Petless for decades, home adds kitten
Shortly after we married in 1988, I began bugging my bride to add a pet to our household by writing “I ‘heart' a puppy” on the foggy mirror after showers. My wife correctly pointed out that adding a puppy to a small, often-empty apartment of childless people who took long vacations didn't make much sense. She suggested, and I agreed, that we wait until the timing was better and we were fully ready to take on the responsibility of a pet.
One house, three kids and 22 pet-postponed years later, we may not be ready, but that no longer matters.
We have a cat.
Our 14-year-old son, Ben, loves cats. His twin brother, Ross, cat-sits for a neighbor. A thrilled Will, 11, considers the cat an answer to his pleas for “a real pet,” after discovering that goldfish even if Mr. Gupps, Stripes or Mr. Gupps II somehow had managed to live through an entire weekend aren't fun. My wife, stepping out to buy a more practical, covered litter box, is obviously kitten-smitten as she comes home with a bag of cat toys and indulgent treats called “Whisker Lickin's.”
The short-haired tabby kitten rescued by our cat-loving neighbor is Maggie, a name that beat out suggestions such as Smokey, Ella (Fitzgerald) and iCat (I thought it made us sound hip), Everybody loves Maggie.
And I'm trying, even though I always think a cat looks out of place if it's not on the lap of a James Bond villain. I think that stems from my traumatic childhood memories of barn cats, which were steeped in death. As a preschooler, I remember barnyard cats repeatedly escaping my grandparent's old dog, Pete, by nimbly springing to safety on a low-hanging tree branch. One day a cat's claws slipped off the branch and (to the surprise of Pete, the cat and me) a dog finally caught a cat. That result wasn't pretty. But it was quick.
Our farm cats often exposed me to the torturous deaths of birds or mice they captured. By age 8, I knew the sound a baby bunny makes when a cat snatches it from protection.
At times our cats turned on each other, scratching out each other's eyes, cannibalizing newborn kittens or raising a ruckus with cat fights that woke me. I still remember the garbled meow of Goldwater, our yellow cat who survived having his throat ripped open during a fight, presumably with a tabby named LBJ.
When I finally found a kitten to love (Otis, named after Purdue University running back Otis Armstrong), my dad moved a tractor and Otis, not showing the quickness or elusiveness of his namesake, ended up as a freshly flattened catskin rug on the shed floor. I always associate the word catatonic with my reaction to that demise.
Other people's cats normally sense my unease around them and wait until I'm holding a drink before they leap onto my lap, causing me to squeal and toss red wine onto a white rug that had never been subjected to as much as a drop of cat urine until I freaked out. Cats are drawn to me.
But not Maggie.
“Where's Maggie?” I ask politely on Day Two after my fruitless searches have me fearing our indoor cat somehow managed to find a hay-baler/cat-mangler in our basement.
“She's under the pew in the mud room,” my wife responds, indicating the bench I've walked past a dozen times without noticing any cat lurking underneath. This means that the kitten still is a bit shy around me, my wife explains. This also means that we might have had cats living under our pew for years and I've just never noticed.
Other than my brief experience watching the neighborhood cats who come into our backyard to use the bathroom and eat cardinals, this cat stuff is all new to me. But I really want to make this work. I want Maggie to become a beloved member of the family and maybe one day sit on my lap as I sip coffee and write a column. Apparently, I'm going to have time to accomplish that goal. My kids tell me that, contrary to what I learned growing up, cats have a life span longer than three months.