Two cats in the yard September 30, 1985

  

There is too much anger in my life.

This became clear this weekend in dealing with work, my uncle, Safire and overall images of pain.

Even my cats drove me crazy, escaping through the broken screen to wander out of doors.

That alone is enough to make a person give up on everything. Since moving to Passaic, I have lost two cats to the streets -- deaf all-white cat my neighbors called “Snowball,” but I called Flake, and an orange and white ball of fur I called Dudley, who turned out to be as much of a street fighter as Flake, paying a high price to prove himself.

Flake was his own entity entirely, a cat that went his own way, and when he stopped liking the food I offered, he wandered off to beg at other people’s doors, drawing complaints from my neighbors about my not feeding my own cat.

Dudley was a comfort to me during the terrible times with my uncle, when my uncle went crazy and attempted suicide nearly weekly that horrible holiday season of 81. Later, Dudley was there in the summer of 82 when I got together with my ex-wife again after a decade estranged, when all the ugly truths came out about her.

I know this sounds silly that a cat can provide comfort, but he did. We had a real partnership to take care of each other.

When he sensed I was upset, he curled in my lap and purred, without my need to pet him, and if I woke in the middle of the night in the panic, he came up near by head and licked my cheek, curling against me as if to keep me warm.

He didn’t take well to Fran when she became my girlfriend, jealous perhaps or perhaps more savvy at reading her character than I was.

Then, one day, he came home seriously wounded, a fight with a tougher cat, although from the size of the bite mark, more like a dog.

I had to put him down, among one of the saddest moments in a life filled with sad moments.

Now I have two cats I found as kittens, both of whom are female, neither of whom had issues with Fran, who gave them their names. But they are rascals just the same, breaking through screens to get into the yard, always driving me insane in the fear that they might get lost or hit by a car or in a fight with a dog the way Dudley did.

But they rarely wander beyond the carport, a contained little fortress full of garages and limited access to the street, and if I am quick enough, as I was today, I can run them down, drag them back to the house, patching the place in the screens they broke through.

God, I can’t wait until winter when I can close the windows and not have to worry about them.



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