Muzzy
Part 1: White paws are important
Sometime during my second year in graduate school, I got an email from one of those department [spam] mailing lists — you know, the ones with irrelevant seminars and job postings. This email came with a cat photo. A fellow grad student needed someone to host his cat for a couple months. I thought of my roommate: she was in her first year, overwhelmed and homesick, and an animal lover. A cat might be the right source of comfort. I forwarded the email to her.
The cat — an 8 year old, overweight tabby named Gaia — was delivered to our apartment in a tiny carrier. She immediately hid under the couch. The next morning, she came to my bedroom door and chirped. She did not meow, but made short, squeaky sounds like a bird when she wanted food or attention. “Attention” to Gaia was to be present in the same space with her, and since I had the habit of working in the living room, she thought I was her human. She bonded with me and traitorously ignored my roommate. Gaia the cat did not care who paid for her food and cleaned her litter box.
Pre-Gaia, I had been a dog person. I had three dogs (one at a time) as a kid. My happiest moment was when I opened a cardboard box and Toto — my first puppy — looked up at me. When I thought of wanting a pet, it was always a dog. I brushed it off with little attention when my boyfriend wanted to confirm that we would not adopt Gaia or any other cat until we graduate. “Of course not,” I said, “We’ll move across the Pacific in a few years, and you are allergic.”
A couple months later, the same boyfriend proposed that we get married and that we get a cat. I said yes to both. Why he changed his mind about cat adoption is still a mystery to me. Maybe it was spring time and he was in love. Maybe he was dreaming about our home together: cozy apartment (check), back windows look out to a creek (check), lots of books (check), cat sleeping on couch (soon). At least that was the plan. We would move into the dream apartment, fill it with books, get a couch, et cetera. After books, furniture, and humans were in place, a cat would be added as a final touch to our home.
We saw the sign while driving around on a Saturday afternoon. The weather was sunny and warm like a typical day in June. We were freshly engaged and head-over-heel in love. The sign, placed in front of a music hall, stated that there was a “Kitten Adoption” event going on inside. It was accurate. About twenty kennels were set up in the hall, purposefully forming a walk-through path for visitors so that they could be exposed to the maximum dose of adorable kittens.
How do one pick a kitten? I don’t know. Unlike dogs, cats don’t recognize you as their destiny and come running to you the first time they see you. Breeds don’t help much: while a Siberian Husky could be adopted because her human likes to run, no human (to my knowledge) insists on a short-haired domestic cat because of some breed-specific quality. And cats don’t look that different from one another, certainly not as different as a Great Dane is from a Chihuahua. As we journeyed the Path of Adorableness, all sixty or so kittens looked equally fluffy and adoptable. We occasionally asked to pet them outside of their kennels, as if doing so would give us more information about the critters. It did not. We were about to give up, when out of curiosity, I asked to revisit the weird cat.
We had skipped past him. He had been in a kennel with his brother whose tabby stripes had been almost identical to his. While his brother had acted like a completely normal kitten — curling up in a corner of the kennel and such — the weird cat had elected to sleep in his litter box. I could hear other visitors commenting: “What’s wrong with that cat?” and their kids exclaiming: “Eww, that cat is sleeping on poop!”
“Why is that cat sleeping on poop?” Linh the Animal Behavior Enthusiast wondered. Meanwhile, Linh the Fighter for Equality defended: “So what? You shouldn’t think less of a cat because he is different. There’s nothing wrong with being different!” By the time we marched back to the kennel, there was only one cat left. The brother, being a standard cat, had been adopted by someone else. The weird cat did not seem to notice that he now had the whole kennel available to him. He stayed in the litter box, his eyes closed, though he visibly wasn’t relaxed. He objected when his foster human picked him up from the box and handed him to us. He wiggled out of our hands and slithered back to the kennel within seconds. But within those seconds, I noticed that he had white paws.
My criteria for an ideal cat were based entirely on the one cat I knew: a shy girl with white paws. This cat was clearly shy and had white paws, and while he was not a girl, why did that matter anyway? My fiance tried to reason with me about the fact that the cat had been sleeping on poop, and when that failed, the fact that we had not moved in to our apartment, and when that failed, the fact that we were traveling out of the country for the next two months. When that too failed, we signed the paperwork, paid the $30 adoption fee, and asked the cat’s foster human to keep him for another two months. “We’ll pick him up from you after we move,” we promised.
(to be continued)
