What's New, Pussycat?
All those cool cats & kittens
I walked in my door to my (supposedly) empty house, just in time to hear a great swell of music — some crooner from the 1940s or thereabouts. Having seen plenty of horror movies, thanks to Dan, I fully expected to come across some dancing ghosts or at the very least an axe murderer. But then I discovered that the music was coming from Spotify on my computer, and from the number of Finder windows open (12) I can only assume the cat was playing on my keyboard when I was out. Whew.
I did not grow up in a cat family. My mom was allergic, so that was the end of the story. My brother and I had both heard the story of her junior prom, when she was over at a friends’ house before her date picked her up, petted her friend’s cat, and blew up into crazy hives all over her body. She had to get in the bath with her prom-ready hair and it was a whole thing.
The spring before I turned 14, my friend Sacheen’s cat had kittens. They were soooooooo cute, y’all. It’s possible I fell in love with one, named “Panther.” It’s possible I went home and asked my mom if she thought she could live with a cat if I took care of it and she never touched it. It’s possible that she told me that it didn’t matter if she could, because my dad hated cats with the fire of a thousand suns (it’s possible I’m paraphrasing). It’s possible I went to my dad anyway and asked him if I could please have a cat. He said no. He said, “I’m so sorry, Susie, I just can’t.” I understood. I dropped it.
Of course, when my birthday finally arrived, I discovered that Sacheen and my parents had been in cahoots. Sach gave me a birthday card with a photo of Panther inside. My mom had secretly had allergy tests done and found that if she was careful, and washed her hands after she touched the cat, she’d most likely be fine. And my dad just loved me that much. After I returned from 2 weeks at theater camp, I would be the proud owner of Hamlet (neé Panther), the cutest little black kitten you ever did see.
Hamlet was definitely mine — he slept on my pillow and I was in charge of cleaning up after him — but he formed relationships with other family members. Shockingly, he loved my dad. My dad treated him like a small dog, and Hammie loved that. He would sit on my dad’s stomach, being roughly scratched behind the ears and spoken for in the special “dog voice” that my dad used when voicing our pets’ innermost thoughts. When I finally moved out permanently, it was decided that Hamlet was too old and set in his ways to move with me. My parents cared for him for the rest of his life.
My senior year of college, I got an off-campus apartment with my friend Martha. She had decided that, as soon as she had a place of her own, she had to have a cat. I was willing to share space with a kitty, so off we went to the shelter where we would find Malcolm: a giant, gorgeous black cat with 6 toes. He was a terror, and my brother’s friends still talk about sleeping on our apartment floor and being attacked by Malcolm in the middle of the night.
After that tumultuous year, I was Childless Catless lady for a while. Then (as so many of my tales begin) I met Dan.
If you’ve been reading me for a bit, you probably remember that Dan and I found each other when I was 24 and he was 32. He already had a house and was a full-on adult, and I was attempting to be one as well. Our relationship moved fairly quickly, and by the following spring I had moved in. We weren’t quite ready to get married, but we definitely were having Commitment Vibes, so what did we do? Adopted a cat, of course.
Angie — named after the Stones' song — came to live with us after we spent an April afternoon at the Como Park Humane Society. An adorable tuxedo kitty, she was a year and a half old when she was picked up on the mean streets of Roseville, MN. She came into our house — which as you may remember, was little more than stud walls with giant holes in the floors — and found a universe over which she could happily reign. Dan called her “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls” after the Heinlein novel. She chased mice and bats and box elder bugs, and welcomed both of our human babies home by stomping on them and insisting on sharing my lap. We lost her soon after our move up north, but she will forever be our “first baby.”
It wasn’t long before Dan found the catless house to be unacceptable, so to the shelter we went! This time, our kids were in on the adoption process. It was pretty clear that the naughty, runaway kitten was destined to be a Loeffler (though from the look on Dan’s face, I was at one point fearing that we would be leaving with her sister as well). She was dubbed “Ruby Tuesday” (because, tradition) and she folded herself seamlessly into our household.
Ruby loved all of us (except Em for a while, but that’s understandable given that Emily tried to dress her in doll clothes) but I was her favorite. She was a gorgeous, long-bodied feline with the most expressive tail. Though she left us too soon, she is immortalized in my classroom: I recorded my read-aloud the spring of the COVID shut down and one of the chapters features Ruby in the background… drinking out of the fishbowl. My students are always very concerned about the fish on the day of that reading.
This all brings me to Jane. Jane the Cat. Lady Jane. Sweet Jane. Jane Says. JANE. Before Jane was a Loeffler, she was a Maxa. (Maxa is the Dean of Students at my school, and an agent of chaos.) It took fewer than 24 hours for her to terrorize the dog, climb up the screens in the porch, and win all of our hearts. Emily is her very favorite, but she has unique relationships with all of us. If she wants to be held, the fact that she is not picked up does not deter her — she will launch her body onto your shoulders. She will scale your legs and back to see what you are making for dinner. She will perch on the half wall between the staircases and give you a punch as you go by. Jane the Cat keeps us on our toes.
I suspect ours will always be a cat household, even if at some point we decide to be dogless. Not because we like cats more than dogs, but probably because we need to be taken care of, and the cats seem more able to take on the job.
Thanks for reading.
Love, Susie
