2674 She of the thundering feet

Friday, November 27, 2009

"One parent can support ten children,
but ten children cannot support one parent."
--- Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz --

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Miss Thunderfoot died at about 1:30 am, yesterday morning.

For ten days I'd been thinking every day that she wouldn't make it through the night. I haven't much left the house for the past week. She'd been alternating between a box on a heating pad in the kitchen during the day and a towel bed in the shower stall at night (a spot she chose), and Wednesday afternoon she disappeared. I couldn't find her in any of the usual places and she didn't answer when I called. About 5 pm, Jasper told me that something was wrong with the litter box, and I found that Thunder had collapsed in the litter.

I was sad that her last attempt to move had been to use the litter box. Such a good little girl.

I sat next to her that night. I didn't attempt to hold her - she never liked being touched anywhere but the top of her head, she loved strokes between her ears - so I sat on the floor next to the nest box in the kitchen and stroked her head as her breathing got slower and slower.

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When I moved in with Jay in 1994, I brought two dogs and a cat with me. Siddy Kitty (formally Obsidian) died three years later at age 20. Jay wanted to go get another cat immediately, but I told him, "No. That's not how cats work. You can keep your eye out for a cat, but the right one will come to you, reach out a claw and snag you. You don't choose cats. They choose you."

He watched the newspaper and called a few times for kittens, but they were always already spoken for. Obviously not the right kitties.

Then one day I saw an ad on the bulletin board in the grocery store, "found cat", with a photo. It was a small gray and white longhair. The guy who'd found her said he couldn't keep her. I waited a few days, and then called the number. I told him it wasn't my cat, but if her owners didn't claim her, I'd take her. It turned out the guy worked in the village pet shop, and I knew him. A few days later she came home with me, and when she saw Jay, she acted like she recognized him and was happy to be reunited with him. She wouldn't let me touch her, but she spent hours purring on his lap.

The pet shop guy, the vet, and I all thought at first that she was very young, because she was so small and had changeable eyes. Some days her eyes were white, some days palest blue, occasionally pastel green or yellow-tinted. But mostly white. That usually means young. Apparently not - her eyes never darkened, and she never grew any larger. She also showed no interest in any toys, not the jingly balls, or the catnip cigar, not even trailing strings. Now I think she must have been a few years old, maybe even fully mature. She'd been spayed, and she already knew about not scratching furniture.

Jay wanted to give her a regal feminine name, like Princess, or Lady, and he tried a few names, but they just didn't work. I told him, "No, that's not how cats work. You can think about names, but you don't name cats. Cats name themselves." She was very regal, and very feminine, quiet and ladylike, polite, but one thing that made us laugh was the way she'd run down the hall when she heard food. There's a thick plush carpet in the hall, over dense foam padding, and then an oriental rug on top. And yet, when she heard food, it sounded for all the world like a bowling ball on hardwood. Rumble rumble rumble. I still don't know how she did it. She became Miss Thunderfoot, and it fit her.

It also fit because both of our dogs were afraid of thunder, and they both respected her.

She'd obviously had a rough life. The pet shop guy said he found her outside the grocery store. She was rubbing at the legs of people going into and coming out of the store and meowing, obviously asking for food, begging to be taken home. He said he felt especially sorry for her because people were kicking her away.

She had some broken and badly healed bones. Her left front leg bent oddly inward at the wrist, and her right hip had a dent. Her ribs were rippled, like some had been broken.

She also had a bad skin condition. She had large wens, bumps, under the skin of her sides and back. They didn't grow, or drain, they were just there. The vet said they were probably filled with sebum, and he could cut and drain them, but they'd just come back. She didn't like them touched.

She had terrible fur. Her fur was ratty, thick and thin patches (my vet described her as "motheaten"). Her tail was ridiculous - long hair at the bottom and a few inches of the tip, then thin short hair, almost bald, in the middle few inches. She shed like no animal I'd ever seen. Jay used to say that if we saved three day's worth of shed fur, we could build a whole new cat. No exaggeration. It was hard to believe she could produce that much fur. It came out in chunks, everywhere she moved, everywhere she sat or lay. She'd be asleep for an hour, and when she got up there'd be two handfuls of fur left behind. The wens meant you couldn't get ahead of the fur by combing her, and there was no way to get a vaccuum cleaner within yards of her.

She loved Jay dearly. She was his shadow. In his last months she didn't leave his side. Her place was under the hospital bed, under his head. She'd tell me when he awoke during the night. It was several months after he died before she would allow me to touch her, and a year before she began sleeping on my bed at night.

I think I know what probably happened. Some couple had adopted a beautiful little long-haired gray tuxedo kitten, who grew into a quiet and polite little cat - a cat who was motheaten and no longer pretty, and who shed horribly all over the place. The male of the couple saw no problem and was good to the cat. The female got more and more frustrated at cleaning up after the sea of shedding. There were yells and kicks, and finally a furtive dropping off in the village. "Gee, I don't know where she is, Dear. Maybe she ran away...."

She came to the right place. I've never had a horror of dirt, hairballs, or dust bunnies, and there was a man here to love her.

She was a good little girl.
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