Thumbelina

Jodi and I are having discussions over what to name our cat. Well, not our cat. We are having discussions over whether we have a cat. Whether to have a cat. Are we adult enough? Do we want the responsibility? Can we get around the provision from our landlords that we are not, technically, allowed to have one? What happens at Christmas? Can we afford it? Who will let it out at 7:00 AM? To which I answer yes, yes, yes, we’ll see, sure why not, and me, if it means we can have one.

I have wanted a cat for a long time. Ever since we shared a blissful abode with The Kitten in New York. Oh, and Katie. Lest we forget Katie, the owner of The Kitten and my dearest friend. But do I have videos of Katie playing not just fetch, but catch, with a bell toy? I think not.


When we left that sweet sweet closet on the Upper East Side, I was bereft of satisfying cat presence in my life. I would relish the days at home when I could see Sara. Sara, light of my life…I’m tempted to make a Lolita reference here, syntactically of course, not because she WAS the fire of my loins, it’s just how can you write “light of my life” without “fire of my loins” after it and not sound like a CBS Dean Martin special? But “Sara” doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Lolita,” not a paragraph’s worth of linguistic musings anyway. But I digress. Sara was the best thing about my childhood, she was its fire and constancy and softness and excitement. By which I mean, as sweet as she might be, you always knew she could rip your face off if she wanted to. It was that element of surprise that kept things interesting.

I remember getting Sara from our neighbors whose cat had kittens. I was seven and Robin was two and we walked up the block to where the kittens were nestled in a box and we chose from among the female ones (the one male had been claimed) and she was just a wriggling baby and we stole her from her mother. I mean, I guess she was old enough and everything because I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have let us take her if she wasn’t “of age,” but it still seems such a cruel thing to steal babies from their mothers, for all parties involved, and to expect the baby to adapt to a new family of oh, say, a different species. I remember holding her on the way home, how small she was, how light. How sharp her little claws, how like small suns her flashing eyes. She was not Sara then, oh no, she was a victim of the nameless limbo of a feuding human family, taken hostage from her feline roots. My parents had given me the opportunity to name her. With the depth and breadth of childhood imagination I had narrowed it down to “Midnight” (she was black), and “Tulip” (why, you ask? I have no answer). My dad told me I would regret these choices and we should go with either Sara, Grace, or Rebecca, which were names he had put in the running for when his daughters were born but which had lost to the ever-popular Katherine and Robin. At least the ever-popular Katherine, which when I wrote the phrase “ever-popular” I expected to see in the top-ten lists of female baby names for most birth years and was astounded to find that I rank 39th in top names of 1981, only two places ahead of “Brandy.” And this according to the Social Security Administration. So there you go.

Well, it sucks when your parents are right, but look what happened. Somehow my dad won, but I recall that it was on a trial basis, under which we agreed to try “Sara” for the time being and see if it worked. I realize now with my full adult mental faculties that I may have been duped—how would we have known if it wasn’t “working”? Would there have been signs, shadows, wonders? Torn curtains, kitten piss on our pillows, yowling in the night? But time went by, and Sara was Sara, and pretty soon it became clear that she was not really Tulip material. Midnight…maybe, but I bet if the SSA had a list of top ten black cat names, that would rank highly and then we would just be another set of uncreative WASPs. We showed them. We made Sara, the number-4 ranked female name of 1988, the name for not our baby, but our CAT. Hah.

Sara was the best cat ever. Yes, she was a teenage pregnancy (or, what are cat years? Maybe she was the equivalent of a mere 7 human years when she got pregnant at the ripe young age of 1), and yes, she ran away sometimes, and yes, she had no qualms about clawing your face off. But she was tiny, beautiful, feisty, frank, and individualistic, but would give you love when YOU needed it most. It was never what she needed, at least overtly, but she could tell when you were weak and required it of her. She was always gentle and kind to my grandfather in his ancient fragility. She loved to “make biscuits” on feather pillows while you were trying to fall asleep. When she had kittens, she would lose count of them (there were 5) and take 3 to the next hiding place she had devised (usually among my mom’s clean undergarments), leaving the last two mewling in their box while she contentedly nursed the others. Once, she had hidden (sans kittens, thank god) inside the car engine, and we drove several blocks before we heard her howl as we slammed on the brakes, and then saw her jump from off the tire onto the road, and then followed the railroad tracks home. Or maybe my dad had to come get her. My childhood memory fails me, except I couldn’t believe she had been under the hood and survived. Once she jumped out of the second story window in pursuit of a squirrel. Once (and this is the worst), she had been gone for a few days. I had to tutor this dumb jock boy in math. This is 4th grade. He said “You seem sad, what’s wrong?” and I said, “My cat is missing.” You can imagine the rest. In case you can’t:
“Oh, that’s too bad. What kind of cat is it?”
“Black. She’s small.”
“Ooh. Where do you live?”
“Central Ave.”
“Oh, God. I saw a black cat smushed on the side of the road this morning, on Central.”
At which point, I think I started bawling. Naivete yet again rearing its ugly head, preventing me from realizing that he had garnered all the necessary information from me before stating his fatal conclusion. Luckily, when I got home that day, Sara had returned, and although she would never kiss-and-tell of her adventures away, one could only imagine the things she had done and seen in her travels, free from her clumsy human appendages.

Sara died in 2005. I found out she was sick during a peace march. We were in Winston, had just walked a couple of blustery miles with several hundred other anti-warriors, and were standing at the five points brandishing signs when my mom called. It was like war had broken out in my heart, and all that marching meant nothing. I guess it’s callous, to feel that so much more acutely than the casualties of war, but I think it’s also natural. I drove home the next day to visit her, to say goodbye. She lay quietly but her breath was shallow. Something had ruptured. Something had been done that could not be undone. She was 17, but she would have had plenty of good years left if only…if only…

When I found out she had died, it was the only day I missed school that whole year. I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back. But somehow I did. Somehow, we do. How is it? How do we do that?

So now here I am, back at school again, and this cat has presented itself at our door. Well, two cats, but one is such a scaredy-cat that it seems unlikely to succumb to our taming in the near future. We think they are related because they both have thumbs. Yes, thumbs. When they walk, their front paws look like little hands, which upon extensive research I have found out is a rare and desirous characteristic of “polydactyl cats,” or Hemingway cats, so-called because Hemingway’s son had one. I love that. The one we think is the mother wears a hideous hot-pink collar but otherwise is beautiful. For awhile, we thought the collar meant she was someone else’s, but through rumors that we choose to believe we have determined that she used to belong to someone who moved away from the neighborhood and left her. I think she was once tame, but her kitten never was and so he is the slinky, nervous one of the two. For a few days, they both sat on our porch and yowled, until, driven to distraction, Jodi gave them some milk. In telling this story to our grandchildren, she will certainly blame me for initiating the taming, but I assure you it was she. Gradually, the mother, whom I’ve taken to calling Thumbs, or Thumbelina, came further and further in. We gave her solid food. On an impulse buy at Target, I bought catfood. So we stop feeding her expensive human food, I told myself. But really so that we could feed her more easily and more often. Then one day she let us pet her. Then one day she let us hold her. Then she sat with us on the sofa. Then she found our bed. And the rest…is history.

She’s up there now, curled up on the bed. Last night she slept there with us. Jodi said if I was going to let her do that, I had to let her out in the middle of the night or else clean up her pee from wherever it was in the morning. But when I woke, she was where she had been the night before. Awake before me, of course, much more in tune with nature than needful of alarms, and staring out across the mountains from the window by the bed.

Do animals appreciate a view? I’ve never thought about this before, one way or another, but I have today quite a bit. What was she looking at, what was she thinking, as she stared across the mountains in the early hours of light? Do they look different inside her golden eyes? How can she be so calm, face the day with such serenity?

There are lessons I can learn from this cat. I think she knows it, and she is going to stick with me till I do. I’m not sure what to do about the landlords. I’m not sure what to do about Christmas. But she found me. This, according to my dad, is the only way one is supposed to procure cats. In the back of my mind, I hear the Little Prince: “One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed.”

I don’t know who is taming and who is being tamed in this situation. But somehow, I think it’s worth the risk.


*A note to my readers: thank you, THANK YOU for the guilt. It's what keeps me going. Also, the photo at the top of this post, of the paw, is not actually our cat. You can probably tell this from the human hand if nothing else. It's from Google images, but the resemblance is quite striking.