Seventeen years ago I requested a white Persian kitten for Christmas, but my father’s storage barn business was slow as it usually was over winter so instead I received an orange and white long-haired tom that hissed and clawed until my arms were covered with more scratch marks than skin.
As in any biped or quadruped relationship, there are moments when you fall in love. Five days after I received Rocky Balboa from the veterinarian clinic, the cat leapt off the balcony of our loft and splatted on the living room’s hardwood floor below. He lay there a moment – a spread eagle piece of fluff – and then slowly dragged himself beneath the tan wicker furniture against the left hand wall.
Screaming, I thundered down the steps and pulled the cat out from beneath the sofa by his forearms and snuggled him close — savoring his docile manner as he was too stunned to fight back – and I knew that I loved Rocky even if he wasn’t the flat-faced Persian lapping Fancy Feast from a crystal goblet.
Nine years later, I left for college and left my cat behind. I held him close and sobbed into his cream sickle fur, promising that one day I would return and take him with me. He did not seem concerned in the slightest—just licked his paws and titled his head while watching me with that one ear cocked from an infestation of ear mites when he was five.
But he should have been concerned.
I never really came back; I never took him with me. During the summers, I would return and I would feed him egg yolks with milk and chopped pieces of American cheese. But I no longer had time to bathe him with my mother’s Pantene Pro-V and comb his fur while blowing it dry.
I was growing up, and he was growing older. His coat was not as sleek; his tail not as scared-raccoon fluffy. I tried to tell myself that this was not harbinger of things to come – of his death and the death of my childhood – but it was the case.
This week, he died at my parents’ home two hours away. I didn’t get to see him before he was buried; I didn’t get to say goodbye.
Honestly, I thought that this black hole wilderness had caused me to outgrown such childish things as mourning a cat that was Methuselah in feline years. In the winter, a litter of Heinz 57 puppies mysteriously disappeared from our land, and this time — unlike the time before — I didn’t sob while searching the sky for vultures and then try to match up their orbit with a spot in the field that resembled bloodied thistle down.
And when five baby birds kept leaping out of their nest above our porch light and scuttling around our yard with underdeveloped wings, I only put on Playtex gloves and rounded them up and put them back a dozen times before I realized that their nest was simply too small to contain them.
The night after my seventeen-year-old cat died, I shook water out of a colander while looking out the window above the kitchen sink. As I watched the pink hem attach to a gown of purple dusk, I realized that I might have grown up, but I had not outgrown the power of a pet’s loss.
“He’s gone,” I sighed.
“Just hitting you, huh?” my husband said, his words curt but kind.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I’ll miss him.”
It almost felt wrong to say that I would miss him, as in recent years Rocky Balboa had become more of my mother’s cat than mine, but I then realized that it didn’t matter.
What mattered was that I remembered him with his cream sickle fur and down titled ear, and as I stood there with water streaming from fettuccini pasta, I knew that one day I would not get my daughter a white Persian kitten but a ferocious long haired tom, and perhaps she would be lucky enough to mourn him when she was fully grown.
And in this, the cycle of life continued; the vestiges of childhood lingered on.
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