Deep in December’s small hours, I can feel her step softly across the covers, my downy white comforter collapsing with a quiet “puff” under each paw. Like she does every morning at 7:02 a.m., Gertie settles on top of me with half a meow, “Rhhh,” announcing her arrival while surrendering her entire weight to my half-turned torso. With paws draped down on either side of my shoulder like little breadsticks, she rests her chin against the curve of my neck. Though mine are still closed, I can feel her black nighttime eyes blinking in the dark, intent on finding any sign I might be stirring, willing me to notice she is there. I know any movement is a giveaway and profess the night is not done with me yet, but it’s hard to stay still when my right arm is falling asleep under the weight of a chubby white cat. She senses the changes in my breath, as perceptible as the shifting morning light. A cardinal peep-peeps outside, and Gertie gently stretches a paw to rest against my chin. Never insistent. Just a suggestion. Mom, it might be time for breakfast.
And so the day must begin. Because once her perfect white paw is that close to my mouth, there’s no way—it’s simply impossible, goes against every impulse of my being—not to turn my head and tuck my chin to kiss it. My free hand drifts up on autodrive to find whatever soft part of her I can reach. A few delicious pats and squeezes later, she springs to her feet and lands on the bedside rug, chirping in confidence that I am soon to follow. I swing my legs down, find my feet, and smile as she leads the way. I amuse myself with the little tuft of ass fuzz on the back of her haunches that shifts right-left right-left right-left right as she beelines to the kitchen, belly swaying.
Lately, if I leave her side too soon after filling her dish, she’ll come to corral me again, insisting that I linger a while longer. And so I happily sit on my shins, stroking her warm neck and shoulder while she eat-purrs. This one kills me softly: If I hover close enough, Gertie will raise her head between bites—and wait for me to kiss it—before returning to the plate for more kibble. Sigh. Whether that is the ultimate compliment or conclusive evidence of our complete codependency, frankly, I don’t care. She asks for so little of me, why shouldn’t she dine with a bit of company?
Every day I count my lucky stars that I am allowed to touch her, this soft little puff of animal in my house. If that is not a miracle I don’t know what is.
•••
My love of cats began with Katie, the neighbor kitty who would hang out on the front steps of my childhood home in Ames, Iowa. A plump grey and brown tabby with pretty green eyes, she wasn’t one of those cats who would nip you when she’d had enough. She purred and purred and blinked into the sun, content to be petted, until eventually I stood up and left her to go play Barbies.
•••
Grandma and Grandpa on the farm had constant litters of kitties who populated the place. Too feral to play with or hold, they’d nonetheless pepper the yard with cuteness. They got a bit braver when Grandpa ambled out of the house twice a day to “feed the boys,” as he called it, with buckets of slop. A collection of discarded meat parts, toast crusts, soggy cereal, and the like would be topped with a pile of the cheapest cat food money could buy and a good long pour of milk to pull all the flavors together. As Grandpa left the house, a bucket sloshing in each hand, the piles of cats lounging in various parts of the farmyard would file in behind him down a permanently parted patch of grass and follow him to the machine shed. There, another clowder of felines would wiggle out from the cracks and crannies of tractors and machinery to swarm at Grandpa’s feet as he poured the buckets into an all-access trough.
While the hungry kitties licked it clean, they’d allow Grandpa, and only Grandpa, to reach down and give their furry bodies a ruffle with the back of his hand. He couldn’t help but laugh his soft, nasaly laugh under his breath. Once in a great while, Grandpa would show us the hiding place of the newest batch of kittens, warm little bodies tucked together in some hidden crevice of a tiller. Or a fuzzy batch snuggling on some shredded tractor seat.
“The boys,” he collectively called them regardless of gender, didn’t often get named, as they rarely lasted longer than a few seasons each, succumbing to the hungers of cornfield predators, bitter winters, or the sad and sickly conditions of your classic inbred barn cat. But once in a while, a special kitty would be awarded a moniker—especially if it was brave enough to hang out near the farmhouse, and most assuredly if it sunned itself on the sills of Grandma’s kitchen windows. The aliases were unsentimental—little more than descriptions of their most basic features: Black Mama. Mittens. Butter. The farm dog, Booties, was named using a similar method—she was a beautiful and bouncy Australian Shepherd with four white feet.
Although he loved them, Grandpa was allergic to animals, so even the most special dogs and kitties were kept outside at all times, to be admired mostly at a distance, which, for a cat-crazy kid like me, was torturous.
•••
My father wasn’t allergic as far as we knew, but for practical reasons—pet hair, pet poop, pet barf, and pet vet bills—forbade domesticated animals at our house, save a few suicidal goldfish. Miraculously, one rare summer we were allowed to care for our friend Colin’s caged hamster and gerbil in our basement, where my younger brother and I built complex mazes for them out of wooden blocks. It was all well and good until the gerbil knocked down a crucial dividing wall and got into fisticuffs with the poor hamster. When the squall erupted, we ran a frantic interference, pulling apart the squealing ball of fur. Weeeee! Weeeeeee! Weeeee!!!! Neither of the rodents were quite the same after that, and although we felt awful bad about it, when we handed the pet cages back to Colin in August and he noticed the gerbil was limping, we shamefully whistled and looked the other way.
Being unallowed to have a furry creature of my very own, my unquenchable feline fandom would continue to manifest itself in more subversive ways—with collections of kitty stickers, puppets, and plush toys; tee-shirts, posters, and hand-drawn sketches. I resorted to fawning over my friend London’s Siamese she’d uninventively named Big Kitty. A roly-poly fat thing with adorably crossed eyes, a patient demeanor, and two visible fangs that were never used for evil, he let me rest my lips regularly on the top of his impossibly soft head. London and I laughed and laughed whenever he opened up his fanged little mouth and said with a naturally commanding rasp, “Rheaaahhh.”
•••
Every lucky kid knows at least a couple of cool couples—friends of her parents whom she wishes were her parents because they are so kind and cheerful and funny and stylish. Katie and Reggie were that couple for me, a lovable and doting pair who invited our family over for an occasional homemade dinner, or stopped by our house after returning from a trip to some exotic and wonderful place, like Florida or Indianapolis. Katie became a living legend in our household. Not only was she a serious cat hoarder, but she spent hours, days, every holiday season creating a custom cat Christmas card—from her family to ours. The card was a creatively collaged montage of her six or seven beloved cats in action. Photographic images captured kitty mouths comedically hanging open, kitty feet in the air, gymnastic napping positions, and beloved toys hanging from jaws. Complete with names clearly labeled, each cat had its own speech bubble depicting some hilarious conversation or witty kitty comment about the various inferior creatures of the household—the occasional lizard, dog, or rat. Christmas was incomplete without the receipt of that annual cat card.
One year, for my birthday, Katie stopped by with an unexpected gift, a year’s subscription to a publication I’d never heard of called Cat Fancy. Its pages were filled with articles, photographs, comic strips, cat products, and fanciful feline merriment. I was thrilled to be filling the void of personal petlessness with this thoughtful gift from my celebrity-status family friend, and hungrily flipped through each issue to find the cutest, cuddliest pictures.
I’d never been much of a reader, but on a few occasions I took the time to browse through an article. Upon the arrival of issue number three, however, I was rudely awakened to the fact that this publication, Cat Fancy, was beyond my paygrade. There it was on page 17: an accurate, descriptive account of, shall we say, cats … getting … fancy.
It was disgusting. It was disturbing. I barely knew about human sex yet. Those explicit descriptions of barbed cat penises—that unless satisfied, would become painfully, hopelessly stuck inside the furry female who once fancied herself in heat but now just wanted outta there—would decades later become an alarming metaphor for my own romantic life. From sweet … to stuck. From pining … to panic. Just. Want. Outta there.
It took me a while before I could look a cat in the eye after that article, but before long the fervor returned.
•••
Grandma on the farm—who was cat crazy herself and kept a scrapbook packed cover to cover with pictures of kittens from postcards, wrapping-paper scraps, and newspaper clippings—eventually picked up on my obsession. Though regrettably she never slipped an actual kitten into my Christmas stocking, from tweendom to well into my college years, Grandma, bless her heart, showered me with a steady stream of stand-ins, i.e., the ugliest cat-themed gifts any of us had ever laid eyes on. I’d thank her kindly in person for the yuletide treasures—glittery, googly-eyed kitty sweatshirts or sets of garish cat-themed bed sheets that were too scratchy to use—but would privately laugh about them with my sister or mother until we peed our pants. My teen years were not the time for experimental cat fashions, as my social life and coolness factor were both hanging on by a thread at best.
That said, in commemoration of a recent and very depressing milestone birthday, to cheer me up, my sister gifted me a snazzy, made-in-China, supposed-to-look-knitted-but-is-actually-printed cat sweater, flaunting a hundred fluorescent kitties with beady eyes, rounded kitty cheeks, and pronounced whiskers. I am now of the age that I can wear it loudly and proudly. I. Heart. Cats.
Maybe I should adopt it as my first-date sweater … or wear it as an audacious New Year’s Eve challenge—kiss me if you dare! It’s a statement piece, really, and a litmus test—that unless you are chill with me cooing over cats, you shall not be a part of this equation. And I am not kitten you right meow.
