The Lions in Winter

Last night, I went to Mom's house for dinner. Nothing extraordinary about that--I usually go to her place for a home-cooked meal about once a week, depending on what days she has off from her job as a checkout at a local drug store. Even so, we still talked on the phone the night before and yesterday afternoon to ponder the wisdom of such a visit this week because of the winter storm bearing down on Shytown. (And if any one of you even considers blaming me for said storm just because of my recent commentary on the singular lack of snow this season, I'll be compelled to reach through your computer and go Moe Howard on your ass.) But since the storm took its dear, sweet time getting here, the streets were merely wet when I left work at five, and snow had just begun to stick to the sidewalks when I arrived at Mom's place in Ukrainian Village.

As I came in the door and brushed off what little snow had accumulated on my coat from having walked straight into the northeast breeze, I found Mom's two oldest cats, Shadow and Kiki, curled up together on the couch nearest the door. This was an unusual sight: the two cats--whose ages, when combined, match mine exactly (37, if you must know; then again, I'm the one who brought it up, now didn't I?)--had never had much use for one another in their many years of living together and rarely, if ever, napped in the same spot. But here they were, both of their geriatric heads inclining upward toward me as I wiped January off of myself. I smiled back at them, dried my hands on my sweater and gave each chin an affectionate scratch.

Their unusual seating arrangement shouldn't have surprised me, I suppose. Cats are smart little things--smarter than we know--and as the two elder statescats of the house, it's natural that they'd stick together, even if such an alliance had not always been the case. But there's more to it than that. Kiki, the younger of the two (16 years old to Shadow's 21), had been, until very recently, a dirvish of fur, capable of running the length of Mom's house not at old-cat speed, but at young-frisky-cat speed. Right around the New Year, though, she became sluggish and lost a couple of pounds, which doesn't sound like much until you consider that she's never weighed more than six pounds in her long life. Mom, conscientious pet owner that she is, took Kiki to the vet. The diagnosis, while not terminal, still wasn't encouraging: Kiki's kidneys were starting to go. The vet treated the cat as best she could, with meds for the kidneys, a steriod shot and an injection of fluids to fight the dehydration. But at her advanced age, there's not much more that the vet or anybody else can do.

After I'd unwound myself from my weather garb, whicch Mom has always maintened makes me look very much like her father in his younger days, and thrown myself down in the living room lounger, both Shadow and Kiki got up, perhaps sensing that my arrival meant that food would arrive soon as well. They weren't wrong. Mom had been busy in the kitchen since we'd talked on the phone, heating pasta sauce, boiling spaghetti strands and baking off Texas Toast. Kiki approached the edge of the couch, looked down--and then froze in place. I couldn't tell if she couldn't make the jump down or if she'd gotten to that spot and then forgot what she was going to do, so I gently lifted her down to the floor--only to have Mom scoop her right back up onto the couch.

Mom was right, of course. She'd brought a plate of food especially for the senior citizens--looked like either tuna or chicken, or maybe a mixture of both--and set it down between them on the couch. That way, she could watch them eat and make sure that no other cat would make a grab for it. Kiki walked over, grazed for a few minutes, sat down, got up again and grazed for a few minutes more. After another rest, she jumped to the top of the couch--a feat which, only weeks earlier, would not have been remarkable at all. She did it with ease, though, and later she left the couch and, with equal ease, jumped into my lap while Mom and I watched the latesst episode of "Ed." (Is it really that much fun to run a bowling alley while practicing law in a small, TV-quirky town? Really? Huh. Who knew?)

And as I sat in the lounger, stroking the small tiger-striped head and feeling her purr reverberate against the back of my hand, I knew. This cat will probably die soon, I knew.

Kidneys are fragile things. I found this out during a severe kidney infection when I was six or so and was laid up in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the hospital in which I had been born, for three weeks. And had Mom been tardy in bring me to our family physician, Doctor Waggoner, or had Doctor Waggoner been less dedicated and not closed his practice for the day to drive me and Mom to the emergency room, it might have been the hospital I died in as well. And if that experience hadn't taught me the dangers of kidneys gone bad, Dad's last couple of years, which were mostly spent shuttling back and forth from a dialysis center in Logan Square, surely would have.

Cats, though, can be amazingly resilient, even when seriously ill. Take Shadow. The cat has been a mutant all his life. He was born in the yard of my grandmother's house and brought in with his mother and the rest of the little for safekeeping. His markings had been like that of a Siamese--dark paws and face, lighter body--but in grays rather than browns. Then, his fur seemed to fall off altogether, only to be replaced by a shaggy coat of charcoal. Add to this a curvature of the spine that, while giving him the perpetual appearance of a Halloween cat, bothers him only in his ability to make vertical jumps. (He can make horizontal jumps with relative ease--with as much ease as a 21-year-old cat can manage--but he has to make several start-and-stop attempts to make a leap from the floor to a couch or chair.)

To be sure, he's not the same cat that he was--his eyesight and hearing are poor, and he sometimes gets up and does laps around the living room as if he'd had a destination in mind when he started walking and would keep going around and around until that destination came back to him again. Still, he remains aware of his surroundings: when Mom calls to me from the kitchen to set up her tray table, Shadow will get up from wherever he is and plant himself at the foot of the tray table until Mom arrives with dinner; when he sees the table, he knows feeding time is imminent. And though he's been sick a few times over the years, but he's always managed to snap back. This cat has been alive since I was a sophomore in high school.

So I rubbed Kiki's head and chin and long, thin tail and let her sleep in my lap as long as she was inclined to (which turned out to be most of the evening). And when I wrapped myself back up to resume my struggle with the snow, which now was coming down at a healthy rate, I sought out both Kiki and Shadow and gave them both an affectionate farewell. I always do this last thing because, at their ages, I can never be sure when "this time" could become "the last time." So every time I go, before or after hugging Mom, I pet the two elderly cats and let them know that they're loved. And they smile and purr and rub against my hand.

They know.

Out on Western Avenue, a different brand of reality exerted itself. Winter, long delayed in the Windy City, had stopped toying with us and was now moving in for the kill in the form of unsubtle winds and large, sloppy flakes. "Heart-attack snow," the meteorologists call it, because shoveling any amount of it can cause one's blood pump to pop like a baloon animal at a birthday party. Fortunately, the streets were still pretty clear, and once the bus arrived I made good time toward home.

Once off the bus at Montrose, though, the weather had to be confronted more directly. The Montrose bus is, at the best of times, even in perfectly sunny weather, lousy. It rarely arrives in a timely manner and usually arrives with a bus buddy or two right behind it. (Safety in numbers, I suppose.) So I hoofed it west through the accumulation because I was anxious to get home--not just because of the increasingly nasty weather, but because evenings at Mom's make me want to go home and pet my own cats even more than I usually do. And they appreciate the extra attention, even if they don't quite understand the motivation behind it.

Maybe the Girlish Girls will each live as long as Shadow or Kiki have. Maybe they won't. But I know they don't just love me because I know how to open the tins of Iam's and they don't. They know they're loved, too.

And on a cold and wet January night--or, really, on any night--there's a lot to be said for knowing that you're loved--even if it's only because you know how a pull-tab works.