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| 5-23-03 Ever the Sun Seeker |
As time passed, and Amethyst aged, I became used to the
lingering wish that I had never said yes to taking her for the original two
weeks. As the weeks became years, I absolutely did miss the ability to travel
freely. I did not find her upkeep onerous, generally, but I knew I was becoming
steadily more attached to her company. I nursed her through several illnesses.
I occasionally paid some hefty vet bills, and I was always questioning the
level of veterinary care she got. I said, from time to time, that she had lived
a long life, and that she was on the Christian Science health plan. This was
not born out by my actions. I could have exercised more alacrity in preventive
maintenance. (That would have been true of my own attitude towards my own
health care at that time.) I was mindful, with each year that passed, with each
crisis that was survived, that I had taken over the care of a life that was
finite. I was not looking forward to the endgame. In that fear, I was
absolutely justified. I don’t think I would ever do what my friend Shelley had
done. I consider it unethical to trick someone into taking an animal, whether
or not they are amenable to the trickery. She has said that it was an act of
love. If this is love, and it serves as a justification for reallocating a
companion animal, it needs to be examined by a lawyer (or a shrink) for
loopholes. Love is another one of those human experiences that results in
attachment. It ends in either death or a certain amount of
grief. To collapse
the experience into a syllogism, to give someone an animal is to foment an
attachment. Attachments, to the extent that they deepen, lead to that level of
grief. I was not looking forward to the gift of grief. When it came, it felt
like - and still feels, some nine months after the fact, like the same bruising
experience that love (including the loving of Shelley) has been. Pet ownership
might add years to one’s life. The loss of a companion, by the abrasive emotion
of grief, takes those years back. Do the arithmetic, but let the story
continue. Let the claws of attachment, relaxed for a moment where I paused in
the winter of 2002 sink in deeper.
For me, 2003 dawned clear with conviction. It was lovely
to be sleeping with Amethyst, but the nine-pound cat did not generate human
warmth. She was not my species. As the year progressed, I developed the idea
that I needed to be ‘more proactive’ about finding a human companion. It was
not that I was setting out to find a wife. I had the idea that an intimate
friendship would be good. I was not getting any younger. I had attempted to
write some new pages for Shelley’s script, but she had torn them right back out
again. None who observed this action were surprised in the least by this
outcome. I had ended up with Amethyst as a significant consolation prize. I had
also exhausted the very limited options in the circle of my colleagues and
their acquaintances. I had a good email correspondence going with the sister of
a colleague. She sent me books to read from her perch as a publisher’s reader
in
Connecticut. As winter gave way to spring, I signed up for Match dot com.
Meanwhile, Amethyst had by now completely settled in. She
talked a lot, but in civilized tones. She did make the
Siamese call - a loud
yowl, which my powers of language are insufficient to describe, other than to
say it sounded like she was being killed the hard way - after either eating or
using the litter box. She always insisted on eating some of what I ate. I
gradually started her on significantly better, geriatric-appropriate cat food.
She continued to play, but also in a more age-appropriate manner. She quickly
learned how to get me to do most of the work. She was the subject of a
significant number of photographs. She charmed every visitor to my apartment.
She continued to take short trips in my car to destinations where she could be
outside on a carefully supervised ‘nature walk’. She sat in my lap while I
wrote. She slept most of the day, sometimes with her legs up in the air, paws
folded down towards her body. I called this pose the ‘pineapple upside down
cat’.
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| 6-30-07 Pineapple Upside Down Cat |
