A Christmas Cat Tale

A holiday of frozen pipes and frostbitten paws

Patrick Paul Garlinger
The Narrative Arc

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Tabby cat in snow
Photo by Sandra on Unsplash

It’s December 2000, and a polar vortex is battering our quaint college town with frigid gusts. As the wind whips against the windows, the Weather Channel displays a purple band of arctic air pushing our thermometers below zero.

I’m recovering from my first semester as an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa. My remorse over the recent election — after the Supreme Court declared George W. Bush the victor by stopping the recount of butterfly ballots and hanging chads — and annoyance with grading final exams are slowly giving way to the joy of celebrating Christmas.

For once, I’m not living in a tiny student apartment — I have rented a charming two-story bungalow right off campus. Flush with extra space and undeterred by the dreadful weather, I’ve invited my parents and my brother’s family to spend part of the holiday together.

Although spacious, my house isn’t insulated for a winter this brutal. The first-floor bathroom is an addition with no insulation at all. When it gets too cold to use without freezing my cheeks, I shut the door and retreat to the warmer one upstairs.

My family arrives with the grace of a traveling circus. They trundle into the kitchen, puffy from winter coats and squawking about the drive from St. Louis, and heave their luggage into the living room. As we huddle and hug, my two cats, Cosmo and Montserrat, accustomed to fewer feet and less talking, scowl from afar.

I adopted them as kittens from an animal shelter in St. Louis.

Montserrat is a sweet tabby who always seems lost in her own world. Her soft eyes suggest a serene life unburdened by thought. She hides for the rest of the trip, oblivious to the hullabaloo.

Cosmo, by contrast, is sensitive, smart, and codependent. His fur looks like soft dark chocolate, and when he meows, he sounds like he’s grousing. His savvy is most evident when the goal is mischief: He deftly chooses important papers from trivial ones to chew. Occasionally, he sits upright in a plush chair, giving the unnerving impression that he’s a cranky and plump old man stuck in a cat’s body.

As bright and naughty as he is, Cosmo is also nervous. His adoption papers from the shelter included the phrase “scared of thunder.” Prone to existential angst, he often wakes me up at night by howling in the next room, as if he’s been abandoned. When I call out to him, he leaps on the bed, and I spoon him while he purrs himself to sleep.

He stares icily at these intruders, threats to his dominance in the social hierarchy (with Montserrat at the bottom, in his mind). He skulks off to find a hiding spot.

As my family settles in, chucking their coats on the couch and raiding my kitchen for snacks, I warn them not to bother with the cold bathroom. I poke my head in to confirm how frosty it is and notice there’s an icicle descending from the tap.

Hmm… that wasn’t there before. I’ll deal with that later.

We spend the day gabbing, clanging in the kitchen, and vegging in front of the TV. Despite the arctic chill, my mother suggests we see the newly released Miss Congeniality because she loves Sandra Bullock.

“She’s a ‘classy lady,’” she says with a big grin. It’s my mother’s go-to phrase for any actress she likes. I’m not sure what makes Sandy “classy,” but it’s Christmas, so I’m not going to argue.

Sure, let’s go see Sandy in sub-zero temperatures. Nothing spells Christmas like getting frostbite to see an FBI agent masquerade as a beauty pageant contestant.

After dinner out, fatigue catches up with us, and we skip Classy Sandy to head home — an incredible stroke of luck, it turns out, because, moments after our return, we’re greeted with a loud crack and water begins to gush from the cold bathroom: The pipe has burst.

As the water creeps across the kitchen floor, we scatter. Half of us run for towels to dry the floor, while the rest bolt to the basement to find the water turn-off. Luckily, it only takes a minute to find it. My stepdad decides it’s the right time to lecture me, belatedly, about leaving the tap open to prevent pipes from freezing.

Thanks, Dad. You couldn’t have mentioned this when you arrived?

Between their car ride and the stress of the holiday-turned-flood, we scurry to different rooms to decompress. I feed the cats and make sure their paws aren’t wet. After their meal, they retreat again to unknown parts.

My sister-in-law pops outside, braving the frigid winds to smoke a cigarette. I notice her standing on the front porch, harshly lit by an uncovered lightbulb. She’s holding the door ajar to keep warm and letting out the precious heat from my already under-heated home.

Really? You’re letting all the heat out for your fix?

I ask her to shut the door and then I head to bed. I’m too late, though. I’ll soon discover the heat isn’t the only precious thing to have escaped.

The next morning, I refill the cats’ bowls with kibble, but Cosmo doesn’t come running frenzied into the kitchen. I figure he’s hiding out of resentment for these interlopers. As I search all of his possible sanctuaries, in closets and the basement, he’s nowhere to be found. A knot of dread twists in my chest.

Fearful that he fled when my brother’s wife was choking down nicotine, I grab my coat and rush outside.

“Cosmo!” I yell at the top of my lungs, my scream piercing the peaceful dawn.

I hustle down the frozen sidewalk, searching for a patch of black against the snow-white backdrop, afraid he’s frozen to death in the sub-zero wind. I’m already berating myself for being a terrible cat dad.

How could I have let this happen?

Three doors down, out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glint of light reflecting off Cosmo’s half-lidded eyes under the stoop.

He’s alive!

His whiskers are icy with crystals, and his eyes dull from exhaustion and fear. He won’t— or can’t — move, and he’s too far underneath to reach.

Some paternal instinct kicks in, and I run home to microwave a can of wet food. The steaming lump smells putrid, but I’m praying its stench will lure him out of his icy cave. As I push the bowl toward him, his nostrils begin to flare from the pungent aroma, and he crawls forward a few inches — enough for me to grab him.

I rush him home and dry him with a towel while he scarfs down the still warm wet food. I wrap him tightly in a blanket, and he falls into a deep sleep. When he finally wakes up some hours later, he acts like his usual grumpy yet needy self.

Thankfully, the vet is able to see us the next day. Chagrined, I share my story of being a derelict cat dad and how he escaped into the night. I know having a cat isn’t the same as having a child, but it’s something like having a child. For me, at least, the worry runs deep.

When the vet pronounces Cosmo healthy and says there should be no lasting damage, relief pours through me. Somehow this nervous, sensitive 5-year-old cat had the constitution and canny to survive a sub-zero polar vortex.

I’m not the worst cat dad in the world.

“He’s got some minor frostbite on his paws,” the vet warns, “so the outer layer of his toe pads will eventually fall off.”

His health is the only gift of the season — even though my family generously exchange presents — that I’ll remember. I consider it a Christmas miracle.

As predicted, within a few days, the outer layer of Cosmo’s toe beans flake off to reveal fresh pink skin like that of a kitten.

Little do I know that all of this is foreshadowing. For the next five years, Cosmo will become an escape artist.

Just two weeks later, with his paws still recovering from frostbite and undeterred by his night-long brush with death, the daredevil will dash out when I take out some garbage. I’ll search for 3 hours and find him several blocks away perched on some equipment in a neighbor’s garage. I’ll swear he is smirking when my flashlight catches his eyes.

I’ll come to recognize there were early signs of his adventurous side. When he was just 2 years old, he darted outside, scaled up a tree, and refused to come down. I was forced to hire an animal rescuer, who shimmied up in spiked boots to retrieve him for a couple hundred bucks.

I’ll eventually realize that, as codependent as he is, he also has a wandering spirit that feels constrained by domestic life. One day, I’ll come to see that enigmatic mixture is what makes him unique.

Our life together will become a grand game of hide-and-seek and howl-and-spoon, as if he enjoys being lost and then found. I’ll stop asking myself if I’m a bad cat dad and accept that our life together is one of danger followed by pursuit, angst followed by snuggling.

A couple of years after the Iowa winter, we’ll move to Chicago where I’ll take a job at Northwestern. One summer, he’ll sneak out for a week-long sojourn in a neighbor’s garage, letting the neighbor feed him, while I blanket the streets with lost signs and call animal shelters about a missing rotund black cat. He’ll wander home, fat and sassy, as if he’d taken a stroll.

I have no clue that nine years from now we’ll end up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, where Cosmo will succumb to diabetes, and I’ll hold him one last time, wishing he still had the energy to dash out the door.

All of that is yet to come.

It’s December 2000. My family has left, and peace resumes in my chilly house. As the holidays fade into a new year, and the soft pink of Cosmo’s new paws begins to shade to black, all I feel is gratitude that we survived this cold and chaotic Christmas.

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