True Tales of Kitty Love by Jo Coudert

Author:Jo Coudert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

IN TOUCH WITH ONE’S FELINES

Ed Goldman

The crying starts as soon as the car starts. “It’ll be all right,” I say as softly as I can, while still fighting to be heard. “Daddy loves you,” I add, figuring there may be some doubt on her part.

I’m already soaked with perspiration by the time I reach the end of the block, the crying now reaching such a feverish, intense pitch that I debate pulling over and reprimanding her. But how can I? She won’t understand and won’t care that this is proving more traumatic for me than it ever will be for her. So I take a deep breath, crank up Mozart’s Turkish March on the classical station and keep telling myself, The hospital is only a mile and a half away.…

Every three days I take my wife’s seventeen-year-old cat, Sabrina, to the Sacramento Animal Hospital for intravenous fluid treatments. They slow down her metabolism, and that keeps her from burning too many calories too fast. Early in her treatments, she weighed four pounds and eleven ounces. Now she’s up to six pounds and two to four ounces, depending on how much of her dinner and then our dinner she eats the night before.

I inherited Sabrina when my wife, Candy, and I began our life together four years ago. The little cat is beautiful and calls to mind a black-and-white Puss in Boots. She also has lungs that would prompt even an opera conductor to say, “Easy.” When I drive her to the treatments, she howls from the moment I strap her carrier into the backseat until the moment when I get her home, unstrap the carrier and let her strut back up the stairs to the house, as though she went to the vet only because she felt like it.

Sometimes between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., she yowls, which is worse than howling, from the first floor of our three-story home. It’s a home with a contemporary, open floor plan. This means the only sound barriers are the earplugs I keep on a shelf behind my pillow.

* * *

I’d never had a cat before, only a couple of dogs. My first dog was a rescue dog, in the truest sense of the word. One evening my first wife (bear with me, as there are a total of three) and I were riding back from dinner with another couple in Long Beach, California. As we came to a stoplight, I noticed there was a very panicked mutt on the island separating the opposing lanes of traffic. She was panting heavily, and that was her only activity since she was, literally, paralyzed with fear. Since my wife and I were passengers, I asked my friend not to go when the light changed (we made many friends that evening). I jumped out of the car, hunched down on the island, about twenty feet from the little dog, and put my arms out. “Come on,” I said as softly as I could above

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