Cat House 1922

I’m a sucker for bungalows. When I found this 1922 house on a quiet side street, I thought it was perfect: lovely woodwork, hardwood floors, steam radiators, plaster walls. There was just one thing: there was only one bathroom, upstairs. Mind you, it’s a big bathroom with a luxurious antique claw foot tub deep enough to swim laps in and the original 1922 built-in medicine cabinet. The good outweighed the bad, so I bought it, moved in, Chloe joined me, then Annie, and I began to renovate. New windows, new kitchen appliances, a new furnace, a new roof, new paint inside and out replaced the old, not to mention a new flower garden in the front yard. Frugal person that I am, I would save up some money, then spend, save, then spend, until the last items on my to-do list were complete except for two big-ticket items. I wanted a downstairs bathroom, new construction,  and the kitchen cabinets, probably installed in the late 1960’s, needed to be replaced. For these major renovations, I would need a loan.

The city where I live was not a serious victim of the housing bubble; increased valuation has been moderate. So by my estimation, refinancing with the lower, post-bubble interest rates would allow me to renovate without too much of a shock to the budget. My credit was good, so I was sure I could qualify for a loan despite the tight post-bubble standards. I drew up a sketch for a modest first floor addition and began interviewing contractors.

Chloe and Annie were not pleased with the parade of contractors visiting the house, but since the plans were confined to the first floor, they stayed upstairs during the visits. “You’ll need to add a heat source for the added bathroom,” said the contractor I had chosen. “Here’s the name of the heating contractor I use. Have him come check out the possibilities.”

The heating contractor descended to the basement to check out my options. “You need to come down here immediately,” he said ominously. “I have something to show you.”  A puddle was spreading on the basement floor. “Your steam heat pipes are leaking somewhere in the walls upstairs. Have you seen any damp spots?”

“Could that be the source of the damp spot on the dining room ceiling? I thought it might be a problem with the new roof and was about to call the roofer.”  We went to investigate.

“You have to get behind that plaster to check out the leak. Good luck!” said the heating contractor, giving me the name of a carpenter he recommended.

The carpenter put a big hole in the living room ceiling with a bucket below to catch the leak, not before a chunk of plaster had fallen, knocking Chloe on the head. “You really should have that whole steam system replaced,” said the carpenter. “If one pipe broke, it’s only a matter of time before a second pipe leaks, and you don’t want to keep ripping out plaster.”

I went back to the heating contractor and we decided to replace the steam system with a heat pump that could also replace my window air conditioning units with central air, all for a price, of course.

“My costs are really mounting up,” I said nervously to the heating contractor, “And I haven’t even begun work.”

“Well, at least you won’t suffer any more surprises,” he said on his way out. Then the doorknob came off in his hand.

The contractor recommended a mortgage broker who worked from her home, a four-by-four built in the 1920’s filled with antiques and inhabited by a big tabby tom cat, Felix. I had plenty of occasions to visit since the loan qualification process took forever. As part of the qualification process, I had repeated visits from the general contractor, a building consultant, the mortgage broker and the appraiser. Each time the doorbell rang, the cats scurried up the stairs. I began leaving the upstairs closet doors open so each could have her private hiding place. “When I remodeled my house, Felix hated the disruption at first,” the mortgage broker said. “But he got used to it and even made friends with some of the construction workers.”

“I wish Felix could communicate with my cats,” I responded. “They could use a feline transition counselor.” The minute I said these words, Felix, sitting at my feet, jumped onto my jacket which I had thrown on a chair. He kneaded it thoughtfully. When I returned home and tossed the jacket on the sofa, each cat sniffed it carefully, a behavior they had not evidenced before. Clearly the lines of communication had opened.

My jacket and I made about ten trips back and forth to the broker’s and Felix’s home as the underwriters’ requests for financial information snowballed. I began to think my fitness as a mortgagee depended not on my fiscal soundness, but on my ability to keep records. “Here’s the key to my house and another for my filing cabinet,” I wanted to say to the banker. “Just rummage around and find what you need. My life is an open bank book” At each visit, Felix paid my jacket special attention, sniffing and kneading. Chloe and Annie inspected it carefully upon my return home. Fifty days after I filed by first request (mind you, that’s ten days longer than Noah was in the ark), the loan was finally granted. I could now spend three times what I had originally budgeted to do twice the amount of work I had planned.

So what coping skills has Felix counseled Chloe and Annie to use in the difficult days ahead? Here are the Feline Transition Counselor’s three rules for cats facing construction trauma:

1.       For God’s sake, get under the bed! The only safe place is under the bed!

2.       If you can’t get under the bed, climb into a cardboard
        box, Standing in a cardboard   box makes cats invisible.

3.       If you crap on the carpet often enough, the workmen will  
          go away.

Wish us luck! The new construction begins.

Puss in books

I was a bookworm. While the neighborhood kids played kickball in the driveway, you could have found me either wedged behind the sofa in the living room or outside perched in the tree house with a book in my hand. As a kid, my favorite books were biographies (I loved the “Landmark” series), fantasies, my favorites being the Victorian fantasy novels of Edith Nesbit and the more modern Tales of Magic by Edgar Eager (both series are unjustly forgotten) plus any novel that introduced me to a time and culture not my own.

I still love to read. Most evenings you can find me on the living room sofa, book in my hand with Chloe perched on the sofa arm and Annie stretched out on the back. Sometimes I even read to them until they get tired of watching a fat middle-aged woman sitting motionless and leap off the sofa to enjoy a more exciting sight like the fish bowl or birds in the maple tree outside. Here are some of the works I know featuring cats as characters.

Not surprising, cats are often portrayed as carousers. We’ve all seen cartoons of Garfield on the fence, singing to a lady love. He’s only the most recent of a long line of amorous kitties. Kater Murr is the tom cat hero of remarkably modern novel by German author E.T.A. Hoffman containing tales and observations by a free-thinking cat. Critic Alex Ross wrote about the novel in the New Yorker (1972), “If the phantasmagoric 'Kater Murr' were published tomorrow as the work of a young Brooklyn hipster, it might be hailed as a tour de force of postmodern fiction." Kater Murr is a direct progenitor of another free-thinking tom cat, Behemoth, who carouses riotously through the Bulgavov’s satirical Russian masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (1940). I remember reading this one summer when I was in college and being sucked into this dark, fantastic world. Another free-thinking, very raunchy tom is Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat (1959) which was made into the first x-rated animated feature film in 1972. But not all the carousing kitties are toms. Jane and I shared a love for the poems written by Don Marquis in the twenties.  Archy and Mehitabel describes in verse the friendship of a soulful cockroach and his slightly slutty friend, the alley cat Mehitabel. Mehitabel reminds me a lot of Jane in her last years as she navigated between the twin shoals of poverty and mental illness with resourcefulness, wit and grace.

When Chloe first moved in with me, in an attempt to treat the skin condition which made both our lives miserable, I visited a homeopathic vet since conventional medicine hadn’t helped. “I really don’t know much about cats,” I told Sid, my vet friend. “I know you have cats. Would you say she’s, well, a normal specimen?”

I’d say, frankly, that she’s a kitty from another planet,” Sid replied. There seem to be a lot of those. Another genre that is remarkably rich in cats is science fiction. Robert Heinlein, D.J. McHale, Andre Norton, and Roger Zalazny have all written sci-fi in which cats play major roles. Science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin has written a charming children’s series called The Catwings about- what else? - winged cats and Erin Hunter has written a wonderful children’s fantasy adventure series, The Warriors, told from the feline point of view. Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh is a series similar to Harry Potter with a magical world set in England.

Perhaps cats play a major role in mystery series because of their legendary curiosity. Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, and Carole Nelson Douglas and Shirley Rousseau Murphy all have written mystery series in which cats solve crimes.  While not detectives, cats play major roles as companions in the mysteries of Nevada Barr, Elizabeth Peters, and Kathy Reichs. More unusual is the Felidae series, a German mystery series by Turkish-born writer Akif Pirinicci, which is can be read as an allegory about Nazi Germany. These are complex, disturbing, multi-layered books full of ethical ambiguity.

So what’s my favorite cat book? It’s neither science fiction nor a mystery, but it does feature a free-thinking tom. It’s The Fur Person, by May Sarton.

In addition to fiction, there is lots of poetry featuring cats. In addition T. S. Eliot’s Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, the anthology that formed the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, poems about cats have been written by such luminaries as Matthew Arnold, Robert Bly, Chaucer, Wordsworth and W.B. Yeats.
Perhaps the best poem ever written about a cat it Christopher Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey,” an excerpt of a longer work, Jubilate Agno. Too long to print here, here’s a link: http://42opus.com/v4n2/mycatjeoffry

Here's my favoite cat poem for the moment, an adaptation by Daniel Ladinsky, of a poem written by Tukaram (c.1608-1649, India):

LANDLOCKED IN FUR

I was meditating with my cat the other day

and all of a sudden she shouted,

"What happened?"

I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged

her to say more--feeling that if she got it all out on the table

she would sleep better that night.

So I responded, "Tell me more, dear,"

and she soulfully meowed,

"Well, I was mingled with the sky and now look-- 

I am landlocked in fur."

To this I said, "I know exactly what 

you mean."

What to say about conversation

between

mystics?

Thought for food

A friend had a tomcat named Buster. Even though he was a burly specimen, he was a finicky eater. He would only eat premium canned cat food, never dry kibble. He could adore one brand on Monday and turn up his nose at the same variety on Tuesday.

One day when I was grocery shopping, I saw my friend slip into the market with a furtive glance, carrying an oversized handbag. Her manner was so peculiar; I shadowed her to the cat food aisle. She put down the bag, pulled out the cat and held him, dangling straight in front of her, his big yellow eyes inches from the tins of food. “OK, Buster, I’ve had it with you!” she said. “You choose!”

My cats are not like Buster. Maybe because both have suffered food deprivation, they’ll eat any kind of kibble I put in the bowl. When I first got Chloe, I only bought premium brands. I read every article I could find on cat nutrition and perused the small print on bags of kibble like I was deciphering the Rosetta Stone. When Annie arrived, she had been prescribed a special diet for cats with poor kidney function. The vet suggested I feed each, individually, twice a day to keep their different diets separate. While Chloe ate with a normal, healthy appetite, Annie inhaled her bowlful in one gulp. Then she vomited it up immediately. Weighing Annie’s need for a special diet with her need for any diet that would stay in her stomach, I switched to continuous feeding, using gravity feeders, for both cats, so Annie could have the security of a constant food supply. I tried to maintain two feeding stations, one for each cat, but gave that up when I discovered they both used the same bowl. As competitive as they are in other circumstance, they are patient when it comes to eating kibble. Each has her own schedule, eating a bite or two whenever she passes by the feeding station. Annie’s kidneys aren’t perfect, but they haven’t gotten worse. I suspect any harm that’s being done by feeding her a regular diet is compensated for by the fact that she no longer has to worry where her next meal is coming from. And while she vomits (“Some cats just barf,” said my vet), she limits herself to throwing up about once a fortnight rather than after every meal.

Still, Annie does have a food neurosis of a specific kind. Once or twice a month I roast chicken wings for myself. I marinate them in teriyaki sauce, sherry, grated raw ginger, garlic and green onions and then bake them in the oven for about forty minutes. It’s a great dinner, especially with a spinach salad with mandarin oranges, toasted almonds and a sweet and sour dressing. Part way through the meal I might leave my seat to grab a drink of water or a glass of wine. Quick as a flash, Annie leaps onto the table, grabs a chicken wing and scurries up the stairs. Since she only steals chicken wings from my plate, never beef, pork or fish, I think she is reminded of the wings from the bodega which she shared with Jane, her former owner, when they both lived in New York City. No matter where I checked upstairs, I couldn’t find the leftovers. For a long time I assumed she ate them, bones and all.

Then one day I decided it was time to turn the mattress in my bedroom. When I pulled the mattress and box spring from the bedstead, I found a hidden world behind the dust ruffle. There were the chicken bones, an entire graveyard. But that wasn’t all. I found the catnip mice that had unaccountably gone missing, all there. Single socks I thought I had lost at the laundromat had been carefully piled into nests along with scraps of paper and bits of yarn that Annie must have been collecting for months. What a mess! Thoroughly annoyed, I grabbed a broom and dust pan. And then I stopped.

Annie had created a home, a refuge, a safe asylum all her own. I remembered Jane, that generous, homeless hostess. Once when I visited her in New York, she and Doug were living apart. She was staying in a homeless shelter near Port Authority. I had reserved a hotel room.  “I’m sorry I can’t give you a place to stay,” she said regretfully. “I can’t offer you a room, but I can offer you a city, my city. Let me show you my favorite places in New York. That weekend was spent exploring hidden refuges in the city, pocket gardens, hidden parks: oases of quiet in the bustling urban landscape.

I cleaned up the chicken bones but left all the rest intact, placing the mattress carefully over Annie’s private space.  She came upstairs, took a dainty bite of kibble from the feeder and then, with a friendly nod in my direction, she ducked beneath the dust ruffle. Annie had gone back home.

Trash Talk

Monday is trash day in my neighborhood. I trundle the wheeled trash can to the curb Sunday night. Monday morning at seven a.m. the city’s disposal trucks lumber down the street while the trash collectors in bright orange vests leap from the running boards, heaving trash cans into a chute with a clatter.

I have no idea how Chloe knows it’s trash day. Can she tell from my routine? Can she hear the trucks from a distance? At six forty-five, Chloe is in the window, quivering with excitement, waiting for the show. She adores heavy machinery.

One of the reasons I bought my house was its placement on a quiet, convivial street. Children ride their bikes, dog walkers and joggers greet each other. Before I purchased the place, I had visions of myself sitting on the front porch swing, drinking my morning coffee and greeting my neighbors as they headed off to work.

A few weeks after I moved in, I was awakened by the rat-a-tat of a pneumatic drill. I rushed out into the front porch to find workmen destroying the sidewalk.  “It’s the sewer overflow project,” one of them yelled over the din. “The city is replacing all the pipes.”

My corner became sewer pipe central. The city placed big, concrete pipes and a Porta-potty by the sidewalk. This became the spot for the construction crew to hang out on endless breaks, smoking, drinking coffee, and throwing fast food sandwich wrappers into my garden.

One morning I was leaving the house just as my neighbor was walking to his car and the work crew was gathering on the corner.

“Have a great day!” I called to my neighbor.

“Thanks,” he responded. Waving at the work crew he called, “How are you doing, Marvin? Good to see you, Brandon! How’s it going, Joe?”

The workers lit their cigarettes and nodded sheepishly.

“How do you know these guys?” I asked.

“I’m a guard at the city jail. Don’t get into trouble, guys,” he shouted genially in their direction, adding under his breath to me, “Better keep your house locked.” This was not the life I’d planned for me or for my new cat, Chloe.

But Chloe loved the noise, especially the rumble of the trucks and tractors. The instant she heard the roar of an engine, she jumped into the window and sat, nose against the pane, drooling on the glass. When I left in the morning, if the street was quiet, I was met with questions from the crew. “Hey, where’s the cat? Is Chloe OK?”

“Just start your engines, gentlemen. She’ll be right there.”

As soon as Chloe heard the big trucks come, she would raise one paw in greeting, just like the Japanese “hello kitty” cartoon. The crew would respond with a mirrored salute, calling out, “Hello, Chloe!”

Chloe loved  being greeted by her enthusiastic fans when the big trucks came. Even now, when the construction project is long gone, I come home from work to find Chloe in the window, greeting me with a high pitched whine and her “hello kitty” salute. Last night I was standing on the sidewalk, talking to my neighbor about a new construction project I’m about to begin when a pickup truck went by. Chloe jumped into the window with a loud, insistent meow.

“Good talking to you, but I think you need to go in now,” he said.

“How so?”

“Look at your window. Your cat is calling you.”

And so she was.

Annie takes control

If Chloe is a country girl, then Annie is a sophisti-cat. Born in Greenwich Village, she moved, as a kitten, to the Soho studio of Doug, a down-at-the-heels artist and his cat-loving wife, Jane, my best friend. She was named Anne Sexton after Doug's favorite poet, who, like Jane, was a brilliant woman crippled by mental illness.
In the seventies, Doug was a high-flying performance artist and art critic. He and Jane rubbed shoulders with Manhattan's artistic glitterati. But the passage of time and Doug's difficult personality eroded his success. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Doug and Jane eked out a precarious living, squatting illegally in the one-room basement studio, living on Doug's social security and Jane's disability checks. Still, Anne Sexton made the acquaintance of some emerging artists and students researching the 70's art scene and spent time in the airshaft outside the studio, basking under a ginko tree planted by Yoko Ono.
Doug wasn't fond of cats and valued Ms Sexton largely for her ability as a mouser, but Jane and Anne spent happy times napping together on the futon, sharing a Big Mac or chicken wings from the bodega and entertaining Jane's grown daughter, step-daughters and other visitors to the studio. I got to know Ms Sexton during several visits to New York before I had Chloe. Like Jane, she was a shy but gracious hostess, rubbing against my shins and purring softly. Physically she reminded me of the Jane I knew in college, tiny and pert, vaguely exotic with high cheekbones and almond eyes.

When Jane died unexpectedly, I visited Doug at the studio. Ms Sexton was there, rubbing against my legs and purring. "She needs a woman's touch," said Doug.
"I'll take her back to Virgina with me, Doug. I know you don't like pets."
"No, Anne Sexton is the only living thing other than our daughter, Victoria, that I have to remind me of Jane. I'm keeping the cat."
After Jane's death, Doug became even more irascible. His daughters visited him less and less. Victoria started college in Massachusetts, and I heard from her rarely. "A friend of mine visited Dad lately. Anne Sexton is looking rather thin," she wrote when we checked in by email.
One day while scanning Victoria's Facebook page, I saw the following plea: "WIll someone please adopt a wonderful cat? As sick as she's been, she just purrs and purrs. Will someone please take this cat?"
I learned that Doug's increasing agitation and eccentricity were harbingers of dementia. He and Anne Sexton had been discovered, half dead, in the squalid studio. Doug's path led to a hospital and a nursing home, Anne Sexton's to a veterinary hospital and a temporary placement with Jane's step-daughter. Because Anne Sexton was a mature, fragile animal requiring special care, no one would adopt her.
"I'll take her," I emailed Victoria impulsively. "It's the last thing I can do for your mother."
"Thanks for the offer," she responded. "Now let's see how we can transition her to Virginia."

I began contacting pet escort services. It would have cost less to hire a limousine to drive to New York City and escort Ms Sexton to my home. Since Victoria's half sister lives near Washington D.C., we made plans to rendezvous there. I arrived to discover a tiny, trembling, drugged creature with a swollen mouth from dental extractions for abcessed teeth. She wore a dainty blue belled collar.
Having researched cat introductions (Cat versus Cat is an excellent book), I was cautious about introducing four-pound, old, sick Anne Sexton to twelve-pound, young, robust Chloe.I had prepared the dining room with a feeding station, litter box and cat bed. The minute Anne emerged from the carrier, she skittered under a low shelf and crouched there, trembling. I made sure I left some items with Chloe's scent in the dining room and took the cat carrier with Anne's scent to the study where Chloe preferred to stay. She showed no interest in the smell.
For three days Anne remained largely in the dining room under the shelf. I took her to the vet where I learned she had signs of kidney disease plus a heart murmur, probably caused by a taurine deficiency. Cat food is routinely supplemented with this vitamin, but Jane had not had the money for cat food, so she had fed Anne with the fast food she bought for herself. When she died, Anne must have lived on whatever she could scrounge from the garbage and any vermin that entered the studio. I hoped poor Anne Sexton could spend her declining years in peace and renamed her Annie to denote what I hoped would be a more relaxed life than she had with Doug in New York.

I became ever more concerned that Chloe, my big, strong, healthy, young, very spoiled cat would attack poor, debilitated, tiny Annie.
The night of the third day, Annie ventured out from the dining room. Chloe and I were asleep when we heard an alien ding-a-ling: Annie's collar. Up the stairs came the tinkling bell. Chloe and I sat together on the mattress. I was guardedly ready to restrain her should she attack. The bell stopped at the foot of the bed. Suddenly, Annie leaped onto the mattress with a fierce soprano roar like a little lion. Chloe ran for the safety of the study. Annie had taken control.

Born Again Cat

It began with an internet romance. A co-worker had just gotten a new dog from the humane society. I was pet free.
"What does your new pet look like?" I asked.
"You can see a picture of him on the humane society's web page. He's featured as adoptee of the month."
Next to the picture of the month's adoptee was a link to the pet of the month, a dog or cat that was featured for adoption. One click and I was hooked.

The most beautiful long haired, white and black cat I'd ever seen stared at me with green eyes bigger than her head. I had to have that cat.
Mind you, I am not a "cat person." My parents bred and showed boxer dogs. As a toddler I spent many companionable hours with Squire, the show dog, lounging around the back yard kennel, sharing a bowl of kibble. Later we had an obese dachshund called Sally Lump-lump (her crooked tail was victim of an unfortunate screen door accident) and a mutt named Lucille. As an adult I became unaccountably fond of guinea pigs. But I never had or wanted a cat.
Still, this cat, named Freedom, was different with her elusive beauty. I emailed the humane society and asked if I could have her.
The director responded I would need a letter of recommendation from my veterinarian. I complied and asked if I could visit the animal. The director asked for a complete history of pet ownership. I complied and asked if I could visit the animal. The director asked for a personal recommendation from a cat-owning friend.
I complied, but countered I felt like I was adopting a Chinese baby, not a cat, given the amount of information I had to supply before I could visit her. Please, I asked, couldn't my cat-owning friend and I come to the shelter to visit Freedom face to fuzzy face?
One Saturday my friend Karin and I arrived at the shelter. One step through the door reminded me why I was not a cat owner. The air was redolent of musky cat and my ears were assaulted by high-pitched miaows. The small back room was stacked with tiny wire enclosures, one on top of the other, like prison cells. There, level to my eyes, crammed into a little cage, was the ironically named Freedom. Our eyes locked. She was miserable. She was desperate. She was beautiful. And she was covered with open, weeping, bloody sores.
"We think it's scabies," said the director defensively. "We were hoping for improvement before you met her. She sees the vet again this week. Of course, we can't let her be adopted until she's fully recovered."
"Send her to the vet," I said. "I'll be back next weekend to pick her up."
"If the new medications take effect, you can have her."
The following week I added one percent to the gross national product buying organic cat food, cat dishes, a litter box and litter, cat beds, cat treats, cat toys, cat trees and a cat travel carrier. I pored over baby books, choosing the elegant and orginal name, Chloe, which I later learned from Google is the most common name for a female cat. Saturday I drove to the shelter with the cat carrier, a twenty-pound kibble donation and a fifty dollar adoption fee.
"I'm sorry," the director said. "Freedom's not responding to the medication. We can't take the responsibility of giving you a sick animal." She added, "I feel really terrible about this. It's clear she doesn't like other cats. These close quarters are torture for her. After you visited, she really perked up. And although I want all our cats to be adopted, there are some I really care for. Freedom is a special animal. I don't want her to be put down."
"I consulted with my vet," I responded. "She helped me write a document saying I take all responsiblity for Freedom's pre-existing condition. I've made an appointement for her to see my vet, even before I take her home."
I felt like I was driving the get-away car for a jail break as Chloe and I sped to the vet's office. She took one look at this trembling ball of bloody fur and said, "I don't know what this is, but it isn't scabies. We can see if it heals on its own with good nutrition and a stress-free life or we can try some antibiotic sprays and ointments."
"In for a penny, in for a pound," I thought. "What the hell, let's try the meds."
Chloe and I headed for home. When we arrived, I took Chloe to the second floor where I had set up the litter box in the bathroom and a feeding station by the study. I opened the carrier, letting Chloe find her own way out and went downstairs to put the medications away.
I came back upstairs to find Chloe had disappeared. She hadn't come downstairs. The closet doors were closed. I checked under the chairs and the desk. No cat. How did that happen? I was overcome with guilt. Somehow she had gotten out of the house. She must have run away.
The only place I hadn't looked was under the bed. I lay on my stomach and peered beneath the dust ruffle. No cat, but there was a suspicious bulge in the box spring. As I stared, prone, at the swelling, a furry leg emerged, followed by a head with big green eyes. Chloe came to the edge of the box spring and stared into my eyes. She blinked. I blinked. She licked my nose. Chloe had been reborn.