Yet their inner lives remain an enigma to us. All were indoor cats, so their activities were on full view. These creatures lived with us for years-in Tigger’s case, virtually his entire life. He died the summer before last while we were in New England our cat-sitter arrived one morning and found him lying dead in a sunbeam, having suffered a stroke or heart attack overnight. But he retained his love of chicken, and of sitting in cardboard boxes, and still enjoyed eating the dog’s food, in front of the dog, with his three remaining teeth. Swaggering and imperious when we first knew him, he became increasingly stiff and frail in his old age. There he had been known as Ty and was regarded by the staff as “standoffish” (a claim we found hard to believe). She had inherited him from her father, who had adopted him from a shelter. His successor, Darwin, was passed on to us by a friend who was moving to New Orleans after a divorce. Before our daughter was born I took a lot of afternoon naps, and Cyrus used to join me on the bed, sleeping alongside me with his paw placed gently over my wrist. When someone in the family developed an allergy, we agreed to adopt Cyrus my wife flew down with him from Boston to Richmond, an experience that terrified him. In his younger days he had been known to creep up on his first owner, the colleague’s future husband, and drop on him suddenly from above, like a feline version of Cato, Inspector Clouseau’s manservant. He was a black cat and we often tripped over him on the dark linoleum in the kitchen. His death was devastating to us both for days afterward we found ourselves bursting into tears without warning.Ĭyrus came to us from a former colleague of my wife’s. We grew used to finding him sitting in the exact center of the kitchen, yowling vigorously at no one. In his last years he suffered from dementia, sundowning as humans do. In his youth he had had glorious golden fur, which became stringy and oily as he aged, owing in part to a thyroid condition. When my wife moved down to Virginia Tigger came with her, accommodating himself (after some initial friction) to my dog. On Sunday nights she would order in from an Italian restaurant and they would sit on the sofa and watch The Sopranos together. He lived with her in Boston, before we met, when she was working at a big law firm. Tigger was my wife’s cat, found as a stray and passed on to her by a cousin when he was about a year and a half old.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |