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Cat: 1993-2005

It was on a miserably cold and icy day in the first week of 1994 that I picked out the most wonderful eight-week old puppy you could ever imagine. Well, that's not quite right. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say that the dog I would call Cat chose me than the other way around.

Let's start at the beginning: a dog who belonged to a friend of mine had given birth to a litter of thirteen puppies the previous November. Her dog was a female German shepherd, while the father was a yellow Labrador retriever from down the street that had apparently gotten out at some point. I don't think the dog was loose for days or anything like that, but--you know--long enough. Anyway, and I'm sure not so coincidentally, Patty (my friend) and her roommates decided to have a Christmas party that year while they had a basement full of adorable puppies that they needed to find homes for. It was a big party, a fun party, and the upshot was that I don't think
they had a lot of trouble finding takers on the dogs. If you saw them and you were able at that time in your life to take one in, well, I don't know how you could have resisted it.

They were still too young (and, really, the party too jumping) to be taken home then and there, but it was a week or two later that I returned to select a dog to adopt. I still remember that day, January 6, 1994, very clearly. Patty gathered all the puppies that were left, a little more than half the litter at that point, in the living room of her place in German Village. The young dogs put on quite a show of playing and jumping, and there were several I liked. Mostly they looked like yellow Labs, though
there were two or three favoring the Shepard side, deep brown with black faces. I was discussing the finer points of each individual dog when Patty said "What about that one?" She was pointing at the dog that had nestled up to me several minutes earlier. "Oh, this one, the one that I've been petting for the last ten minutes?" I looked into his brown eyes and he looked back into mine. "Yeah, I guess I should really take him."

You know, he really did look like a little cat then. He was fairly tiny, white and fluffy. But I guess I just picked the name because it seemed funny. I tried some different names on him, but that was the one that stuck for whatever reason. It seemed to bother some people--"Doesn't that confuse him?"--but if he minded, he never showed it.

Cat was a handful. He was a good dog, totally loving and loveable, but he could be mischievous. Sure, I was able to teach him basic obedience, but he always had a mind of his own and he was always very clever about getting what he wanted. At one point--he was older, maybe seven or eight years old--Cat actually figured out how to open the refrigerator at my apartment on Silver Lake Blvd. in Los Angeles. The first time he did that I had just been to Trader Joe's and he made off with a whole package of hot dogs, some relatively expensive cheese and some paté. He really like bread for some reason, we had to keep it out of his reach when we left the house or else he'd climb up on the counter and devour the loaf. Well, that was Cat--Christy said it best: even when he was bad, he was still pretty cute.

Cat was diagnosed with cancer late in September. I guess in retrospect we should have caught it earlier. He slowed down a lot in the last year or so, which I chalked up mainly to age. After all, he was going to turn twelve on November 4th. But over the last month or two it became obvious that something else was going on. First his hips gave out. His particular mix is susceptible to hip dysplasia, so it wasn't much of a surprise when he was diagnosed with that. The vet was able to give him some supplements that helped with that, but around the time he started taking them he began to develop a bad cough. I had thought maybe it was an allergic reaction to the supplements but no: it was cancer, and it was so advanced that not much could be done about it. We put him on prednisone, a steroid, which lessened his pain for the last couple of weeks, but eventually that stopped being effective.

Sunday, October 2nd was a gorgeous day in Long Beach, sunny and mild with a slight breeze, just everything that you would want from Southern California weather-wise. It was also the day that we knew we had to put Cat to sleep. He had been up coughing all night, sometimes producing small black chunks. He was a little better during the day, though, and I think he enjoyed taking a last walk around our block and driving around town with the windows down. At least we had been able to make his last days a special time. We spoiled him with treats and were able to have a little party for him the week before with all of his canine buddies over.

At the hospital everyone was super nice, especially the vet who administered the dose. But no matter how prepared you think you are it's still tough to say goodbye to someone who gave you so much love. In our nearly twelve years together, Cat was the one constant thing in my life. He was with me through graduate school and when I moved to California, through a lot of ups and downs. The rhythms of my day and his were intertwined, and it is still weird to come home and not see him running down from the top of the stairs, not to have him to take for walks, not to just have him around.

I guess death is just a part of the deal. You get to have an animal for a time, you get to love and take care of and teach each other, and then you have to find the courage to see them through to the end. Putting him down when we did was the right thing to do, but that doesn't make it not hard to live with. R.I.P, buddy.

 

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