around every corner, you’re no longer there

I want to thank the great number of you for the outpouring of support and kind wishes over the loss two days ago of one of my best, my dearest and truest of friends, who just so happened to be an old, blind cat named Banjo. He was indeed better people than most people you could ever meet.

So many people-people, we human ones, simply don’t get it, a close bond, a reciprocal lifetime connection, with a pet. Because pets to wide swath of unlucky folks are just something outside, on chains, in pens or in little plywood houses other than our own homes, sleeping at the tops of driveways or on porch steps, or relegated to country barns killing mice or rats, or to hunting-season cages in the backs of pickups, to be fed and maybe patted a little, maybe, but otherwise largely ignored. And sure, maybe sometimes you could get close to a dog, but even then, it’s still an animal, right? It’s not like it’s human.

And a cat? I mean, it’s just a cat, I have too many times heard people say. You can always get another one, anytime.

One time, when I lived for a couple ugly years in Elizabeth City, just after the dawn of the last century, I was doing some story or other for a Virginia newspaper, a piece that involved the local city council. I was over at the home of one of the council members, interviewing him. He was a public-school art teacher by day, a guy I held in pretty decent regard up until that moment. A fellow council member happened also to be there, an overgrown child of a man who should never have been elected to anything; the two had grown up friends in that same neighborhood. Somehow the subject turned to cats, and the second council member asked the first: Remember how when we were kids, we used to take kittens and throw them at cinderblock walls to kill them? And the two of them then laughed. And they laughed. And these wretched idiots laughed.

Those were just cats, after all. You can always find another one of them. I mean, there are a million of them.

And each one of them can be one in a fucking million. Because they are, truly, as unique as any one of us. And potentially more loving and devoted than most of us could ever allow ourselves to be, if those animals are given half a chance before the wildness from neglect or feral living has taken over.

It is for damn good reason those ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as gods.

Old Blind Boy Kitty, as we often called him, was a lumbering love of an endlessly devoted soul, a “furry Roomba” as my wife, Lisa, sometimes joked, for his maneuvering a room head-first, who would so often purr just at the sound of my voice when I came into that room, his great fluffy head tilting and turning as if still trying to see me. As a young sighted cat, Banjo would meet me at my front door, excited to hear me as I came home from work, and he’d talk and talk and talk to me from the other side, until I came in, when he would, every single time, race across the room to jump on this round table I had then, just so he would be at arm-level for me to pet him. Then he would close his flawed eyes, working his downy forehead further into my hand, and just purr and purr and purr. Because to him, I mattered so much, so very much. I lived alone then, in the middle of a permanent separation from my first marriage, at the outset of a divorce. Banjo was not “like family,” as devoted pet owners sometimes say of their pets. He was actual family, as are, and always have been, all of my wonderful furry brood, woof and meow alike.

He was, in fact, the most loving of family I could ever have asked for.

I found him nearly 16 years ago, as a deathly ill kitten in a rainy alley on a chilly December night in Farmville. The local vet said that very next day, forever earning my disdain, that she had literally seen him earlier that same day I found him, on an adjoining street, and thought she should go back for him, and then something came up, and she didn’t. Also, that she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to make it anyway. She had chalked him up already to dead.

But there I was out walking that night before, lonely and honestly uncaring of the steadily misting rain, catching occasional strains of a ramshackle choir still struggling through Christmas carols on the steps outside a church a couple of blocks away. I had taken a short-cut down the narrow service alley that runs behind part of downtown Main Street, heading home then, dodging puddles, when a car turned in at the far end of the alley, lights haloed in the descending mist, and forcing me up against the closest wall … where I nearly stepped on a wobbly little ball of fur and sickness in haphazardly piled wet leaves; the huddled thing would indeed surely have died there before morning. But not then, not yet, as he stumbled back behind me a few feet, visibly shaking, a large white growth obscuring much of one of his eyes, and barely able to stand. And then, he just stopped, and he looked at me, as best he could. And he mewed, the very tiniest of sounds, a tone all his own, which I swear to you I can hear in my head even now, and which melted part of me even then. And then, he waited.

So, against all the internal voices saying no, no, no, you have two other cats already, you can’t take on this sick little creature right now, you have no money, you idiot, for fuck’s sake, you’re barely just back to being employed, you can’t, you just can’t, you … I turned toward him, and then began the bittersweet little pas de deux I think about now almost constantly. I’d advance just a little, coaxing, cooing, come on, little guy, you’re OK, it’s gonna be OK, don’t be scared, I’m not gonna hurt you, and more on and on like that, and he’d retreat a few feet again, then stop and, again, he’d just mew.

When I stood up with him and turned to face Sue, his mewing now like an insistent alarm clock, he had gotten a tiny claw embedded in my left ear, and my love for the rest of his remarkable life.

At least 20 minutes of this later, now in a heavier rain, and with the help then of my wonderful sister-in-law, Sue, who lived with my sister in a house just nearby, I finally got my hands around the terrified ailing fluffball, out from a sprawling pile of rain-flopping cardboard boxes he’d managed to wedge himself behind.

Sue, drenched then as I was, bless her lovely soul, said with a chuckle, “I guess he’s yours now.”

Except she had it exactly backwards.

I have had a lot of loss in my own life; it’s just part of living, and loving, really loving, and it happens on its own inalterable timetable, our most fervent wishes be damned. And his has been, in no uncertain terms, one of the single-greatest losses I have ever endured.

If you get that, then you do. If you don’t, then I honestly wish for you that once in your own life, and the life of a needy animal, you have, and take, the chance to. I’m not going to sugarcoat things and say that this pain I’m in is not hideous, but what brought me to it was its own very special kind of glorious, no ifs, no ands, no buts. And I wouldn’t trade one second of my time with that dear old beautiful soul to be rid of all of this wretched hurt that follows me right now, not for all of this big and troubled world itself.

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