Three nights before Christmas and if any mice are stirring in this house, they'd best be packing their things. All is in readiness for the arrival of Scout, the grey tabby shelter kitten who is scheduled to join the Oakes household on the day before Christmas Eve.
There is strategy in this timing. Like many parents at this time of year, Petra and I have checked our list quite a bit more often than twice and cannot shake the anxiety that we have not bought enough presents for the children, or that one or the other of them will perceive some sort of imbalance, or that we will in some other way fail at Christmas this time around. Parenthood, after all, mainly consists of an endless series of opportunities to screw up, and never more so than around marquee holidays like Christmas.
So it is our hope that Scout's arrival, two days before Christmas, will trigger the following sequence of events.
First, the children will rocket to previously unimagined heights of ecstasy.
Next, after Petra and I have enjoyed their worshipful adulation for a bit, we will advise them that a cat requires considerable startup investment and so the rest of the overall gift haul may be slimmer than usual this year.
Then, as usual, what we fear is a skinny number of gifts on paper will look like a veritable mountain under the tree, even before augmentation by grandparents and other relatives, and Christmas will turn out perfectly after all—because, you know, getting stuff is the point of Christmas, right?
I feel confident in saying that, as long as Petra and I don't tip our hand in the meantime, Scout's arrival will be the biggest surprise of our children's lives so far. This is because, throughout the entire said lives to date, we have insisted that no fur-bearing pet would ever be allowed into our home. This has turned out to be a deception, but it was an easy one to carry off because we always believed we were telling the truth.
Our main excuse was the matter of Petra's allergies. These were diagnosed in the first years after she and I started dating, when we were living in our first apartment and, not incidentally, sharing it with the cat Petra brought into our relationship. Frustrated by a chronically stuffy nose, Petra submitted to one of those skin tests that doctors use to identify a patient's specific allergies and learned that hers included both dog and cat dander.
Her allergies weren't severe. How could they have been? In addition to then owning her own cat, Petra had grown up in a cat-owning household, and even with all the hours she had logged in the presence of cats it had never yet occurred to her that she might be allergic to the things. Indeed, we found that her symptoms were reasonably controllable with a program of conscientious vacuuming and making sure Petra washed her hands after petting her—our—cat.
But there was also the problem that this cat was not the best ambassador on behalf of feline-dom. Although undeniably cute and endearingly affectionate, over the years she started to acquire the unfortunate tendency to avoid her litter box in favor of anything else that resembled one in the slightest: suitcases left open during packing, baskets of fresh laundry, drifts of clothes unwisely allowed to develop in the back corner of a closet.
It's not that these accidents happened every week, but they tended to stick in the mind when they did occur. Petra, who has lacked a sense of smell since adolescence, had to rely on my nose to detect the evidence. I developed a tic of sniffing my way around the apartment, wondering if I had really just caught a whiff of the distinctive ammoniac stench of a cat's leavings or if I were just imagining it. How could I help forming the impression that cats were nothing more than walking, furry bags of urine? Even in the best-kept cat-owning households, I started to notice, there seemed always to be a slight tang of this scent in the air.
In other words, even if Petra and I had never had children, we would have been leery at the prospect of maybe once again having to vigilantly guard laundry baskets and sniff couch cushions before sitting down. Then all of a sudden there were two small kids around, and obviously only a crazy person would have introduced into the house yet another being whose sole contribution would be messes for us grownups to clean up. So a good number of years passed during which it seemed inconceivable that we would ever again own a cat.
Then Belle started talking about getting a rabbit. By this fall, it had become clear that she, even more so than Axl, who at least has his own snake, would never relinquish her dream of owning some kind of pet mammal. This fall, understanding cats and dogs to be incontrovertibly out, she started thinking about smaller animals that could be contained in some way, to limit the spread of their allergens throughout the house, and she hit on rabbits: cuddly, yet confineable.
In the way children have of moving their parents by inches, she raised the idea of getting a rabbit first as an outside possibility and then just kept talking about it as though it might actually happen. A few weeks later, Petra and I realized we had dilly-dallied too long. Because we hadn’t confronted and contradicted every single one of her assertions, she was increasingly under the impression that she really might get a rabbit.
Clearly, something had to be done, because who the hell wants to live with a rabbit? They bite, I've heard, and not only do they poop while they eat, they then eat the poop for dessert. I didn't want one, but I didn't realize how strongly Petra agreed with me until one day she mentioned that maybe she could live with a cat again after all. Especially if she could be spared any of the litter-box cleaning, at worst a cat might lead to some occasional discomfort, and what is a little discomfort to a mother, compared to granting her children's fondest desire? (Just another one of "love's austere and lonely offices," I suppose.)
Petra texted a friend of hers who volunteers with the animal shelter in the next county, and soon we were ordering cat supplies (to be delivered to Petra's office, so as not to give the plan way), setting an initial appointment with a veterinarian, and otherwise making the necessary arrangements to bring Scout home on the day before Christmas Eve.
This was a bewildering turn of events, because in addition to the bad experiences we'd had with Petra's cat, wasn't I really a dog person, at heart? I'd always thought so. Certainly I had grown up in a dog-owning family. Not only did my family own three dogs (in series) throughout my childhood, but my father was always telling stories about his own dogs, starting with the one that had been his faithful companion as he explored the Chesapeake Bay island where he grew up.
After I left home, decades passed during which I not only never acquired my own dog but almost never felt the slightest desire to do so. Still, the combination of growing up with dogs and then having my belongings peed on regularly by a cat combined to strengthen a sense of allegiance to the former.
About two or three years ago, when I had once again started working from home, I did briefly entertain the idea that perhaps it would be nice to have a dog around for company. A dog would not only reliably pee outside but might also cause less trouble for Petra, I thought, because it could be trained to stay off of furniture and beds and countertops and thus reduce opportunities for her to cross paths with its dander.
But then again, no. By a curious happenstance, our neighborhood is replete with object lessons as to the big and small miseries available from dog ownership. In just the next two blocks, there are compulsive barkers, escape artists, and yards landmined with excrement, which the kids are forever tracking home. Then there are the walks, and the necessity of arranging for a walker if one travels away even just overnight. It all sounds like a hassle, even in the best case, and even the best poker players know you shouldn't count on drawing a handful of aces.
A dramatic example of just how badly dog ownership can go is available at the home of some people who live not two blocks from where I sit typing this.
Welcomed into that household as a cute little puppy (naturally), their dog is now a dangerous and aggressive she-wolf with one gory mangling and several lesser but still not insignificant biting incidents on her record, not to mention a compulsion to bark incessantly and furiously at anyone with the temerity to enter one of the backyards neighboring her own. This would be bad enough even if her owners didn't persist in a state of pronounced denial concerning just how frustrating and even frightening their dog can be.
When one set of their neighbors installed an eight-foot fence made of solid white plastic between the two backyards, it was a physical manifestation of how profoundly the simple decision by one family to get a dog has torn the social fabric of this neighborhood.
But first, before all of the dogs in my life, there were cats. One was real, and the others were what adults would call imaginary.
When I was born, in the mid-1970s, my parents were not long out of a several-year peripatetic dropped-out phase that had taken them, in their roughly converted Chevy Greenbrier van, from Boulder to Austin to New Hampshire to Maine. They reentered society in D.C., so my mother could enroll in library school. Adams-Morgan, the neighborhood where they found an apartment, would one day become quite fashionable, but in those days it was still a good place to find a cheap apartment.
We lived in a second-story walkup above an awning shop. There was a back porch looking out over the alley and surrounding rooftops and backyards, and it was onto this porch that a cat came strolling one day, as dignified and self-assured as if he had made an appointment. We put down a saucer of milk, and that night we brought him indoors.
I cannot now remember this cat's name, so I'll call him Felix, but I do remember how he earned his keep. Each night, he would stalk and kill roaches, dotting the carpet with their corpses for us to find in the morning. In an old notebook, I recently found where I’d recorded my father conceding that, although he'd been glad of the help, he might rather not have known how many roaches we were living among.
To help me feel better about the dark stretch of hallway near my room, my mother painted in mural size the tiger from Henry Explores the Jungle to keep me safe. An imaginary cat was just right for protection against imaginary threats; the real one turned out to be on guard against the real dangers in the night.
It was my father’s practice to sit up late reading, in a chair below some windows that looked out onto the fire escape. One night as he read, he noticed Felix moving his head as if he were tracking movement outside one of these windows. Turning, my father found himself looking at the face of a man who was peering in. My father turned out the light and called the police, who arrested the man for being in possession of what the law calls burglar tools.
My mother found appointment as a children’s librarian in the city system. Through her work, she discovered a love for the art and craft of storytelling and even went so far as to seek training and mentorship from advanced practitioners. My elementary-school years were dotted by her visits to my classrooms as a storyteller, the class—rendered giddy by the break in routine—clustering excitedly on the rug at the front of the room to listen to tales of The Mixed-Up Witch, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly, and Joji, the Boy Who Drew Cats.
As the story of Joji opens, we learn that he is of concern to his parents because he neglects his chores in favor of obsessively drawing pictures of cats. His parents apprentice him at the village temple, in hopes that the priest will be able to guide him in a more productive direction. Eventually the priest, too, admits defeat and tells the boy that, since he can't seem to stop drawing cats, he must return home. Fearing that his father will be angry with him, Joji instead decides to try his luck at the next village’s temple but finds it empty, almost abandoned. Evening is coming on, but—before bedding down for the night in a storage closet—he festoons the main room’s rice-paper screens with cat drawings, concluding with one that is almost as long as the entire room.
During the night, Joji wakes to the sounds of a violent struggle. He cowers in his closet until daylight, when—carefully sliding open the closet’s door—he finds a rat “the size of a cow” lying dead in the middle of the main room’s floor.
And when he’d gone to bed, hadn’t the big cat he'd drawn been facing in a different direction?
The villagers rejoice at the destruction of the monster that had been plaguing them, and the priest invites Joji to live at the temple as long as he wants. Joji accepts and settles down to a long career as an artist, albeit one with only one subject.
By the time my mother was regularly telling this story, our own cat had been dead for several years. He’d had to be “put to sleep,” I was told, a figure of speech that was confusing to my three-year-old ears. While I'd been at preschool one day, he had misjudged a leap onto the top of our small black-and-white television set. Overbalanced and scrabbling for purchase on its smooth surface, he pulled it down on top of himself, killing the television instantly and himself eventually.
In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov traces a motif through his early memories. A family friend, a general in the Tsar's army, shows the boy a trick with matchsticks. Fifteen years later, an old man stops Nabokov's father on the street to ask for a light, and when the proffered match flares Nabokov recognizes the now former general, disguised and in flight from the Bolsheviks.
“What pleases me," writes Nabokov, "is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904-1905, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over the frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
The purpose, or at least a method?
Because here I am back at owning a cat again, and the most bewildering thing about Scout's impending arrival is how much I am looking forward to it. I spent so many years thinking I preferred dogs over cats because they were trainable and seemed more generally helpful. Now I find I myself thinking I prefer cats after all, and maybe precisely because they aren't these things. I find myself drawn to their quiet aloofness and self-possession. In my current mood, they feel like an animal analogue to the iconoclasm of the artist, which is perhaps why Joji felt them to be kindred spirits.
I am large, I contain multitudes, apparently. Is it the case that we never stop changing, or that we never change at all?
