Aug
17
Misc.
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Cat update: still no Cat. Tomorrow I’ll go back to the shelter (it’s closed on Mondays) to see if this is her, although I’m not very hopeful because 1) I visited the shelter a few days after that cat’s pickup date and I suspect “Phoebe” is the same cat I peered at for an extra second before determining it wasn’t Cat; 2) the picture of that cat doesn’t show a notched left ear, which Cat has; and 3) of all the names I can imagine a well-meaning shelter employee coming up with for Cat, Phoebe just isn’t one of them.
I hate not knowing what’s happened to her. I suppose it would be worse to find her flattened and glassy-eyed on the side of the road somewhere . . . but I don’t know, at least we’d have closure then. This is a weird sort of limbo where I alternately feel hopeful, discouraged, mournful, and weirdly certain I’ll see her again someday because this can’t really be how the story of Cat ends, can it?
Oh, Cat. We miss you.
In happier news, three things:
• District 9 was fantastic and entertaining and really kind of surprising and I definitely recommend it as being 100% babysitter-worthy
• I maybe have an agent (!!!) who’s interested in working with me on what will SURELY be an awesomely fun little gift book, and while I do not exactly have a publishing contract in hand I feel (hope) this is an encouraging first step. At this point it’s on me to pump up the marketing part of the book proposal a bit, so if you are by chance a retailer who would greatly enjoy professing your desire to carry such an item, or a corporate entity who might be interested in doing some cross-marketing promotional activities with regards to said book, or an author with experience transforming the why-my-book-will-sell section of your proposal into an irresistible publisher siren song, well, hot damn but I would love to talk with you.
• JB and I have been watching The Wire kind of a lot recently and as a result all sorts of new phrases have been creeping into our lexicon, their levels of inappropriateness depending on whether or not the kids are still up. The other day I was walking with Riley across a parking lot and said “Stay close by” for about the frillionth time and he grumpily asked me why I’m always telling him to stay close by, gosh. I replied, “Because I gots to school you, yo,” and without missing a beat, he said, “You feel me?”
Aug
13
Cat
Filed Under Uncategorized | 181 Comments
About a week ago, Cat disappeared. She’s been an outside pet for years (there was no stopping her, believe me) and I didn’t worry at first—she’s been known to wander, and in the hot weather we had recently she barely came inside, preferring to lounge in the grass and absorb heat into her fur.
She always comes home at night, though, in order to power the contents of her food bowl and meander off to yowl at top volume outside Dylan’s room. After a couple days went by without seeing her we started thinking, hmmmm.
Once, after returning from a vacation during which we elected to leave out food and water (and a slightly opened window to the utility room, unsafe as that probably was) instead of boarding her, she didn’t come home for a few days and I thought the worst. Eventually she returned, a little scraggly-looking and extra raspy-voiced, but no worse for wear, and I’ve been hoping for the same happy outcome to this situation . . . but it’s been so long, and this time we’ve been home the whole time.
I’ve done the unpleasant missing-pet tasks: driving around looking for her, posting flyers in the neighborhood, calling the pet hotline, placing an ad on Craigslist. Yesterday I went to the local animal shelter and looked through their found pet reports and peered at all the jailed cats—so many friendly animals coming alive in my presence and issuing forth mrows and blrrrts and sticking paws through the mesh of their cages; me knowing some (all?) of them are surely doomed to euthanization—and they told me to keep checking back, sometimes cats don’t get picked up and taken to shelters for months, but keep in mind they’re only held for 72 hours. Jesus.
As each day goes by without her coming home I feel worse, guilty (no collar! No microchip!) and sad and jumping at every outside noise and rushing to the window. I hate not knowing, and the idea that I might never know, that she might never come home and we’ll never, ever know what happened to her . . . oh, it just sucks.
Every day when I’d come home from work she would emerge from her hiding place in the bushes along our front walk and accompany me to the front door, where sometimes she’d come in and sometimes the cacophony of shouting children would send her back out onto the lawn, where she’d roll and stretch and wait for things to quiet down. For a week I’ve been pulling in the driveway, and she’s not there. I keep looking out the living room window and she’s not there.
We turned the cat food auto-dispenser off so it would stop dumping food into a bowl no one is eating out of. Her bed is empty.
I was hesitating to write anything about her being gone, thinking, oh, she’ll probably show up as soon as I hit publish and won’t I feel silly then. But now I would very much like to feel silly. I would like to once again be driven half out of my skull by a pet who wants in, who wants out, who meows outside doors and bedroom windows, who occasionally crawls inside the dog’s food container to take a stealthy shit, who has been a giant pain in my ass ever since I took her home from the shelter when she was a tiny, evil kitten; who has lived with me in houses, apartments; in Corvallis, Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle; who has been a part of my life for over ten years.
“Where do you think Cat is?” I asked Riley a couple days ago, because I secretly believe children know everything we don’t.
“I think she DIED,” he said. “Because she’s old like Grandpa’s cat.”
“Well, no, she wasn’t that old,” I told him.
“Oh,” he said, and thought for a moment. “Then I think she’s on a cat vacation.”
I hope so. I hope she’s having a good time. And I hope she comes home soon.
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