Night Watch

One morning at work my co-workers and I chatted about the weekend before the day’s business began.

            “Did you see Saturday Night Live this weekend?” asked Shawn. “That political parody was hilarious.”

            “I’m no night owl. I’m an early bird,” responded Teresa. “Saturday and Sunday I started the day with a walk at sunrise."
             "So what are you?” Teresa and Shawn looked at me expectantly, “A night owl or an early bird?”

            Actually, I’m neither. I have a tedious physical condition which causes chronic pain. As a friend with rheumatoid arthritis remarked quite accurately, “The problem with chronic pain is not, ironically, that it hurts. It’s that it wears you out.”

            So I’m tired. Ideally, I could sleep nine hours a night. Realistically, I hope for seven or eight. But here’s what my nights are like.

            At about nine p.m. I take a long, hot bath to ease my aching muscles. Chloe sits nervously on the bathmat by the tub. She finds it deeply disturbing that I would immerse myself in liquid. I towel off and crawl into bed, fluffing the pillows and grabbing a news magazine. I plan to read a little before I fall asleep.

            I stretch out on my back with a sigh. Just as I start the first article, Chloe leaps onto my chest, her head facing my toes. She kneads and purrs luxuriously. I try to adjust my reading angle, twisting this way and that, trying to focus on the page and avoid the big, furry butt creeping closer to my face. After several unsuccessful attempts to peruse the text, I put the magazine aside and turn off the bedside lamp. What the heck, I need the rest!

            The steady hum of Chloe’s purr lulls me to sleep. After an hour or so she jumps off my chest with a cheerful meow.  “Don’t worry,” she seems to say, “I have to go but I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, Annie will protect you.”

            Annie jumps into my chest. Her razor sharp claws dig in just beneath my collar bones. “Don’t worry,” she seems to say, butting her head into the space between my jaw and my chest. “I’ll protect you. When I have to leave, Chloe will be back.” Annie purrs softly into my throat as I drift back off to sleep.

            I wake up a few hours later with the sound of Annie crunching kibble and thumping down the stairs. Chloe jumps back onto the bed, stretching sideways on the mattress, leaving me about ten inches on the far side of the bed. Hanging precariously onto the edge, I fall asleep, awakened by an odd sensation. Chloe, purring and kneading the blanket intently, is trying to insert her tail into my mouth.

            It’s 4:30 in the morning. I give up on sleep. I fluff the pillows again, sit up and open the magazine. I might as well read. Annie and Chloe are at my feet, each on one corner of the mattress. They sit like little sentries, facing the bedroom door, alert for intruders.  At 5:30, I put the magazine aside, turn off the lamp, and close my eyes for one hour until the alarm clock awakens me for the day. I stumble, bleary-eyed, to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face.

            The cats jump reluctantly off the bed while I straighten the quilt. They leap back onto the mattress, sighing and stretching before curling into cozy balls of fur. I pet each one gently. Each opens one eye, just a slit. “Go to work,” they seem to say, “and leave us in peace. Last night was strenuous and we’re on guard tomorrow night as well. We need to get our rest so we can take good care of you.”

            I tiptoe downstairs and, yawning, brew a cup of coffee before heading off to work.

           

The Proverbial Feline, #1

When Chloe first arrived to live with me, she had a terrible skin disease which covered her with bloody scabs. In addition to consulting with my regular vet who prescribed an antibiotic cream that Chloe would have no part of, rushing to hide under the bed if she caught sight of the spray bottle, I also consulted with anther veterinarian friend. She said, “A good diet and a stress-free life will go a long way toward a cure. Cats have a remarkable ability to recover from almost any illness. They are practically indestructible. They have nine lives, you know.”

            Within a month, Chloe was cured. The scar on her back, the only reminder she was ever a miserable, bloody fur ball, is covered by her long hair. But that incident got me thinking about proverbs which feature cats, especially those proverbs I’ve known all my life, and how they explain cats, me and life in general.

            When I think about that cat with nine lives, I am reminded of the feral cat that lives where I work, a pretty grey tabby. She stays far away from humans. She’s painfully thin. When I arrive at work early in the morning before the others have arrived, I see her skulking through the few brushy spots that border the parking lot near my office building. She must be searching for rodents, birds and insects to eat. I can’t help but compare her life, a constant struggle for existence, to the life Chloe and Annie enjoy: unlimited water and kibble, a warm, cozy bed where they can lounge all day, a human caretaker who greets their approaches with cat treats and affectionate caresses.

            I compare myself with my friend Jane, especially during her last, difficult years. At the end of the month when her disability check was exhausted, she went hungry. She spent time in a homeless shelter near Port Authority that required her to stay on the streets from early in the morning until dinner time. In the interim, during the winter months, she walked New York City’s frigid, windy streets, wrapped in a motley assortment of jackets, blankets, scarves and quilts I sent her. They were regularly stolen by other shelter inhabitants or else she would lose them during her travels.

            For those few, difficult months, Jane was a feral creature, eager to live at any cost so she could save her daughter, her husband and her father the pain of her death. A deeply faithful Christian, she was convinced her life – a life plagued by mental illness and poverty – was part of a divine plan. She prayed daily for the wisdom to understand her plight and the strength to endure it.

            I’m a non-theistic Quaker. I don’t believe in a personal god. I’m not counting on an after life. I have a comfortable existence, a pleasant home, a job I love, a broad circle of friends, a small but close family, sufficient financial resources and two bad cats. Do I want nine lives? One is sufficient, especially the one I have now. While I write, sitting in the upstairs study, Annie eats some kibble at the feeding station in the hallway and enters the room. She rubs against my ankles; then looks at me, meowing insistently.

            “OK,” I say, “Up you go!” I put my notebook on the end table by my cup of steaming tea. Annie jumps into my lap. I scratch her behind the ears. She stretches and purrs contentedly before curling into a ball. I watch her tiny ribcage rise and fall in perfect rhythm with my breath.

            Why would I want nine lives? I ask myself. This moment contains all I desire.

The Gressions

When I come home from work, Chloe is in the window, waving frantically and meowing. I enter the house and she jumps into my arms, burrowing her head into the crook of my neck. Annie saunters into the room and rubs against my ankles, purring loudly.  Chloe, the little drama queen, is as emotional as a furry Edith Piaf. “Mon Dieu! Annie is un diable! She roars at me! She bares her claws!  Sacré bleu! I am desolée!”

             Annie looks up at us, a deceptively sweet smile plays on her little kitty lips. “Just wait, ma chère,” she seems to say to Chloe.  “Just you wait. Your protector is here now, but she’ll go back outside sooner or later. She’ll leave you alone, unguarded, sans protection. And then you’ll be mine, all mine to torment.”

            Annie trips blithely upstairs. Chloe jumps from my arms. She flops onto her back and I rub her belly. I start upstairs, Chloe at my heels. She runs happily ahead of me, then stops cold on the landing. Annie crouches in the upstairs hall, barring Chloe’s passage. I don’t know how tiny Annie has the power to intimidate Chloe, who is twice her size,  with a glance, but she does. Poor Chloe slinks back downstairs.

            “Why do you threaten poor Chloe?” I ask Annie who is now sitting beside me on the bed while I change out of my work clothes. “What is your problem with aggression?”

            “A gression?” Annie looks at me arrogantly. “I have several gressions, many, many gressions. They’re my fondest possessions. I will never give them up. And I keep them with my other treasures under your bed.”

            Maybe the power differential is explained by the fact that Chloe has been declawed while Annie still has her talons. She uses them against Chloe to great effect, swiping her savagely at every opportunity. Sometimes I’ll come home to find Chloe hiding behind the sofa, huge clumps of her hair on the carpet.

            I go back downstairs to cook dinner. Chloe looks at me imploring, twining around my legs and considering her prospects. “May I have a pearl handled derringer for Christmas, please? Just a feminine, dainty, single-shot model. It would even the playing field.”

            “No, Chloe! We try to be peaceful creatures in this house. Even if we don’t succeed," I say, looking at Annie who is peering around the kitchen door, growling softly. "For heaven’s sake, I’m a Quaker! A derringer could be fatal.”

            “I wouldn’t kill her; I’d just wing her.” She looks at me hopefully.

            My friend Ed suggested that I offer to buy Chloe a Taser gun. “So she could stun Annie,” he suggested helpfully. “It’s not lethal, but it’s effective.”

            Still, I hope for a weapon-free solution. When Annie unleashes her gressions savagely, I stand between her and Chloe, hoping the situation will defuse. Fat chance!

            Cats are the queens of displaced aggression. They see a threat outside the window and react by attacking a catnip toy indoors. I protect Chloe from her foe by warning Annie sternly, “No gressions!” while standing between the two. After Annie leaves the room, Chloe thanks me with an angry hiss and a swat of her declawed paws before raising her tail like a battle flag and prancing to her window perch where she sits looking outside and ignoring me pointedly, a portrait in disdain.

            There aren’t many Quaker artists. Quakers disparaged the arts as frippery until the twentieth century, but one early American Quaker artist, Edward Hicks, painted over sixty versions of The Peaceable Kingdom based on Isaiah 11:6, “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” It’s a lovely scene. The naivety of the artist’s vision mirrors his naïve hope for a peaceful world, a world without two bad cats.  I prefer the nuanced words of Quaker Pamela Umbima. As George Fox, the founder of Quakerism would say, they speak to my (and Chloe’s and Annie’s) condition:

"This is a marvelous world, full of beauty and splendor; it is also an unrelenting and savage world, and we are not the only living things prone to dominate if given the chance. . . We have no reason to be either arrogant or complacent: one look at the stars or through a microscope is sufficient to quell such notions. But we have to accept our positon in the world with as much responsibility and fortitude as we can muster, and try to grow up to our measure of love in this tangle of prospects and torments.”

Quaker Faith and Practice, Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers in Britain). Warwick, England, 1995, 25:08.

Litter Wary Critic

I have a weak stomach. I can take the sight and smell of blood, but other bodily effusions make me gag. I am not good around babies with spit-up and dirty diapers. Before I got Chloe, I worried about my ability to clean a litter box without getting sick. I managed by buying “clumping” litter, rushing into the bathroom, holding my nose and encasing the noxious clumps in a plastic bag which I tied tightly before throwing it in the trash can outside the house.

For the first month I had Chloe, she dutifully used the litter box. One day I came downstairs to find a fresh fecal deposit on the oriental rug in the dining room.

“Oh crap!” (And I meant that both literally and figuratively). As soon as I cleaned up and sprayed room freshener liberally, I rushed to computer to google litter box problems. I discovered there is a whole cottage industry devoted to the non-litter-box compliant cat. Ominously, there was a lot to read.

The articles encouraged me to see my vet to rule out physical causes, so Chloe and I made an appointment.

“There’s nothing physically wrong with your cat,” the vet said “Let me recommend the services of a veterinary behavior specialist. Fill out this detailed questionnaire, make an appointment with the specialist – here’s her card – and perhaps you can get to the root of Chloe’s problem.

My friend Jane had been a lifelong consumer of mental health services, so I knew a thing or two about psycho-therapy. I imagined Chloe reclining on a tiny couch, telling a feline psychologist about her relationship with her mother or her conflicts with Annie while I sat in the waiting room for fifty minutes, reading back issues of Cat Fancy magazine.  I was wrong. The behavioral specialist put together a complicated regime for me. I had to bar Chloe’s passage to the dining room except when I was present. I cleaned litter boxes twice a day and experimented with litters of different scents and textures and boxes made from different materials, moving the boxes to alternative spots and logging a daily journal of Chloe’s bathroom activities. It was driving us all crazy. I hate keeping records and was forced to spend my free time logging Chloe’s every move while lugging litter boxes around the house. Chloe was suspicious of this person who followed her everywhere, notebook in one hand, litter scoop in the other. And Annie, jealous of all the attention Chloe was getting, started pooping outside her litter box as well, to get a piece of the action.

“I‘d rather live with crap on the carpet than become a fecal policeman,” I complained to a friend.

“This is kind of weird,” she responded, “but I know somebody who had a dog with issues. He found a pet psychic who was able to – you know- read the dog. The psychic told him exactly what the problem was and how to deal with it. He swears it changed the dog’s behavior entirely.

“That’s just crazy,” I scoffed.

“No crazier than a friend I know who paid a hundred dollars for her cat to see a kitty shrink,” my friend laughed. “A phone appointment with the psychic is only forty bucks.”

I held Chloe on my lap so the pet phone psychic could catch her “vibrations.”  She told me Chloe had lived in the county and other information I couldn’t verify. Then I asked about the litter box issue. “Why won’t Chloe use the litter box and what can I do about that?”

There was a pause.  “Chloe just doesn’t like using the box,” she said. “She likes the freedom of using the carpet, not to mention the paw feel of the soft carpet pile compared to the sandy feel of litter.” Another pause. “I’m not sure you can do much about it.”

This was clearly neither a physical complaint nor a psychological problem. This was a lifestyle choice. Chloe was a committed free-ranger, preferring to think outside the box. I refused to give in. I moved a litter box into the dining room, putting it on the carpet in the corner spot Chloe preferred for bathroom activities, not noticing that it was directly below a damp patch forming in the ceiling plaster. (I was soon to discover a leak in a radiator pipe in the ceiling). I combed reviews of kitty litter and found a “cat attractant” litter I purchased on line.

When I filled the box with cat attractant litter (a combination of litter and herbs), Chloe expressed interest.  She sniffed the box, looked at it  thoughtfully and sniffed some more. After careful consideration, she backed into the litter box gingerly. At that moment, a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, smacking her on the head.

She jumped out of the box indignantly, completing her business on the dining room carpet as far away from the litter box as she could get. She refused to step into that corner of the  dining room at all, and I can’t say I could blame her. I was pretty upset myself.

A few days later I discovered a crack in the litter box in the bathroom, the one Annie uses for all her bathroom activities and Chloe uses for urination only. The litter was leaking onto the floor.  I went down to the dining room and got the unused box, cleaning it with bleach and water, putting it in the front yard so the sun could complete disinfection before filling it with fresh litter and placing it in the bathroom. Chloe entered the bathroom and stopped short. She looked at the box and then at me with alarm.

“What’s the matter, Chloe? The old box broke, so here’s a new one, nice and clean and tidy.” She stared at me and the box again. Clearly, her message wasn’t getting through. Deliberately, she looked first at me, then the box, the ceiling and the box again. I got the message. This was the litter box of death. If she used it, boulders would rain from the sky. No way was she using that box.

I went to the basement and got a spare litter box which I filled with fresh litter for the bathroom. I took the box of death and accompanied by Chloe, carried it downstairs and placed it ceremoniously in the trash can outside. When I reentered the house, Chloe looked relieved.  Thanks to her quick thinking, she had saved us all from certain death. She sighed contentedly and crapped on the oriental rug.

Cat House 1922

I’m a sucker for bungalows. When I found this 1922 house on a quiet side street, I thought it was perfect: lovely woodwork, hardwood floors, steam radiators, plaster walls. There was just one thing: there was only one bathroom, upstairs. Mind you, it’s a big bathroom with a luxurious antique claw foot tub deep enough to swim laps in and the original 1922 built-in medicine cabinet. The good outweighed the bad, so I bought it, moved in, Chloe joined me, then Annie, and I began to renovate. New windows, new kitchen appliances, a new furnace, a new roof, new paint inside and out replaced the old, not to mention a new flower garden in the front yard. Frugal person that I am, I would save up some money, then spend, save, then spend, until the last items on my to-do list were complete except for two big-ticket items. I wanted a downstairs bathroom, new construction,  and the kitchen cabinets, probably installed in the late 1960’s, needed to be replaced. For these major renovations, I would need a loan.

The city where I live was not a serious victim of the housing bubble; increased valuation has been moderate. So by my estimation, refinancing with the lower, post-bubble interest rates would allow me to renovate without too much of a shock to the budget. My credit was good, so I was sure I could qualify for a loan despite the tight post-bubble standards. I drew up a sketch for a modest first floor addition and began interviewing contractors.

Chloe and Annie were not pleased with the parade of contractors visiting the house, but since the plans were confined to the first floor, they stayed upstairs during the visits. “You’ll need to add a heat source for the added bathroom,” said the contractor I had chosen. “Here’s the name of the heating contractor I use. Have him come check out the possibilities.”

The heating contractor descended to the basement to check out my options. “You need to come down here immediately,” he said ominously. “I have something to show you.”  A puddle was spreading on the basement floor. “Your steam heat pipes are leaking somewhere in the walls upstairs. Have you seen any damp spots?”

“Could that be the source of the damp spot on the dining room ceiling? I thought it might be a problem with the new roof and was about to call the roofer.”  We went to investigate.

“You have to get behind that plaster to check out the leak. Good luck!” said the heating contractor, giving me the name of a carpenter he recommended.

The carpenter put a big hole in the living room ceiling with a bucket below to catch the leak, not before a chunk of plaster had fallen, knocking Chloe on the head. “You really should have that whole steam system replaced,” said the carpenter. “If one pipe broke, it’s only a matter of time before a second pipe leaks, and you don’t want to keep ripping out plaster.”

I went back to the heating contractor and we decided to replace the steam system with a heat pump that could also replace my window air conditioning units with central air, all for a price, of course.

“My costs are really mounting up,” I said nervously to the heating contractor, “And I haven’t even begun work.”

“Well, at least you won’t suffer any more surprises,” he said on his way out. Then the doorknob came off in his hand.

The contractor recommended a mortgage broker who worked from her home, a four-by-four built in the 1920’s filled with antiques and inhabited by a big tabby tom cat, Felix. I had plenty of occasions to visit since the loan qualification process took forever. As part of the qualification process, I had repeated visits from the general contractor, a building consultant, the mortgage broker and the appraiser. Each time the doorbell rang, the cats scurried up the stairs. I began leaving the upstairs closet doors open so each could have her private hiding place. “When I remodeled my house, Felix hated the disruption at first,” the mortgage broker said. “But he got used to it and even made friends with some of the construction workers.”

“I wish Felix could communicate with my cats,” I responded. “They could use a feline transition counselor.” The minute I said these words, Felix, sitting at my feet, jumped onto my jacket which I had thrown on a chair. He kneaded it thoughtfully. When I returned home and tossed the jacket on the sofa, each cat sniffed it carefully, a behavior they had not evidenced before. Clearly the lines of communication had opened.

My jacket and I made about ten trips back and forth to the broker’s and Felix’s home as the underwriters’ requests for financial information snowballed. I began to think my fitness as a mortgagee depended not on my fiscal soundness, but on my ability to keep records. “Here’s the key to my house and another for my filing cabinet,” I wanted to say to the banker. “Just rummage around and find what you need. My life is an open bank book” At each visit, Felix paid my jacket special attention, sniffing and kneading. Chloe and Annie inspected it carefully upon my return home. Fifty days after I filed by first request (mind you, that’s ten days longer than Noah was in the ark), the loan was finally granted. I could now spend three times what I had originally budgeted to do twice the amount of work I had planned.

So what coping skills has Felix counseled Chloe and Annie to use in the difficult days ahead? Here are the Feline Transition Counselor’s three rules for cats facing construction trauma:

1.       For God’s sake, get under the bed! The only safe place is under the bed!

2.       If you can’t get under the bed, climb into a cardboard
        box, Standing in a cardboard   box makes cats invisible.

3.       If you crap on the carpet often enough, the workmen will  
          go away.

Wish us luck! The new construction begins.

Puss in books

I was a bookworm. While the neighborhood kids played kickball in the driveway, you could have found me either wedged behind the sofa in the living room or outside perched in the tree house with a book in my hand. As a kid, my favorite books were biographies (I loved the “Landmark” series), fantasies, my favorites being the Victorian fantasy novels of Edith Nesbit and the more modern Tales of Magic by Edgar Eager (both series are unjustly forgotten) plus any novel that introduced me to a time and culture not my own.

I still love to read. Most evenings you can find me on the living room sofa, book in my hand with Chloe perched on the sofa arm and Annie stretched out on the back. Sometimes I even read to them until they get tired of watching a fat middle-aged woman sitting motionless and leap off the sofa to enjoy a more exciting sight like the fish bowl or birds in the maple tree outside. Here are some of the works I know featuring cats as characters.

Not surprising, cats are often portrayed as carousers. We’ve all seen cartoons of Garfield on the fence, singing to a lady love. He’s only the most recent of a long line of amorous kitties. Kater Murr is the tom cat hero of remarkably modern novel by German author E.T.A. Hoffman containing tales and observations by a free-thinking cat. Critic Alex Ross wrote about the novel in the New Yorker (1972), “If the phantasmagoric 'Kater Murr' were published tomorrow as the work of a young Brooklyn hipster, it might be hailed as a tour de force of postmodern fiction." Kater Murr is a direct progenitor of another free-thinking tom cat, Behemoth, who carouses riotously through the Bulgavov’s satirical Russian masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (1940). I remember reading this one summer when I was in college and being sucked into this dark, fantastic world. Another free-thinking, very raunchy tom is Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat (1959) which was made into the first x-rated animated feature film in 1972. But not all the carousing kitties are toms. Jane and I shared a love for the poems written by Don Marquis in the twenties.  Archy and Mehitabel describes in verse the friendship of a soulful cockroach and his slightly slutty friend, the alley cat Mehitabel. Mehitabel reminds me a lot of Jane in her last years as she navigated between the twin shoals of poverty and mental illness with resourcefulness, wit and grace.

When Chloe first moved in with me, in an attempt to treat the skin condition which made both our lives miserable, I visited a homeopathic vet since conventional medicine hadn’t helped. “I really don’t know much about cats,” I told Sid, my vet friend. “I know you have cats. Would you say she’s, well, a normal specimen?”

I’d say, frankly, that she’s a kitty from another planet,” Sid replied. There seem to be a lot of those. Another genre that is remarkably rich in cats is science fiction. Robert Heinlein, D.J. McHale, Andre Norton, and Roger Zalazny have all written sci-fi in which cats play major roles. Science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin has written a charming children’s series called The Catwings about- what else? - winged cats and Erin Hunter has written a wonderful children’s fantasy adventure series, The Warriors, told from the feline point of view. Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh is a series similar to Harry Potter with a magical world set in England.

Perhaps cats play a major role in mystery series because of their legendary curiosity. Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, and Carole Nelson Douglas and Shirley Rousseau Murphy all have written mystery series in which cats solve crimes.  While not detectives, cats play major roles as companions in the mysteries of Nevada Barr, Elizabeth Peters, and Kathy Reichs. More unusual is the Felidae series, a German mystery series by Turkish-born writer Akif Pirinicci, which is can be read as an allegory about Nazi Germany. These are complex, disturbing, multi-layered books full of ethical ambiguity.

So what’s my favorite cat book? It’s neither science fiction nor a mystery, but it does feature a free-thinking tom. It’s The Fur Person, by May Sarton.

In addition to fiction, there is lots of poetry featuring cats. In addition T. S. Eliot’s Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, the anthology that formed the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, poems about cats have been written by such luminaries as Matthew Arnold, Robert Bly, Chaucer, Wordsworth and W.B. Yeats.
Perhaps the best poem ever written about a cat it Christopher Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey,” an excerpt of a longer work, Jubilate Agno. Too long to print here, here’s a link: http://42opus.com/v4n2/mycatjeoffry

Here's my favoite cat poem for the moment, an adaptation by Daniel Ladinsky, of a poem written by Tukaram (c.1608-1649, India):

LANDLOCKED IN FUR

I was meditating with my cat the other day

and all of a sudden she shouted,

"What happened?"

I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged

her to say more--feeling that if she got it all out on the table

she would sleep better that night.

So I responded, "Tell me more, dear,"

and she soulfully meowed,

"Well, I was mingled with the sky and now look-- 

I am landlocked in fur."

To this I said, "I know exactly what 

you mean."

What to say about conversation

between

mystics?

Thought for food

A friend had a tomcat named Buster. Even though he was a burly specimen, he was a finicky eater. He would only eat premium canned cat food, never dry kibble. He could adore one brand on Monday and turn up his nose at the same variety on Tuesday.

One day when I was grocery shopping, I saw my friend slip into the market with a furtive glance, carrying an oversized handbag. Her manner was so peculiar; I shadowed her to the cat food aisle. She put down the bag, pulled out the cat and held him, dangling straight in front of her, his big yellow eyes inches from the tins of food. “OK, Buster, I’ve had it with you!” she said. “You choose!”

My cats are not like Buster. Maybe because both have suffered food deprivation, they’ll eat any kind of kibble I put in the bowl. When I first got Chloe, I only bought premium brands. I read every article I could find on cat nutrition and perused the small print on bags of kibble like I was deciphering the Rosetta Stone. When Annie arrived, she had been prescribed a special diet for cats with poor kidney function. The vet suggested I feed each, individually, twice a day to keep their different diets separate. While Chloe ate with a normal, healthy appetite, Annie inhaled her bowlful in one gulp. Then she vomited it up immediately. Weighing Annie’s need for a special diet with her need for any diet that would stay in her stomach, I switched to continuous feeding, using gravity feeders, for both cats, so Annie could have the security of a constant food supply. I tried to maintain two feeding stations, one for each cat, but gave that up when I discovered they both used the same bowl. As competitive as they are in other circumstance, they are patient when it comes to eating kibble. Each has her own schedule, eating a bite or two whenever she passes by the feeding station. Annie’s kidneys aren’t perfect, but they haven’t gotten worse. I suspect any harm that’s being done by feeding her a regular diet is compensated for by the fact that she no longer has to worry where her next meal is coming from. And while she vomits (“Some cats just barf,” said my vet), she limits herself to throwing up about once a fortnight rather than after every meal.

Still, Annie does have a food neurosis of a specific kind. Once or twice a month I roast chicken wings for myself. I marinate them in teriyaki sauce, sherry, grated raw ginger, garlic and green onions and then bake them in the oven for about forty minutes. It’s a great dinner, especially with a spinach salad with mandarin oranges, toasted almonds and a sweet and sour dressing. Part way through the meal I might leave my seat to grab a drink of water or a glass of wine. Quick as a flash, Annie leaps onto the table, grabs a chicken wing and scurries up the stairs. Since she only steals chicken wings from my plate, never beef, pork or fish, I think she is reminded of the wings from the bodega which she shared with Jane, her former owner, when they both lived in New York City. No matter where I checked upstairs, I couldn’t find the leftovers. For a long time I assumed she ate them, bones and all.

Then one day I decided it was time to turn the mattress in my bedroom. When I pulled the mattress and box spring from the bedstead, I found a hidden world behind the dust ruffle. There were the chicken bones, an entire graveyard. But that wasn’t all. I found the catnip mice that had unaccountably gone missing, all there. Single socks I thought I had lost at the laundromat had been carefully piled into nests along with scraps of paper and bits of yarn that Annie must have been collecting for months. What a mess! Thoroughly annoyed, I grabbed a broom and dust pan. And then I stopped.

Annie had created a home, a refuge, a safe asylum all her own. I remembered Jane, that generous, homeless hostess. Once when I visited her in New York, she and Doug were living apart. She was staying in a homeless shelter near Port Authority. I had reserved a hotel room.  “I’m sorry I can’t give you a place to stay,” she said regretfully. “I can’t offer you a room, but I can offer you a city, my city. Let me show you my favorite places in New York. That weekend was spent exploring hidden refuges in the city, pocket gardens, hidden parks: oases of quiet in the bustling urban landscape.

I cleaned up the chicken bones but left all the rest intact, placing the mattress carefully over Annie’s private space.  She came upstairs, took a dainty bite of kibble from the feeder and then, with a friendly nod in my direction, she ducked beneath the dust ruffle. Annie had gone back home.