Goodbye, Butterscotch
Butterscotch was a homeless kitty who’d wandered into the fellowship hall and was speaking louder than the speaker. I didn’t take him home that night. After leaving my life in Washington I didn’t want to have anything I’d have to take care of, nothing to love and lose. The next week someone handed him to me. The women had been passing him around and he smelled of cologne. I stopped at K-Mart for a bag of dry food for him and he had it torn open before we got home. I put some outside and told him he was my outdoor cat. He circled the house yowling for the next two hours. I let him in, but just, I told him, for a little while.
That was about nine years and eight months ago.
He became my indoor-outdoor cat, coming in in the middle of the night announcing his presence. He’d be waiting in the drive when I got home or sleeping in the house and then yelling at me before I could open the door as though he’d been waiting there for hours. He thought five AM was a good time for me to get up and get his tartar control treats until we got that moved to seven. He had a really cute begging gesture. He’d paw my face or my arm or my leg when he wanted something, like petting or treats. It would have been cuter if I’d had him declawed.
I’m trying to think of all the good things about him being gone. I won’t have to get a cat sitter when I go into the hospital this winter. I won’t have to get out of the car in black pants and discover I’m covered in cat hair. The kitchen floor will be safe from dismembered kills and I’ll be able to walk across it barefoot in the dark. I won’t have to worry about burrs and ticks in my bed. I’ll be able to keep my laptop on the bedside table without fear of him knocking it off. There will be no more triangular tears in the curtains from his sudden compulsion to climb them. I won’t have to move his paws when he stretches across my chest, kneads my hair and gets dangerously close to my ear. Never again will I have to wonder if he thinks his name is Damn Cat.
A parade of friends, family and pets from hamsters to horses goes through my mind. I was devastated at the loss of each but don’t feel the pain now. I know I’ll be better in a few days and stop thinking he’ll be waiting for me the next time I come home from work. I won’t go to the door and futilely call when I’ve accepted the fact that he blended into the autumn leaves and vanished in the night.
But right now I can’t stop crying.
