Adoption

About two weeks ago I had one of those days on which I could do was hug Fred and mourn the loss of Sarah last year, and Chloe the year before. The grief was so raw and recent that it came as something of a shock to realize that it had been a good six months since Sarah died in my arms.

The day seemed to have been a turning point of sorts. Before it, I wouldn’t in any way consider talk of adopting another cat. I wouldn’t hear of it, in fact. After that day, though, the prospect didn’t seem quite as painful. Since Sarah’s been gone, Fred—total sweetheart though she is—had been acting rather weird, as if she felt she had to make up double the kitty neurosis of her absent older companion. She started doing this weird thing in the mornings in which she’d jump on the mattress at six a.m., poke at me and whuff, then jump down—a couple of dozen times. She started walking around the house and talking to herself in that where is everybody? yowl, though she’d know full well I was sitting on the sofa. She became obsessive over a couple of lengths of extra-chunky yarn that she would carry around the house with her in her mouth, yowling all the while. She couldn’t even sleep at night unless the yarn was draped over Craig and I in decorative shapes of her own making.

So we figured it was time to look for a buddy for her.

We dipped our toes in the water kind of tentatively, by visiting an adoption event at a pet store in Port Chester. We’d decided going in that we preferred a female cat under a year old, but perhaps a little older than tiny kitten-age. The one cat who fit those criteria was an orange-and-white calico named Skittles, who was eight months old, tiny, and very sweet; she had an inquisitive way of looking around at all the other animals and people as we both held her purring, narrow frame in our arms. She’d been rescued from a high-kill pound in Kentucky and brought out here to a foster home. I melted a little more at the prospect of getting a cat like that into our household.

But it was the day before Easter, and we both were going to be out of the house for most of the next day, and it didn’t seem right to adopt the first cat we saw and then just leave it. So we looked elsewhere, the rest of the week.

We went to an animal shelter in Norwalk a couple of days later. It was a giant complex where they wouldn’t even talk to us until we’d filled out one of those long questionnaires I’ve seen at other shelters that are full of well-meaning—but ultimately invasive—questions. Questions of a sort like, How much would you be willing to spend on your adopted pet in the case of a medical emergency? or May we visit your home to screen it prior to adoption? that make me want to scrawl down profanity-laden responses like my checking account is none of your goddamned business and oh hell no. They subjected us to a lengthy interview in a room full of teddybear cats so full of good will and trust and love that they would’ve curled up on Mussolini’s lap with no qualms, no doubt to see how we interacted with them, and then asked what I thought were a series of really insensitive questions about how our previous cats died.

I get that they’re trying to match their pets with people who aren’t going to abandon them and who will give them a good home, but damn. If my cat was 22 and died of old age, why do I have to go into detail about her last few minutes? Back off already.

Finally, grudgingly, they took us to see some of their adoptable cats. But they did it in the way our real estate agent showed us houses, a dozen years back. We said we wanted to a two-story three-bedroom house in Royal Oak, and he’d take us to a two-bedroom ranch in Southfield. We’d repeat what we wanted, and he’d show us a one-bedroom condo in Ferndale. We’d asked to see friendly young female cats under a year old, and the cats we saw were all mostly ten, male, and were so feral they’d run behind the cat furniture and hiss and hide whenever we entered the room.

We tried our vet, since that had worked when we’d gotten, but they didn’t have anything. Then last Friday, we drove to Long Island to visit the North Shore Animal Shelter, which was supposed to be huge. It was. It’s an entire complex with a vet school, a shelter, a cat domicile, and a pet supplies store. And the place was packed with dogs of all sorts—but only maybe twenty cats, all of them older, and all of them marked ‘Best as only cat’ on their cages.

There was one cat there whom we liked, a young tom named Lenny. Lenny was beautiful—he was a soft red color. In his cage, he was sweet and friendly and narrowed his eyes at us in an inviting way. Lenny had been dyed pink, either by pranksters or by his previous owners. The dye couldn’t be washed out, so Lenny looked a little bit like a punk from the nineteen-eighties at various angle, when suddenly he’d have the hue of a luridly-glazed doughnut. We liked Lenny a lot . . . until we got him out of his cage. At that point he was all screw you, SUCKAHS! and started running for the exits, and then started biting and clawing anyone who’d attempt to restrain him. When I put him back into his cage, he got a death grip on my right hand with all four paws and his piranha jaws. It took a good five minutes to detach him, and once they had, my hand looked like I’d thrust it into a running lawn mower.

So that was discouraging.

Then Saturday we went back to the pet store where we’d been the week before, since they were supposed to have another adoption event. Kentucky Skittles was still there. So we adopted her. Full circle, in a way.

We renamed Skittles as Ruby, and she’s a sweetheart. She stepped out of her carrier and investigated the house with a hungry curiosity. She proved right out of the box to be an excellent fetcher, tirelessly chasing after toys and scraps of paper, picking them up with her teeth, and then dropping them at our feet. She cuddles and purrs, and loves to look out of the windows. She’s taken over the top of the grand piano, across which she likes to sprawl like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. What more could you want in a cat?

Fred was not happy at first about the new addition to the family. She spent most of Saturday atop a dresser, balefully glaring at Ruby and growling the feline equivalent of Don’t come near me, Kentucky trailer trash. Things changed the next morning when Fred observed Ruby playing a good long game of Fetch with me. By last night, they were playing with each other like old buddies, and this morning they were eating side by side peaceably.

It’ll work out just fine.