Now for a little background on today’s situation. When we had Urban Family Thanksgiving on Saturday, Rick hung the wishbone up over the sink to dry out. I had a feeling that this was a bad idea, since Charlie thinks the sink is a fun place to hang out, but forgot about it until last night when I caught sight of it. But because I was in the middle of hanging Christmas decorations, I forgot about it again. Until I stepped on a piece of it in my bare feet this morning. I say “a piece” because it was in pieces. And I could only find enough pieces to make up about half of the wishbone. I panicked a little. The cats seemed fine, but you always hear that animals will die if they eat cooked poultry bones, and for all I knew both cats had eaten some. All I could think of was the time my old dog ate a brillo pad, and the vet told us to feed her bread and butter so the steel wool would adhere to it on its way through her digestive tract. Problem: cats do not like bread and butter, so I gave them wet food instead, felt their tummies to see if it caused them discomfort, and when it didn’t, head off to work.

I spent a large portion of the day convinced that I would come home to find one or both of them lying dead in a puddle of blood caused by the wishbone piece that had punctured their GI tract, so I left early. When I got home, both of them were absolutely fine and happy to see me home at that unaccustomed hour. However, this begs the question, how do we get our wish? Was the wish used when I spent the whole bus ride home thinking “Please let them be all right!”? Or do we have to rip Charlie apart by the front legs?

Charlie does many tricks. He fetches his toy mousies and brings them back, he begs for food at the counter (okay, that’s probably not a good trick, but it’s cute as hell), and he will sit like a prairie dog or give you a high five for a treat or a bit of food. He’s not quite as smart as Joe, I don’t think, but we praise him often for wanting to please us and perform, because Little Man was practically feral when we got him. We expect more from him than from Freddie because he’s obviously smarter, and because he does tricks, you often hear “Goo’boy, Charlie!” in our house. Tonight, however, Freddie must have gotten tired of all the praise showered on the interloper, because when I held out a piece of turkey to him, he slapped me four (he doesn’t have thumbs, four is all he’s got). I made him do it four times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but it seems that he’s learned a new trick. He also apparently learned how to sit like a prairie dog somewhere along the line, because he did that, too.

And yes, he has been praised repeatedly for his new skills. Sped Cat has proven that even slow cats occasionally learn new tricks. Goo’boy, Freddie!

We have two litter boxes in our bathroom for the cats. One is an extra-giant one that I line with sifting liners to make my life easier. I scoop every day, but when it gets really foul, I just take out one of the liners and life is all better, no scrubbing. I am lazy, and not really into coming into closer contact with cat feces than I have to. The other litter box is a LitterMaid, an electric one that scoops the poop so I don’t have to. It rakes it up nice and neat into a little tray, and I empty the tray every few days or so. It is a leftover from Piss Crusader days, when my vet suggested cleaning the box more often as a way of keeping Jesse from pissing all over the house.

Joe was cool with the electric litter box. So was Jesse. Charlie also took to it like a duck to water. But Freddie…that thing is his mortal enemy. He will hang out in front of it after it’s been used and wait for the raking to begin (it’s set to ten minutes after the cat exits the box). He trembles with a mixture of fear and excitement while he’s waiting for that to happen, and goddess help you if you touch him to try to calm him down while he’s doing this. I tried once, and he jumped two feet up in the air and came down with all claws out right on my hands. I’ve left him alone since then.

When the litter box starts its rake cycle, Freddie springs into action. He waits with one paw poised, for the lid on the disposal tray to flip up, as it does when cat poo is being dumped into it, and quicker than you would believe, he whacks the damned thing. Sometimes he whacks it repeatedly, and I’ve even caught him biting it. The electric litter box is Freddie’s mortal enemy, and I truly believe that in his little cat mind (and it is a small one), his facing it down every day is a feat of courage unequaled by most of us in our lifetimes.

Unfortunately, Freddie is also a spazz. Well, I guess that could have been inferred from the hatred of the electric litter box, but whatever. Any time he uses the other litter box, he is more likely to pull the liner over his deposits than he is to scoop the litter over them. I’ve even seen him paw at the wall to “bury” things. I have told him on numerous occasions “Dirt, not plastic” as a reminder of what to cover his poo with, but he is a cat of small brains and does not listen.

So yesterday, as I was in the shower, he used the regular litter box and pulled the liner down over his pee. He then left. I thought nothing of it until I was getting out of the shower and I saw him tentatively step on the disposal tray cover of the electric litter box. I thought he was going to bite it and tried to shoo him off, but then he put one cautious foot after another into it until he was planted in prime poo position, and he did what he needed to do. I was shocked, until I looked over at the other litterbox and realized the dumbass had pulled the liner completely over the litter, leaving him without a place to go.

And that is how Freddie, my brave little toaster, faced his fears and took a shit on his mortal enemy. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us, I’m just not sure what the hell it is.

Miss you, Joe-Joe.

In reality, it was a very lazy day. Rick hit golf balls in the morning, I…didn’t do homework. (Spring Break mentality is killing me, people. I am so behind on the homework, but there I sat watching Project Runway.) In the afternoon, he came home and cooked us beef tenderloin for dinner, and then we flipped back and forth between the Sox game and The Sound of Music. He’s a good boy, letting me not only watch musicals but sing along with them. Although I wonder how much of it he was actually paying attention to and how much he was making up scenes in his head. Like this one, which flew out of his mouth because he has no internal censor:

Maria (on TV): “Which brings me to another transgression, Reverend Mother. I was singing out there today.”

Reverend Mother (on TV): “Only in the abbey do we have rules about postulants singing.”

Maria (on TV): “I can’t stop wherever I am.” (Rick cuts in, as Maria) “In fact, I made up a new song today! Would you like to hear it? ‘Dominique-nique-nique….’”

Rick as Reverend Mother (severely annoyed): Maria! That’s enough!”

I almost pissed myself because I was laughing so hard.

Other than that, we had a very lazy day, as shown in this photo montage.

“Dude, what? I’m sleepin’ here.”

“See? I has a tired.”

“What the hell is the other one up to? Is he going to jump on me again?”

“No, I’m just stretchin’!”

“But I could kick your ass. I have thumbs, you know.”

“I hate my life.”

Actually, that shows that three of us had a lazy afternoon. Freddie looks harassed. Somewhere in cat heaven, Joe is looking down and laughing because now Freddie knows what it’s like. Karma exists, even on the feline level.

Joe passed out of this world on Tuesday night at about 8:30, right as Keith Olbermann was reading the day’s World’s Worst Persons. He had been going downhill for a while, and by Sunday he wasn’t really able to use his back legs. We were bringing food and water to him and taking him to the litterbox when he acted like he needed to go, but on Tuesday morning he wasn’t showing interest in food or water anymore. His breathing had also changed early that morning-it was shallower and more labored. We knew that he was going to go soon, and decided that if he could, we wanted him to pass at home with us instead of with the vet. Joe hated the vet, and I wanted him to have good memories at the end, not be stressed out. I made some calls to let people know what was happening, and we settled in for the wait.

Tuesday was the longest day of my life, and also the hardest. We don’t think he was in pain-he never cried out, just rolled back and forth as his hips would get uncomfortable and occasionally sigh. He stayed with us in the living room the majority of the day, although when the sun finally came out that afternoon we put him in a sunny spot on the bed-he loved to lie in the sun. We sat with him, putting water on his tongue when we could to keep it from drying out, telling him what a good boy he was, petting him, and letting him know how much we loved him. At about 5, I was sure we were going to have to take him to the vet, but I realize now that the waiting was much harder on us than it was on him. He had a couple of mini-tremors in the early evening, and we decided to settle in with him on the couch. Joe lay on Rick’s lap, I sat beside them, and we waited, continuing to talk to Joe and tell him what he meant to us and petting him. His breathing got slower and slower, and then he was gone.

I’m glad he got to go that way, with the two people he loved most holding him and being told how much he was loved in his own home. When it’s my time to come, I hope I can go like that. But even though it was a relief that he had gone relatively easily, that night was so hard on me. I’ve had Joe since I was 14, and every night that we were in the same house, he slept with me. Even when we weren’t in the same place, I knew that Joe was somewhere in the world. That night was the first night in almost 18 years without him. I cried for a long time, because although I’d had him for so long and we’d had such a good life together, when you get down to it, 18 years isn’t long enough. It doesn’t seem fair that this little guy whom I had loved so much, who was basically my little brother, was gone and I had to go on without him. If you’ve ever had a pet, you’ll understand what I mean. Pets love us so intensely-Joe was one of only two creatures in my life that looked at me with adoration every time he saw me (the other was the golden retriever I had as a kid, Brandy). I always felt like the center of his world, and suddenly that was gone.

Joe was a really phenomenal cat. I got him when our neighbors up the street threw him out of the house for having “relations” with his mother (dude, he’s a cat, you didn’t fix him or his mother, shit’s going to happen). We found him later that same day, when he was wandering the streets and came to play with me on my front porch. We had a number of outside cats that we fed and played with at that time, but that afternoon when he saw me and came hurtling across two lanes of traffic and right in front of a semi to get to me, I told mom I thought he was too stupid to stay outside. He might get squashed. She agreed. Boy were we wrong-he was just exhibiting typical gifted behavior: get really focused on something you want and display an alarming lack of common sense in the pursuit of it. We realized he wasn’t stupid when he figured out how to eject tapes from the VCR and then push them back in because he liked the clicking noise (I watched him do that for 10 minutes one night and am still sorry we didn’t have a camcorder to record it). When he figured out that pressing the buttons on the answering machine sometimes let him listen to Uncle Norm talking for minutes on end, we had to keep the answering machine under a box so he wouldn’t break it, too. To this day, these stories are legend among my friends.

Joe could also communicate in ways I’ve never seen with another animal. Until his last few days, I always knew exactly what he was thinking. He was a Siamese mix and had that distinctive yowl as a result, and never hesitated to tell you what he really thought about what was going on. As the years went by, he learned to yowl in ways that sounded like English. You knew damn well when Joe was telling you “No.” We also had a language of head nods. I would nod my head at him, he would do the same back to me. It was our way of saying “Hey, how’s it going? Okay here.” Bongani saw Joe do that one night and incredulously asked “Did that cat just give you props?” Yes. Yes he did. My friend Kim said on more than one occasion that Joe was my familiar, and she was right. If we had been in Salem in 1692, Joe and I would have been toast. Joe spoke my language, or maybe I spoke his. It’s a very quiet apartment without him, and yesterday after Rick went to Pittsfield to check on his ma for the first time in a couple of weeks, Freddie and I looked at each other like “Shit, now what?” For as much as Freddie harassed Joe, what I’ve learned in the past two days is that he really loved him as well. Freddie has been downright subdued since Joe left us, sleeping a lot, glued to my side when he’s awake. He knows that something happened and that Joe isn’t here anymore, and he’s trying to make sense of it just like the rest of us.

So if I’m a little quiet for the next few days, know that’s what I’m doing: remembering my best friend, trying to figure out what to do now, and spending time with the little guy who’s been left behind with me. Think good thoughts for us and for Joe, okay?

I’m going though a lot of ups and downs right now. I have a tendency towards depression – definitely genetic, as most of my family has it as well – but usually by this time of year, I’m through it. Mine is very seasonal affective disorder, and usually the longer days are enough to kick me out of it. We’ve been getting a lot of days of rain in a row this spring, so maybe that has something to do with it. The grey skies bring me down, and then I’m prey to whatever bad thoughts come along. Those thoughts are mainly about my cat Joe these days.

If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know my cat Joe is not exactly a spring chicken anymore. As near as we can figure, he’s 18, turning 19 at the end of August. Joe hadn’t looked or acted his age, well, ever, and I had pretty much decided that the bitchy little guy was going to live forever. Or at least until age 25, like Rick’s brother’s cat Maynard. The plastic incident changed things for Joe. At the time he swallowed the plastic, he was still a fairly respectable 12 pounds. I’ve called him my linebacker kitty for years, and he’s always been solid. I guess those three days without food while we tried to figure out what the hell was going on took their toll and his body started to live off its reserves. He’s gotten thinner and thinner since then. Today, he’s about 8 pounds, and I can feel the bones in his spine and his knobby little knees.

He’s also started to have a fair amount of problems with arthritis. His hips especially bother him, and he went from jumping up on things to trying to jump up but missing, to not even trying to jump. We put up a stool at the end of the bed so that he can get in and out without injury and sleep with us when he wants, but he much prefers us to carry him.

The past couple of weeks, he’s not really shown much interest in the dry food he’s always eaten. I’ve given him wet food, but that leads to diarrhea, and a cat with arthritis in his hips doesn’t need to be squatting in the litterbox every five minutes. He doesn’t have the energy even to move his feet out of the way when he pees, so we’ve been cleaning litter balls out from between his toes a lot. This morning I found that he was so exhausted from a night of diarrhea that when he had peed in the litterbox, he had apparently gotten his tail in it, so there were litter bits stuck there as well.

All of this sounds bad, and when I’m really depressed, I think he doesn’t have much time left with us. I hope that he can make it the next three weeks until my mom comes up for a visit so that she can see him before he goes. But on the other hand, he’s still very interested in the wet food and in treats (most of the time), he always makes it to the litterbox, he still loves to sit beside me and purrs like mad when I pet him, and he played with Rick a bit the other day, swatting at Rick’s hand and eventually biting Rick when Rick wouldn’t quit touching Joe’s paw. So I just don’t know.

I’m talking to the vet this evening, getting medicine to stop the diarrhea, and I’m going to tell her what’s going on and ask her point blank if she could tell me if we’ve reached the point where we’re going to have to put him down. I’ve never had to make that decision before, and never been around when my mom had to make the decision for two of her cats. I like this vet immensely and she likes Joe a lot, so hopefully she can tell me if I’m just being pessimistic or if we’re getting close to the end.

In the meantime, I would really like to see some sunshine instead of grey skies and rain.

While I was on my blog hiatus, Joe managed to rack up another $723 at the vet through the course of two visits, because he ate a piece of plastic. While a genius among cats in a number of respects, he is fucking retarded when it comes to shiny bits of plastic and goes after them on a regular basis. I have known this for as long as I’ve had him, and make a concerted effort to keep them out of his reach, but on this particular day he was faster than me. I’ll start at the beginning.

Rick had gotten a digital photo frame for his mom’s birthday, and I was setting it up. It came with a remote control, and to keep the batteries from being accidentally drained in the box, there was a piece of plastic inserted between the batteries and the remote contacts. You know the type, a card-like thickness, about two inches long and an inch wide, with a red arrow on the end so that idiots know to remove it from the remote. I took it out, stuck it beside me on the couch, and went about uploading photos onto the frame. I took a pee break, and shortly thereafter, Joe started making hacking noises like he was about to launch a hairball. Except no hairball came up, only ropy saliva.

This generally means he’s eaten something he shouldn’t have, so I pried his mouth open and looked for it. I couldn’t see anything. “What the hell did you eat?” I asked, but of course he couldn’t tell me. I suspected the plastic tag, but couldn’t remember if I’d thrown it out or not, so I wasn’t sure. He continued to hack for the next few hours, and in the evening, I called my mom to get some advice. Joe had tried to eat a couple of times, but it immediately came back up. She suggested I take him to the vet if he wasn’t better by the next morning.

The next morning, I called the vet, told them I thought the cat had swallowed a piece of plastic, that he wasn’t able to hold food down, and that I was worried. I took him in. The vet pried open his mouth, but didn’t see anything. He took blood, and because he didn’t know if it was a virus or something making Joe hack (since he couldn’t see the plastic, he apparently discounted that), gave Joe some penicillin, vitamin B12, and something else all delivered subcutaneously with some IV food because he was “very dehydrated.”

The next morning, Joe showed an interest in food and was able to get some down, so I thought hey, maybe he does have a virus. Maybe I was wrong about the plastic. And then the hacking started again, so we went back to the vet. He told me he would do x-rays if I wanted, but they probably wouldn’t show plastic, and since Joe was “very old,” I would have to decide how much money I wanted to spend on him because maybe he was dying. I was a wreck by this point, but told him to go ahead and do the x-rays and left Joe there. I felt awful about this, because Joe hates the vet with a passion, but there wasn’t a lot I could do.

Later that afternoon, I got a call from the vet. They had sedated him for the x-rays and the vet had taken another look down his throat while he was relaxed. And found a plastic tab with a red arrow on it. He removed it and did the x-rays anyway just to make sure nothing else was going on, and they came back clean (I had also been worried about tumors, since Joe had one a year ago, but no tumors in sight). Joe was released to me that evening after the vet had given me a lecture about “cat-proofing” my house. I kind of resented that, since I know that Joe has a thing for plastic and have never had this problem before, but what the hell.

Joe improved immediately after the plastic was removed (big surprise) and boy was he angry that I wasn’t feeding him as much as he wanted immediately. I could see his point, since he hadn’t eaten in four days at this point, but since he was recovering from anesthetic, I could only give him little bits of food at a time. The rest of the time he bored holes into my head with his angry eyes.

And that’s how Joe got a little bit closer to being the $3,000,000 Cat.

And then Rick went up to Pittsfield on Monday and Freddie was doing things he wasn’t supposed to every two seconds all night long until I was ready to kill him. I told Rick the cat had been acting up since he’d been gone, and he informed me that’s because I let the cat walk all over me, and that I need to get up and discipline him. I told him I was. He said “No, you have to discipline him in a way he understands. You start with snapping your fingers in his face. If he still acts up, you flick his ear. If he does it again, you give him a cat noogie. That’s the most severe thing he gets, and he doesn’t like it.”

I was laughing by this point. “I didn’t realize you had a punishment system complete with tiers of wrongdoing!” I said. Rick just said cryptically, “We’re developing a language.”

Apparently I need to learn a new language.