Each day offers gifts
pure as a child’s smile, rare as
a blue-eyed bunny
Families often bring pets to school at dismissal, usually dogs happily greeting their beloved children. This is the first rabbit, a Lionhead named Benny. His pure white fur is silky-soft; I was awed by his beautiful blue, almost-human eyes. Thanks to the family for letting me take his photo.
Late June afternoon on the porch. A long-settling stillness, the day’s brilliance deepening to amber, shadows slanting across lawns and pavement, a cool pre-dusk breeze riffling trees and wind chimes, carrying the sound of a child calling in the distance. It’s not a child; it’s a little goat from a neighbor’s pen, hidden in a patch of woods. Bleating for its supper, I suspect. Startlingly humanlike voice. A neither-here-nor-there sound, disembodied, suspended in the air like time itself, clinging to these green and gold moments, unwilling to let go…
“Mom, let’s go for a walk,” says my youngest son (aka Cadillac Man).
I grab my shoes.
Walking beside me along our neighborhood street, my boy speaks, as he always does, of music. Songs he is learning, one he wants me to practice with him (it has to be simple for me. He can sing any part he likes in any key he likes; he can play anything he wants on the piano or guitar). I say I’ll try. He speaks of his new job at the funeral home; we reflect on the recent death of a beloved friend who’s the same age I am. Fresh-grated sadness, still surreal.
As we talk I note that no neighbors are out and about this afternoon. We seem quite alone. At one house, pool towels draped over the front railing billow in the breeze. American flags on front porch flagpoles ripple and flap with crisp smacks. A couple of cicadas rattle from high in the trees that frame backyards. Our long shadows stretch out on the pavement before us, where flecks of quartz wink; when my boy and I turn at the road’s end, the shadows disappear.
We pass a row of cypresses where there’s sudden movement in the grass. A black shape materializes, runs after us, crosses right in front of us…
Good thing we aren’t superstitious.
A young black cat, meowing.
“Awww,” says Cadillac Man, as it rubs against his legs. “What a sweet little cat.”
It comes over to me, rubs against my legs, purring madly.
We are devout dog-people. I can’t have a cat. I’m allergic. I learned this at age five or six when my family took in a stray Siamese (Mr. Cat, we called him) that took refuge on the stoop of my childhood home during a storm. Swollen eyes and asthma didn’t stop me, however, from bringing home a black kitten nobody else wanted when I was in college…
“It looks so much like my cat Moriah,” I tell my son. The name came from a magical cat in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, a book I read when I was about twelve.
Cadillac Man bends down, picks up the creature. “I would keep it if you could breathe.” The little cat nestles against him. Animals love my boy. They seem to sense his gentle spirit.
After a moment, the cat twists to get down. Cadillac Man releases it.
“It looks kind of thin. I wonder if it’s hungry…” Do moms always think about this first? Is this our deepest default, this hard-wired compulsion to feed all little living things, to keep them living?
The cat sits looking up at us with big, unblinking, green-yellow eyes. Meow.
And it trots right beside us, like a good dog would, back to our driveway where I feed it some of Dennis the dachshund’s steak-flavored food in an old dish.
“I hope it stays,” says Cadillac Man. “It can be an outside cat.”
I examine the cat as it eats. “It has all its claws.”
“We should name it,” says Cadillac Man.
“Look how rusty its fur is in the sunlight,” I observe. “Black cats aren’t exactly black. It’s a genetic mutation of the tabby pattern. See the faint rings in its tail, there at the tip? So much like Moriah, only she was smaller and didn’t have a tail…” another mutation. She was the last kitten left in the Free Kittens box on campus the day I found her and took her home. Shelters say black cats are the hardest to find homes for; no idea on stats of cats with stumps for tails…
“We aren’t naming it Moriah, Mom.”
“Of course not. She was one of a kind and besides, this one’s a boy.”
Cadillac Man is silent for a moment. The cat has nearly finished his steak dinner. “Well, you know it has to be a musician’s name…”
This is what he does. Since childhood he’s named pet fish after bass singers; his dachshund, after drummer Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys.
I can see what’s coming: “Brian, I suppose?”
Cadillac Man smiles. “Not quite. I christen this cat Douglas.
Brian Wilson’s middle name. I was close.
After licking the bowl clean, Douglas follows us up the sidewalk, cutting in front of Cadillac Man to roll over just like Dennis the dachshund does for a belly rub.
“Awww,” says my boy, rubbing the proffered belly. “Listen—he’s purring like a truck!”
Indeed he is.
It’s getting late. We need to go in to wash up and have our own supper, so we stroke Douglas one last time. I make sure to wash my hands well, with extra soap.
We peek out of the windows from time to time. Douglas is lying on the porch, and then he’s gone.
But not really.
He’s curled up under the rocking chair, sound asleep.
When he wakes, I take one of Dennis’ soft blankets out and put it in his chosen sleeping spot. Douglas sits on it at once.
“There,” I tell him. “Now you know that if you need a safe, comfortable place to sleep, you have one. If you’re hungry, I’ll feed you whenever you come around. I’ll leave water out for you. It’s summer, see…”
Douglas purrs as if he understands…and maybe he does, for the next morning he comes to polish off a whole bowl full of food, and he’s waiting in the driveway to greet us on Wednesday night when we return from prayer meeting.
And then he vanishes.
A day passes, and another, and another. No Douglas.
It storms. Thunder, lightning. Rain gushing from the gutters.
I hope he’s all right, wherever he is. If he belongs to someone, I hope he’s back home and happy. We ought to have named him Macavity, the Mystery Cat.
I shake out his blanket, fold it, replace it. I toss yesterday’s water from his new dish and refill it with fresh.
I think of Mr. Cat. Of Moriah. So long ago.
I wonder if it’s absurd to keep leaving fresh water out for a cat that may never return.
But I do it anyway, because I told Douglas I would.
I also told Cadillac Man we could have named him Question Quigley (from Harry Potter) for that tail
The best shot I could get of his face; Douglas kept trying to rub against me while I attempted to take his picture
Asking for a belly rub
For comparison: my cat Moriah, almost forty years ago, with my childhood dog, Bagel
—OH, and P.S. Guess who came for dinner last night?
Memories, like little shadows, return, too.
*******
And so it is that black cats are my favorite, despite their long-maligned history (another reason I feel concerned for Douglas). I wrote another take on them if you’re so inclined: 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Cat Crossing Your Path in the Time of COVID-19 While Driving to School to Teach Online Near Halloween of Election Year 2020.
–with special thanks to the Slice of Life community at Two Writing Teachers.
We are our stories.
“Waiting …” jmcmichael. CC BY-SA
When I write personal narrative, memoir, and even realistic fiction across elementary grade levels, I usually give students choices of topic for the writing I’ll model. Many times they’ve chosen for me to write about my dad not wanting any pets when I was growing up, despite my desperate begging for them.
Students rejoice when I overcome my dad to get a dog or a cat.
One of the things I haven’t fully explored with the children is why my dad didn’t want pets. Truth is, it took years for me to fully understand . . .
That’s where I’m going today.
To set the stage, here’s a modeled excerpt, the scene when my mom, my sister and I have brought not one but TWO puppies home from our neighbors’ house across the street. It’s getting time for my father to arrive from work, and he has no idea we have these puppies:
“Will he make us take them back?” my sister whimpers. She has her puppy, Bagel, wrapped in a pink doll blanket. She cradles him in her arms like a baby.
“I don’t know,” says Mom. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
She sort of sticks her chin out when she says that.
The three of us sit in the living room, waiting, and when I hear the car door slam, I jump. I hold my puppy, Onyx, so close I can smell his puppy breath.
He’s home! What will he say? Will he yell?
I can hear his work shoes coming up the steps. I watch the doorknob turning . . .
Here he is, in his blue uniform with the white hard hat on his head, his big, gray lunchbox in his hand. He looks at us.
He sees the puppies.
He wrinkles up his face: “What in the . . . ”
“Surprise, Daddy!” yells my sister, holding Bagel up high in the air. “We got you some puppies!”
Suffice it to say the man knew when he was outnumbered. And defeated.
Bagel, the collie-colored, long-haired dachshund mix, was still with us when I got married.
As was Moriah, my black cat:
Free kittens.
Take one.
The sign stood on a chair beside a disheveled guy leaning against the wall at the college bookstore entrance. This guy—another student, I guess—held a cardboard box in his arms. Kittens! I hurried over to look inside.
Only one dark, little shape huddled in the box.
“Is that the last kitten you have?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “No one wants her because of her tail.”
“What’s wrong with her tail?”
The guy scooped the kitten up and showed me her backside. She didn’t really have a tail, just a stump.
“What happened to her?” I wanted to know.
“She was born this way. The only one in the litter like this.”
The tiny black kitten looked up at me with her big yellow eyes.
She meowed.
She rode on my shoulder as I drove home wondering exactly how to approach Daddy.
“Please,” I said, clasping her close to my heart, where she purred against me. “No one else wanted her. I’ll keep her in my room.”
“You’re allergic to cats!” he thundered. “Find somewhere for her to go!”
I didn’t, and once again, my poor father was defeated.
Moriah developed an endearing habit of running up the leg of my jeans and my shirt to my shoulder, where she liked to ride while I walked around.
One day, my father roared from the bathroom: “FRRAAAANNCESSSS!”
My whole first name.
Yeah.
Had to be something really bad.
I flew down the hall to find him hunched over the bathroom sink. He’d been shaving. White cream all over his face.
When he shaved, he never wore a shirt.
Moriah, watching him, had decided his shoulder looked inviting.
She ran up his leg and his bare back to his shoulder, where she was now hanging precariously by her nails. Embedded in Daddy’s pink skin.
“GET-THIS-CAT-OFF-OF-ME!” shouted Daddy. His blue eyes, reflected in the mirror, blazed at me. (Note: He actually said a few more words than this. I’ve chosen to censor.)
I extracted my cat and we hid for days, until Daddy’s scratches healed.
Two years later, when I was about to be married, the apartment where I’d be living had a no-pet policy. I couldn’t take Moriah.
The night before the wedding, I handed her collar to my dad. “She’s yours now, Daddy.”
Here’s the crazy part: He looked pleased. He kind of half-smiled.
Weeks afterward, my mother told me on the phone: “Your dad buys turkey at the deli for Moriah. He tears it up in tiny pieces and puts it in a dish for her.”
“He—WHAT?”
He did it for Moriah until she was gone. Then he said, “That’s it. The last of the pets.”
Until my mother brought home a little Shih Tzu. She named her Bridget.
Daddy grumbled for months, but was soon buying deli tidbits for Bridget, too.
When I was expecting my first baby, I came home for a visit, and Daddy told me this story: “When you were born, your mom and I had a cat. A big, orange tabby named Tiger. He kept getting in the crib with you and we worried you’d suffocate. I ended up having to take him to the pound. It was terrible. I swore I’d never do that again.”
I looked at his face, this face that had frowned about pets all these years, saw the pain-shadow cross over it.
All this time, I thought he was just being hardhearted.
One night, Mom called. “Bridget died today,” she said.
“Oh no. Are you okay?'”
“I’m all right. Your dad buried her underneath his camellia bush.”
A pause. Then:
“He cried like a baby. I’ve never seen him sob like that before.”
My throat wrenches. Tears burn like fire.
Oh, Daddy. Daddy. I’m sorry for everything.
And there was one more dog to come, yet another that my mother brought home without warning. A Corgi.
Daddy sighed, complained, vented for weeks on end.
He named her Foxy.
He taught her tricks, played with her every day after work. Foxy knew when to expect him; she sat on the back of the sofa, watching through the picture window, waiting for him to come home.
Maybe it’s a case of saving the best for last, for, out of them all, Daddy loved Foxy best.
He never had to give her up, suffer her loss.
She suffered his.
For weeks on end, she sat at the picture window, watching for him. Sighing, whining. Day after day after day, waiting, forever waiting, for him to come home . . .
Fatherlove.
lit bits and pieces 