Blue Goodman 1990- 2007

I had hoped that my first published blog entry would be about the miraculous birth (truly) of our twins, Margaret and Josephine. But that essay has turned into an epic work in progress, and so instead my first entry is a memorial to my little buddy, Blue.

His given name - as part of a family of pedigree show cats living in western Pennsylvania - was Blueberry. His breed being, of course, the Russian Blue. He was, unfortunately, born with mutant toes and would never see the runway. His coat, however was that shiny cool gray that epitomized the breed. Almost all undercoat, his fur was almost rabbit-like. At the end of his misshapen toes, instead of the expected razor-like claws he had thick stubby toenails. More like a dog's than a cat's. Perhaps he too was aware of this, because he never even tried to use his claws in anger. Choosing instead to bat at his opponent with an open fist and bluff his way through with a strong hiss and a deep growl that sounded as if it was emanating from a much larger, but unseen, barrel-chested animal several feet behind him. He was tiny; never getting much larger than about 8 lbs. In his spry years many people mistook him for an adolescent. Not much is known of his early years except that he may have been abused by one of his owners. (He carried with him throughout his life an intense fear of brooms.) Another subsequent owner found that despite his size, he was intimidating the other pets in the house, honing his passive/aggressive terror tactic that he would employ with mixed results throughout his life.

In 1997 my former girlfriend, Leslie met him and took him in to live with her in her apartment in Pittsburgh. (He possessed fabulous potential as a fashion accessory.) His first three days were spent hiding behind the refrigerator. That's when I met him; a meek, moaning nervous little wreck. I was marginally employed at that time, working out of my apartment and began borrowing Blue to keep me company during the day. She had no cat carrier and it was cold, so I would tuck him inside my leather jacket and button him up against my chest for the drive, his head poking out under the collar, facing backwards with his paws draped over one shoulder. He eventually would let me pick him up and carry him around this way inside the house. Within a few weeks he found all this physical contact calming for his nerves and started begging for more with enthusiastic nose to nose head-buts. Sometimes he would bonk me so hard it would make my eyes tear. Blue the miserable, antisocial head-case became Blue the sweet and needy head-case. He had lost all sense of feline dignity and became instead an affectionate slob. He came along when Leslie and I decided to move to Florida, flying in as cargo the day after we arrived in West Palm Beach.

Our apartment was in an old Florida building-boom Mediterranean style stucco mansion that had been poorly subdivided. Less than a month after moving in, Blue snuck out the back door and just disappeared. He had never been an outdoor cat before and knew nothing of his new neighborhood, much less about the dangers of Florida's natural environment. Biting spiders the size of your hand. Fire ants. Thorny and serrated plants of all kinds. And semi-feral neighborhood cats with a lot more street smarts than he'd ever have. Everybody says that cat's always find their way home. But they'd never met Blue. His weak meow (an abbreviated squeak, really) and slight build gave him more of a resemblance to Truman Capote than anything even remotely related to lions and bobcats. The local cats (and local kids) could have their way with him and he wouldn't ever know what hit him. The second day we put up signs all over the 'hood advertising a reward for his safe return. On the third day we received a dozen lame leads from neighborhood teenagers who were more interested in finding out if we were offering an award. On the fourth day we had all but given up hope finding him alive. On the morning of the fifth day, after turning off the shower, I heard his distinctive squeak. I ran dripping wet to the balcony overlooking the living room (remember, it was a mansion) and saw him standing inside the back door we had left open for him. I shouted to him to wait and the squeaky reply he gave was: "WHAT?" as in: "what has gotten into you?!" He had a big clean gash on his thigh and we rushed him to the vet for stitches. I'm certain his recollection of the entire incident was simply, "I went out for a walk. Got hungry. Came home. And you brought me to this man who stuck needles in me and forced me to sleep on a wire rack for an entire day. I'll remember this...

We moved again the next year, into a house of our own, but Blue never again strayed farther than the front porch. He occupied his days chasing annole lizards across the window screens and trying to bat geckos off the walls. He would greet me at the front door every evening with his signature squeak and head butt my leg until I would pick him up, toss him over my shoulder like a burping baby and purr in my ear for as long as I could hold him there. After our first year in the house Leslie and I adopted a retired racing greyhound named Monty. He was a sweetheart who would never hurt a fly. He was however, trained from birth to chase after small furry animals. Though he showed admirable restraint, all Blue ever saw in him was his resemblance to the Big Bad Wolf. Blue began a round-the-clock blockade of the water bowl, attempting to dehydrate Monty out of his world. We countered by placing two water bowls in different parts of the house. Blue conceded the battle, but never warmed up to this intruder, directing at him a constant stream of invisible darts from his eyes for the remainder of his time with us. As much as he hated other animals, Blue truly loved people. All people. He would even follow the pest control guy around the house, begging to be picked up. Movie night at our house meant a smorgasbord of new laps to try out.

Leslie and I split up in 1999. She worked very long hours and her personality was too restless to take care of the "children". I wound up keeping the house, along with Monty and Blue. I met Mary Ellen the next year and she soon warmed up to me and my "instant family". And Blue, meanwhile found in Mary Ellen - who is a voracious bookworm - an almost constant lap at the ready.

He became ill gradually over the next couple of years and lost much of whatever weight he had. I couldn't keep up with the mess in his litter box and he began to leaving deposits wherever he happened to be sitting at the time. Unfortunately for our roommate Joe, that was often on his leather jacket or some other of his rare or precious objets that tended to collect around him. If Joe hadn't been such a workaholic and party-animal, he might have used his super powers for evil and found a way to make Blue disappear permanently. (Years later, Blue and Joe did reconcile, with Joe honoring Blue with a prominent, if not actually flattering portrayal in our beloved family portrait he painted for us when he moved to North Carolina.)

His doctor's diagnosis was lizard poisoning and made us promise he would swear off lizards forever. This ended one of my darker pastimes, which was capturing stray annoles inside the house and letting Blue torture them to death. I took up more wholesome pursuits and Blue started taking potassium supplements to aid his ailing kidneys. His doctor said I might also have to start giving him additional I.V. fluids every day to keep him ticking. That, he said, would make whatever time he had left more pleasant. I knew Blue held a dim opinion of modern medicine and would rather be dead than submit to an endless cycle of restraints and needles for his remaining days. That was seven years ago. Who'd have expected him to last this long?

Three years ago Mary Ellen and I moved to DC and once again, Blue made the trip in cargo. Honestly he did not like moving back up to the northeast, with it's cold, damp winters. His favorite place was in our Florida house, lying in a sunbeam on the kitchen windowsill, watching the lizards run up and down the big mango tree in the backyard. Flicking his tail with fantasies of how great it feels to knock one of those guys to the ground playing over and over on a loop in his mind. Our lives got much busier once our daughter, Lucy was born, and we had less free time to sit with him. Fortunately, Lucy quickly took to Blue (Boo-boo to her) as her first friend. He in turn, was incredibly patient with her and accepted all sorts of indignities he would never have accepted from anybody else, even me. (How long do you think you could pick up a cat by wrapping your arms around its waist and carry it around the house upside down, banging its head against the furniture as you go? And if you did, could you ever get that cat to allow you to do it again?) Blue did. His motto of companionship being simply: Any attention is good attention. Which may have, incidentally, been the root of his undoing.

Earlier this year we moved again. This time across the Potomac to Arlington for a bigger house to accommodate our growing family. By now we had picked up another cat by the name of Kitty. When we moved to DC she was a feral kitten who would come to our back door for scraps and would shadow me when I did yard work. I got her neutered at the animal shelter simply because I didn't want to wind up with even more kittens at our back door. I never had any intentions of making her our pet, and her default name reflects that. What hadn't occurred to me though, was she had already made up her mind that she was going to be ours!

By now, Blue had given up the fighting life and chose instead to just snub her friendly overtures. Perhaps he thought that a really cold shoulder might make her go away. I don't know. He just stuck by his people and we stuck by him. Or at least tried our best to. But you know how it is: All these children, and all those home repair projects and someone is going to get their nose out of joint. I think Blue felt snubbed. Actually, I'm sure of it. He began leaving poops in prominent places around the house. Clean the litter box. No change. Extra litter box. No change. The weather warmed up and we exiled Blue to the backyard until we could figure out how to deal with him. He made a nest under the house and would come out to greet me when I changed his food or took out the garbage. I don't think he ever understood why he was exiled. He was, after all, just a cat. With a cat brain. Dog's sole motivation in life is to be a part of the pack. You can use that to your advantage, doling out sticks and carrots as needed. Cats have no such motivation. They exist for their own benefit and if you're lucky, they'll let you bask in their glow. Blue was very much a cat in that respect. But he clearly needed people. He was the most dog-like cat I'd ever met.

The other day I came across the first and second gifts I'd ever bought him. The first was a turquoise colored plastic-handled grooming brush with which I initially bribed my way in to his confidence. He would twist himself around to rub his chin and jaw on its stiff wire bristles. It made me wince to watch, but it seemed to give him transcendent bliss. The second was a feather on a string tied to a long stick. It is on its second or third feather now and sports a makeshift handle I fashioned from a length of braided fuel line hose for Lucy to more easily grasp. It's funny to think that $18 spent ten years ago was all that was needed to cement a friendship. He was my little buddy. I understood his quirky interpretation of sociability, and he accepted my occasional insensitivity. We cut each other a lot of slack, and I think that might have been the key to our lasting friendship. My life changed a lot and his stayed more or less the same and that seemed to work out fine for both of us, until it didn't anymore. I had spent the better part of the past month stressing about what could be done to allow Blue to rejoin the family, where he obviously belonged, when he got into a skirmish with a raccoon who was trying to poach his dinner. Blue was always fearless with larger animals and I never worried about his ability to bluff his way out of danger. But his ability to channel blind rage could not cover for what the raccoon probably sensed immediately: That here was essentially a very old and weak little cat who had little with which to back up his threats. (Feel free to read Mary Ellen's account of the events of last week in her blog, "Snacks Please".)

Blue was as much of a friend to his people as any cat can be. I doubt any other cat could ever fill the role of "the Family Cat" the way he did. For that we loved him and will miss him dearly. And though I know he was not prone to introspection or existential thoughts like some other cats are, I hope that now, free from his aches and pains and dependencies, he can see our relationship in the same good light I will always hold for him. And that in his new home there are warm, friendly laps at the ready for him to sit on whenever he wants.