Great Encounters of the Other Kind (4)

Unexpected happy returns

The returns are immeasurable in terms of money.  Just as money cannot buy the wag of a dog’s tail, so could it not buy the reassuring magic of cats whose personalities (or catnalities and dognalities, as our father used to say) are as enjoyable, interesting and as varied as they come.

Take Rexit.  Imperious, jealous of her privacy and would much prefer to be left alone, she gives joy to someone who wakes up at dawn to prepare an early day’s breakfast.  Rexit always accompanies her down the stairs and wakes her up if she fails to wake up on time.  My eyesight or taste may be put to question, but I daresay that Rexit, who by the way has very clean habits, is as beautifully exotic as the actress wife of Alain Delon.

Tuxe is the exact opposite of Rexit.  He loves to be cuddled, even by strangers, and knows how to entertain visitors as if he understands human conversations.  Once so unattractive with a so-so face and sparse hair that stood out like worn bristles of a rejected hair brush, these days eight months after, with his shiny black and white hair that makes him look like he is going to a ball in a tuxedo, he has been transmogrified into a long-legged, regal young pharaoh.

Lexa is an oxymoron.  A bit weak in the head, she looks like a nerd without the intelligence that goes with it.  Yet she has two beautiful large eyes whose size is matched only by her trusting innocence.  Onyx meanwhile seems to have the strain of a Persian cat.  She is quiet and as svelte as Julia Roberts with a face similar to that of Winona Ryder’s with a hint of Assunta de Rossi’s.  And I do not mean to insult these beauties, nor our cats.

Ewox is now a full black ball of delight.  He holds a secret.  In the lower middle of his belly is a three-inch tuft of white hair that looks no different from that on the map which Shakespeare called “the sacred spot that is England.”

Admittedly we have our practical limits to what we could take.  But much as I would wish to wring the necks of those humans who threw or neglected these cats and kittens, I could still say that it is their misfortune that they do not know what they are missing.

Someone to blame, in case

Once, a visiting friend of the husband’s asked me if by chance the husband is not only humoring me over these cats.  I confidently answered that such humor could not have lasted this long.  His patience would have long worn thin if it were so.

“Never get between a child and his pet,” our father once said.  While I understood it then as our father’s way of taking the side of children who brought home pets, which I excelled in, in my adult life the wisdom of those words rings truer.  Pets, I have learned, are stabilizing for children.  It is said that in their own uncomplicated way, pets help prepare children emotionally for the more complicated relationships with fellow human beings later in the ambiguity of their adult lives.

Perhaps now my continuing compassion, or passion, for animals is unusual; abnormal, even.  But if things are difficult to explain, I can always call on the origins of our genes.  Our paternal grandmother had a pet pig, so our father’s story went.  The pig had a free run of the house, even walked the living room, and accompanied our grandmother to church.  Grief expectedly descended on the house when it was run over by a speeding vehicle.

My two younger siblings meanwhile had a firsthand experience of another kind with our maternal grandmother when they were early graders. They came home from a vacation in those halcyon days with just one story for me.  They grieved for and buried a dog named Kosygin.  Giving a beloved dog the most possible decent burial they could give, the three of them, grandma and two grandchildren, did a private hearse by walking around the house more than once in single file, with flowers in their hands.  My brother then planted a cross he made on the dog’s grave at the backyard.  Those memories are reassuring.  If I cannot explain something in me, I credit my ancestors!

As for the husband, he may not have such background stories to lean on but he does have a poignant primeval memory of a sweet, reassuring lullaby his mother used to sing to him.  He can even recall the lyrics, which go thus, “Close your eyes my baby bol/ Slumber on iring kibol…”

(2004)