momfoolery

Mom and the cats

Jeanne used to be a real bitch. She started out ok; she was sweet as pie when I was quite young. Then, even though she had been a chemist before I was born, she went to work as a librarian when I was about six and became bitter, and I was terrified of her. She said once, after I was long grown, “I missed my job as a chemist so much, I grieved for it as if someone had died. I guess I took that out on you.” Oddly, that ended up being all I needed in the way of an apology and I took her off my shit list. She mellowed even further as she aged, to the point we’re at now where she depresses me and drives me nuts, but she’s so sweet about it that I feel guilty on those days when it feels like she’s sucking the marrow out of my bones. 

But while the way that she felt about me morphed and eddied over time, she always loved animals. And not just the cute ones. For instance, she adored pigs – especially the disturbingly huge and awkward ones – and would spend forever scratching them when we went to the county fair. She was forever bringing home injured creatures, mostly birds, but sometimes rabbits and possums. It seemed so natural as a child to always have some ailing creature in a box in the garage, but when I reached adulthood, I started to wonder where in the heck she found them; I’ve been on my own for 30 plus years, and I have yet to find one animal by the side of the road that is close enough to alive to need rescuing. She had some kind of St. Francis of Assisi thing going on, I guess. 

We moved from our last of a string of apartments into a house when I was ten (two bedroom, one bath, 1250 sq feet for $36,000! Why in god’s name couldn’t they have bought two???). There the stream of animals really widened, and my parents moved up the food chain to cats. 

The first came to them like it was one of those Reader’s Digest stories; the cat had lived next door until the owners moved. The cat objected and walked back to the old neighborhood, taking up residence in my parents’ backyard. The owners tried twice more to re-locate the cat before they gave up and he became my mom’s property. 

There was a mom-cat who lived in the bushes alongside the freeway that crossed the end of our block. She was responsible for a number of their cats before my mom finally caught her and got her fixed. She was always responsible about getting all of the cats taken care of, reproduction-wise. She even looked into the cost of a cat vasectomy as an alternative to castration. She was disappointed when it turned out to be prohibitively expensive; “I just thought it would be nice if they could still have a little fun,” she had sighed. 

The most they ever had was ten. I liked to see them lying around in the yard, the way stayed in a pattern, equidistant from each other, like the way strangers carefully place themselves in an elevator. They died off one by one, and then I guess my parents had lost their cat mojo, because strays never showed up again.

Eventually, my dad died, too. My mom adjusted pretty well to being alone; she was already getting kind of forgetful by then, and I think that took some of the sting off things. But when I found two kittens in the park, I thought of my mom, and was sure that those cats were manna from heaven. 

One is a tabby, the other orange and white. The tabby came out of the bush first as I was unlocking the car and he started meowing. Pretty bold for the one who ended up being the shyest. It was raining and he was tiny, so I scooped him up and tossed him in the van. Then the orange and white popped out. At that point, I might as well, so I popped him in too. I waited for a bit to see if there were any more, and then I drove home, planning my next move.