The Cat and I

Mimshky is gone. She died this last weekend and we laid her to rest in a corner of the backyard. She lies undisturbed beneath an Iris plant or a lilly plant, or whatever the plant was that we dug up so we could bury her.

When Sydney and I got married I understood she had had cats and liked them but I really didn’t know what that meant. My experience with cats left me thinking they were tyrannical, arrogant, lazy, ungovernable creatures, and that describes the nice ones. After we had been married for a while, I learned she would enjoy having a cat but she was kind enough to consider my desires on the matter. I held off for a while but for her birthday or for Christmas about twenty years ago, I agreed we could have a cat with some conditions.

Those conditions were that the cat could not sit on my chair or my bed, certainly not in it, could not claw the furniture or make annoying noises at night, and would be banished for alienation of affection. O foolish man! To think I understood so little of cats as to think they could or would ever abide by or could be trained to or coerced into abiding such conditions. Or that their women would either. So we got a cat.

The children loved her as a kitten. She was black except for white paws and a white chest that stretched up under her chin and down to her belly. Someone told me that was called a tuxedo pattern. She was fawned upon by the women in the household and even some of the boys occasionally which only encouraged her naturally lazy and territorial instincts. The women called her Muffy or Mimshky or some such; I called her other names. We tolerated each other over the years; I had my territory and she had hers. If she got on my chair or my bed, I removed her and kept removing her until she understood the Lord of the Manor was not to be trifled with. As a young cat, she could stay outside much of the time and that helped.

Occasionally, we had run ins like the time she wanted chicken from my plate. I had put it on the table as she sat on the bench seat adjacent to the table eyeing the plate. I was not giving her chicken. Sydney at the other end of the table would have, but cats are not bright, stubborn yes, but not bright. We knelt for family prayer as she lay on the bench, I with a protective hand up by my plate because I knew what was on her mind. It’s hard to be spiritual during prayer when you are trying to guard your chicken with your eyes closed and head bowed. Instead of going for the chicken, she hit me in the head with her paw. A civil relationship had degenerated into war. For the rest of her life, I dare not leave a plate unattended at my end of the table if it had chicken and she was in the vicinity.

She got older, I got older, and the children left. Somehow I got the responsibility to feed her in the morning and put her in the garage at night. She couldn’t be left in the house at night because her nocturnal activity kept us awake. She also spent more time in the house because she was less mobile and more vulnerable to other creatures outside including other cats in the neighborhood. This is when trouble began to brew.

She decided to sleep where I sat or worse where I ate. So she would sleep on the end of the breakfast table where I ate my meals. That might seem innocent, but I watched Sydney comb through her fur removing fleas on a daily basis. Even with a flea collar which didn’t last long, I knew she would go outside and collect a new set of fleas. Worse yet, I knew her feet were in the kitty litter box and occasionally she would get tired or bored and lay down in that box. Our kitty litter box does not flush; you have to shovel the cat bon bons and effluvia out of it. Those same feet and belly were the ones lying where I ate breakfast and dinner. She was an old cat but she was still wily. I removed her from the table and then she waited until my back was turned and made another attempt.

We did the same thing jockeying for position to sit on my favorite chair. When I was sitting on it, she approached warily waiting for me to get up to get something so she could take possession. Recently I was sitting on the front edge of the chair and she approached and I could see she was trying to decide how it difficult it would be to get in the chair and sit down behind me since she could see that half the chair was not being used. Cats are very sharing animals. Uninvited, they will share anything you have. The rest of the chairs in the room were empty.

And then there were the veterinarians she was taken to. They thought they could make her live forever, and of course, viewed her as an annuity which needed to be preserved. We spent $400 the last week so a vet could tell us she was dying. We knew that, and the cat knew that, but apparently the vet had to charge us $400 to make it official.

Toward the end of her life, I thought I was winning the conflict. She was so old she couldn’t jump on the table like she used to although she would still surprise me on occasion. She liked being outside when it was sunny because she could lay in the sun and warm her old bones. She would find a spot and stay there much of the day. When I put her in the garage at night, I had to set her down gently because if she’d been sitting for a long time, her legs had trouble supporting her until she could stretch them out. If I won the chair, I usually won it for as long as I wanted. She was a worthy opponent for many years and I will miss her.