As bewitched as all of us Oakeses are by Scout, the cat who joined our household a month ago, we keep her out of the master bedroom so as not to aggravate Petra's allergies. When I emerge in the morning, usually between four and five, Scout is reliably posted in the hallway just outside the door, expectantly awaiting what has become our ritual: I sink to the floor and pet her and scratch her stomach while she stretches and writhes in apparent ecstasy, purring at top volume. She then follows me into the bathroom, patrolling under the clawfoot tub and inspecting the shower stall while I tend to my ablutions.
For a number of years, I have heard arguments that men should pee sitting down but refused to consider it. Sure, peeing sitting down would probably keep things cleaner and might even be better for my "urodynamic parameters," but the ability to pee standing up is my gender's sole consolation for not being able to grow an entire human being inside our bodies and giving it up is a big ask.
I resist no longer and pee sitting down most mornings now. This is because of the time—just a few days after Scout had joined the household and we were just settling into the above routine—I was mid-elimination and suddenly noticed Scout's head emerging from between my legs as she craned to see what all that splashing was about inside the toilet bowl. I only narrowly avoided drenching her and...
"Wait a second," Petra said.
I was in the middle of describing my new morning routine to her and was just explaining how it had only taken a few days for Scout to cause me to relinquish my very masculinity when she broke in.
"I'm just trying to imagine your reaction if we could go back in time and tell the version of you from five years ago that, by 2021, not only would you be happily living with a cat but even changing how you pee because of her and not kicking her out the door instead," she said. "I *think* you'd find it pretty hard to believe."
Indeed. Speaking of urine, for a long time, my official stance had been that I was pretty much revolted by cats—"nothing but furry walking bags of piss," I'd been known to call them, along with pointing out that their vaunted "cleanliness" actually consists only of rubbing themselves down with their own spit—and I felt what I can only call a sort of incomprehension toward anyone who owned any.
In my defense, I'd had personal experience of owning a cat that had not infrequent "accidents." Also, this neighborhood we moved to ten years ago has over the years featured many outdoor cats, so I've had the chance to observe and experience what you might call the externalities of free-running cats.
There was one cat that I would see, from time to time, spraying my grill cover. The leavings of other cats were, from time to time, found in flowerbeds and the children's sandbox.
And, although I never personally witnessed cats in predation mode outside my window, I was aware of the unrelenting, completely unnecessary slaughter that outdoor cats—essentially an invasive species, in this regard—visit on songbirds, killing close to 2.5 billion a year on this continent alone.
On the back of all of this, it had long been easy for me to hold to the belief that the decision to own cats was at least bizarre and even—in the case of people who insist on letting their "walking bags of piss" damage other's property and murder birds who are minding their own business in their own God-given ecosystem—downright selfish.
Then came Petra's startling concession that, despite her cat-dander allergy, she might be able to see her way to letting one of the things into our house, and I was no less startled to notice a sort of thawing in my heart where these animals were concerned. Suddenly I found myself quite a bit more open to the idea than I would ever have expected, and although part of this enthusiasm was on the children's behalf, I found that I was greatly anticipating our new pet's arrival.
Petra was right to point out how unlikely this development might once have seemed.
In addition to my direct experience of some of the downsides of cat ownership, another influence on my attitude toward cats came during my previous stint working for the City of Waldhurst, in a department that tended to receive complaints from the public that were not easily addressable to any other specific arm of the city government.
A surprising number of these complaints concerned cats, sometimes from people resentful of the depredations of outside cats kept as actual pets by their neighbors but most often and intensely from people enduring proximity with what seemed to be Waldhurst's strikingly large population of stray and feral cats.
One case that sticks in my mind concerned a householder who had essentially been forced to surrender not only his backyard but also one of his porches to members of a colony of feral cats that insisted on using these areas as latrines. These cats might have moved in on their own, of course, but the caller found it irksome and unhelpful that his neighbor insisted on feeding them in her own backyard.
I was frustrated to realize that I could do little to help. Our county, one of the largest in the state, is served by exactly one animal control officer. Although in theory the amelioration of such situations lay squarely within the scope of this officer's duties, the reality was that the local animal shelter was almost always too full to be able to accept any more cats and so he mostly just didn't return this kind of call.
It did little good for me to explain to callers who wanted this man's neck wrung that he worked for the county, not the city, and that diplomatic relations between the two governments were chilly at best. Given the choice between calling someone with the authority to help but who never answered the phone and someone who couldn't help but would at least listen and commiserate, many people chose the latter.
With my own strong olfactory memories of the results of just *one* cat *occasionally* peeing somewhere I didn't want her to, I was filled with empathetic horror by details such as how this man's porch was being sprayed by toms so often that, in warm weather, the stench could even be smelled inside.
Such situations offended my sense of justice, and my inability to do anything about them frustrated my strongly felt desire to prove—in contradiction to the self-serving twaddle peddled by people like the Koch brothers and the huge number of American politicians and voters who are essentially their marks—that government *can* help people and accomplish things. By calling this into question, feral and other outdoor cats—as well as their human enablers—began to feel something like nemeses to me.
So it was that, in response to an acquaintance's Facebook post of a kitten swimming in a bathtub with surprising proficiency and even what seemed to be enjoyment, I commented "that's why you need to use a sack" and was promptly unfriended.
I didn't care. With several years under my belt of reflection on the negative traits of the species felix catus and little to no exposure to its upsides, I frankly couldn't understand why people who let their cats run free outside shouldn't be charged with misdemeanor vandalism and/or public-urination-by-proxy and why cats that insist on shitting and pissing in your child's sandbox shouldn't be trapped (as would happen in relatively short order with a loose dog) or even shot like rats or other noxious vermin.
My application of the word "bewitching" to Scout at the beginning of this essay is quite intentional. It seems the best word to capture a relationship in which she inspires longing in all of our hearts—the almost pathetic desire to be the one whose lap she chooses while we are watching television; the children's hope that she will select them to fall asleep next to at night; the foolish pride I feel that, for the last week, she has more often than not chosen a perch by one of *my* office windows to nap on during the day—even as she remains mostly aloof toward us. She needs us, of course, but, to adapt the immortal words of *Cheap Trick*, we also want her to want us, and her relative stinginess with signs that does only intensifies the spell she holds over us.
I'll never call myself a "fur parent," though. No, no, that would be taking things too far. In case you aren't familiar with this terminology, "fur parent" and its sub-variants—"fur mom," "fur dad," "fur nonbinary," etc.—are synonyms for "pet owner." Now, synonyms rarely have precisely the same meanings as one another (that's why a thesaurus can be so dangerous in the hands of a beginner), so the various "fur..." appellations can still be synonymous with "pet owner" even as they attach to very different conceptions of the relationship between pets and the humans who keep them.
What this difference is, exactly, may be hard to nail down. To say that a self-proclaimed "fur X" cares more about their pet than someone who thinks of themself as a mere "pet owner" probably isn't quite right, but it seems safe to say that the former is expressing a more gleeful embrace of and intensity of identification with the project of keeping a pet. At the very least they are probably much more interested in talking about their pets, all the time, in a way that brings to mind the joke about how to tell if someone is vegan: "Don't worry, they'll f***ing tell you."
There is in the Christian tradition the idea of the "holy fool." This idea has manifested differently in different churches, nations, and eras, but in general this category comprises the kinds of prophets, hermits, monks, and mystics famous for demonstrating religious devotion through such antisocial acts as giving away all of their belongings, going naked in all weather, speaking in riddles, evangelizing on street corners, and otherwise behaving in ways that people in society's mainstream tend to find discomforting, disruptive, and even rude.
Although these "fools" have always had their followers—for example, St. Francis, who certainly fits squarely within this category, founded a religious order based on exactly this sort of orientation to/rejection of worldly concerns—they repel many others who are not at all attracted by the prospect of living so far outside of society's norms and don't appreciate the implication that their devotion is suspect unless they do.
It seems to me that there is something of the "holy fool" in certain people whose devotion to their pets greatly exceeds that of most pet owners. In fact, the terms "pets" and "pet owners" aren't entirely accurate here, because I'm referring not only to people who genuinely consider their pets to be actual family members but also people who help at animal shelters, foster cats and dogs to save them from execution and/or socialize them for better adoption prospects, and—most St. Francis-like of all—feed and care for strays "in the wild," so to speak.
The further along this continuum we go, the less we can characterize the human-animal relationship as that of owner and pet and the more we must probably think of it as a sort of philosophy of and orientation to life and the world—you know, sort of like a religion.
Certain stereotypes naturally come to mind when we try to picture someone like this. There is the "crazy cat lady," for example, someone who—in the popular imagination—can best be imagined as a sort of hoarder, but of cats rather than newspapers and empty Pringles tubes.
It is telling that this epithet is gendered and that there is no readily available archetype of the "crazy cat man." Perhaps it seems impossible, to our patriarchally warped mindsets, that a man would indulge himself so frivolously and with so little of what our culture considers to be masculine self-control. And of course it is easy to leap to the conclusion that crazy-cat-lady behavior results from some misfiring or mutation of the maternal instinct and that the cats in question are the objects of a love and devotion that is "supposed" to be but is somehow diverted from being directed at children, not a dynamic that stereotype suggests can arise with men.
As one of many signs that my heart has thawed considerably where cats are concerned, I recently inferred via Instagram that an old friend of mine—I'll call him Raoul—is feeding a colony of stray cats in his neighborhood and not only did I *not* scorch him in the comments, I even tapped the little heart symbol to show that I "liked" the photo he shared.
Really what I meant was that I understood—finally.
If you are operating under the influence of the stereotype that the only people who care about stray cats are frustrated women with disordered desires to have small, cute things to care for—along the lines of the lonely zoo apes we sometimes hear of adopting the young of other species that happen into their enclosures—you might find this friend of mine surprising, and for reasons that go beyond his gender.
Raoul is a journalist and an author of nonfiction books, with long experience in war zones, failed states, and states that are only barely holding on. He speaks at least five languages. He owns a ballistic vest and knows the smell of pepper spray and the sound of small arms fire. He loves ideas and books. I once lost him for more than an hour in the stacks of the glorious Normals Bookstore http://www.normals.com/history.html, in Baltimore, and when he emerged it was with a stack of dusty history and fiction tomes that spoke to his catholic tastes and inquisitive intellect.
The course of his career has naturally caused him to lead an unsettled life, with frequent job changes and irregular pay, moves to and from small apartments in far-flung countries, and sudden long- and short-term travel on assignments.
So it is even more striking that, for at least the last decade and maybe even longer, he has owned and been devoted to what—given that his circumstances would seem to militate against owning even a pet lizard—it feels accurate to term a virtual menagerie of mammals. These comprised three cats and a dog by the summer of 2019, when he sent me a desperate request for assistance. He was taking a new job based in Puerto Rico, he told me, and he needed my help transporting his animals to his new apartment in Viejo San Juan.
There are many rules that apply to traveling on planes with pets, of course, and one of these at most airlines is that each passenger may carry on no more than one "pet container." The plan Raoul proposed was for the two of us to fly to Puerto Rico together, each transporting one of his three cats. I would then stay in his apartment for a couple of days while he flew back to the mainland to initiate stage two of the plan, in which he and his father would return to San Juan with the dog and the third cat.
I ask for no special credit for agreeing to help despite what was, at the time, my incomprehension as to why my friend chose to live this way. Taking him at his word that his pets were to all intents and purposes family members who could not simply be abandoned while he jetted off to take a new job, I made plans to meet him at BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport, outside Baltimore, to execute his mad scheme. Some things one just does when asked.
I enjoyed myself on this trip, no less for the strangeness of the overall situation. I'd spent time in San Juan in my Coast Guard days but hadn't been back in more than twenty years. On the first day of this trip, before Raoul returned to the mainland, he leashed his dog and showed both of us around his new neighborhood, which was full of the centuries-old Spanish colonial buildings I remembered and where we were never far from breathtaking views of the Atlantic, my old friend. During the two days I was on my own, I haunted coffee shops and bars, walked downtown San Juan until my legs ached, and ate a fancy seafood stew at an Italian restaurant that I remember with fondness even now.
I also fed the two cats in my charge and kept my fingers crossed that I would not have to explain their presence to the landlord, who prohibited pets and probably spoke as little English as I did Spanish.
Oh, did I forget to mention that, on top of everything else, I was aiding and abetting my friend in violating the terms of his lease from day one? His landlord's pet prohibition added spice to this affair in general but looked like it might be a real problem on the afternoon of Raoul's return with the dog and the third cat. The apartments in Raoul's building all opened directly onto the central stairwell, and—at the same time that Raoul was texting me that he and the animals were in a cab on their way over from the airport—a crew of workers from the property management office were in and out of an apartment on the landing below Raoul's, and up and down the stairs, apparently inspecting or maintaining or otherwise, you know, managing the property.
I took up a station across the street in a coffee shop with a good view of the apartment building, texting updates to Raoul, who was of course keen to avoid these representatives of his landlord given his plans to walk right up the stairs to his apartment with a dog on a leash. I enjoyed thinking about how the barista might have interpreted the situation—an obvious mainlander with what I sometimes relish imagining looks like a "special-forces beard," engaged in overtly surveilling the building across the street—but realistically she was probably just updating her Pinterest board on her phone while waiting until the time was right to ask if I wanted a refill.
It all worked out in the end. Raoul successfully established residence with his pets in this apartment, and they all had about six months to settle in before the pandemic arrived.
I strongly doubt that Raoul would tolerate being called a "fur parent," but—to return to my earlier "holy fool" metaphor—I've probably never known anyone who, at the level of basic personality and temperament, more resembles the prophets of old. Given his relatively ascetic lifestyle, his philosophical stance that the purpose of journalism should be to elevate the voiceless, a transfixing interlocutory style, and such an easy ability at making friends with stray cats as to make you suspect he actually speaks their language, it is easy for me to picture him silver-bearded in a ragged cloak, leaning on a gnarled staff, striding at the head of a procession of one-eyed, scarred, limping alley cats who know he is leading them to some kind of salvation.
On the day before Christmas Eve, disconcertingly giddy at the imminent arrival of our new cat, which Petra was bringing home from the shelter by way of the veterinarian's office, I realized I very much wanted to tell someone and that there was no more obvious choice than Raoul.
"So, within the hour, we become cat owners..." I tapped into my iPhone.
"This is a most excellent decision," he replied, almost immediately. "You won't regret it. Were it not for cats, I would have left a trail of slaughter across the land... They provide a very calming influence.
Petra is right that, five or more years ago, the thought that we would not only once again become cat owners but that I would be absolutely in love with the said beast would have struck me as highly unlikely if not impossible.
I once was blind, I suppose.
Now I see?
