The Cat Came Back

“It’s really Rockstar!” my wife exclaimed as she bounded down the stairs, with my thirteen-year-old daughter close behind. The two of them showed me the photo on the Humane Society’s website of a cat put up for adoption not an hour before. Rockstar, our six-year-old domestic shorthair, snuck out last June and never returned. He likely succumbed to an owl or a coyote as his sister Moonlight had done only thirteen months earlier. But could this really be him?

This cat looked smaller and thinner than Rockstar. When we adopted Rockstar and Moonlight as kittens six years ago, we fed them each one can of wet food per day and as much dry food as they wanted. Moonlight knew her limits, but Rockstar just kept eating. “A diabetic cat is an expensive cat,” advised Sandy, the veterinarian technician who lived in the brick duplex across the street from us back in Virginia. We promptly cut off Rockstar’s supply of dry food, but he kept the weight. Could he have slimmed down that much after six months on his own?

Three hours later, we returned home with two new cats: the boy we had seen online, who was one year old and not Rockstar, and a female tabby half his age with whom he paired up when they were strays in Houston. When we met them at the shelter here in Colorado, they were coiled together in the litter box, where they held court for potential adoptive families.

Even up close, he looks almost exactly like Rockstar. My wife says it’s a sign.

Rockstar wore mostly white fur with patches of black covering his ears and extending down around his eyes, with a notch of white extending up between them. He had a black tail and black spots on his back. The new cat has the same black eyes, face, and tail, and diverges from our memory of Rockstar only in the constellation of spots on his back.

The girl cat became Callie first, and then Tessa a few days later. Still, we struggled to name the boy since we tended to call him Rockstar anyway, much to the chagrin of my daughter, who initially opposed adopting him for precisely that reason.

My wife proposed names to memorialize our old friend, such as “Rockstar Junior,” just “Junior,” or my favorite from that category, “Two-point-oh.” My daughter pushed for a completely new name, afraid that a name like “Junior” would blind us to the uniqueness of our new companion.

The latter option won out. My nine-year-old son, who as the male child holds naming rights for male pets, called him “Thor,” after the Marvel Avengers character from the movies. We are now getting to know this new cat, but with the confidence that he can fill the void Rockstar left behind.

Thor and Rockstar share their oversized amber eyes and their cuddly personalities, at least so far. Only their five shared months on Earth protest against reincarnation.

Rockstar used to pamper his sister, nuzzling her and licking the top of her head while she slept, though she snapped and swatted when he nuzzled or licked her other than the way she would have preferred. It always struck me as curious that the same dynamic governed relations between the male and the female at every level of our household: parents, children, cats. Sensitive males seeking tenderness; prickly females on occasion deigning to indulge them.

Shortly before Moonlight disappeared, I decided for reasons completely unrelated to her name to learn Beethoven’s Piano Sonata №14 in C-sharp Minor, the “Moonlight,” on our electric piano. Measure by measure I fingered the melancholy of the left hand and the triumphant nostalgia of the right. I mastered the piece right around the time I found a tuft of orange-tan fur in the grass just past the patio’s edge on the morning after Moonlight likely tussled there with the coyote that got her.

I took a hiatus from the sonata. Our piano at that time sat only five or six feet from the sliding door that leads to the backyard and through which both cats had often made late-afternoon escapes as we carried dinner out to the patio table, only to return as darkness fell. A couple months later, I returned to the piano and began plodding through the sonata.

Recognizing the tune if not the name, Rockstar arrived at the sliding door, looked outside, then turned his big eyes toward me. His somber expression seemed to say, “Remember?” as in, do you remember there used to be another cat? Did I have a sister? Was it all real? It was more irony than anyone should have to face. Especially a cat.

Thor seems to care for Tessa much the same way, though it remains unclear if their connection is romantic, platonic, or of two adoptive siblings. They cuddle together in the crate in which we brought them home, and they play chase a few times a day. We have yet to see them quarrel. Of course, Tessa is only six months old. Perhaps she will grow feistier with age and fulfill her destiny as a female of our household.

How many parents have arrived home to find Stripey floating belly-up in his tank, and have zoomed off to PetSmart for another specimen with the same scarlet lashes that earned the old swimmer his name? Had our kids for some reason been away for the half-year intermission between Rockstar and Thor, we could have effected a perfect swap! We could have leveraged our bona fides as grown-ups to assure the kids that, don’t be silly, the spots on the cat’s back had always looked like that. They may have bristled at first, but over time they would have bought the lie and appreciated the ruse.

But I wonder, what would happen if I suddenly disappeared and my wife quickly remarried a man who looked just like me? And imagine if he knew my pancake recipe, could make the kitchen sparkle in the space of twenty minutes, and chose my 80’s favorites for Friday family movie nights. Would it matter that Mr. Two-Point-Oh was someone else entirely, or would it suffice that my wife and children continued to enjoy the comforts to which they had habituated?

As we age, the passing decades submerge the bold dreams of youth in a sea of obligations and expectations that come to constitute our relationships with others, and that someone else could likely fulfill just as well. Rockstar experienced this when he was still alive. We did not miss the havoc he and Moonlight wrought on our house as kittens, shearing our honeycomb blinds with their claws to access the sun’s rays. Over time, an occasional cuddle was enough for us. Thor can do that just as well.

Going back in time, however, is not the answer. Nostalgia for youth itself feels superficial and out of place. We scolded the latter-year Rockstar when he delivered a bird or a mouse from the backyard to our doorstep, and I could get in much more trouble than that if I tried to reclaim a youth best left in the past. Midlife crises run afoul when one forgets that youth, though wasted on the young, can be downright dangerous in the hands of a forty-six-year-old.

But there must be something new at this time of life, not a return to the past but rather an opening to a new future. I am no longer the man my wife married, and the Stepford Husband who might take my place at the griddle seems boring, unfulfilled. I prowl the world looking for what is different about me now. I know it’s there, but what is it?

I imagine Thor experiencing the midlife crisis without having lived the first half of the life. He is looking for himself, but he has come into the world of our expectations, and he cannot grasp their origins. Like an understudy called to duty in a lead role, he’s acting the part while still learning his lines, and wondering where the role ends and he begins.

Maybe our experiences aren’t so different after all.

Rockstar’s disappearance was not the only event to punctuate change in our life this past year. We have given our entire first floor a completely new look, from the new two-tone kitchen on one end with a quartz bar and an embarrassing excess of storage, following along natural hardwood floors to the new bookshelves and geometric tiles surrounding the gas fireplace on the other end. The TV and soundbar now hang above the fireplace, providing Parisian cafe views and mellow jazz as I write from the family room sofa. We also upgraded a basement bathroom for good measure.

Rockstar’s absence proved timely since he missed three months of activity during which a roaming animal would have been inconvenient. I can see electricians, plumbers, and carpenters tripping over him as they carried supplies and equipment around the house, or worrying each time they opened a door to the outside world. The hardwood floor company even included a clause in their contract that any pets need be sequestered in a different part of the house during their work.

A new era has opened in our family’s life, for sure, so much so that if by some miracle Rockstar returned to our sliding door this evening from a jaunt in the prairies surrounding our neighborhood, he would likely not feel at home, even before spotting his doppelganger on the sofa. As much as I miss Rockstar, would he fit into our new lives? Or is his memory part of something past and out of reach?

Humans have long attributed epochal shifts to astral reconfigurations. For around six years, we lived under the sign of Rockstar. Rockstar then went into retrograde, perhaps upon Moonlight’s disappearance. Truth be told, the “only cat” period of Rockstar’s life felt like the denouement of an earlier period when two cats had ruled our house. Rockstar may have felt it too, and maybe his ultimate departure offered the only satisfying dramatic resolution. This may explain why we solemnly marked Moonlight’s departure by lighting a candle and sharing reminiscences as we sat on the floor around her framed photo, and yet we held no such ritual for her brother the following year.

Now we are under the sign of Thor. Thor brings new life and new energy, particularly as my children point out how he differs from Rockstar. Perhaps he will disrupt some of our household’s longstanding patterns, like the docility of our males. Tessa has even been spotted licking his head while he slept, a spectacular departure from the pattern set by Rockstar and Moonlight. I can learn a lot from this cat.

I don’t know what the Age of Thor holds for me, but the invitation to change is clear. When I do make pancakes, people don’t eat them, and anyway I’m trying to cut back on carbs. I still clean the kitchen for my own enjoyment, and I face less resistance to my 80’s classics because my kids have watched everything else. But there is something new in me, perhaps not yet noticed by those around me. I will be different in this new era, even though I look just like the old guy.