Aug
13
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.
Aug
11
Lately we’ve been taking the boys to a nearby college campus which is 1) satisfyingly empty after hours with tons of areas to explore, and 2) teeming with small cottontail rabbits—they’re everywhere; in the wooded trails, hopping across the parking lots, contentedly gnawing grass in the common areas. On Sunday I loudly asked, “Who wants to go see the bunnies?” and from the corner of the room behind a pile of Legos, a tiny voice peeped, “Me.”
Oh, Dylan. I can hardly believe it, but he’s a year and a half old now. A toddler! One who can talk. Using words. My god.
At eighteen months, Dylan is obsessed with animals and the noises they make. Particularly the cow (MOOOO), the sheep (AHH), the cat (MOW!), the owl (HOO. HOO.) and the horse (MOOOO) (?). He loves books featuring pictures of animals and is constantly clambering into our laps, saying “Book! Book!” and insisting on yet another team viewing of My Giant Book of Farm Porn or whatever it is.
His language has been exploding lately and he’s so strainingly eager to communicate. When I get home from work, or open his bedroom door in the morning, he shouts “Mama! Mama!” before pointing to every recognizable object nearby: “Fish! Dada! ‘Orse! Ball!” Woe be unto you if you do not acknowledge these namings with the proper enthusiasm, for he will simply repeat ‘orse, ‘orse, ‘ORSE, ‘ORSE until you shout YES! Yes! That IS a seahorse, right there on the cover of that book about . . . seahorses. Holy fucking SHIT, Dylan!
Some of his frequently-used non-farm-animal words that come to mind: Mama, Dada, ball, noo noo (macaroni), up, down, baba, more, song, star, water, walk, outside, inside, shoes, socks, Riley (I don’t know how to spell the way he pronounces this, but its meaning is unmistakeable), hot, all done, night night, light, cookie, cracker, waffle, car, truck, baby. The words he can say are nothing compared to what he can understand, which I tend to forget until I do something like quietly ask JB if I should put the farm video on and Dylan cocks his head before heaving himself onto the sofa and pointing at the television. “More! More!”
He watches his brother with squirrel-bright eyes and wants to do everything Riley does, which is both awesome and horrifying. They cackle and conspire together. They plot ways to break bones and shatter household objects. Their favorite game is to violently pogo up and down on the living room couch, screaming and laughing, while I flap and squawk as uselessly as a mother hen.
Dylan is terrified of the vacuum cleaner, but in other areas of life seems to be fearless to the point of reverse Darwinism. He beelines for the nearest physical catastrophe with an unerring sense for what will give me the strongest heart palpitations, and just when I think he’s surely starting to get the hang of this self preservation business, I find him precariously balancing on the top of his toy car, grinning widely while it begins to roll out from under his feet.
This weekend I suddenly realized I didn’t know where he’d disappeared to and I began walking through the house saying, “Dylan? Dylan! DYLLAANN!” over and over, peering in bathrooms and behind bedroom doors, and I kept hearing this bizarre, floating giggle that seemed to come out of the air, and I couldn’t find him and I couldn’t find him and I kept hearing the giggle and I finally shouted in sheer desperation, like someone in a horror movie, “DYLAN, WHERE ARE YOU?” and suddenly I saw him from where he had climbed into his stroller and was hiding in the seat. “Hee hee hee,” he said, his eyes crinkled nearly shut with the fun of it all.
He has the most stubborn cowlick in the world, a perfect representation of his resistant nature, and his recent haircut protests were surely audible from space a few days ago. Oh, he is a furious little sniglet when he wants to be, stomping around throwing things and pulling books off the shelf and biting the furniture and strangest of all, vengefully cramming dog hair in his mouth when he’s mad.
His moods are like summer storms, though, and as quickly as the black clouds roll in they’re gone, and his good humor shines through once more. And he’s off: to gallop at top speed while yelling “AAHHHHH!”, to steal one of my shoes and drag it around the house, to pound all the annoying buttons on Riley’s battery-powered Buzz Lightyear (“Zurg will—Zurg will—Zurg will—Zurg will never see this coming!”) to grab the dog’s Frisbee and try his level best to throw it for her.
He is, at times, a most colossal pain in the ass; he can be frustrating and exhausting and a challenge of near-Everest proportions. But oh, this boy. He is so funny, so pure, such a delicious pie-slice of life. He is a lovebug who can’t get enough affection, he wants to be held and kissed and carried from place to place. “Up , up!” he says, holding his little hands high, then cuddles straight into my chest, rolling his arms underneath his body as if burrowing right into me. I can’t get enough of this determined, intentional love, so much stronger than a baby’s needful contentment. I can’t believe there will ever come a time when he’s too big to fit in our arms.
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