Pet Calculus

NOTE: I wrote this rant the day Luci was dying, at the end of August. Then, it sat in my computer waiting for either exposure or deletion. Since I still miss my big guy and his death still stings, I went for exposure. So, I swapped the current verbs for past tense and shipped it.

In late August. I watched another of the many pets we have survived suffer the end of his life. Like our last cat, we had Luci (short for “Lucifer,” a character in one of Ms. Day’s favorite cartoon series) for about a year. He was a shelter cat who suffered a lot of unintentional abuse and misery in his life before us. We don’t know much of this story, but his previous owner, an older woman, died in her house/apartment and her body wasn’t discovered for several days. Luci wasn’t discovered in the house/apartment for an unknown but extended time after she had been removed. When a company was hired to empty the property, those folks found him grossly overweight (he’d opened a large bag of Purina Cat Chow and helped himself) and his long black fur was matted into dense dreads. A police officer delivered him to the shelter and while he struggled, he did not bite or scratch her. Our best guess was that he was a Norwegian Forest Cat or very close to that. Depending on the season, he weighed between 16 and 18 pounds and it was all muscle. He weighed closer to 30 pounds when he was brought to the shelter. His fur was so messed up that he had to be sedated and shaved. After all that, he was in a tiny cage in the shelter for more than 6 months before Ms. Day decided to adopt him.

When we brought him home, he was a mess. He was terrified, disoriented, and still never made the slightest attempt at lashing out from fear or anger. He would struggle to get away from us, but never using any of his formidable weapons: 1” fangs and claws nearly that long. For a big cat, he could hide incredibly well. It was several months before he would willingly be touched, but slowly he began to sit beside me while I wrote in my corner of our dining area. Ms. Day says we bonded because we both come from train wreck histories. All my life, I was the black sheep of my family and Luci was, literally, a black cat. We are both introverts, easily overwhelmed by people and situations. He always fled whenever I would grab a guitar, so he had far better musical taste than me. He was a shop cat, there was nothing he liked more than to relax in our work areas while we work.

But he was on his 3rd urinary tract infection in less than 3 months. He battled through the first two, but the last one was his last. There is math involved in living with a pet, especially one you unwillingly become attached to. The area-under-this-curve is the pleasure you derive from their lives vs the pain you will suffer when that ends. Ms. Day says she looks at their short lives as “brief, beautiful flowers.”

I have outlived so many people and animals in my 76 years that I do not have the emotional resources to do that again. When their lives end, I am stuck with wishing it was me and not them and feeling like my heart has been ripped out. Nothing about the brief time I had with them compensates for their loss. Fuck “better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all.” I can see how that philosophy could work with “beautiful flowers,” but not with a living, thinking, responsive being that had become my friend and, even, family. As you can see from the chart above, the area under the “misery” curve is substantially greater (longer and deeper) than the brief pleasure of that life, if the life is a short one. And the fact is clearly that we suck at keeping cats alive and healthy.

These are awful times in history and, particularly in this country. Half of the country is unable to tell fact from fantasy; and they are proud of that fact. I am incredibly tired of being disappointed when I discover someone I once thought might be a decent human being is a Trumper. I try to keep a sense of humor about the decline and fall of the United States, but it is hard for me not to look at the sky and hope for a planet-killing asteroid. The way we have chosen to kill ourselves is going to be slowly, painfully, stupidly and sadly and I’m not up for that.

It is embarrassing and unrelentingly painful how much I miss my big, beautiful, black cat. It has been more than a month since he died and I still catch myself hoping to see him bounding around the kitchen when I wake up, trying to get me to let him outside on his leash to watch the sunrise and the life in our backyard. I miss how he would hug me, with no claws involved, when I’d pick him up to carry him outside or bring him back in at night. I miss his silent presence. I miss him sleeping, purring loudly beside me in my office while I write. I miss his undeniable sense of humor and intelligence.

The pets we’ve lost in the past 3 years have given me an appreciation for the wild hope that there is an afterlife. I, honestly, have fewer than a handful of humans who I’d like to see after death, but at least a dozen beautiful, soulful animals have passed through my life and I can almost imagine an eternity with them that would be pretty fantastic. 

When people ask “If you miss him so much, why don’t you get another cat?” my answer is “I don’t want another cat, I want Luci.” Irrational, I know. Even delusional, I suspect.

None of This Should Have Happened

   Luci (short for Lucifer)

Last year about this time, we had yet another pet die. (We are. apparently, the place to send animals you want to see dead and buried.). It was heartbreaking because that cat, Diva, was a one-in-a-million animal who actually reconvinced me that I liked cats. One of the many disadvantages of living in a rural area is that, usually, all forms of healthcare (for humans and animals) is pretty dismal. We’ve been lucky because, so far, the Mayo Clinic has a facility in our town, but our luck with veterinarians has been more typical: as in dismal. We lost one cat, two years ago, due to repeated episodes of urinary tract blockages and insanely expensive and ineffective treatment. That cat, who was a pretty poor representative of the feline species as a pet in every way, Ms. Day had named “Doctor Zogar.” And I called him “Stinker” (to give you a hint about his personality and our relationship). After his demise, Ms Day didn’t give up and adopted another shelter cat almost immediately. A year later that cat, Diva, died after even more money spent and even worse diagnosis and totally, grossly, embarrassingly ineffective “treatment.” Being charged hundreds and thousands of dollars for ineffective pet medical care is the epitome of “adding insult to injury.” Ms. Day is a dedicated cat-lover and after a few months of going cat-less, she decided she needed another cat. I, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with either the decision or another pet. I’m still not clear on how Ms. Day convinced me to go along to the local shelter to look at cats, but I may forever regret that lapse in judgement.

She’d done some due-diligence, came up with some selection criteria and, after one really poorly-chosen attempt, had it down to three possibilities. Her main criteria, after Diva who was small and fragile from the start, was that our next cat needed to be strong and tough enough to survive. A large, long-haired cat the shelter had named “BB King” was the obvious answer. We felt the name was inappropriate and Ms. Day renamed him “Luci” (short for Lucifer) after a favorite character in a Netflix cartoon series.

Luci had been a middle-aged woman’s pet until she died in her home and went undiscovered for several days. After her body was removed, it was some time later before the house cleanout service came to remove her belongings from the home and discovered she had a cat. Luci had, in the meantime, clawed his way into a large bag of cat food and had eaten his way up to nearly 25 pounds of fat, upset, matted and dreadlocked cat. A cop delivered him to the shelter where he had to be drugged and shaved to untangle his matted fur. Then, because of his size and appearance, he was stuck in a small cage at the shelter for more than 6 months before he attracted Ms. Day’s attention.

I think, because of his sad and traumatic past, he was cautious, fearful, unsure of how to live in a house with people, and yet he was “a presence.” We are not sophisticated cat people. Ms Day loves cats and, mostly, I tolerate them, but neither of us are particularly alert to what's going on in a cat's head; me least of all. I guess it should be some sort of consolation that our local shelter doesn't know much about cats either, because we didn't get squat for guidance from them. We brought him home from the shelter, let him loose in the house, and he promptly disappeared.

For a large cat, he could find an incredible number of hiding places in an 1100 sq ft house. His first disappearing act was behind my office computer. This is not a neat area, with lots of cables, usually a stack of bills, and many other things that could be easily knocked over or disrupted to expose his hiding spot. Never happened. Because he was so careful and sure-footed, he went for days only coming out to eat hiding behind that computer.

 That was clearly not Ms Day's intention for having a cat. She wanted someone to cuddle up with on the couch, a companion. I can't, of course, speak for Luci, but I think he just didn't want any more awful stuff to happen and he was keeping his distance until further notice.    

Having spent 6 months in a shelter, the only food he was familiar with was the cheapest Purina Cat Chow. And, maybe, that was the only food he had eaten with his previous owner because that was the only thing he would eat. So, using food to entice him into expanding his behaviors wasn't a useful tactic. The only tool we had was to wait and see what kind of animal he would turn out to be.

After doing a little reading and some internet searches, I learned that the right move would have been to put Luci in a small room and let him become comfortable with that space. We have a small bedroom, that Ms. Day uses as a dressing room, and we set that up for a cat. He quickly settled in and spent most of his days on a couch looking out the window into our backyard. It didn't take long until he appeared to be looking forward to us visiting him in that room. After a while, we left the door open and he started exploring the house and us.

Ms. Day is not particularly patient. So, she started bringing other cats in from the shelter to see if they would meet her needs. The first one was a noisy, super irritating male cat that made me start to look for a camper and another place to live. Turned out he was sick and he went back to the shelter. Ms. Day is nothing if not relentless and she brought another cat home. This one was a small, noisy, but very friendly female cat. That cat moved into the room where we had tried to acclimate Luci. Which, of course, meant he could no longer go there. And things went downhill pretty quickly from there.

I will never be able to explain how this happened, but, somewhere in that period, Luci and I made a connection. Especially in the winter, I like to get up before the sun, make a bowl of cereal and fruit and coffee, and head to my computer and write. Lucy started sitting on the couch near where I would work and overtime he moved closer and closer to me. Eventually, he was sitting close enough that I could easily reach over to pet him and hear his gigantic purr. When her territorial acquisition tendencies forced me to give up my spot in the corner of our sunroom and move upstairs to ride, Luci moved with me.

When spring arrived, I started to spend those mornings on our back porch and trained Lucy to come out with me on a leash tethered to our clothesline. It took him almost no time to learn to put up with the tether for the opportunity to be outdoors. He and I spent hundreds of hours quietly enjoying each other and that space. Ms Day developed something between tolerance and love for Luci because of his and my connection. He was never "her cat," but he certainly was our cat. But, in many ways, he was my first pet. Every other animal that has come into my life, was brought and kept there by someone else, usually Ms. Day. As for cats, way over 3/4 them would have been out in the cold in minutes if it weren't for Ms. Day or our daughters or grandkids.

Ms. Day deserves a lot of credit for putting up with Luci. We had serious behavioral problems with him, particularly in his territorial marking of the spaces the second cat had taken up. And, in retrospect, he probably had urinary tract problems right from the beginning. Most of the time, he was absolutely house trained, but there were instances where he tried to “reclaim” (as in piss and crap all over) that small bedroom and even our bed. The first time he marked our bed he almost ruined it. But Ms. Day helped clean up the mess and tolerated him for me. We did not, by the way, work out what was going on until after Luci died and in our grief looked back to evaluate those moments.

We had experienced another cat, only a few years ago, going through the rapid decline of a urinary tract blockage and having been raped-and-pillaged by the local vet for well over $1,000 in failed "treatment." When Luci clearly started showing those symptoms, we tried to treat him ourselves (as the local shelter often did for similar reasons). His first bout was serious and with warm baths, for which he had to be sedated, massage, and diet he came out of that one as strong as ever. But, a little more than a month later, those symptoms returned and we tried the same tactics. It seemed to have worked but, after we had been gone for a day visiting friends, when we returned he was well past the point of no return.

We spent almost all of his last day together. The weather was kind to us, slightly cloudy, mild temperatures, with enough of a breeze to keep the mosquitoes off. Luci loved the yard and our house and as the day went I moved him back and forth from his favorite places to another. There is a spot in one our gardens, under a clawfoot bathtub on a bed of Moss where Luci liked to watch birds. He spent most of the day there and I sat on my swing chair a few feet from him making sure he had water and something to eat. He didn't eat but he did drink. Late afternoon he started to crawl from that spot towards me on the swing chair. I picked him up and he wants to be held. So, for the first time, I brought him back to my swing chair and we sat together on the phone for almost an hour. He tired of that and struggled to get up, so I brought him inside and laid him on a towel below the couch where he spent so many hours watching birds in a feeder I had made for him. And that's where he died.

Luci, the strongest, quietest, least demanding, most gentle friend an introvert ever had was dead. I buried him in a spot behind our backyard, next to Gypsy and Diva. I have put so many hours of love and enjoyment into holes in that spot that I can barely walk by it without breaking down. When Gypsy died, I planted four small Cedars in that area as a memorial. I maintain it like a more intelligent person might maintain a cemetery.

Cleo, the replacement cat Ms. Day found to satisfy her cat needs, was a total territorial bitch to Luci most of the time. Anytime he made an attempt to approach her, she would hiss and swat at him, but now she wanders the house looking for him. She used to sleep on the corner of our bed, guarding the bed as if it were her private territory and making sure he knew he was no longer allowed there. Now, I find her sleeping in his old spots at night: the "cat shelf" or on the pad I laid out for him on my electronics parts bin in the basement, my upstairs office chair, the wicker chair he used to like the claw on the back porch in the morning, or the couch with a bird feeder view. All of Luci’s old hiding spots.

I am not going through this again. I loved the animals in my pet cemetery, but there is something wrong with me that obliterates the memory of all those good times with the pain of losing them. Our house and yard was haunted for months by my memories of Gypsy, when she died, then Diva, and now Luci.

Someday I will stop looking for Luci whenever I see a dark shadow in the corner of the house or the yard. Someday, when I get stuck in a spot in my writing, I will stop automatically reaching out with my left hand to pet him for comfort and inspiration. Someday, I won't wake up at 5:00 in the morning, looking forward sitting on the back porch watching the sunrise while my giant cat pounces bugs in the yard and terrorizes squirrels. Someday, when I see some walking their little dog, I won't think, "My cat could beat up your dog." But I will never want to go through this pain again. I am 76 years old and Luci was barely five. I expected him to outlive me by several years. If I had the option, I would have split my remaining years with Luci in a heartbeat. We have friends who have nearly 20-year-old cats, but cats rarely live beyond five or six years with us. We are clearly not a good home for cats and I don't have the temperament to grow attached to them and watch them die.

 

Another Valuable (expensive) Lesson

In late 60s, Ms Day and I lived in Dallas, Texas. We were poor, but didn’t know it and we mostly got by surprisingly well considering that we were totally on our own as kids (me, 19 & she, 17) in a big city. We’d financially “graduated” into being car owners in 1968—a nondescript German import brand that no longer exists—that looked a lot like a tiny hearse. .As usual, Ms Day decorated it to look like a vehicle the Munsters or Adams family might own. While I was driving to a meter reading route (I worked for the Dallas Water Department) I was t-boned at an intersection by a lady driving a new model Cadillac. Our car and a lot of my savings were totaled as a result. The German hearse was unrepairable and our friend/mechanic had a great deal for me; a barely used 1959 MGA that an Air Farce guy had been keeping in storage for several years and was looking to unload for $500. What I knew about cars, auto mechanics, and car maintenance could have been extensively documented on a single side of a page with double-spaced, large type print.

The MGA was a very attractive sports car with some of the most ludicrous attempts at engineering in human history. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been saddled with a worse car for that time and place. The picture, at left, is pretty much exactly the POS British crap that I owned, color and all: 4 cylinder, 1489 cc, 108 BHP (79.488 KW) @ 6700 RPM, cast iron block with an aluminum head, dual SU carb, twin Lucas distributor, 4-on-the-floor manual transmission, rear wheel drive, two-seater convertible, wire wheels and all. That summer, Dallas was hitting some record high temperatures and the postage stamp MG radiator wasn’t even close to up to the job; resulting in multiple blown head gaskets. (A good reason why that generic MGA picture is next to a pond.) Couple that with the twin carbs and distributors that needed moment-by-moment adjustment or they’d slip out of tune and set the freakin’ wooden floorboards and air filters on fire, and you have a formula for sudden bankruptcy and lots of stranded moments in weird Dallas neighborhoods (the only kind of Dallas neighborhood).

By the time I gave up on the MGA, my hard-won savings went from more than $3,000 (Almost $28,000 in today’s money.) to the $500 I received from the sucker who bought the car from me. When he drove the MGA off, it was bellowing smoke from yet another blown head gasket and back-firing because it was, again, out of time. I was happy to see the damn thing disappear from my life and amazed that someone who owned a beautiful white 1960’s Ford Falcon convertible would want a British anything.

The inspiration for this essay was an accidental run-in with a 1960 MGA and its owner at the Red Wing River City Days this past weekend. The bleached white beauty at right is the exact car. I was bicycling past the car show when I saw it and I had to take a look for old times’ sake. The owner was nearby, providing some comic relief. I had all sorts of flashbacks looking at that money-sink of a wannabe-vehicle.

Ms. Day’s “favorite” memory was when I foolishly signed us up for a rally that ran some distance in the north Texas countryside past Plano, west to Grapevine, and into Ft. Worth before sending us back to Dallas for the finish line; not that we got anywhere near finishing. Somewhere near Lewisville Lake our MGA started backfiring, setting the floorboards on fire and sending flames into the passenger compartment. We spent the rest of the rally driving slowly towards home, watching the ditches and fields on the way for any sign of water and the typical Texas litter that would include bottles and cans to hold water to use in putting out our flaming vehicle. One of my “favorite” MGA memories was as we were returning home from our wedding ceremony in the MGA, some damn thing happened in the transmission causing enough pressure to pop the rubber transmission fill stopper and shoot hot transmission lube into the vicinity of the glovebox where it dribbled down on Ms. Day’s bare legs and her wedding dress.The only good part of that memory is knowing that she was still this happy to be married to me after all of that.

So, while I looked at the MGA in the car show, I listened to the owner talk about the “joys” of owning this kind of vintage POS. He described the fixes he’d made to the car’s many engineering faults, the money and time invested, and the joys of driving the damn thing. I looked at the odometer and he’d managed to rack up a grand total of 5,200 miles in 64 years (he was the original owner, too), or about 80 miles per year. That isn’t even a decent stat for a pair of boots.

The MGA was a life lesson for me, though. Since that car, I have never once felt a moment of envy toward any sports car owner. If they don’t look like total assholes, sympathy at best, but envy never. Sports cars are uncomfortable, unreliable, impractical, and irrationally expensive. As David McRaney said in the “Spotlight Effect” chapter of You Are Not So Smart, “The spotlight effect leads you to believe everyone notices when you drive around town in a new, expensive car. They don’t. After all, the last time you saw an awesome car, do you remember who was driving it? Do you even remember the last time you saw an awesome car?”

You Mean “You”

When we talk about Democratic or Republicans politicians, we are talking about ourselves. We elected them. We selected those representatives from the nation’s population and promoted them to their office, step-by-step. And when we rant about the important (to us) things that they don't do, their corruption, they're incompetence, or their positive qualities, we are talking about ourselves. That is the most obvious thing about representative governments, they represent us. We are most certainly getting the governments we deserve: locally, state-wide, and nationally.

The worst of us—the racists, the violent bad actors, the criminally insane, the privileged and idle rich, the con artists, and the entitled and lazy white middle class who imagine they should also be rich and powerful—are getting exactly the government they want and when that goes bad, as it always does, they will blame “the libs” for their failures. The “far right,” “fascists” to anyone with a lick of reality-based intelligence, has always been happy to break anything that can be broken. Deluded by their grossly inflated self-image, they imagine that anything that smart people can build can be rebuilt better by fools.

The best of us are, as always, better than humanity’s best have ever been. As  Isaac Newton put it, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Some how, defending those values has inspired people like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tina Smith, Ilhan Omar, and the dozens of (all Democrats) national and state politicians who are on Donald Trump’s “enemies list.” Our best have taken the rarely met ideals of this country and humanity and have tried to push the bar higher in hopes of a nation that actually provides “liberty and justice for all” and provides that kind of model to the world to make this tiny planet a better, safer, and more sustainable place. It is an honorable battle, but probably a lost cause.

Why would an exceptional person run for political office in this country? I can't answer that question. I don't have a clue. We are a despicable lot, on average. When exceptional people end up in public service, they are making an incredible sacrifice. And for the most part, few of us appreciate that. Worse, for the most part, few of us deserve it. How can an empire continue to exist with flam-throwers everywhere and so few defenders? Obviously, it can’t. And, so far, none in history have managed that fatal internal battle. As always, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

It is hard not to be cynical in the face of wall-to-wall cynicism, greed, stupidity, and what appears to be species suicide.