Gone, But Not Forgotten: Tales of a Much Loved Cat

My most amazing, smart, wonderful cat was Bob. He was a person trapped in a cat's body. Really, I could tell you stories all night. Anyway, he was in charge of things when he was alive. I just paid the bills.

Oh, boy, Bob went through all nine lives and then some, I think. In addition to being hit by a car, he slipped and fell off a three-story roof as I was trying to talk him down, was going to the pound when I rescued him (yet a more detailed story for another issue), had a couple of serious infections from fights, and spent the last four years of his life fighting off various infections and God knows what other maladies. Oh, and by then he was deaf too.

Then, of course, there were the dogs. He hated them. If they were on the sidewalk, OK. But if they set one toe on his property - they were his. He'd chase them down the street and if they didn't run fast enough he'd jump on them and ride them like a jockey. He blinded a German Shepherd in one eye after it had the nerve to bark at him, and one of my neighbors found him hanging off the throat of a pit bull that charged him in the driveway. Bob had attacked the pit bull, and the dog was losing.

With people, though, he was the sweetest thing you can imagine. And funny. Once he hid amid the olive branches on the wall in front of the house. My brother, who is 6'5", came through the gap in the wall to get to the front door when Bob leaped over his head to the other side. As he was passing over my brother he went "Mah!" and scared Rick, who otherwise felt only the faintest breeze over his head, half to death. Rick said you could practically see Bob laughing upon landing.

Bob even found his way back to a house he'd lived in only three weeks after he was hit by a car that left him with a broken jaw and a bitten-off tongue. The whole family but me had written him off. If he'd been dead I would have felt it and I didn't. The moment he showed up at the top of the ridge behind the house was like something out of a Disney film. I still get weepy just thinking about it.

I'll tell you one more story about Bob and leave it at that. Here's how we met. I was visiting a friend about a week before heading back to college for my sophomore year.

I was getting ready to leave, and we were standing in the foyer when the front door popped open and Bob walked in. Bob, by the way, walked like John Wayne - that jockey swagger. I didn't know Caroline had a cat. "Oh no", she said, "he belongs to the people next door". She picked him up and he started to purr, and when he purred he sounded just like one of those old percolator coffee pots. I petted him for a while and left.

Now, as it happened, her street was being repaved that week, and I had to park at the bottom of it, about a quarter of a mile away. So Bob escorted me to the car. We'd walk, then he'd stop to sniff a plant, sharpen his claws, stare at a bird, whatever. I'd walk past him. I'd be a way beyond him when he'd gallop past me and resume what I later came to realize was his rightful position three steps ahead of me. We walked all the way down the street this way. Then, when I got to my car, he climbed in. It was the only time he got into a car voluntarily. Anyway, I told him I couldn't take him because he was already somebody's cat. So I finally got him out of the car and went home.

A couple of days later Caroline called and asked if I remembered that cat; did I want him? Turns out he'd been dumped in the neighborhood (A story I question. My theory is that for some reason Bob didn't like where he was and just left, and everyone there had dogs. They all loved him, but no one could keep him. If I took him, they would have a neighborhood garage sale to raise the money to get him fixed. If I didn't, they would take him to the pound. You know, of course, how this ended. There's actually a subsequent drama of his finally settling in to be our cat, but I've taken up enough of your time with this. I should add, though, that the neighborhood did have that garage sale.

Did I mention that Bob was with me for 20 years in the end? I think he was somewhere between 23 and 25 when he died.

Jennifer Weber, History Professor at the University of Kansas and author of Copperheads, the Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North (Oxford University Press) currently shares her home with Beastie and Miss Thing.

January 01, 2008

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