Special 'ops

Planche à Grief

On Monday, we lost our lovely nut of a kitten, Hopkins. She was hit by a car just twenty feet up the road from home. I've been trying to focus on everything that could have been much worse. She went very quickly, and she breathed her last while we held her close. It took more than a little courage for the two women in the car to come to our door (our neighbor Chuck told them which it was) and deliver the awful news. I don't know whether it was the driver or passenger who told us, "I think your cat's been hit. I'm so sorry." I don't want to know whether the one who was driving was speeding or distracted, because that knowledge might cloud other knowledge. Here's what I do know: she felt terrible, and it could easily have been me in her shoes (or seat).

Hops lived dangerously, as Pete and I allowed her to do. She was mostly smart about cars, but sometimes lounged and rolled in the middle of the sun-warmed street. She tussled with other cats, eluded coyotes, and once backed a raccoon out of her favorite tree. The implicit contract that we made with her a little more than eight years ago had a safety waiver and innumerable "roaming charges" in the fine print. She loved her freedom, and we loved for her to have it, but we knew that we made an irresponsible choice when we let her come and go at will. Irresponsible with regard to her safety, the safety of neighborhood songbirds, and the purity of the local watershed. Irresponsible, as it turns out, with regard to a driver who might not have time to stop if she darted across the road. We decided years ago that we'd probably never have another cat, because we couldn't imagine making a different choice. Still we'd hoped against the odds that Hops could sustain her reckless, intrepid ways into a ripe old age. We can't believe she's so suddenly gone.

We laid her on her well-loved scratch pad (her "planche à griffes," chewed up, taped up, fragrant with catnip) and buried her in the front yard. We planted a red-twig dogwood over her grave. We don't think she'd be offended, as she always preferred dogs to cats and looked to Barley as an older sister. Our neighbor Tracy came by with flowers and a cross as we were laying the stones. (Did I mention that we have wonderful neighbors?)

Hopkins' presence will remain vivid in our home for a long time to come. Pazzo will keep running to the window to search for her whenever he hears her name. Pete and I will keep listening for her chirp in the mornings and missing the sweet furry weight of her in the evenings.

What is a lap for if not for Hops?

Sweet little lunatic III

I wouldn't say my push to adopt "Zeke" was totally reckless, but in the mix of confused motives that drove me to overcome my family's skepticism, there was more than a dash of hubris. After seeing the remarkable headway that Barley and Kili had made in a few short weeks of clicker training, and after making noticeable progress with dogs at the shelter who appeared at first glance much more "behaviorally challenged" than Zeke, I had become smitten not only with a handsome pup but also with my nascent abilities as a trainer.

Even the most rational of us may be susceptible sometimes to magical thinking, and I have never been particularly rational when it comes to my relationship with non-human animals. All my life, I have entertained the fantasy that I could learn to speak with dogs, dolphins, eagles, wombats, elephants, and others (though my social ambitions have never extended as far as cockroaches or tapeworms). Clicker training looked to me like the golden key to the peaceable kingdom. Once we understood each other, we could all live together in perfect harmony, the naked and the furry, the crawling and the winged.

I had conveniently forgotten that the glorious web of interspecies relationships includes significant and not so peaceable distinctions like the one dividing predators from prey. In my enchantment with the prospect of mutual understanding, I had forgotten that, if you suddenly learned to speak "dog," one of the things you'd likely hear from your adorably hyper new adolescent kelpie mix is, "CAT!! MUST GET CAT!! AAAARGH!! CAT TOO HIGH! MUST VAULT OFF WINDOW SILL!! AARGH!! TRY AGAIN! FOILED AGAIN! TRY BETTER! NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!!" I think that's a pretty accurate account of Zeke's internal monologue the first time he got loose in a room with Hops. We soon discovered that his antipathy for cats and squirrels was so strong that he would attack any trees or furniture that had once given his enemy safe harbor. (Pete has since wrapped protective chicken wire around the "criminal" fir and cedar in our back yard.)

Thus I learned yet again the value of humility. That old Greek lesson never seems to stick: keep your head down if you don't want the gods to notice and bop you one. Welcome to the great cosmic game of whack-a-mole!

On the upside, Zeke found his new name. "Pazzo" is Italian for crazy.

Not the pun you think...

Hops is short for Hopkins, after Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found divinity in the motley and impure.







Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Our pack (brood? herd? exaltation?) has evolved on the model of "punctuated equilibrium" over the last eight years. Every time things reach a state of relative calm and predictability, we introduce a new variable into the mix. When Barley was eight months old, we knew we weren't yet ready for another dog but thought she'd enjoy a companion more constant and less baffling than her human charges. Well, I thought so. Pete's and my marriage is constructed around a mostly creative tension between my reckless optimism and his crusty "realism." That's what he calls it. As I often perceive it, I propose and he disposes. But the truth is not quite so simple.

I'd never had a cat or thought I'd want one. With a few memorable exceptions, I had always found them more irritating than engaging. (There's a reason junior high girls get labeled "catty.") But I'd been hearing from friends that dogs and cats could live together in perfect harmony, even become great friends, if they met early enough in their lives not to notice their differences. At eight months, Barley had already developed a noticeable prejudice against the proposition that cats were people too (she charged them when we encountered them on our walks), but I hoped her young mind (and my old one) remained pliant enough to accommodate a small feline's reality.

Even the county shelter folks get admirably creative around here. When Barley and I were at the nearest dog park one day, an enormous RV pulled into the parking lot, full of animals in need of homes. Where better to find a ready bunch of demonstrated suckers? If it had required any real initiative on my part, I might not have pursued my peaceable kingdom fantasy into the realm of the actual for months, if at all. Cats in the abstract still didn't appeal to me much. But here Barley and I had only to climb a couple of metal steps into a shelter that had come right to us. I walked her (on a very short leash) down a row of cages, thinking that all the hissing and cowering probably didn't bode well for her ability to make friends across the species barrier. Then up to the bars of one cage came a curious little calico, bold as you please. She chirped at Barley, who was momentarily nonplussed but in the next moment sprang up for a closer look, planting both paws on the cage before I could catch her. The kitten took only a half step back and chirped some more. She seemed fascinated. I was charmed. Barley? She had a light in her eyes that I chose to interpret as a desire to know this unaccountably confident creature, not to eat her.

As I drove back home with Barley, I began to assemble my pitch to Pete, but I quickly realized that the kitten could speak much more eloquently for herself. I only told him, "There's someone Barley and I really think you should meet." He was intrigued enough (and indulgent enough of my stubborn fancies) to get in the car and let me drive him back to the park. My work was done. Pete had lived with cats before; he didn't share Barley's and my native mistrust. (I still get freaked sometimes when staring into Hops' alien, snake-slit eyes.) So there was nothing to keep him from falling fast and hard for the patchwork little bundle of impudence who trilled at us from her cage. "Well? Whaddya think?" I asked.

"She's a sweetie," he said. "What should we call her?"