Tigger

Not long after Dad died, Mom took a job as a cashier at a neighborhood grocery store.

It wasn't so much because she needed the income, although the extra cash didn't hurt, but because she didn't want to sit at home, thinking about the fact that her life partner, the man she'd been married to for 30-plus years and raised two children with, was gone.

The store she worked at wasn't one of the national chains, but a much smaller local chain that had a couple of locations in the city and at least one location in the suburbs, which apparently still exists. The two city locations, including the one Mom worked at, are long gone. (One was razed ro make way for a Dominick's; the other is a parking lot.)

She didn't work there long--something under a year--before moving on to another cashier job, this time at a large drugstore chain, where she's been ever since. In her short time at the grocery store, though, she came away with something most people don't get on the job: a cat.

The cat in question, a female tabby, was small and young--perhaps a few months old--but evidently quite loud. She had gotten into the grocery store's warehouse, and other, less feline-incline employees were planning on capturing the kitty and, at the very least, throwing it out, if not removing it in a much more permanent fashion.

Cats, though, are, for the most part, smart critters. They know when someone likes cats and when they don't. Mom was able to coax the tabby to her, earn its trust, and eventually bring it home.

Mom named the tabby Tigger--not the most imaginative name, I know, but our family will never be renowned for our ability to give intriguing appelations to pets (examples: our Black Lab mix was named Blackie; my Russian Blue, Gray Cat).

She almost wound up being my cat. When I moved out of the apartment on the second floor of my parents' house and into the first La Casa del Terror, I definitely wanted to have cats with me, but Gray Cat was quite elderly by that point and would need more attention than I could give her; Mom and my brother would be home much more and could keep a better eye on her. (She lived a couple more years, to the ripe old age of 20.) Mom very much wanted me to take Tigger, a very personable (and now much better fed) feline, and another recent acquisition, a female gray-and-white kitty called, er, Kitty-Kitty. (See what I mean about the names?) I had already committed to take on Lottie and Ms. Christopher from JB, though, so I got the Girlish Girls and Mom kept her two new furry friends.

Mom wasn't too thrill about that at first. Or so she said--she'd agreed readily to the idea of me taking Olivia off her hands, but when the day came, she had tears in her eyes.

It didn't take Mom long to get over "being stuck" with Tigger, though, as she found that the young kitty was friendly, affectionate and, unimaginative as her name was, appropriately bouncy. Other cats came as older cats went away, but Tigger and her new friend, Kitty-Kitty, made Mom smile many, many times, as beloved pets always will.

In the last couple of years, Tigger had her medical challenges, as all elderly kitties will. Her joints were creaky, her kidneys were less than bouncy, and her weight, never great, dropped noticable. However, Mom often said, as long as Tigger ate, pooped and was in no obvious pain, there was no reason to have her put to sleep.

I visit Mom's house for dinner as often as I can--weekly if possible, though work and weather sometimes get in the way. Last Saturday was Mom's birthday--no way I was missing that. I brought dinner (Mom's meal of choice, Popeyes chicken) and two pair of brand-new gloves (she'd requested one pair, but the sales in the department stores are so "pleasepleaseplease!" this year that I was able to buy her two pair for less than the regular price of one). We ate dinner and watched TV for a while, and various cats paid me visits, including Tigger. She was walking unsteadily, reminding me uncomfortably of Christopher's uncertain gait in the couple of days before I had to take her to the vet one last time, but she managed to jump onto the loveseat, walk tentatively onto my lap and stay there much of the evening.

Mom regarded Tigger sadly. "She going to be the next to go," she said.

"I think you're right," I replied, stroking the kitty's head and trying to feel her purr--it was there, barely audible.

When it was time for me to head for home, I gently lifted Tigger out of my lap. "Put her on the warm spot," Mom instructed, pointing at the ass imprint I'd left on the blanket covering the loveseat. I placed the elderly tabby there, and she immediately curled up and went to sleep.

On Monday, Tigger seemed to be having even more trouble walking, and Mom decided to take her to the vet Tuesday morning to see what, if anything, could be done. Monday night, Mom was in her bedroom, watching a bit of TV before retiring for the night, as is her custom, when she heard a cat pawing at the closed door and crying. She got up and opened the door. It was Kitty-Kitty making all the noise, but she didn't come in. Instead, it was Tigger, also standing there, who made her way into the bedroom. Kitty-Kitty then turned and walked away. She hadn't wanted into the bedroom at all; she just wanted her longtime friend, too weak to ask for herself anymore, to be able to go where she wanted to be, to go sleep with Mom, who picked her up carefully, placed her on the bed and kept her company until they both fell asleep.

Tuesday morning, Mom got up early to take Tigger to the vet. There was no need--Tigger had passed away peacefully in her sleep. She was 14 years old.

Swimming Underwater

That's what it's felt like the past couple of days.

After rallying somewhat over the weekend with her new, improved meds, Ms. Christopher declined suddenly and rapidly starting Tuesday, when she was unsteady on her feet (never a good sign for a cat, one of the most surefooted creatures on Earth) and not inclined to eat, through Wednesday night, when I coaxed her to chow down on some Meow Mix lobster & crab combo even though she was having trouble walking, through Thursday morning, when I put her down on the floor (after keeping watch over her all night and getting not a wink of sleep) and watching her try to stand, cry out in pain and sit back down.

Superbadfriend told me a few days ago that Christopher would let me know when the time had come. She was right.

I kept her comfortable for the remaining hours before dawn, made the earliest appointment I could with the vet (who was as heartbroken as I was at this sad, sudden turn of events) and got her there by cab as quickly as possible (rush-hour traffic nothwithstanding). The vet made a brief examination, determined that Christopher's liver had finally given out and did the only thing left that we could do for her--end her suffering.

I would later take Chris down to Mom's house and, with my brother's help, lay her to rest, with one of her favorite catnip toys tucked between her paws, in the backyard, just a few feet away from Gray Cat (my Russian Blue who made it to 20 years old before having to be put down in 1997), Monkey (Mom's cat who passed last year) and several other family pets. I went to work for a few hours--sick as it sounds, the distraction was welcome--and finally, regretfully returned La Casa del Terror, which still smelled strongly of sick cat on a day that was too cool for open windows.

Olivia ran up to me and begged for food and attention, but then started searching the apartment for Christopher, looking under the bed and couch (two of Chris's favorite hiding places), around corners, in the litter pan. The two cats didn't like each other much, but they'd been roommates for nearly four years and Li'L O couldn't understand why the big fluffball wasn't there. "She's not coming back," I explained to her as calmly as I could through tears. "It's just you and me for now." And there were phone calls and messages from friends from coast to coast, grieving along with me.

The hardest part, though, was the minutes spent in the examination room, comforting my poor, dying Girlish Girl--my friend who'd blessed my life with unconditional love for 13 of her 15 years--while the vet and her assistant administered the muscle relaxant to ease her pain and the final injection to end it. The whole time, the vet, the assistant and I stroked Christopher's fur, telling her what a good, sweet kitty she was, even well after she couldn't hear or feel us anymore.

And so she was, as anyone who ever met her--and quite a few who didn't--knew well.

The Cruelest Month

To my mind, Tuesday is the worst day of the week.

On Monday, your body is still recovering from whatever flavor of debauchery you chose to overindulge in Friday night,
Saturday and Sunday; hence, your body never really wakes up to the fact that it's back at work, doing the usual bump-and-grind. By Tuesday, though, body and mind have not only recovered enough from the weekend to realize that the weekend has, in fact, ended, but that the next weekend is little more than a speck on the horizon, no more than a pinpoint of light at the end of an seemingly interminable tunnel.

I feel the same way about April. For the first quarter of the year, a slight hangover from the holidays, in concert with the numbness of winter, prevails. By April, though, the holidays have worn off, there's enough of a hint of warmth in the air to fool you into thinking that winter is finally, completely, entirely over (ha), and the passage of time becomes alarmingly apparent: "What the fuck do you mean it's fucking April al-fucking-ready?"

April is a lot of things--most of them bad.

It's when one day warms up to 70, only to drop to 40 the next day (as it did the morning of the day I'm writing this). It's when when the trees begin to bud and the green grass tries to force its way through the brown (and as dry as this past winter was, there's plenty of brown to go around). It's when what's left of the "too, too sallied" mounds snow at the edges of parking lots have melted, leaving the residue of dark gray behind as a reminder of the least pleasant memories of months--not days or merely weeks, but months--now past.

April is the month that my own personal childhood cat--a medium-sized gray girl forever known as "Gray Cat" because she was certified by a competent veteranarian as a male and named "Smokey Junior" (after Smokey, a handsome Russian Blue and the finest rat catcher I've ever known, though I wish he hadn't been so proficient because he loved bringing, er, "trophies" home to show his appreciation and affection for us) until she went into heat and the testicles the vet thought she'd seen turned out to be tiny twin mirages--finally had to be put to sleep.

Gray Cat lived to be 20--an amazing span of time for a feline, to be sure, spanning from elementary school through college and into my so-called "adult" life. And most of that 20 years was spent in remarkably good health, except for a bout with a burst blood vessel in her left ear, which looked more like a potato chip than an ear for her remaining years.

But seven years ago (was it really that long ago? Damn...) in the middle of April, she started having trouble walking, then started staggering, then...you know where this is going, don't you? Gray Cat lived with Mom after I moved out of the house (since Mom and my brother were home more than I was and could take better care of her), and one April day Mom called me at work to say that she'd made "the appointment" with the vet--Gray Cat had tipped over over in the litter pan and couldn't stand back up again. The time had come.

As "work" at that point was a evil publishing company in one of Chicago's northern suburbs, getting to Mom's in time to go with Gray Cat seemed an impossibility shy of a sudden genetic mutation that would cause arms to fall off and allow wings to grow in their place.

But then, a coworker volunteered to drive me down to Mom's (said coworker had endured a similar situation with her beloved dog and felt I should be there for he old girl) and our department head, a pet owner herself, gave her blessing.

I made it.

When I came into the living room, Gray Cat rose with effort and tried to cross the couch to come to me one last time. I caught her before she fell, held her against my chest and whispered over and over that it was all right, everything was all right. I held her the whole way to the vet, through the procedure (tearfully apologizing to her the whole time for having to do what had to be done) and all the way back to Mom's house, where she was laid to rest in the backyard and had a yellow rose bush planted over the spot--a yellow rose bush that blooms every spring, sometimes even in April.

(Side note: Yes, she should have had a more formal, more fitting name than "Gray Cat," but I freely admit to having no talent whatsoever for naming pets: our first family dog, a female black lab, was, I'm told, named "Hey, You!" because I continually yelled this at the poor animal and each time I did, she came to me. So the name stuck. Poor old pup. Good thing Lottie and Ms. Christopher were already named when they came to me.)

April is when baseball season begins in earnest. And when the pain begins in Chicago.

April is when Christ was crucified. (Okay, he came back from the dead a couple of days later, but still...)

And this April will be the first full month of the current war in Iraq. And yes, I think it'll last through the month, making April more literally cruel than usual, and it may last for many months to come.

I don't suppose we could just skip April altogether and head straight into May, could we?

Silent Night

A friend/coworker of mine recently wrote on her Web site a long, detailed account of what it was like to experience Christmas while growing up Catholic. Another good friend, JB--one of my oldest and dearest friends, in if truth be fully told--read that account and agreed with much of its detail.

My holidays had no such structure. Mom was a "lapsed Catholic"--a necessity, as Dad had been married and divorced before and the Church frowned upon such unions. So we never went to Christmas Eve mass or sang carols with the choir or any such community activity.

Instead, we had simple rituals. We'd open our presents Christmas Eve morning, amassing enormous piles of wrapping paper and bows for the (many) cats to savage. Then, Christmas Day, we'd go visiting. Grandma lived in a small cottage off of Western Avenue in Bucktown--a ten-minute bus ride on a good day, a half-hour walk on a bad one. Mom would bring dinner. If we were lucky, it was just ham or turkey. But if we were truly unfortunate, it was the kidney stew that took hours to cook and made the whole house smell like a sweaty foot. And Grandma would spend most of the time offering her food to me, my brother and her cats.

Mom and Grandma would spend much of the time bitching at one another. Grandma was a master packrat, saving the likes of toilet paper rolls and empty cat food cans in drawers, under dressers, etc. And Mom would go on continuous "search-and-destroy" missions, throwing out the salvaged bits of plastic wrap and the wrapping paper carefully preserved from the previous Christmas and whatever else she could find. (Yes, theirs was a complicated relationship, and my mother has, in her later years, become much more like Grandma than she'll ever admit.)

After such frolic, the family (minus Grandma, who had badly swollen legs and rarely left her cottage) would walk over to the house of some family friends who also lived in Bucktown. They often had large gatherings on Christmas Day, with children tearing through the house while adults stood in clusters, beers in hand, telling dirty jokes and laughing about how much bigger the kids were this year than they were last. And every year, the family friends would set up the coolest Christmas tree on the planet: a tall, wide aluminum tree with a color wheel rotating at its base, making the whole living room sparkle in blue, then red, then yellow, then its natural silver. (Try going into a hipster vintage store these days and buying an aluminum tree; if there's anything left in your wallet when you walk out, I'd be damned surprised.)

Our tree, by comparison, seemed downright frumpy. Mom always picked out a nice "live" tree (as "live" as any tree that's been cut off at its trunk, stuffed in a truck and sold in a grocery store parking lot could ever be), but then attacked it with lights, beads, tinsel and ornaments until the tree itself was no longer visible to the naked eye. Our cats still managed to find it, though, swatting at the lower branches and knocking loose glass balls or unlucky angels.

One year, my own personal cat, a Russian Blue who never did have a proper name beyond Gray Cat (a long story for another time) and managed to live to be 20, clambered up the middle of the tree and, being surrounded by a veritable fortress of festive decoration, couldn't quite make good her escape before Mom, returning home from her job at the plastics factory, stared into the center of the tree, only to find it staring right back at her. (All of our cats were declawed shortly thereafter.)

We followed this routine, year in and year out, through bountiful holidays when we young ones got whatever toys we'd pleaded for (like the Mego Fonzie doll with "thumbs-up" action, or the huge rubber gorilla that my brother later operated on with a very, very sharp knife) and through lean holidays with gifts wrapped in aluminum foil and the mistletoe-accented carton of Salems waiting for Dad under the decoration-clotted pine.

But years passed, as years have a way of doing, and things changed, as things always must. The mom-half of the family friends passed away, and the dad-half, some time later, remarried (to her twin sister--yeah, that sounds weird, but they're happy to this day, so who am I to say shit?) and moved to Iowa. Grandma died not that long after, and the little cottage was gutted by fire the following February.

So we just spent the holiday with ourselves, worried that each would be the last with Dad who, after too many years of too many beers and almost as many cartons of Salems, was in fragile health, with his heart rebelling every few months or so and his kidneys trying their damnedest to give notice as well. For Christmas in 1994, I gave Dad a couple of CDs: Hank Williams' Greatest Hits (Hank Sr., NOT Hank Jr.) and a collection of songs by Johnny Cash. Dad was from Alabama, so country music had always filled our house. And since Dad couldn't get out much anymore--he walked with an aluminum cane, and just making it to the end of the block was a chore--he'd often just rest in bed, Hank Sr.'s voice warbling out "Your Cheatin' Heart," singing my father to sleep.

Those CDs wound up being the last Christmas gifts I gave Dad. He died the following June.

Now, the routine is simple: Go to Mom's house Christmas Day, spend a few hours petting the cats and hugging her when she cries because she misses her husband and her mother, and head back north with a bag full of leftover ham or turkey (never kidney stew). I walk up the three flights to my apartment, shoo the Girlish Girls out of the way on my way in, and head for the living room, where I turn on the red pepper lights and the small, fake pine tree Grandma always had in her window. Then I light a candle, say something as close to a prayer as an avowed agnostic can manage, and feed the Girls before they attempt to gnaw off my leg.

And, usually, I sit in the dark for a while, letting the red glow of the pepper lights duke it out with the twinkle of the tree and the unsteady flicker of the flame. Maybe I'll spend a few minutes contemplating the years already passed and the one about to join them in memory. Or maybe I'll feel like I'm being a fucking drama queen, blow out the candles and surf the Web for porn. But in those few minutes in the not-quite-dark, memories will come and go, and I'll either laugh to myself or cry to myself, all the while petting Lottie and Ms. Christopher, who no doubt concluded long ago that their guardian is either an idiot or a weirdo--or, most likely, both.

But when all is done and said, I can't complain too much. I'm alive, employed, and blessed with wonderful, eloquent friends. No, things aren't what they used to be and can never be so again, for bad or good. And no, things aren't as good as they can get. Not yet, anyway. But things aren't too bad over all. And that's good enough for me.

Happy holidays, people, and peace in the approaching New Year.