George

Back in my 30’s I lived on a street with a feral cat problem. The neighbors and eventually myself fed the stray cats and the population boomed. Well boomed might not be accurate, kittens were born, kittens died, some kittens lived, some cats died. We generally had less than 10 feral cats living on the street at any given time.

One day I was walking my dog in the neighborhood about a quarter mile from the feral cat colony on my street and my dog Mandy excitedly stuck her head into a pile of brush on the side of the road and started pulling on the leash. I pulled her out and lifted a branch. There was a tiny kitten, shaking and hoping we would go away. I groaned and told myself and Mandy if the kitten was still there when we walked past this spot on our way home from our 3 mile circuit I would do something.

Of course it was still there and the neighbors working in their yards were oblivious to the plight of the baby kitten. Mandy and I ran the rest of the way home. I grabbed a pair of cream colored (bad choice) fleece gloves and a small crate that I had for my feral cat activities and got in my car and drove back to the spot. With my gloves on, I picked up the shaking kitten and noticed he had a deep cut on his bottom near the base of his tail. His eyes were crusted shut and he was in pain. I took him around to the nearby people asking if they were missing a cat. I knew the answer. He was a mirror image of the feral cats on my street. A black and white tuxedo.

So I took the injured kitten home and thought about what to do. My live in boyfriend was not a fan of cats and he was out of town. I called him and told him about the kitten and sent him a picture of the kitten squished as far away from me as it could get in the crate with hateful eyes staring at the camera. My boyfriend saw the picture and says, ‘Oh, he’s a baby. He can stay.’ And that is how I ended up with a cat.

I took the kitten I named George to the vets to be checked out and learned he was probably about 4 weeks old. The vet was skeptical about the wound but cleaned it up and put a single staple in his butt to try and pull the skin together and sent us home. We speculated that he might have been hiding under a lawn mower when it was started up. George’s tail started to ooze and stiffen over the next days. The tail was clearly dying. I called my vets and told him I was afraid he’d break it off during play it was so stiff. The verdict, George’s tail had to come off. George had just enough healthy tail left that he was able to survive the operation without being paralyzed or otherwise impaired from the removal. He had a teeny tiny stub that he screamed about whenever I had to change his bandage or treat it. It was not a fun time for either of us.

George was born to a family of feral cats that was many generations deep away from belonging to a human. Like his family he avoided humans as much as possible. But he loved me. He was a typical playful curious kitten, earning the name of Curious George. George was a welcome distraction in my life at the moment. He was not welcomed by our dog Bandit who was 13 years old and dying of cancer. But George knew to stay away from Bandit who couldn’t do much but lay on his bed and bark at the interloping, troublemaking kitten. Wide-eyed George would sit on the couch with Mandy and stare at Bandit while he barked. George had a curious habit of sucking on the blanket on our bed and kneading it like he was nursing. My vet told me it was because he was too young when he was separated from his mother.

George grew into a healthy but shy cat who spent most of his time hiding in our finished basement. Throughout the 5 years he lived in that house George’s safe place was in the drop ceiling of that basement. He learned to jump onto anything that would get him close enough to the ceiling that he could leap up and push the tile up just enough that he could get himself in. He broke many tiles when they gave way, suddenly tired of holding his weight. He and pieces of the tiles would come crashing down and we’d be left with another empty spot where there should have been a ceiling tile.

When George was about a year old I brought home a friend for him, Chloe. They were buds during the early years, playing tirelessly and sleeping together with their arms wrapped around each other’s bodies. Over the years they would become less close and maybe like any two creatures that spent so much time together, get on each others nerves.

George was not a fan of leaving the house and the sight of the crate would send him hiding and he was a world class hider. I had to cancel more than one vet appointment because I could not catch or find George. In 2010 when I was planning my great escape from an unhealthy relationship I had to strategize how to be sure I could get George out of the house in the 8 hours that I had to vacate the premises before my soon to be ex-boyfriend returned from work. It was a cause of great anxiety leading up to that day. I had planned to begin packing right after my boyfriend left for work, I had a moving team coming and my sister and her husband would be in town staying at my new house and arrive that morning to help me as well. The night before I planned to leave, my boyfriend retired to bed early as he’d been on a binge the night before. So I went to the basement and quietly tried to find George. I managed to snag him near the water heater and shove him into the crate. I ran upstairs and shouted to my boyfriend that the Internet was down at work and I had to go reboot the modem and I ran back down, grabbed the crate and ran to the car as quickly as I could afraid he’d see me running with the crate. I drove to my beautiful tiny new house and left George snug there with a litter box and food I had left for the occasion. Such a relief.

George settled into his new peaceful home with my other cats Chloe and Orange and my two dogs Mandy and Buster. He was that rare cat that was never a problem. He used his litterbox, he ate the food he was given but not so much that he was ever fat, he drank plenty of water, he scratched his scratching post not the furniture. His biggest weakness was his inability to trust humans. Dogs and other cats he loved.

When I met my husband and we bought a house together George found new places to hide and would pick one area of our new house that was his safe haven. Then he’d move onto another. He finally settled on the basement like he did as a youngster so many years before. Amazingly after about three years of living under the same roof my husband Joe was welcomed by George and became the only other person in the world Georgie would ever ask for attention from.

George grew thin over the past couple of years, actually downright skinny. But he was happy and still jumping up on a stand where his food was and greeting us heartily whenever we came downstairs and ask for petting. In the past few months I moved the food to the floor for him after seeing him miss his jump onto the stand once but he still hopped up on the bench where I stretched my hamstrings each day for a little attention. Then one day he couldn’t.

A couple of weeks before we were to leave for Portugal, eighteen year old George had become a sack of bones. He was skin and fur and bones and I could see he wasn’t going to be around much longer. I agonized over what to do. Finally I called my pet sitter and explained the situation while bawling on the phone to her. Her words were so kind, ‘what can I do for you to make it possible for you to go’. I said I felt bad leaving her with a cat that might die while I was gone. But that I wanted him to live out his life in this house where he had become comfortable. That a trip to the vets was likely to kill him and he still had moments of spunk and I wanted him to enjoy what little time he had left. I didn’t want to rob him of any days. Through tears in her voice she said that things would be fine. She wanted me to go and she would take care of him. She had no concern about his situation and she felt like my pets were her own. We’d facetime if there was an issue. I setup an account with a vet who would come to the house to end Georgie’s misery if he seemed in pain. I left a credit card and hugged George goodbye not expecting to see him again.

The ten days passed in Portugal with me each day waiting for that call but it didn’t come. Just pictures of George and reassuring words from our pet sitter. We arrived home around midnight (much later than expected) on a Monday and George was there to greet me. I fed him a pouch of broth but he didn’t eat much. I went off to bed and repeated the same feeding the next morning and spent extra time with him in the morning. He was so weak and not that interested in food. His head shook and his eyes looked bleary. I worked from home that day. When I went down to see him that evening he was gone. I cried. I went upstairs and told Joe it was over, he was gone. I cried some more. Everyone says he waited for me. Maybe he did, just like all those years ago under that branch.