I really, really worry about becoming a crazy old cat lady (staring at you, Miss May). I try not to write too much about them, and I don't collect cat figurines, or wear applique cat shirts, or dress Dave and Eudora in little outfits and walk them around the neighborhood in a baby stroller. Yet.
I grew up with cats. Lots and lots of outside cats. Just like my parents, who were both raised on working tobacco farms, did.
One of the things I missed the most in college, of course, was having a cat. So after graduation, even though Rex and I moved into an apartment in Raleigh with a "no pet" clause, even though Rex was not a cat person, I brought home a kitten. I couldn't help myself: She was a tiny gray tabby in a cage at McCrory's at Crabtree Mall, all by herself. She cost $9.99.
I lied to Rex. Told him I'd rescued her from the parking lot of our complex. As always, he gave in and let me keep her. We named her Lovecat Margaret, after one of my very favorite Cure songs ever and Rex's favorite English prime minister.
My God, Lovecat was the least social cat ever. She was, quite honestly mean as hell. Her favorite toys were a disposable razor, a used battery and a pack of matches. Rex and I had friends over for a dinner party and they stared on in horror as I talked with my hands, as usual, but with a four-pound cat attached by all four sets of claws and all her teeth to my hand. She refused to be litter trained, so after much disappointment on my part, we sent her back to Shallotte to live at my parents' house as an outside cat.
Before my parents had a chance to get her fixed, she got knocked up by a very brave tomcat and had a litter of four kittens. A neighbor's dog got loose and murdered her as she tried to protect her babies.
My littlest sister Amy cried as my parents gave those kittens away 15 years ago, but she insisted they keep one, a gray male she named Blue. He was an outside cat, but, like his mother, he was tough as nails.
Blue stared down many a dog, got in a lot of fights with other male cats and gained a lot of scars, but he always loved his people and greeted everyone with a purring ring-around-the-leg. He was the king of the property.
Over the past few years, Old Blue came more and more to resemble the cat from Stephen King's "Pet Sematary." Each time I went home and saw him, he'd lost more teeth, become more deaf and his voice sounded more and more like a death rattle. His body had become a bag of bones and he moved along creakily. But he hung in there.
Last week, Blue started losing control of his bodily functions and had long since stopped cleaning himself. My mama was sitting in her swinging chair in the back yard and saw a fresh hole my daddy had dug. "Is that for Blue?," she asked him, knowing that she would be the one to take him to the vet's office for the last time.
The next day, she set the cat carrier on the ground under the carport and Blue walked right in. She had lined it with one of her best towels -- a blue one. My mama held him, wrapped in that blue towel, in the vet's office, stroking his head as the drugs set in. It was only when a vet tech named Jill came in the room that she started to cry. "Blue was Amy's cat," my mama said, "he was the last living thing we had left of hers."
After Blue drew his last breath and left his suffering behind forever, my mama declined cremation and brought him back home. My daddy buried him out on the back of the lot near the dozens of cats, hamsters, guinea pigs and parakeets we had growing up in our very own pet cemetery. But Blue's spot is special: My daddy piled a huge mound of dirt on top of it, broke an earthenware flowerpot and placed the pieces over it to keep it safe. My parents are going over to the beach this afternoon to gather seashells to place around it.
Into the sea, you and me.
The Cure - The Lovecats
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HAIKU
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