My cat is napping at my feet. She isn't napping at my feet for any feline feelings of affection, appreciation, or tenderness tossed in my direction. Long ago, in fact, we realized she had no warm feelings to direct to her primate keepers. Instead, she is napping at my feet because, throughout our apartment, we've placed blankets and other small items - here and there. They're items she enjoys lying on, or next to, and we placed them deliberately near locales where we're likely to plant our overfed butts.
My cat - plagued with two dads, an autoimmune disorder, a stressful (and constantly fluctuating) territory, dreary Seattle weather, very little brains, an abusive kittenhood, a forced hysterectomy, and a variety of other undiagnosed maladies - subscribes to the philosophy of any-old-port-in-a-storm. Thus, though every fiber of her (warped, asocial) being tells her to stay the hell away from Short Mom and Tall Dad, her need for comfort-kneading objects sends her to our proximity every evening. Tonight, with my boyfriend glued to C-SPAN coverage of one-day-until-the-Iowa-Caucus and unusually fidgety as a result, she fled to the bedroom to choose a blanket next to me.
Despite her misery, I think it's poetic justice that she's in our home. In the wild, she wouldn't have lasted five minutes. Two days after getting her at the Seattle Animal Shelter (where she'd been passed over for three weeks), she came down with the feline version of pink eye. Two months later, fluid filled her lungs due to undiagnosed, chronic asthma - and my boyfriend rang me in lab to tell me such after the vet diagnosed her sluggish, gasping breaths (me, on the phone: "What? You're kidding... I graduated college summa cum laude and phi beta kappa with a degree in biology and I had no F***ING CLUE cats could get asthma!!"). Two steroid-filled years later, we're told that, while her kidneys are fully functional (despite steroid abuse), she has what's called Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. She's apparently had it since birth, which explains her occasional difficulty finding her litter box (which is why her original, abusive owners first dumped her in the animal shelter), and the Solution now is to Avoid Surgery as Much as Possible Through the Power of Prescription Food. So far, the high-protein, high-salt, high-moisture content canned food has been greeted by her as mana from heaven. This morning, just after the diagnosis was made formal at the vet's office (her second trip this week - she seems to save these bombshells for holidays), my boyfriend and I alternated our going-back-home-with-the-cat conversation with occasional utterances of (sympathetic) "Poor kitty" and (bitter) "F***ing cat."
But, of course, when I look at her - and reflect upon how we ended up with her - it seems entirely appropriate that we should end up with such a creature. After all, we're the house that Modern Medicine built. I was born a month late and barely survived infanthood. My boyfriend was born backwards, sees through glasses thicker than the Jovian atmosphere, and once got in a car accident in a mall parking lot. Plus, nothing on God's green Earth could get either of us to put our netherregions into a woman's netherregions and make a life. According to Darwin, we're not only dead ends, but we should have never been allowed to grow up to reach dead-endhood. Our existence is a monument to humanity's compassion for those-who-would-be-eaten-in-times-of-famine... or, more aptly, those-who-should-not-survive. And yet, here we are. My boyfriend was one of the first people in his family to go to college, and the first to get an advanced degree. I'm a ho-hum momma's boy of little talent and less greymatter who's pushing for a Ph.D., defying most standardized tests I've put my No. 2 pencil to. So, of course us evolutionary rejects should end up with a cat who not only enjoys running into walls, but who also has defective lungs and a defective bladder. All we're missing is a dodo, a Triceratops (my favorite), and a bathtub full of selections from the Ediacaran fauna, and our family will be complete.
Except that, with our luck, we'd get the diabetic Triceratops, and the cat would eat the dodo.
Still, so it goes. And the cat still sleeps at my feet.
Posted by James at January 2, 2008 07:48 PM