For many people, holidays like Thanksgiving are something they look forward to only slightly more than root canals and rigid sigmoidoscopies. Me? I generally like the holidays. I get to spend just enough time with my family to remind me why I don't live in the same state anymore. (I'm joking.... really. I love my family. I do. Don't look at me like that.)
But this past Thanksgiving was.... well, a nightmare. For the first time -- for stupid reasons I now regret -- I took my cat Dolittle home to Savannah with me. And he proceeded to get lost for SEVEN nerve-racking, miserable days.
Understand that my mom is not a cat person, so it was a very big deal for my cat to get an express invitation to visit. But she wanted me to be able to stay a while without having to hurry back to check on Do.
He did relatively well on the trip down -- the vet gave me some sedatives for him -- though I did spend a bit of the nine/ten hour trip with a cat wrapped around my neck and head. He seemed to want to be as close to me as possible. He spent most of the trip literally under my seat, resting his butt against the back of my shoes. (Don't bother telling me it was dangerous and dumb not to put him in the carrier, but i couldn't listen to him yowl for nine hours.)
When we got to Mom's, Do was a little freaked. Strange place and all, and my mom... well, i think she made both of us nervous. If she'd caught him on the kitchen counters, my clean-freak mom would have had a heart attack. (She doesn't understand why i haven't "trained" the cat to stay on the floor. Obviously, she has never spent any time around cats.)
But we let him out on mom's screened porch, and he seemed to really like that. So much so that he didn't want to come back in the house when it was time to go to bed. And since my mom was dead set against letting Do sleep in my room, and I didn't want to put him the carrier (with all the attendant piteous yowling), the porch seemed a good compromise. He had his litter box, food and water, his own comfy pillow from home.... and yes, we checked to make sure the very sturdy door with a wooden lower half was latched securely. The entire lower half of the porch is paneled with wood.
The next morning at eight am, a frantic mom bursts into my room. "Is the cat in here with you?"
My first groggy thought was: "Are you kidding? I wouldn't bring the cat in here after you said no way; I have no desire to die, thank you very much." Then I realized why she was asking, noticed the panic in her voice, and bolted out of bed.
Somehow, that damned cat had managed to open the door. Within minutes, we were both out in the yard, walking around the neighborhood in our pajamas, calling "Doooo-kitty... kitty kitty kitty..." (Do actually will come when called... 90% of the time.)
But this only brought the three stray cats my mom has been feeding to the back porch, expecting their breakfast.
I spent hours walking around the neighborhood, then both of us in our cars driving around.... still no sign of the cat.
I was sick, crying, frantic. Mom was guilt-stricken and miserable.
Needless to say, Thanksgiving dinner was pretty dismal. By the next day, after more hours of searching, asking neighbors... and still no cat... I had cried so much i had a gushing nose bleed.
I found every cat in a two-mile radius around my mom's house over the next six days, but still no Dolittle. No one had even seen him. We made two visits to the local pound, and I cried some more in disappointment and just from the sight of all those poor cats and sooo many kittens.. oh, god how many kittens -- so cute, so furry, so innocent, looking out of those cages, reaching out their little paws....
I'll just say it right now: if you have an animal you haven't spayed or neutered, you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity. I know that almost all of those sweet cats and kittens I looked at will be probably be gassed in the next week, and it just breaks my heart.
Worst of all, i had been through this before with my darling lost Luci, my first cat. I still don't know what happened to Luci, and all of this was so miserably familiar. By day four, i was certain i would never see Dolittle again. I was sinking into a deep, nihilistic depression marked by a certainty that my life was such shit that even my cat had left me. I had no job, no money, and certain other people had let me down that week.... It was just more shit on top of more shit.
I did something I haven't done in... hell, twenty, twenty five years? I didn't just offer a quick prayer to God that I'd find Do. I got down on my KNEES and prayed, "Lord, please have mercy on my poor cat... Let me find him. Let him find his way home."
Understand, I don't believe in prayer. Even if there is a God, I am pretty sure he has more important prayers to answer -- an end to famine, war, disease, people in deep and dire pain and suffering -- and if he hasn't answered a significant number of those prayers, I don't expect him to worry about one cat. Even if he did, I'd be a pretty lame asshole to barter for favors after years of a distinct lack of faith. Still, i did it. I prayed, "Don't do it for me, do it for Dolittle. He's just a poor little cat, after all."
Finally, a friend of mom's called and said he'd spotted a cat fitting Do's description three streets over. We rushed over, I crawled through back yards while Mom slowly drove the streets... and found the cat the friend had seen, but it wasn't Do.
I hadn't expected an answer to my prayer, but still, I was a little resentful. I'd swallowed my own principles to beg on my knees, and God still wasn't cutting me any slack. God couldn't even be bothered to throw me the bone of getting my damned "lost cat" ad in the local paper.
The complication, of course, was the holidays. Even after we called and emailed an ad in, with assurances it would go in Saturday, the ad never showed up. We called again on Sunday but, of course, got no answer. (I mean, really, the Savannah paper is more like a big flyer.) We placed it again on Monday and were promised it would definitely go in on Tuesday.
I was, frankly, reaching the breaking point of my endurance for family, a bed not my own, a shower with lousy water pressure..... i wanted to go home desperately, but was loathe to leave without Do. I wanted to find him just to have the weight lifted, the omnipresent worry ended.....
Monday afternoon Mom had me raking her yard (and we won't even go into details on what my mother's standards for yard work are; if she could find a way to get rid of dirt altogether, she'd do it.) I decided to walk around the outside of her backyard privacy fence one more time.
And that's when I saw it: Do's bright red reflective collar and tag. It was snagged on the top of the privacy fence behind Mom's. Now I was sure, without his collar, even if someone found him, they wouldn't know to whom he belonged. I was sure I would never see him.
But I looked at the collar and thought that at least I now knew what direction he'd gone in. I went walking around the street behind Mom's again... and this time i managed to stick my head into the back yard with the privacy fence where I'd found the collar.
I was calling, "Dooo kittty... kitty, kitty, kitty" as I'd been doing all day, every day for seven days. But still nothing.... I began walking away toward the next yard.
And then I heard a meow. And then another meow. It sounded like Do, but then I'd thought I'd heard him before and it only turned out to be one of Mom's strays.
I pressed my face against the slats of the fence one more time.....
And there was Do. He was just hunkered down in the middle of that back yard, meowing. Being the same cowardly little shit he is at home when he gets of the house. He just hides under the bushes and yowls, as if to say, "I changed my mind, I don't like it out here."
I could try to tell you how my heart leapt, the joy and sheer relief that flooded every fiber of my being... but if you have a pet, you can imagine better than any cliche I can put down here.
I had to force my way into that back yard's privacy gate, but worries of trespassing and damage to the fence only flitted through my mind for the briefest of seconds. I'd have climbed that fence if I'd had to.
Do let me grab him up, but it was quickly obvious that the cat was seriously freaked. He was staring around in panic. As i carried him back to Mom's, he jumped at every noise -- a car passing, a dog barking in the distance, a squirrel rustling through the leaves... and he began to struggle to leap out of my arms. He scratched me quite badly, but i kept hold of him, whispering in his ear that he was safe now, that I wasn't going to let anything hurt him. It scared me that he was so scared, even in my arms.
Finally home, he was still skittish, but he seemed okay except for a strange bend in his tail. Hair seemed to be missing, as if it had been caught in something. He still won't let me touch it.
That night Mom relented in her own relief (she was blaming herself, just as I was blaming both of us for his loss) and allowed Do to sleep with me. I was so relieved and contented to have my cat sleeping on my legs again. By morning, he was rubbing his face against mine, depositing his hair onto my lips....
The next morning, I got him in the car and broke the speed limit most of the way home. I just wanted both of us back where we belonged. I wanted that cautious look in his eyes completely gone.
He seems completely recovered now. He spent most of this evening in my lap, utterly deep in kitty dreams, limp and alternately curled into a comfy ball, then sprawling in that boneless way of cats.
I do not believe that my prayer brought him back to me. I'm not that much of a hypocrite.
But still, I prayed again, a heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving.
