Thank God It’s Friday.

March 30, 2009
Filed under:The Number Nine

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I want to shout it from the rooftops, I want to go around to each and every house that got a flyer from me labelled “Lost Cat”. I want to stick signs up on all the lightpoles and on placards in people’s yards where I’d previously posted all those flyers saying “Reward!”

I want to call all of those people who rang me and thought she might be “a bit tabby?” “Black spots instead of orange?” If “she’s a ‘he’?” and I want to thank each and every one of them for their kind words of encouragement and their hopes for her to come home. I want to drop by that nice woman’s house, the one who recognised me at the kid’s school, and tell her that her kind wishes must’ve helped.

Because my cat has come home.

A year ago, almost to the exact day, we were cooking dinner and heard a yowling at our front door. An emaciated and pushy little creature came into our lives like it would be sheer lunacy for her to be with anyone else. True to this, she treated most things like it would be sheer lunacy to do anything else.

NOT bat at your ankles while you empty your morning bladder? Crazy.

Refrain from loudly telling you that she had just made use of that new bag of cat litter? Madness.

Stop randomly biting your toes while you tickytack on your laptop in bed? Preposterous.

To her mind, there simply wasn’t any alternative to sashaying clumsily like the kitten she was into our kitchen and into our hearts. And I will say it too, I love that cat.

And I’ve never loved a cat before. Ask anybody that’s known me, I’ve never lived with a cat that didn’t treat me as if it’s shit didn’t stink and I did. Cats are bossy, fussy, above-it-all narcissists that treated me as if it was giving me the gift of it’s presence. I hated cats.

Then came Friday. A cat that didn’t think it was a cat, meowing loudly and climbing on my leg when I would come home. Biting playfully at my wrist when I’d pet her in bed. Sleeping noisily near my pillow before being exiled from our bed for batting bits of plastic around underneath our bed at 3 AM. She didn’t act above me, she acted like she liked me. Almost for as long as I’ve had an office in this house, I’ve had that cat sleeping across my lap while I worked.

She’s actually there right now, blissfully sleeping and giving the occasional purr. She doesn’t smell quite right and didn’t have the strength to get up into my lap on her own, but she’s back.

Back where she belongs.

It wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary, we’d just forgotten to bring her back in the house at about 4:30 before we’d gone to Ron and Sam’s for dinner. We were only home at about 8:30, to put kids in bed and ourselves not long after, and we just didn’t think she’d take off. A day later, and I’m going through all the shrubbery looking for her napping self. Two days later and I’m knocking on all the doors of neighbour’s who own similar nap-inducing shrubbery. 3 days later and I’m putting up flyers at the supermarket, news agent, and on all the telephone poles at nearby streets.

Placarded signs on neighbour’s lawns and 100 flyers, folded and stacked, went out in each and every mailbox for a 2-block radius as I pedalled my shitty old beater of a bike around one Sunday afternoon. Ads in 2 newspapers were free, but to up my chances of hitting every available family in the surrounding suburbs, I spent another $70 per week on 5 more newspapers.

A phone call here and there didn’t do much. One of them was a heartbroken old Scottish lady that hung up on me and expressed much surprise when I was able to ring her straight back. She hadn’t really wanted to call but her sister had made her promise she would, and she choked up a bit as she told me that she was pretty sure she saw my cat on the side of a main road by our house. The description fit and the location was precise, as that road is directly behind our house, but luckily I’d spoken to the neighbour the day I’d lost Friday, and he’d said that he was sure the cat had been hit that morning, making it impossible to be her. By description though, it was probably her mother, one of the ferals from our crusty old neighbour next door.

Hope was fading, and then yet another old deaf gal rang me, telling me that she’d been feeding a cat similar to the description but was unable to catch it, but she’d ring me if she could catch it. Her address wasn’t far, and her description was really, really close (for an old lady) so I asked her if I could come over and look around. I actually asked after I’d already ridden my bike to her front gate (a large and very foreboding front gate) but she said I wasn’t allowed in and that she’d ring me. Another 150 flyers later, and I was canvassing her neck of the woods when I did a huge double-take. This cat was the exact same size and description, only her orange spots were ringed by black. I might’ve thought Friday had mutated but there was something very different about the eyes of that cat staring at me. To be honest and a bit silly, I couldn’t feel any love. Other than that and the black colouring, she was a dead-ringer for Friday.

Despondent, I finished the flyers and went home. I let the newspaper ads run out and I stopped checking the “Found” section. A few more weeks passed and I couldn’t bear to look at the folder on my desktop with the files for the fliers and the pictures of her, so I renamed it from “Lost Cat” to “lc” instead of throwing it out. Then, last night while going through some photos that my 8-year old son had taken with my camera (he’s really quite talented) his clever little artistic eye had seen fit to get several shots of Friday eating her dinner, probably not long before she’d gone missing. It was too much. Later, laying in bed, I started making plans for a memorial for her, so that we could say “good bye” and maybe get some closure. I was ready to let go.

Then, this morning while making the kids lunches for school, I heard a noise that could only be described as so insistent that it was obnoxious. A yowling outside my front door that I figured had to be either yet another feral cat from next door, looking to either get down and dirty on my front door or just got caught pissing on my truck tires again. I could hear the voice in the back of my brain telling me not to get too excited, not to even consider the possibility of such a one-in-a-million chance that it was my cat.

And there she was, sashaying into the house the same way she did a year ago, as if she was simply being exactly where she belonged. Skinnier and smelling funny and meowing loudly and insistently, almost as if to try and tell us all about the crazy adventures she’s been having.

She’s on my lap again now, dozing happily while I’m typing this, and I have to say that she actually is exactly where she belongs.

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