Newsroom With A View

I never wanted the cat. I hadn’t even wanted the first one, who was born to a semi-stray under our back porch in Richmond, Virginia. I had no control over that or my wife crawling under the porch and falling in love with the runt of the litter.

But the second one more or less was my fault. I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t want it, but I didn’t keep my mouth shut, so it was my fault.

Two or three months after the semi-stray’s litter under our porch, in the early morning dark as I took a bag of garbage out to the bin in the alley I heard a kitten-ish peeping. I went back in the house, got a flashlight and went hunting for the source of the sound. Eventually, the sound led me to the concrete landing of the apartment building next door. Under that landing was a small gap, and in that gap two tiny eyes glowed in the flashlight beam.

I went back in the house. I figured the mother cat would come and find the kitten. Before I left for work, though, I told my wife what I heard and found.

About two hours later, my wife called me at the office. That little, tiny kitten was climbing the outside stairs of the apartment building outside her study. The stairs had a large gap between each stair, and she worried it would get very high up, then fall through a gap to the concrete pad. I told her to relax, it will be fine, it’s so tiny it can’t possibly climb very far. I hung up.

I turned to a co-worker and said, “There will be two cats in my house when I get home from work.”

I was right.

The first cat was still a kitten but, as quickly as kittens grow, loomed like a giant over the second, who hunched his back to make himself as big as possible and jumped sideways at the first cat, who stared at the odd sight.

We soon learned that wherever the new kitten had come from, he was being paper-trained. We found out because the room where we kept him had bags of old magazines and paperback books, and one day I found him dumping on top of one stack. I remember holding him upside down, poop trailing over his belly, as I tried to carry him someplace where he would not leave a holy mess. A short while later I explored and found his previous visits to our library stacks.

With all other paper removed from that room except a large square of newspaper around the litter box, he chose to poop and pee on the newspaper, not in the box.

But it occurred to me: If he wants to pee on paper, try putting a square of newspaper inside the litter box. It worked! Over time, I put narrower and narrower pieces of paper in, until one day he was litter-trained. Voila! I’m a genius!

He was an adventurous boy, but odd. He got in my lap exactly one time, for just a few minutes. Then he jumped down, never to return again. He didn’t resist being picked up, but he stiffened. It reminded me of stories about babies born to women addicted to crack, “crack babies” was the term. I called him a “crack kitten.”

We did not let the cats roam, but in Richmond we had a second-floor porch, and we put a kitty door in the screen door to it, so the cats had, except in very cold weather, free access to an outdoor area pretty much 24 hours a day. Then one night we couldn’t find him. I went around the house calling for him, then went out on the second floor porch, wondering if he was under a chair in the dark. I called his name. From the distance, on the ground below, he meowed. I ran inside, grabbed a flashlight and ran out the kitchen door. I called him, he meowed, and the flashlight fell on him, his eyes shining back.

Instinctively I ran toward him — and instinctively he bolted through a hole in the fence.

For the next three days we searched around, and I walked the alley at night, calling his name. Research told me that indoor cats that get out tend not to wander very far because they are afraid, but he seemed to be too afraid to call out. One evening he did, and I followed his sound. I called him, he meowed. I advanced. I called him, he meowed, I advanced. I was getting close — and then a car with an extremely loud muffler roared down the alley. He didn’t answer me anymore.

The next night, I waited until after 11 p.m., when it was quieter out, and went out and called his name. He meowed from what sounded like the neighbor’s yard. I went out the front door and around to the neighbor’s side gate. Luckily, it didn’t have a lock on it. I went in and sat on the back steps and called the cat. After I called a few times, he emerged from the darkness and rubbed up against me. I petted him and petted him and called his name. Then I gently scooped him up, cradled him and started the walk back home. As we neared our front porch, a loud car came rumbling down the street, and the cat tensed in my arms, so I locked my arms down on him and hurried to the front door. The car passed, the cat relaxed, I opened the door, and I dropped him gently to the floor.

“Percy’s home!” I called out as I wept.

In Lenoir, we have no outdoor porch for cats to lounge on and stare hungrily at birds, but we have plenty of windows. Lots of big, tall windows, so lots of sun, morning, noon and late afternoon. And a big staircase, with high ledges looking down the stairs to the first floor. It’s a good house for a cat.

But cats don’t stay kittens. Age catches up. During the past couple of years, he developed an auto-immune disorder, and then diabetes, and then a little more than a week ago something like a severe sinus infection. He stopped eating. The vet also found lesions inside his mouth. Because of the diabetes, he already had been losing weight, but without eating his weight plummeted. On Thursday we decided we had to put him down.

For years I have lamented the burdens of these cats. I never wanted him in the first place. When the hell will I stop crying?