This photo captures a work moment with me and my research staff, Bella and Carmine. They field all incoming queries about my memoir, Sayonara Cowboy. They may take a while to respond, and the estimated wait time is never. Cats are like that. Just so dog people don’t get their dander up, I hasten to say we are an equal opportunity employer, having hired Mr. Henry Chow (below), but only briefly, because he claimed on his resume to be a cat person. Looking back, I think he took the job just for the treats.
But this blog is about a cat from long ago. I wrote about him in my memoir, but I didn’t recognize until recently that he was the catalyst for bringing tuxedo cats into our family more than a half century later.
The cat from long ago and I met when I was ten and quite lonely. It’s a condition no boy that age ever admits to. My grandparents had moved to a new house in farmland far, far away from the place we left. I expected a friendless summer, and I was set to enter a new school as a stranger to all for the sixth consecutive year. But there was this cat. I put it this way in Sayonara Cowboy:
Although he came uninvited, we had a guest from the first day we moved in–a stray cat, a youngster, with black and white markings, but smudged and matted by tough times being scatted from barn-to-barn by humans or harassed by other feral creatures. In a few weeks Grandpa’s vegetable garden, Grandma’s flower beds, our backyard, and the expansive field of golden rye beyond it became his dominion. He was no longer a stray, and he was mine.
Sometimes, the first friend you make in a new place becomes your best. I know it is true that we loved each other. There is no marker where he is buried, but for this, in memory.
The Boy and the Black-and-White
From the hedge row, the Black-and-White
bounded to the road as the boy yelled No!
but the deadly play was already done.
He was a tom, a stray. Though never given
a noble name, he had found a bed, a dish, and
the cooing affections of clumsy, larger creatures.
The car flung the Black-and-White to the shoulder
where he lay serenely, suggesting the way
his kind luxuriate on a Sunday porch.
But this is not leisure. The cat’s head lolls,
its last breath of autumn is a wisp of steam
drifting toward the boy, then disappears
Forever, like hope unhinged. He wants the day back
to what it was. He hates himself for time he wasted,
mindlessly waiting for a school bus.
His grandmother hangs clothes out to dry,
sees the boy, now lost, stumble as he cradles
the still-soft checkerboard of a cat.
She knows anguish; sees it coil around the boy
and grab his throat between sobs. She thinks
if only, then remembers, he must work through it.
Driving him to school, she tells him that when
he comes home, he should make a grave –
lay the Black-and-White under the red maple.
Later, raking leaves and acorns, she watches him
finish the burial. He drags a rusted spade behind him
drops it by the white barn; stalks to the far fence.
He rages, kicks clods of dirt in an empty field.
Moments ago, summer was a flying carpet—as real as
a boy and his cat who soared over a sea of golden rye.
So, I write this is to explain how I felt about Bella and Carmine when we first met at the animal shelter, and how their tuxedo markings shouted out to me, from my long-ago best friend.