Cat Lady

Peaches and cream! Well, not exactly. Today's morning smoothie is made of peaches, soy milk, and coconut oil.

We weren’t supposed to keep her. We were supposed to have her only for a week, while her owners went on vacation. Her name was Wendy and she was a tiny red and white stray cat with huge amber eyes and a petal pink nose, in the shape of a heart. She came with a litter box and food supply to last her a week.

Of course we fell in love with her, and of course we kept her!

Wendy arrived just as I started my career as a journalist, and she and I learnt the ropes together. She was the perfect newspaper cat, she loved the crackling sound of paper, and would often sleep on top of it or roll on it. When I was alone at night, writing and re-writing, editing and filing, Wendy was right there, next to me. I called her my Muse. I thought I couldn’t write without her.

“How does this sound?” I’d say and read a paragraph I had written.

If Wendy didn’t look up in a certain way, the paragraph had to go. I trusted her completely.

Later, when I was pregnant, Wendy happily tested all the purchases we made. She checked the firmness of the crib mattress, she warmed up the Moses basket, and she very gently put her soft white paw on the blue, fuzzy baby blanket. After having examined everything, she turned to me with her grave, amber eyes as if to say:
“Everything will turn out all right, you’ll see.”

But everything did not turn out all right. That summer, we discovered that Wendy was sick with cancer and that there wasn’t much to do. The vet gave her a few months. Alone at night, I cried and cried over the cat that had tip-toed her way into my heart and who now lay curled up, unassuming, in my lap.

“Wendy, Wendy, Wendy…”

And my tears fell on her fur.

When she was beginning to give out, we gave her sterile water intravenously several times a day and mixed steroids into her food. This perked her up sufficiently to survive the birth of our son. I think I was slightly obsessed with the thought that the two of them had to meet.

After Wendy died, we got another cat right away, because I couldn’t bear the emptiness that Wendy’s absence had created. That’s when Bessie, a black-and-white tuxedo cat, came. Whereas Wendy had been elegant, quiet and lean, pure aristocracy, Bessie is plump, loud, and sturdy. She is also quite aggressive and vocal, screaming loudly whenever something displeases her, scratching ankles and hitting the air with her paw. But she assumed the mantle of Muse without complaint, and sits in my lap whenever I write (like right now).

Since Bessie’s arrival, we’ve acquired two more cats. Eddie, a beautiful purebred British Short hair, whose owner had to move abroad and couldn’t take him, and Sugar, a tiny tortoiseshell kitten found in Harlem. This (mostly) silent trio comforts me whenever I am alone, makes our apartment a “home”, and never turns down an invitation to nap. I suppose they also turned me, originally a bona fide “dog person”, into a (Crazy?) Cat Lady, a title I wear with pride.

Bessie, current Muse-in-Residence.