24 February 2005
Lost and Found
This post should probably come with a disclaimer. Warning: cat story. Six months from now, this is probably the entry you’re going to look back on and say “that’s when I stopped reading, when he started writing about his cat.” Just remember, you were warned.
Last Friday after work, I walked out to the parking lot and my car wasn’t there (I should be used to it by now). I wandered around aimlessly for a while before I remembered that Laura had stolen it that afternoon to buy beer for the “Friday meeting” at her office (this is her office’s name for what the rest of us would call “cutting out early to booze it up”). She’d even called me to tell me while she was doing it. “Hi, honey, I’m stealing your car to buy beer.” Since she stole my car to buy it, I figured I deserved to crack open at least one or two, so I headed over to her office (conveniently across the street from mine) to do just that.
A couple of Guinesses and and hour or so later, it was just me, Laura and our friend Sarah left in the conference-room-turned-happy-hour. Laura was already starting to clean up empty bottles when Sarah leaned back in her chair and said, “Does anybody hear a cat?” The three of us shut up and listened and sure enough, there was a distinct “meow” coming from the second-floor deck outside. Laura pulled the blinds and looked out the sliding door.
“It’s a kitty!” The door slid open and a little black and white fur cannonball launched through the opening and landed on the conference room table.
For a cat wandering around the alleys downtown without a collar, it was surprisingly clean and well-behaved. It sauntered around the table, surveyed the territory, and promptly laid down in front of Laura to be petted and played with. It looked about three months old, frisky but not hyper, with an adorable little face and a tiny pink nose.
Sarah, the only cat owner in the room, picked it up and held it for about 30 seconds before pronouncing her judgement: “This is a good cat.” Laura and I looked at each other and back at the purr-factory on the table, both thinking the same thing. Sarah was wrong. This wasn’t a good cat. This was the Perfect Cat, the kitty archetype. We were done for. We had no choice.
I was the first one to say it. “Somebody should really take this kitty home.” Laura just looked at me, but I could see the plan forming in her head. Sarah shrugged. “Isn’t it supposed to rain tonight?” I offered.
That was all it took. Five minutes later Laura and I were walking out to my car carrying a bundle of fur and love. We were already late to meet Laura’s out-of-town friends for dinner, so I cracked open a can of Chicken of the Sea and improvised a Found Kitty sign with a photo printer and a Sharpie.
After dinner we made copies at Laura’s office and hung them up downtown. Nice and simple, a couple of pictures from the conference room table, my phone number and a short rundown of the pertinent details.
FRIENDLY KITTY FOUND AT 7th & MASS DOWNTOWN. (S)HE IS SAFE & FED.
We suspected she was a she (Ashley later confirmed it by feeling her up), but we’d just met and I didn’t want to invade her space, so I wasn’t positive yet. And I figured anybody looking for their lost cat would be glad to know she was doing OK, and not being force-fed pot or tortured by crazy people. With every poster we hung up, I had visions of a parent trying to comfort a ten-year-old girl bawling her eyes out about her lost kitty.
At the end of the night, after everyone who’d come over to pet her went home, I put a pillow in the bathroom for her and went to sleep. When I came back in the next day to check on her and she peeked her head up from inside the bathtub, I wanted to giggle like a little girl. Instead I called the Humane Society, in case the owner called to report her lost, but they hadn’t heard anything. I left my number, just in case.
Everybody warned us. “Don’t name her. You’ll just be heartbroken when the owner calls.” We both knew they were right. But after the first day the owner hadn’t turned up and we were already calling her Lucia. We were helpless.
I was supposed to be the practical one. I told Laura not to name her. I knew what would happen. But I went crazy too, in my own way. I spent most of Saturday reading websites about taking care of cats. Training them, feeding them, keeping them happy. Sites with smiling pictures of middle-aged ladies on them. Laura caught me making a shopping list. I’d starred the things it was OK to buy before we knew if we could keep her.
- litterbox
- brush
- food*
- toys*
- vet
- bed
- collar
- dishes
- scratching post
- harness
(No, seriously. There’s a legend in my family that my parents once trained their cat to walk on a leash with a harness. It could happen.)
Even with the list, we waited. It had only been a day. We carried her to the park to do her business in the mulched flowerbed by city hall instead of buying a litterbox. Then we just got one of the cheap disposable litterboxes, and one storebought toy. Just one. I made another one by wrapping a wadded-up paper towel in masking tape and dangling it from a string. She loved that. The bright orange stuffed mouse she could take or leave, but the paper towel wrapped in masking tape, that was irresistable. That and the paper bag with a hole in it.
By Sunday we were starting to get our hopes up. If they were really looking for her, they would have seen the signs, right? Or at least called the Humane Society? She found us, we told ourselves. We were turning into cat people, crazy people, lost in our own world of fur.
That was when I got it – the dreaded message on my phone from an unknown number. “Um, hi. Rumor has it you found my cat…”
I swore I could feel it, right then. Yup, that’s my heart right there in my stomach. When I put down the phone, Laura asked why I was smiling. I told her I wasn’t. I was grimacing
It got worse as soon as we called her back. No ten-year-old crying girls. It turns out she wasn’t looking for her at all. She was getting a coffee at Henry’s and she saw the flyer. “I thought, huh – that looks kind of like my cat.”
Laura described her coloring, her nose, her age. Her face got longer and longer with every confirmation. This lady found her cat. I watched Laura try not to grimace when she asked “What’s her name?”.
“Oh, I’ve got two 15-year-old boys who change her name every week, so I just call her No Name…” Pause. “Or Shithead.”
Shithead? Shithead? We call her LUCY!
Needless to say, it was tough to hand her over when Flaky Owner Lady came to pick her up. Laura handed over the again-nameless cat. I didn’t get up. The cat squirmed and meowed. “You like it here, don’t you?” said the owner lady. Laura and I tried hard to smile.
We took it hard. I threw away the litterbox. Laura put away the leftover signs. We couldn’t look at them, but I couldn’t stand to throw them away. I kept the list too, just in case.
For a while, we tried to make ourselves feel better by laying odds on her coming back. “She knows how to get to my office. If she comes back to us again, we can keep her.” But we’d learned our lesson—false hopes and all that. We gave it a two percent chance, and went back to the routine of our kitty-less lives.
Last night I got a call in the middle of the night, from an unknown number. I’d just given my number to a client at work that had been having trouble the night before, and I was sure that this was them, ready to ruin my night. But it wasn’t.
“I’m calling from Liberty Hall downtown. We saw your found kitty posters, and we think we found the same kitty again, at the same intersection.”
We couldn’t believe it. We didn’t want to believe it. She came back, to the same place. We’d given her the long odds and given up on her too early. But she came back. I told the girl on the phone we’d be there in five minutes.
We deliberated, really we did. We almost didn’t go get her at all. Neither of us wanted to go through the same experience again. If we went to get her now, there was no going back. She would be Shithead no more, and we would be cat people forever.
As I handed Laura her coat at the door I shrugged and said “Isn’t it supposed to rain tonight?”
While I finished this entry, Lucy (full name Lucia Liberty, as requested by the Liberty Hall staff who helped rescue her) jumped up on the desk and started typing for me. Now I’m holding the keyboard in my lap and she’s leaning over the edge of the desk, trying to reach the keys. I’m glad to know she’s a computer nerd just like me, but it’s getting hard to type.
As an extra bonus, I’ll leave you with gratuitous kitty photos (Laura’s and mine) and a list (not comprehensive) of rejected titles for this entry…
- Bizarro Jack is Back (Lucy is the Bizarro world version of Rob’s Dalmation, Jackson – duh)
- Purr Factory
- Kitty Custody Battle
- Lucia Liberty Jones
- Lost and Found and Lost and Found
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