Kitty Love

Wednesday, December 22, 2010
4:18PM

I just read a friend's post about pets and the connection we have with animals, which reminded me of my old cat Artemis, a beautiful horse named Tango, and the fact that I want to get a pet, a cat. I do love animals. In some ways, I enjoy them more than people. Animals don't know how to lie. You may catch them doing something they oughtn't, but they just look at you afterward. They don't deny it, and that makes forgiveness so much easier. Given the choice, it's hard to say whether or not animals would be honest, but the thing is, they are and I love that about them.

Artemis was my favorite cat ever. I had several great ones, but this one was mine. Kristen and I rode out to my high school friend Ashley's grandmother's house in Friendly and picked her from her litter mates. She was tiny and mewed the whole way home, crawling all over Kristen. Once at home, she treated me like a mother duck for several weeks, following me all over the house, wherever I went. Frequently, in her very young kitten days, that meant that she would follow me right into the bathroom, even into the bath. The first time, I didn't know to expect it. She climbed up on the ledge of the bath and was pawing at the water. I thought she was just trying to figure out what it was and once she understood it was water, she would find it distasteful and wait for me elsewhere. Nope, not this cat. She liked water and jumped right in, her small paws flapping like platypus flippers out to the sides of her round kitten belly. She didn't meow, panic, anything of the sort. I scooped her up out of the water and sat her on the floor where I began the long process of drying her off with the blowdryer. If you've never blow dried a cat, it takes a long time. Idk, I thought she might get pneumonia. I let her back in the bathroom next time, figuring it was a one time deal, she'd learned her lesson, and like a normal cat, wouldn't be back in the bath. Wrong. She made her second jump the very next bath. And other times, she would crawl from the ledge, out my shoulder and all the way down my chest, as if my body was a beach leading her into the ocean, and just paw at the water awhile. I loved that cat.

My mom wanted to have her spayed. This caused me to freak out. I started bawling hysterically, asserting that it was my cat and I thought it was cruel to take away her ability to have at least one litter since she couldn't speak against it. I'm not saying let's let all the strays run around and reproduce wildly. But this was one cat, who was well-cared for, and I felt mean about having her cut open only to wake up and not be able to reproduce anymore. We assume animals don't know the difference, but how can we be sure? I mean, if someone drugged us, cut out our reproductive organs, and we woke up the next morning with a scar and a lot of soreness, wouldn't we think something other than the obvious, superficial signs had gone wrong? My mom could see I wasn't going to calm down about this and would clearly see her as the devil if she forced me to get my cat, who I felt I was supposed to protect, spayed.

Anyway, as luck would have it, Artemis got knocked up of course. I was excited. The only animal babies I'd ever seen as a kid, I mean... at home... were little wriggling hamster babies that looked like hunks of ham with faces. They were cute and all, but I couldn't hold them and play with them much. So Artemis went weirdo-cat on my ass again, and one night about three in the morning, I woke up to the sounds of her munching placenta off her first newborn-- on the pillow beside my head. (Thanks, Cat, I guess that's what pillow cases are for.) I remember feeling so calm, thinking, oh whatever, she's just having her kittens. She knows what to do. In my fog, I rolled back over and nearly went back to sleep. Nature told me I should just go to sleep. My training told me I should go wake my parents and have them take care of her in case she needed help. So within minutes, the whole family was in my bedroom, and my dad was petting my cat after she got her second and last kitten out. Understandably, she was tired, and soon went to sleep.

She was a good mama. Some of her behaviors really cracked me up. Of course, as the little kittens tried to learn how to use the litter box, they weren't initially very good at it. They scattered litter everywhere and tracked it out on their fits and low-dragging bellies as well. That meant the need for frequent vacuuming. Artemis did not like the vacuum. She seemed to think it was a demon come to snatch her babies. She swat at it like a maniac, and did this bizarre battle cry: Hiss-snort-hiss, hiss-snort-hiss. My mom loved to mock that battle cry, and most times she'd wind up crying laughing about it. It caused my dad to start referring to her as "Tardamis." I always felt special and honored when she'd drag her kittens out from under the bed by the scruffs of their necks and present them to me, and let me play with them. I remember, one day I had Andy over, and she was hiding under the bed with the kittens. I wanted her to get the kittens so we could see them, and she seemed to understand that as she went under the bed and brought them out for us.

Then my freshman year of college, I remember my dad coming over to pick me up for a weekend, and we were on our way back across Route 7. Freshman year, particularly the second semester, was really hard on me. I didn't want to be in school at all, it was just what I was doing as the next natural step. I felt cut off from all social ties- I always got along better with people significantly older than myself and suddenly I was surrounded only by people my own age. That made me feel displaced. At home, I did everyone's laundry, not just mine, and I remember feeling really sad one day as I went to do laundry in the dorm, because no one else's laundry was mixed in with mine. Then I had a young friend die in a car accident and also just had a total existential meltdown/crisis. I told my dad I couldn't wait to go see Artemis. I had a connection with that cat, and even though I obviously couldn't tell the cat what was going on, I knew I'd feel calm if I could just play with her for awhile. The way the semester was going, I wasn't even surprised when he told me my cat was dead, that she'd been hit by a car while I was gone. I remember just being numb, not crying, thinking, of course my cat got hit by a car. My parents didn't know I'd started seeing a therapist that semester. Things were rough, I just wanted my cat.

I used to play this game with her, once I noticed it worked. I'd look her straight in the eyeballs and will her not to look away until I looked away, and crazy thing that she was, she never did. I could hold her like that from across the room, indefinitely. She was strange and moody, like me really, not huge on being picked up, dragged around, excessively affectionate... unless it was on her terms, and then she'd demand all the attention you could muster.

Carly's cat, Aphrodite, was the more affectionate one. Man was that cat a little attention whore. She climb in everyone's laps, including my grandmother's, who hates cats, and press her face up under their chin. She would then proceed to pass out and take a thirty minute nap in your lap while you petted her and she purred. Unfortunately, she, too made it to the highway.

Before she died, she developed either a bladder or behavior problem. We aren't really sure which. But because of that, my parents have refused to get anymore cats. It never seems quite like home without a cat. It never seems quite like Christmas without a cat knocking off glass ornaments and smashing them against some corner somewhere, or chasing balls of wrapping paper around the room and gnawing on them. That gradually became my favorite part of Christmas, just watching the cats chase around wads of wrapping paper. Here we'd all blown ridiculous sums of money on buying gifts, and the part that interested the cats was our refuse. Our cats were always confused by Christmas. Suddenly the family room is a mess, plastic bags, tags everywhere, people coming and going. They'd come out for awhile to chase the wrapping paper balls and then slink back under the tree for a nap. We knew they were awake again when the tree would start to sway and we saw paws sticking out from the low branches, poking at some twirling figurine of Santa Claus. The cats made Christmas for me. I think I'll get another cat soon. :) <3