Three Weeks With Wilson. Memories of Felines Past and Present.

Katie Andraski, “The River Caught Sun... Testing from Texas: Please Comment

Three Weeks With Wilson. Memories of Felines Past and Present.

My neighbor, Dan, who lives just across the hall in this old co-op building, left last Wednesday to spend three weeks with his mother in Cape Town on the coast of South Africa. Susan works for part of the year at the University of Cape Town on a global rheumatic heart disease eradication project, and this is Dan’s first trip.

He is sending back spectacular photographs, but he did confess, in his most recent email, that the reports from Wilson’s many friends that he was “extra affectionate . . . makes me miss him even more.”

Like any normal little girl–at least one growing up in the hills of North Georgia–my first cat was named Tiger. He was a small tiger-stripped stray. He looked a lot like Wilson. We lived in the woods. My father had hunting beagles. It would have been unthinkable to have an animal in the house. Tiger was an outdoor cat. After my father died, during my senior year in high school, I left for college, my mother sold the house, and I don’t know what happened to Tiger.

I spent many years with “indoor-outdoor” cats. The indoor part was because I really wanted them purring in my lap at night when I was reading; the outdoor part was because I had grown up with the firm-and completely false-belief that cats need to be outside. The result of these terrible years was that I either lost my cats to cars, dogs, or raccoons, or endured the fruits of their own predatory natures deposited on my doorstep or brought in through the cat door–sometimes to be polished off in the living room.

The list of these ill-fated cats includes Grindl, Ronald McDonald, Gordon, Stella, Beast and Beardsley, Twig and Leaf. Twig and Leaf were my Come-to-Jesus moment. Leaf disappeared. Twig was gone for nearly a week and returned with a deep puncture wound in his neck which should have killed him, but didn’t. I spent almost two weeks with a panicked cat wrapped in my J Crew barn jacket, struggling to get away, held tightly to my chest, until finally he was able to settle down.

I learned that sometimes being restrained, wrapped away from your own fears, is the best medicine. Temple Grandin whose autism prevented her accepting touch from others, built a soft-belt restraining chute for herself, modeled on the one she had designed for her cattle. When I had llamas, I purchased a similar chute that had been modified for these particular animals. When they were partially restrained, they would struggle. Once they were fully and gently restrained, they let go. My llamas loved that restraint.

Grindl was the first cat I had as an adult. She was a Siamese and her claim to fame in my memory is that she slept in the cradle with my son from the day he came home from the hospital. Of course, I heard all the tales of cats sucking the breath out of babies and listened carefully to my friends’ dire warnings.

Then I sat for hours watching my baby and his first cat sleeping soundly, the baby making those wonderful snuffling sounds that babies make, the cat purring contentedly, wrapped around his diapered bottom. My now middle-aged son has always had a cat.

Ronald McDonald and Gordon were the victims of cars going too fast on a residential street. Beast vanished.

Beardsley was taken down by neighborhood dogs. Stella was gone for a week and came home with an injured eye that had to be removed. She lived a long life, always just off balance when she tried to jump.

The first of the indoor cats was little Abraham, a beautiful pink Persian who was sick when I got him but managed a very happy eight years before his auto-immune deficiencies took him. The last year of his life he was on an Aids medication and he jumped right up on the kitchen counter every morning for his dropper full of banana-flavored meds.

And now I have Isaac, who officially adopted me on January 21 2007, the worst looking white cat you can possibly imagine. I was finally through grieving for Abraham and was happily shopping for Ragdoll kittens. I had made up my mind to invest the outrageous sum of $600 per kitten.

I did not want a three year old, short-haired, alley cat. Before January 21, Isaac had been hanging around my apartment and, of course, I was slipping him the occasional bowl of milk–well, alright, Half and Half. But I was determined not to take him. But on the 21st, I arrived home from my son’s birthday brunch, and there was Isaac again. This time one paw was hanging loose. It was a Sunday. I took him in and he slept quietly on the sofa all night. Monday morning I took him to the vet to have him neutered and cleaned up. They couldn’t perform the surgery because he was running a high fever. Eventually, we were referred to an osteoarthritis veterinarian. As the vet bills mounted, my son and I would look at each other and say, “One Ragdoll.” “Two Ragdolls.”

Today, as I type, Isaac is sleeping in the afternoon sun coming through my old casement windows. He follows me from room to room, never far away.

I have met friends’ cats and cousins’ cats and strangers’ cats, have written about cats I’ve never met.

Which brings me back to Wilson, waiting patiently across the hall for my next visit.

Wilson, ironically, is an indoor-outdoor cat. When he can’t be outside, he follows the sunlight from window to window.

Wilson is remarkable. Dan opens the back door and Wilson wanders out and down to the grass outside our building to roll around, munch on the greens, and eventually wander back home.

He never goes further than the back yard, never goes near a street. All the benefits of outside living without the risks. Wilson seems to have figured it out. And I’m growing fond of him.