading for an incredible three years before they gave in. The day I found Diamonds is one of my first memories and also one of of my clearest to this day, two decades after the fact.
It was late Spring and my aunt, who used to cart me around for company and entertainment before she had children of her own, had taken me to visit her in-laws. These people were (well, still are) very Polish and very trashy and on their lawn they had a broken down car propped up on cinder blocks, and a tiny little kitten living underneath. I spent the entire visit trying to coax her out from under the car. My perseverance paid off and my aunt helped scoop the kitten out for me and told me we could take it back to her house with us. Her sister-in-law asked if I didn't want a prettier kitten. She had pure-bred Himalayans inside and I could take one if I wanted. I took one look at those perfect little blue-eyed puffballs and my fate was sealed--I chose the raggedy-ass alley cat from under the car.
When we got back to my aunt's house she told me I'd have to call my Mom and ask if I could keep the kitten. My mother had just given birth to her third child in three and a half years and must have had very little fight left in her. She told me to ask my father. This was a very big deal to my three-year-old perception, because it meant calling my father at work which we only did if something important happened, like the time I needed stitches. My aunt dialed the phone for me and as I waited on hold for my Dad, I formulated my plan. Lying and manipulation are valuable traits I picked up at an early age and I knew this would have to be the performance of my lifetime.
When my Dad answered the phone I explained to him that I already had a kitten, and Mom said it's okay, and do you think it's okay? My juvenile mastery of the leading question worked magically--he said yes. Just like that. I nearly died from the shock. I called my mother back immediately. She, too, nearly died from the shock.
After I knew for certain that she was mine for good, I gave her a name. Diamonds, because "they're a girl's best friend," and possibly something to do with the music video for Madonna's Material Girl. Forgive me. It was, after all, the 80s.
After that, my next memory of Diamonds is of her peeing on my Dad's coat on the drive home from the vet's office, after she got spayed. I'm sure at this point my father was beginning to regret his decision to let me have a cat, but frankly it was too late.
The first week of kindergarten, we had to make some ridiculous collage-y type representation of ourselves, and our family members were each represented as a colored construction-paper circle. I included five circles for my family, and when my teacher asked who the extra circle was for, I said, "My cat."
"Oh, honey, your cat isn't a family member!"
"Yes she is."
And that was that.
(This is the same kindergarten teacher who asked me if I was retarded. Ask me about that story some time if I haven't already told you.)
There are no pictures of Diamonds when she was a kitten and I sometimes resent my parents for this, but there are also very few pictures of my brother from this time period, either, and I think he wins that pity-party, hands-down. There were, however, no less than ten million pictures taken of her beginning in 1993, the year I got my own camera for Christmas. Diamonds was my favorite subject, although admittedly she hated the camera and was a horrible model. Most of my pictures are of her tail as it runs away from me, or of her hiding under the Christmas tree, or the couch, or the dining room table. I have a lot of really, really bad pictures of her.
Another reason she was a horrible model is because she was fat. Very fat. Obese. She was a smart little thing and figured out how to open the cabinet where we kept the cat food, and then the cat food box, and then the individual packets of cat food inside the box. She also liked waffles with butter and syrup, and would run when she heard the toaster pop, the same way most cats run for the can-opener. How could you resist that? You can't. So she had a waffle for breakfast most days. Those waffles added up and at her heaviest she was topping the scales at something like 24 pounds. My little eight-year-old hopes would shoot through the roof every time someone asked if she was pregnant. I wanted nothing more than for my beloved Diamonds to continue her family line. I was a freakish child and watched a lot of public television--they were always airing cat shows. I knew all about bloodlines and feline musculature and all sorts of ridiculous shit and I NEEDED my cat to have kittens. Somehow, I eluded the important details, like alley cats aren't really of show caliber and also, my cat was spayed. All I knew was that she wanted to have kittens. She deserved to have kittens. I'd read about animals who lost litters and then adopted effigies of their babies. I would present her my stuffed animals in an effort to get her to latch on to one and treat it as her own. She never did, of course. And the fact is, she'd probably have made a horrible mother. Because she was a bitch.
Diamonds was known to bite. She bit my grandfather once, when we left her alone for a week to go down the ocean and he was in charge of feeding her. Just walked right up to him and took a chunk out of his hand. She bit my father's friend once, a man who loves cats as much as anyone I know and who has always had a way with them. And she scratched me, once, badly, when I was little. It left a scar from my neck halfway down my chest that I still have now. My father took her to get her front paws de-clawed after that. She spent the rest of her life sharpening her phantom claws on cardboard boxes and chair legs. It always broke my heart. It also made me laugh, because I am kind of evil myself, but also because she got this incredibly serious look on her face like sharpening her non-existent claws was a VERY important job. I don't remember her ever scratching or biting me after that (other people are, of course, another story.) I like to think this is because she realized then that we were soulmates, that she couldn't stand to see me hurt, that I'd never suffer at her hands ever again. But really it was probably just because the fear of God and the vet had been put into her.
Nonetheless, we became more and more smitten with each other. At night she'd fall asleep on my pillow, in the morning I'd wake up to her kneading my back. She was smitten with me when I was in elementary school and she let me stuff her into babydoll dresses and push her around in a stroller. She was smitten when I was a miserable hyperbolic nutcase teenager and sobbed into her fur every time a modicum of evidence was presented that lead me to believe the universe really was out to get me. She was still smitten when I (finally, thank god) got over that ridiculous stage of my life and then decided to spend a summer in Alaska, thirty-two-hundred miles away from home, growing-up some and maybe getting my shit together a little bit. By this time I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take on the world. Diamonds was old and decrepit and weighed less than half of what she used to. She was missing a front fang and was beginning to develop cataracts. She walked slower, took longer getting up, slept more and hardly ever went outside. I always knew she was getting old and would die, but I never really, well, knew it. It never occurred to me that she might die while I was away. And she didn't.
I came home in mid-September, and my kittycat was there, perfect still, waiting for me. She purred like crazy when she saw me. She was in the same condition as when I left her four months prior, which was not a good condition by any means, but no worse either. I spent the entire day on the couch, jet lagged, happy to be home, snuggling with my cat. That night, Diamonds slept on my chest, purring in my face. I woke up the next morning expecting to roll over and find her on my pillow same as every morning. Instead I found her behind the toilet in the basement bathroom. She looked horrible, and I made an appointment to take her the vet the next day.
She could barely walk or eat. I hand-fed her bits of tuna and carried her around on a pillow all day. By that evening she wasn't walking or eating at all. By nightfall her eyes were turning thick and glassy, she was starting to go blind. I knew then that we needed to do something soon, but it was Sunday night and the only 24-hour vet was 45 minutes away. The only car rides she'd been on in her life were to the vet, and so she hated the car, and I thought the stress of driving would certainly kill her. I was struggling with this when one of my best friends in the world called. He said he'd be right over. He only took a few minutes to get there, but by the time he got to my house Diamonds was lying on the bed, breathing sporadically, and probably completely blind by this point. My mother and I had to keep talking to her because she cried when she couldn't hear us. I was afraid to touch her because I thought I'd hurt her, but I rubbed behind her ears as gently as I could, and whispered to her that we were both going to be okay, and she could go now, and it would be fine. My friend took one look at her and said he'd call an emergency vet who made house calls, to put her down. I am not the most reasonable person in the world, but I do know animals need to be put to sleep sometimes. Still, when it came to that, I was crushed. I felt so responsible anyway--I'd left her for four months! For four long ridiculous months I'd been off gallivanting with moose in the Great White North while my cat was trying to not die. Letting someone euthanize her certainly wasn't going to alleviate that guilt.
But it didn't matter, because while he was on the phone with the vet, Diamonds took one last deep breath, let it out with a horrible, guttural combination of a choke and a meow, then died.
She had excellent timing.
A thunderstorm was rolling in and if we didn't bury her soon, we wouldn't be able to. The funeral was now or never and there was no time to grieve. My friend drove me to the grocery store where we picked every purple flower out of all the bouquets in the flower case. Back home, my Mom wiped her fur down and cleaned her up a little and wrapped her in my purple pillowcase. My Dad dug a hole in the garden.
I had never really watched anything die before, especially not like that. It was horrible and excruciating and yet, somehow, oddly satisfying at the same time--it was the only real closure I think I've ever gotten in my life so far. I held her body and rocked it like a baby while we waited for my Dad to finish digging. I'd been to plenty of funerals but never once touched a human body--they always grossed me out. Diamonds, though, I held close and kissed and petted until we slid her into the box and put it in the ground. (This may gross some people out. These people are cold, mechanical robots with empty holes in their chests where hearts should go.)
The first month or so was miserable. I wanted my cat back. I felt cheated--I'd been home for one day and she up and died. And I felt guilty. And lonely. And sometimes I felt nothing at all. I went through the whole spectrum. And eventually I got used to it. And now, she's still such a part of me that it's as if she never died at all.
I think of her all the time. As in, every day, all he time. This is maybe borderline crazy, but whatever. Every time I see a cat, I think of her. And I have cats, so I think of her... a lot. I compare every cat to her (no one ever comes close,) I talk about her anytime I talk about cats, to other cat people, to people who care that my dead cat ate waffles and stole my heart. This is perhaps overtly sentimental and not really my style, but whatever: she's not gone, because she was my cat, and she'll always be my cat, and I still love her today as much as I did the day I pried her out from under that car.
I know I have a long life of cat ownership ahead of me. I will never not have a cat. When I moved out of my parent's house and shacked up with my boyfriend, I told him we'd need to get a cat. He resisted for a while, but, let's be honest, I am adorable and it is hard to say no to me. One day he called me and asked me to meet him over his aunt's house. He sounded suspicious.
"Why?" I demand.
"There are kittens here."
"Why do I want to come look at kittens that I can't have?"
"Just come over."
We took home Boris and Schroeder a week later. Two-and-half years after that we added ChaCha.
My cats are like tiny, furry little external pieces of my heart that run around and chase fake mice and eat my houseplants. I love them so much it's ridiculous. They are absolutely adorable. And I'm not just being biased, either--other people will tell you the same. I have some cute freakin' cats. And yet they don't come close to Diamonds, not by a mile. They aren't even in the same ballpark. And I don't really miss her anymore or pine away for her like I used. But when I think about it that way--that I'm only 23 and I'll never again in my entire life know or love another cat as perfect as she was--that kind of gets me.
But, honestly? That's hardly a bad legacy to leave behind.
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| Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
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7:53 pm - Pardon the Schmoop.
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Talking about the Hello Kitty Super Hero that hangs from my rear-view mirror:
"What were you thinking when you bought that?"
"I was thinking 'That's a hotshit little kittycat, I want that in my car.'"
"That's what I was thinking when I met you."
This is why I like him.
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