Feline Insubordination

We have two cats, who have gone over the years from being little Slinkies of fur descending the stairs to cheerful adult loungers on the sunny sidewalks of our neighborhood to old cats, if 13 even IS old age for a cat. I actually think they’re about where we are in life, crimped up a bit with the Arthur-itis and heaving themselves out of bed mornings to crookedly make their way to the bathroom same as us.

Anyway I’m supposed to take the one named Abraham back to the veterinary referral hospital today so that the internist can make sure the wound from his sex-change operation is healing up nicely. (It was a guy problem, as with older human males and the slowed-down pee-stream: he got blocked. His bladder swelled and he couldn’t empty it and of course he didn’t SAY anything and the toxins built up and built up and he crept off to hide and die right here in the house and would have succeeded too if my friend Mary and her girl Rachel hadn’t come and used their Psychic Powers to find him in a dark tucked-away corner of a third floor bedroom. One catheterization, then another, repeated IV’s, five days in the hospital and a blood transfusion: all these were assembled like baguettes around a diamond, around the central centerpiece drama of the surgery that removed that last little length of the garden hose as the doctor called it where the urethra curls in a funky enough way to make trouble down the line. (It has something to do with crystals in the urine but don’t ask me what. I just write the check.))

So here I am this morning trying to get Abe to the vet, and he can’t KNOW that, right? I hadn’t even taken the cat carrier out or done anything except look at him in a “Don’t go far, pal” way when he came inside an hour ago! He’s usually right between my feet wherever I go. He follows me from room to room, speaking that kind of cat language that has a lot of r’s in it, maybe it’s Spanish I don’t know. He helps me write every day, even sitting on my printer which is convenient as ALL hell as you might imagine.

So I’m calling him for a good 30 minutes here. I’ve opened a fresh tin can of cat food, making loud spoon-on-the edge-of-the-can noises. I’ve whistled the special whistle which he can’t EVER not answer, conditioned as he is to respond to it since his kittenhood. His sister Charlotte pays absolutely NO attention to my calls OR my whistles but she was just here a second ago, lounging on the kitchen love seat. She looked up as if to say “He’s an idiot; we know this.”

But that darn Abe won’t show himself and I’m starting to have a thought here: Charlotte has problems of her own to the extent that our regular vet said “when you can line up six windows of time spaced at five-day intervals bring her for a series of injections that will mitigate her pain.” Because she hurts; she fell out of a tree once they think and her X-rays show that on either side the big knuckly ball of bone at the top of the hip scraping dryly, grating against the hollowed-out portion of the pelvis in which it’s meant to pivot easily.)

I looked at the cat carrier and I looked at Charlotte. She’s bigger than Abe with the kind of hang-down tummy a lady-cat gets. She looks like a big old hot-water bottle, only really kind of beautiful too, like a jet-black jacket of sheared mink draped in a luxurious tumble of folds over the arm of a chair.

I got under her gently and eased her into Abe’s carrier, yelled “Tough on you old grey Abe! I’m taking Charlotte out to get her high!” and OUT that door I went.