Great Encounters of the Other Kind (2)

Solutions, solutions

When I could no longer bear feeling like a fugitive, I told the husband one day that I just have to learn to let go.  We can take Rexit to that cat shelter in Quezon City that I have read about, find that shelter somehow.  She would become anonymous, fade in like those hundreds of other cats, he protested.  Never had convincing me been so easy.

Then, like a shower of blessings, my kid sister in Cebu who had learned of our dilemma called to say she can take Rexit.  She has a single detached house with a lawn in a safe enclave.  Aware that she held no passion for cats, I never thought of asking her.  But what are sisters for, anyway?  By Christmas, Rexit was already in her permanent home.  The season’s extra gift was the affection for cats my kid sister finally developed.

‘When I play with my cat, who knows I do not make her more sport than she makes me?’  Michel de Montaigne, who established essay as a new literary form, wrote in Essays II.

Who indeed is the plaything when human and feline play with each other?  To be safe, I will just say that a kitten had enhanced sport in the husband.  He was fixing some branches of a tree near the gate when he heard a loud, hysterical meow.  By his account, out of a dirty rolled canvas cloth came a very small kitten, surreptitiously thrown at the gate when his back was turned.  Whoever owned it must be kin to the illusionist David Copperfield.  He disappeared in a split-second.

When I reached the door, I saw the husband tackling a kitten like an American football player.  Scared of the traffic noise, the kitten instinctively went away from it, only to land a breath away from the gaping mouth of a dog.  The husband got it first.  Now he had his own kitten.  And a new responsibility.

Tuxe stayed in the condo for a week and wracked the husband’s nerves with his noise and aversion to being left alone.  That time I was in Cebu to prepare for his book launching.  When he followed a week after, he was lugging Tuxe in a cat carrier.  It turned out that the plane he was in was also a connecting flight from Hawaii.  At the baggage claim area, he was asked by a gracious American lady if he brought the kitten from Hawaii and what its breed could be.  This comes from Luzon and the breed is catus cavitenus, he answered, and prayed that the lady is not a zoologist.

Then Lexa came.  The wails of a kitten in distress made me look out the gate at 1:00 a.m.  There she was, lighted by an approaching SUV’s headlights, hardly able to walk in the middle of the street.  I ran out to stop the car and picked up the most pitiful kitten I have ever held.  Nowhere could I make out where its eyes were.  The vet saved her eyes with professional cleaning and two weeks’ worth of antibiotics. Onyx followed a week after, thin and hungry but spritely.

We surmised that her mother had brought her to our backdoor so she could eat.  A kitten by herself could not have climbed that gateless high cement fence.

Solutions came too as problems cropped up.  This time a great catsitter was available during our absences in the person of a niece, our eldest brother’s only child who came to work in Manila.  She grew up an expert at taking care of pets, even knowing where specific pains of sick domestic animals are, such that I wonder why she became a lawyer and not a veterinarian.

(2004)