Until Shadow

If you ask people which they prefer, cats or dogs, you usually get a solid and unwavering answer. Some are dog lovers. Some are cat people. Me? I’m a dog guy. My beautiful Annie died a few years ago. She was seventeen. A Pound-puppy she was and, like all others, the best dog in the world. I think back to her always smile and Chantilly Lace trot and just know that every day with her was a good day. Even so, no specific story comes a-calling. So, I reach back farther and my heart nestles into a comfort, like a soft nest of happiness. I said I’m a dog guy, but that’s not the way it used to be.

Before something happened to me, I was a cat person. That something was always a mystery to me.

Now, we had all manner of pets when I was very little, dogs and cats galore, I’ve been told. I remember none of them. Until Shadow. She came into my blinkered boy world like a frolic and left it like a dream. When I hearken back to that so many years ago, I wonder if she was a real cat and not some magical creature traversing.

One day Shadow was just there, playing with a mouse in the fresh tilled earth of our garden. She was about eight weeks old, smoky gray and part Persian. The mouse was teeny and white as chalk against the rich soil. Mom said it must be a pet that escaped its cage from somewhere nearby.

“And look at that,” she said. “She doesn’t know she's supposed to kill it.”

“Who's to say what a cat is supposed to do,” I thought to myself. I walked over and watched as she blocked the path of the mouse with a paw. The mouse retreated, turned around, and ran the furrow the other way. Shadow blocked that escape with her other paw. The mouse, again, turned around and ran the other way. Shadow blocked again. The mouse reversed. All the while, her bemused cat eyes never left that mouse as her head jockeyed left and right, left and right, like a little mouse tennis match. Deciding to end the point, Shadow put both paws down at the same time and the mouse scampered out of bounds. She watched it go, then looked at me. I bent down and picked her up. She was already purring. I was a goner - lost in love. I was eight.

She was a different kind of cat. She was the kind that came when you called, you know, like a dog - but more than a dog. Mom noticed it. Every day, Monday to Friday, just before 3 p.m. she would hop onto the window ledge above the kitchen table and wait for me to get home. She’d see me walk up the sidewalk and be there to greet me at the back door. She’d stay with me for 15 minutes or so and then take her leave for the window ledge above the sink. There she would wait for my brother to come down the alley, home from junior high. He would round the garage and she would greet him likewise. She would split her purrs and affection between us for the better part of an hour or more then she was off to the frontroom window ledge. There she would sentry back and forth until dad rolled up and parked. Like clockwork.

She went out at night. She was a different sort of cat but a cat nonetheless, and cats have needs. They need to go out and stalk and carouse the alleys and yards. If she ever hunted, I did not know it. She was not the sort to leave a trophy for us on the doorstep. We fed her good food and plenty. That seemed to be enough for her. She caroused though, all right! I became a proud uncle to seven grey kittens and was very excited to have nominated myself honorary father and name-picker.

It was summer and my best friend, Ricky was sleeping over. We set up our sleeping bags on the rug under the pool table downstairs. Shadow and her new family, just a few days old, stayed in a cardboard box in the unfinished part, just on the other side of the wall. Very late at night or very early in the morning, I woke up, as Shadow was smoothing her way past me, out of my sleeping bag. I was sleepy and young and did not understand as I thought, “There’s something cold on my foot.” Before my wee brain could process the sensation and the event, Shadow returned. She nosed her way into my toasty little cocoon and placed the second kitten at my feet. The ramifications and her rationale pierced my heart. They were cold, you see. She edged out and past me again. I tried to hold her but she gently determined her way out from my help and back to her children. I pulled myself out and woke Ricky and told him. He watched me unzip the bag.

My mom and I nursed the remaining five kittens with Shadow over the next few days. We used tiny, toy baby bottles and a homemade formula. One lived. It was her first litter, I was told, and she just could not produce enough milk. It was my first experience with death. I imagine it was Shadow’s as well. I made a casket out of a shoe box. I lined it with newspaper that I cut into skinny strips and crumpled so it was soft. I put the six babies in it while Shadow watched from her bed box, her last kitten latched on and nursing. I carefully sealed it with masking tape and wrote, “Shadow’s babies” on the lid. Mom and dad let me bury them in the back yard and I held my own service for them. I never did name them.

Some time soon after that, I do not know the timeline, I developed an overwhelming allergy to cats. Farm animals, too, but we didn’t have those and I didn’t know that ‘til quite some years later. I came home one day and Shadow and baby were simply gone. Unbeknownst to me, my parents had suspected that Shadow was causing my sickness and had arranged a trial separation for a couple of days. That was the saddest week of my young life.

Where did she go and who got the joy of her company afterwards? I don’t know either. I have often wondered. Other things, distressful and complex were shaking my family at the time. Why it was somehow ordained that I should lose Shadow, too, is a mystery to me. And if she was some magic teacher and her time was up, I am unsure what I was to learn. Maybe we are not supposed to understand everything. Or maybe all the things that are happening around us, like bad things, aren’t our fault. And even though we might try to change them, we can’t. Maybe. Two things are certain: she was no ordinary cat, and everyone thinks I'm a dog guy.