Among the sacrifices loved ones make for one another is The Move to a New City. Dearest, I need you in my life, but that life now includes a job-slash-school in a place where the weather is strange, the grocery aisles are wrong, and the pub rats don’t know us.
The house we lived in after the first big move, from California to Boston, accommodated the girls. I would’ve preferred the city proper, closer to classes, but they needed a yard, a stoop, a shaded street.
When we moved to Denver, it was my turn: an apartment blocks from work and the thrum of downtown; a courtyard to gaze upon, but no real yard. For nearly six years, they’ve borne their disappointment, knowing my heart beats to the rhythms of Capitol Hill.
How giving, and mostly uncomplaining, they’ve been. And soon their season will cycle back.
For four months starting in May, Sophie and Fleetwood, my cats, will have a yard to call their own, plus a family with two kids eager for interim pets. My sabbatical is a return of sorts to California, to San Jose, my hometown and a base from which I can visit a sister recovering from radiation and chemotherapy. Pancreatic cancer.
I have promised the cats, and myself, that the next place we buy or rent will allow them to scamper, chew grass, bury unmentionables in the sunny dirt. Pets aren’t children, though otherwise sane people act as if Rex and Fluffy are in fact little humans with fur and a long, inexplicable record of truancy. Still, the end reason to keep company with any creatures, human or non-, is to do part of your living through them.
Married Stan tips ’em back with single Jeff for the vicarious thrill of sex unimpeded by kids or routine. Mom never misses Jane on the parallel bars because she loves and supports Jane, but also because the parallel bars proved her own undoing in college.
Indoor cats live longer (my spry specimens have made it to 13). They avoid feline leukemia and other diseases that require a raft of shots, the sort of vaccinations antibiotic-fearing parents refuse for their kids. They don’t get picked off by raccoons or sadistic teens.
But Sophie and Fleetwood crave a return to outdoor air and interaction, or at least I crave it for them. I’m not sure if felines are simply smaller, tamer versions of the big cats. I am sure that my cats, abandoned littermates saved by my brother-in-law so long ago, are too sheltered to know they might not be wild.
It’s this potential myth that Sophie, Fleetwood and I share, the idea that wildness is always with us, even in a flat with a litter box, even in a cubicle blotted by fluorescence. My cats must again scale trees, torment dogs and pounce from bushes because sometimes the only jungle I can imagine is filled with Disney predators that speak in complete sentences and sound like David Schwimmer.
Speaking of “Ross,” he had some sort of tiny, anthropomorphic monkey in early episodes of “Friends,” a pet only a shade less manly than my blue-cream calico and brown-and-red sort-of Maine coon. Dudes aren’t supposed to have such pets. Women, it seems, used to like the sensitivity associated with owning a cat; today, it’s like they’ve just discovered I’m not The Rock.
“A man with cats must never live alone,” a Parisian woman once warned me at a writing retreat in Holland.
“Why not?”
“Because then he won’t be social.”
I guard against this by socializing plenty and seldom discussing my felines. Like rooting for a favorite team, you either get it or you don’t. It’s not up to me to show people where the wild things are.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
