Setting memories

I have no patience for people who tell pet stories. It strikes me as wasteful to spend that much time and emotion on an animal when there are children starving in the world.

Clearly, I'm an idiot, and God is teaching me something. Yes, I should care about the children who are starving, but there is a reason that he put animals in our lives.

As I've mentioned, I have a fur-baby (a very, very furry fur baby) who is wasting away in front of me. The unofficial diagnosis is FIP (Feline infectious peritonitis) but there is no test for the actual infection. There is also no cure. The vet told me on Tuesday that there is nothing she can do for him.

There is some awful irony here. I have another cat, Hoot, who was once half of a matched set--Hoot 'n' Anny. His sister Anny went to her reward in August of 2004, almost 10 years after a vet in Nashville removed a lot of her FIP-ravaged girl parts when she was spayed. I remember the doctor offering to diagnose her (for a ridiculous amount of money) and then telling me that there was nothing he could do to save her once he diagnosed her. I told him how ridiculous that sounded to me, and he sent her home. She never was a fat, thriving cat, but she seemed happy for the rest of her life.

I was about to talk about the irony of that. I never knew FIP was contagious. Smudge probably got it from Anny and it has been dormant in him all this time.

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I spend a lot of time talking about Hoot, the Jesus Cat. He gives me a lot of material. Between his sermons and his calculated murders, he is a fascinating and brilliant animal.

Smudge is not brilliant. When we call him the Supermodel, we are also referring to his tendency to look as smart as Paris Hilton.

Like most of our cats, he was a foundling. In July of 2001, I went out on my front porch and saw something black sticking out of the vents of the crawl space under my house. I screamed, thinking it was a snake, but then I realized that snakes don't have silky fur.

I caught him the same way I've caught bunches of kittens--I meowed at him. He came right to me. As I stroked his incredibly soft, long black fur, I noticed a wound behind one ear. We took him to the vet, and they removed a "wolf" from his head--some sort of worm larvae that burrows in the skin. The vet said it would have killed him in a few more days.

We kept him on the screened-in porch at my parents' house at first. Dad didn't want another cat in the house. But Smudge immediately demonstrated that he was purely ornamental and was meant to live on an end table or in a chair. His fur (which does not puff out like a Persian--it is sleek) needed to be inside if it was to stay clean. Besides--one of his few talents was instant litter training. He never once had an accident.

He had another useful and unusual talent. When we found him, my brother's large family was staying en masse at my parents' house while they built their house. Three small children chased young Smudge (whose name was chosen by my niece) through the house constantly. When he was cornered, he would slap, but he would always pull his claws in. To this day, the only times we have been scratched is when his claws needed to be trimmed.

Beyond that, his talents are purely visual. My brother swears that he poses. The picture I posted doesn't do him justice--he usually keeps his front paws neatly together, his neck high, and his tail curled becomingly around him when he sits on the table. He could pose when he slept, too--he curled into a perfect ball. Because he is so black, we called him "the hole in the couch." When he walked into the room we would threaten to stand and salute. He waved his beautiful bottle-brush tail in the air like a flag. (We called him Pepe le Pew for the same reason.)

His tail is a whole other story--he uses his tail more like a dog than a cat. He doesn't exactly wag it, but he waves it around for pleasure. If it is twitching nervously, he is irritated. But all other times, he waves it at us like a little old lady would wave her fan when she talks.

He had to have some way to communicate. He only meowed under certain conditions. He probably went weeks without meowing (while Hoot never shuts up!) And he never purred until he got sick. Sometimes I could see his sides moving as if he were purring, but you could only hear a faint noise if you put your ear to his side. When my parents returned from long trips, he sometimes made a fluttering noise with his nose, but it was like an animal trying to imitate a purr.

For a few summers, we had him shaved to cut back on the drifts of black fur floating through the house like tumbleweed. We soon discovered, though, that he was terribly cold natured. Every time we turned on a lamp, he would go sit under it, sticking his head up in the shade so that he looked like the world's tackiest lamp. Only a few months ago, I caught him with his tail stuck all the way out the top of a lamp.

He loved to be adored. Up until a couple of months ago he could be provoked into a play-fight early in the mornings, when he was most alert. Sometimes in the morning he would go running--his idea of working out was to run full-tilt from the living room to his food dish. Then he would rest for the next 23 hours.

He doesn't pose anymore, and he doesn't prance. He doesn't want me to massage him anymore. I imagine it is uncomfortable--when I pet him I can feel all of his bones. But he wants me to rub his chin for as long as either of us can keep it going.

And when I do, I feel him purring...