We lost our cat several years back from old age. Chloe was 17. When she adopted us, we took her in to the vet to find out more about her, thinking we would hear that she was a kitten that was about five months old. Turns out she was three and at a whopping six pounds, wasn’t going to get much bigger. We had a loaf of whole grain bread in our fridge that weighed more than she did.
All pets have something unique about them. When I was teaching middle school and the classroom discussion wound its way off course with pet stories, I knew what my students were doing. They were doing what Congress is a master at, which is filibustering, except in this case the subject usually turned to my student’s pet hamsters, snakes, Gila monsters, and cocker doodle-doos (not a rooster). And somewhere in the mix of those stories there was always a Chloe story.
As my garden tries to crash land here at home after signaling Spring for over two months now, I sometimes wish our kitty was still here. She followed me around my garden while I worked, and because I enter a Zen-zone out there in horticultural bliss, Chloe scared me out of my overalls by tenderly rubbing up against my leg when I least expected it. Try to explain to a paramedic that a furball caused your heart palpitations.
To be honest, I never had a burning desire for a cat. I’ve always been more of a dog person, because honestly, dogs act more like us. They drool, they follow other humans around, and they hang their heads out of moving cars. I gave my daughter strict instructions to leave “that animal” alone, thinking it would eventually wander off. What I didn’t know was that Emily had already named her, sang lullabies to her, and supplied her with a steady ration of leftovers. The cat and Emily won of course, leading shortly thereafter to a pricey vet bill, an array of cat toys, and a weight activated bed that warmed to a comfortable 101 degrees when Chloe stepped in for a nap. Not a bad life for a drop-by cat, but a life I began to think needed some tweaking if she was going to earn her keep around our house.
So, I taught her a couple of tricks. At least they looked like that to the casual observer. What I really did was read a book on cats and then adjusted my commands to the stuff cats do anyway. Those things for our cat would be, in order of importance, sleeping, watching things move and eating fried chicken.
Fried chicken? Yep, Chloe love the Colonel. After watching her devour a piece of fried chicken like a mountain lion, I began to wonder if I could teach her how to sit on command with a little operant conditioning. At first, the idea seemed ludicrous given our cat’s air of self-importance, but over the course of a week I began to see some evidence of progress. A week later, fried chicken in hand, my authoritative “SIT!” resulted in our cat promptly plopping down like a boss. No one could believe it, but there it was, a performing circus cat right in our kitchen.
My next cat trick really had more to do with trust than a trick. It involved a cat’s desire to nap about 23 hours a day, so that when I found her in deep REM’s I quietly slid both my hands under her little tummy and air lifted her to another location. It was kind of like time travel only in our house. Chloe just yawned, looked around once to get her bearings, and accepted the fire mantel as the natural place to resume sleeping.
After suffering through commands to sit and random relocation, I gave our Chloe a bit of down time by setting her up with a YouTube movie of birds coming and going at a bird feeder. Movement, as it turns out, is a primordial aphrodisiac to a feline, so it wasn’t long before Chloe was addicted to the iPod and regularly assuming an attack pose in front of her favorite bird video, ready to pounce. Like all good parents, we had to limit little Chloe’s TV time, so we put a cap on everything but starlings and pigeons. Her response went from quiet maiows to outright howls, but I just told her to sit, and that took care of it.
If Spring ever gets here, they’ll be a day when my trowel will be working through the soil and my flats of zinnias will be spread out under the maple, waiting for their new home. Something will come over me, a ray of sun or maybe the sight of geese flying up to the nearby park, but it might be the silent nudge, a swooshing tail of a cat adopting me as family.