How I Ended Up With Amethyst in the First Place

Amethyst, performing her opera, 7-2002

In the summer of 2002, I was busy preparing to travel from one end of the United States to the other by car. I was going to drive west, visiting old friends along the way. On this leg of the summer’s journey, I would end up in Oregon. I followed the route of the transcontinental railroad back, stopping in Utah at the Golden Spike National Historical Site. After a brief stop back in Champaign, I was scheduled to accompany dance classes at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston Maine. At the end of all of this unprecedented traveling, I had heard from Shelley that she needed me to keep Amethyst at my apartment for a few weeks. She had a house guest that would be visiting from Sweden, and he was highly allergic to cats. I was more than happy to oblige, with the understanding that there would be an exit strategy to this arrangement. So there I was, lounging around, reading about the places and history that I had just traversed, when I got a visit from Shelley and Amethyst. Amethyst came with her two stainless steel dog dishes, a hooded litter box, a bag of cat litter, a seven-pound bag of Little Friskies, and 25 pounds of the cheapest cat food that money could buy. I was warned not to change her food, or to do so gradually. She had a sensitive stomach. The downstairs door closed on Shelley, on the way to her vehicle, who waved buh-bye with a pair of fingers. I climbed the stairs to an apartment that was no longer solely mine. Ammy spent about fifteen minutes exploring the place. She knew where the food bowls were. She had sniffed the box. For a few brief minutes it seemed as though she were going to let this ‘naked aggression’ stand unchallenged. I sat down on the broken couch with no legs. It was hot. The window was open. Not much of a breeze. I made the ticking noise to attract the cat, but no cat appeared. I picked up my book.

I had not read more than one sentence when, from the other room, the one with the door to the hallway that led to the stairs and the outside world, came a full-throated feline yowl, and then another. And another. Etcetera. OK. Put down the book and have a look. Sitting on the little piece of carpet by the front door to our apartment, Amethyst the cat was on her haunches, almost all of her weight on her hind legs, staring at the closed door. Yelling. At the “top of her lungs.” This was not at all unexpected, of course. What took me by surprise was the voice itself. I had owned cats that had spoken up about their miseries before, but this was in an entirely different register. Even cats I had experienced “in heat” did not have this sort of operatic focus of pitch and tonal control. Welcome to the world of the “meezer.” In retrospect, and in view of the controversies noted above, there was nothing about this performance that suggested that Amethyst was anything but a purebred Siamese. Amethyst knew where the way back out was, and she never lost track of that information. She eventually died, with her eyes wide open, staring in the direction of the door to her world. She always expressed herself well, and in such a way that there was no mistaking her intentions. She would repeat the message as long as it took to get the point across, or until her desires were met, or until she became tired, bored, or distracted. She carried on in front of the front door of our apartment for most of three days, pausing only to eat, drink and use the cat box. In the end, she was not overtaken by boredom, fatigue, or distraction. She was overtaken by laryngitis.

In the relative silence that followed, there were two favorite cat related entertainments that had to be explored. Fundamental to the exchange between ‘beast and man’ is the matter of feeding. It is a truism that companion animals give us unconditional love. Like many truisms, this one is false. They are affectionate in exchange for reasonable treatment and regular food and water. I have noticed that the more palatable the food, the less conditional the love. I set out to find out what this cat actually liked to eat. I started with commercial cat food. I went to the grocery and came back with a few cans of Fancy Feast, white fish flavor. I put some of this on a plate. Ammy wouldn’t do more than sniff and taste this stuff. Instead, she wanted whatever it was I was having. When I was in the kitchen “crinkling packages”, she was at my feet looking up with full attention. Swiss cheese was the absolute favorite with her, but she’d also eat a tomato. If the bread were buttered, she’d eat both the bread and the butter. In a few days, she learned the ways to get up onto the counter in the kitchen. She walked the counter trying to get the first crack at any of the following: cereal with milk, spaghetti, bologna, ham, hamburger, salad dressing and anything soaked in same, and any sort of tuna, whether salad or casserole. She would not pass up an opportunity to lick a bowl of mushroom or tomato soup. She never stopped perking up to the sound of a crinkling package. I worked my way through the varieties of Fancy Feast products. The winner was “Savory Salmon.” She loved that stuff from the moment she tried it in the summer of 2002, until the week that she finally expired. She loved that, and of course, the concept of “human food”, especially yogurt. But I’m not a big fan of yogurt.

The second thing one can do with any cat worth its salt is play with strings, toys on strings, and toys that move. Amethyst, according to Shelley, had been ignored for most of her life. Perhaps because of that, she was willing to play full out, like a kitten. She would kill whatever it was that was on the end of the string until it was nothing but a shredded remnant. She would twist on her back and swat at the air trying to catch the dangled shoelace. She chased, at full feline tilt, whatever ball was rolled across the floor. Wherever the object went, she was hard on its heels. This was to be our central entertainment for the two weeks of her visit. She was in and out and over all of the junk furniture that I, in my lengthening bachelorhood, enjoyed. She picked one sorry green chair to use as a scratching post. She turned it from tattered to shreds in a short time. She was, as near as we can guess, 15-17 years old.

In between bouts of playing, she was a queen in repose. She might have been a bit disheveled when Shelley delivered her, but after a week of Savory Salmon, tuna and Swiss cheese, she was developing a silky sheen. She liked to lounge with her feet in the air. Her tortie point colors were stunning, really. Her eyes were a clear, deep blue. She purred like a locomotive, and she purred readily.  In the sunlight that streamed in from the window, she took on the purple hue (from the dark red mingled with the tan in her colors) that had led to her name. The bonding between us was already under way.

Amethyst, after two weeks at my place. Gettin' to like it.

Then, as fate would have it, about the right time to start bugging Shelley about taking her back, Amethyst ran low on Friskies. I tried switching her, more or less gradually, to the cheap food, but she puked it up. In fact, she went on a regular puking bender. She became listless. I called Shelley, who gave me the name of the clinic that had been seeing Amethyst since her youth. I set up an appointment with the kindly Dr. Neitzel. On July 25, 2002, I carried Amethyst down to my Honda Civic Hatchback, and we drove to the vet. She had been listless, but in the car, she yowled. She stood on her hind legs and looked out the windows. She paced back and forth. She was shedding heavily, so that it seemed as though clouds of fur were blowing around in the hot car. The windows were almost completely up, preventing any sort of escape attempt. It was not that long a ride, really. In the waiting room, Amethyst was checked in. She got a good looking over by the DVM. He found nothing overtly wrong, but thought she might be feeling her age. He remarked that she had an extraordinary amount of tartar buildup on her teeth. He gave her a cortisone shot and sent us home. I paid my first vet bill in many years, about $50. Amethyst was the same going as she had been coming. She stood, she paced, she yelled. It did not immediately emerge from this outing that she was a good traveler. Back in the apartment, she went right back to lethargy. Three or four days passed and her condition seemed only to worsen. I called the vet and made a follow-up. This time, Nietzel found the trouble: she had a pronounced abscess behind her left shoulder blade. He would have to sedate her, shave her shoulder and clean the wound. He warned me that these senior citizens sometimes did not do well with anesthetic. He also said that action must be taken, since blood poisoning was surely the next phase. He would need to keep her over night. “Had she been out and in a fight?” No, but she had been chasing a ball under some rickety old furniture.

The next day, I picked her up and paid the second, much more substantial bill. Amethyst was very ready to get home. She came with some instructions, some oral antibiotics in solution with an eyedropper, and a topical antibiotic wash. I looked under the chairs and found the culprit: a loose upholstery nail jutting out from the fabric where it bunched up beneath the furniture, just perfect for wounding a fast moving cat in the heat of play. I sat back on the offending chair. I looked over at the snoozing cat, now sporting a shaved patch on her shoulder. It would be at least a week of daily regimen to heal the wound. There was no way I could press the case that Amethyst’s owner should now take her back. The environment at Shelley’s was, in my opinion, too chaotic. No one would attend to the convalescent. It began to sink in, gradually, inexorably, that I was now the owner of an ancient Siamese.

Up Close and Personal 2002