Yowl

Last week, The Lady-Killer was spending the night at his best friend's place--a sweet bachelor pad on top of the best friend's grandmother's house, which is handy because Grammy occasionally wanders upstairs to leave cookies or cinnamon rolls she's just baked--and that meant Abbey and I were on our own. When TLK isn't home, Abbey takes up her old position, something I used to refer to as Substitute Boyfriend.

When Substitute Boyfriend Abbey realizes that, hey, that boy who lets her smell his breath--which is one of her favorite pastimes--isn't going to be in the bed with me overnight, she hops up on the bed and stands on the empty pillow until I raise the blankets. Then she goes under, turns around, and situates herself so that her head rests on the pillow, so that her body is spooned against mine. And then we go to sleep.

This is how it used to be, pre-TLK. I imagine Abbey gets very nostalgic for those days, since now that TLK is in her spot she sleeps in one of the less-awesome nests she has around the house (the blanket on my desk, the giant box full of fluff, the recliner).

Usually Abbey is a very good bed-mate. She's snuggly, warm, and she smells good (cotton candy, maple syrup, or oatmeal, depending on the day). Usually we can pass the whole night snuggling like that, but last week at 4:30 AM Abbey began to wheeze, and those wheezes woke me up. She's had colds before, and she has a generally squeaky nose, but this was different than all that. This was something that sounded painful.

So I made her an appointment at the vet's. As soon as I hung up the phone with the receptionist, I began the long process of dreading this appointment. After all, Abbey is not a cat who takes kindly to others. It's no secret that I raised her in strict Single Mother with Only Child style so that Abbey loves me, only me, and generally distrusts anyone who tries to show me attention. And if they try to show her attention? Forget it.

And it wasn't only that. The logistics of getting her there also stressed me out. Abbey has done many trips back to New York with me--and that's a 9 hour car drive--but apparently she's so over those because this summer, when I was headed off to New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Abbey refused to get in the carrier. TLK and I did everything we could to make this happen, but Abbey thrashed, bit, clawed, and yowled until we gave up.

I figured I'd have a repeat of that when I tried to put her in the carrier to take her to the vet's. And I wasn't wrong.

I gave myself an extra twenty minutes to get her into the carrier before we needed to leave to make our appointment. They were the most exhausting twenty minutes of my life. I tried gentle coaxing. I tried treats. I tried wet food. I tried begging. Then I tried more forceful efforts. I tried putting her in frontward, backward, sideways. I tried to hold her above the carrier and lower her in.

Nothing worked. She made the most heartbreaking sounds. She stared up at me and cried-cried-cried. Those eyes were saying, Mama! How could you?!

I was fresh out of ideas. And by that time we were going to be late, and I was crying too. (YOU try listening to that gut-wrenching, you're-killing-me sound for 20 minutes without shedding a tear!) So I did the only thing I could. I got on the phone with the vet and asked if they had any tricks of the trade that would help me get her in the carrier.

"Oh, just put a little food in the back of the carrier, and she'll go right in," the receptionist said.

But Abbey's too smart for that. Abbey just sits in front of the carrier and is all like, "Do I look like an idiot?"

Besides, I'd already tried it, even though I knew it wouldn't work when I began the process.

"Well," the receptionist said, "is there an alternate mode of transportation?"

That's when it dawned on me: The Box.

The Box is Abbey's favorite nesting area. See?

It's a giant affair, left over from my move from the Old Apartment of Death. It's filled with fluff I purchased after Abbey developed the habit of kneading the batting she'd confiscated from the underside of my recliner. The Box is where Abbey goes while we're in the office. It's where she often sleeps at night.

I hated the thought of ruining one of her sanctuaries, but I had to get her to the doctor's office. I'd spent a terrifying half hour earlier that week Googling "cat with stuffy nose" and the results had been YOUR CAT'S LUNGS MAY BE FILLING WITH LIQUID AS WE SPEAK AND SHE IS GOING TO DROWN IMMEDIATELY. I was sufficiently terrified.

So I dragged the giant box into the living room and in my most chipper voice I said, "Abbey! Look! It's your box! I am going to put this dish of food in your box! How do you feel about that?"

Abbey felt swell about that, and she hopped right into the box and started eating her food. She didn't even mind when I started closing the top, as that's part of a game we play. She also didn't mind when I picked the box up and started walking toward the door with it. Abbey is a box fan, a box expert, a box aficionado, and hardly a day goes by where she isn't sitting in a shoebox waiting patiently to be picked up and carried around. She probably just thought that's what we were doing with this much bigger box.

When we got outside, however, Abbey could sense disaster brewing, and that's when she stopped eating her food and gave one cry.

"It's okay, Abbey!" I said. "I love you!" I looked like a jackass: I was a girl speaking to a giant box labeled BEDROOM/CLOTHES.

I put her in the car, and we started toward the vet's. Abbey tried once or twice to break out of the box--she pushed her head against it, her little pink nose the only thing visible from the tiny opening in the box folds--but we managed to make it unscathed. And then I walked into the lobby, where plenty of local pet owners were waiting with their normal pets who were lolling about on a leash or in a carrier. One cat was even sleeping on a sample cat house someone was selling.

My cat was crying and poking her pink nose through the opening in the box. In a few minutes' time she would get so stressed out in the exam room that she would release her anal glands and coat the good doctor in that liquid.

Still, she wasn't as bad as I thought she'd be. There was no biting. There was no swatting. In fact, Abbey, in her addled, over-taxed state, loved up on each of the nurses and doctor. She rubbed her body all over them, let them pet her--but she growled the whole time she sought their love. Maybe it was her attempt to say, "Hey! I'm cute! Look! I'm nice! Please don't kill me!" while simultaneously letting them know she was in the mood to cut a bitch.

In the end, there wasn't anything really wrong with Abbey. The doctor thought she might have a touch of a cold, and he prescribed her a low dose of medicine before sending us on our way. And on the way out, a woman who was coming into the office held the door for me. She looked confused as to why I was bumbling a giant box through the doorframe.

"It's okay," I said to the meowing box. And then, to the lady, I said, "It's a long story." Which, I think, is an understatement.

The Cat Whisperer

"Watch this," The Lady Killer said to me the day I got home to Maine from The Everyone I Went to Grad School with Had a Baby Summer Tour of 2010.

He bent and scooped up Abbey. He held her close. He nuzzled her under his chin. He kissed her head once, twice, three times.

Abbey didn't make a single sound. She didn't growl, cry, or fuss. She simply submitted to his love. She even leaned into him.

"Holy shit," I said.

"I know!" he said.

Weeks before, their relationship was a bit more complicated: Abbey would give him a single minute's worth of affection, and then, just as he was getting into petting her, she would step back and snarl and hiss. She would bite him. She was saying, "Hey, Motherfucker. Back the fuck off."

This wasn't out of the ordinary, really. Abbey used to be a really sweet, really cuddly and kind cat--back when she was little. I have pictures of everyone holding her. My brother, my mother, the Possibly-Gay-Black-Belt, my mother's boyfriend, my father. She accepted love at every turn.

But then something happened.

It's impossible to know exactly when or why. This cat has never suffered any trauma. She simply was born, lived at my uncle's house with her mother until she was old enough to leave, and then she went with me to Maine, where she spent her kitten days doing everything a kitten loves: destroying things. My curtains. My bedspread. My office chair. A couple purses. A table cloth. My sleep schedule.

But even though I was frustrated by her kitten ways, and even though she was as bad as a newborn child, and even though whenever I turned my back she launched at the curtains and clawed her way up them until she was too high to get down--which meant she cried and cried and cried until I came back in the room and had to remove her claws one by one until she was no longer stuck to the curtains--I loved that cat more than anything. My love for her was obscene (I got excited on the drive home from school because I knew I was on my way home to her) and embarrassing (she has a Facebook fan page). When she had a bad reaction to her first round of shots, I cancelled a much-needed post-move massage and stayed in bed with her all day.

She has known nothing but love. But she knew it from me. We were, after all, mostly alone. For a long time, I didn't have many visitors to my apartment here in Maine. That's not true anymore--Abbey's got lots of people around her these days--but maybe she got a little strange, a little finicky, a little bitchy because of that. Maybe her aggression and bad attitude was her protecting me. Who knows? But I am certain of this: She hated everyone but me.

And Abbey did not make an exception to this rule for The Lady Killer. He could get down on his knees and stare soulfully into her eyes--he could roll out the glow he shines on for old waitresses and cute check-out girls--and he could say, "Abigail, all I want to do is love you!" and she would still hiss at him. And then he'd turn to me and say, "Dude, your cat is a BITCH."

And it was true. Until what I'll call The Miracle.

The Miracle started poorly, like so:

It was the day TLK and I were leaving for New York, to the Great Pink Torpedo Wedding of 2010, and the car was packed. All the suitcases and laptops and shoes and food was loaded up for the nine hour drive. All we had left to do was put Abbey in her carrier and take her down to the car.

Abbey has never really been a fan of her carrier, but I can always get her into it. When she was a kitten, it was simple. I just chucked an earplug into the carrier, and she skittered after it. Or, alternatively, I'd place a pile of treats in the back of the carrier and tell her to go at it. She wised up to that tactic pretty quick, though. Now when I try the food trick, she attempts to break into the carrier from the other end so she can steal the treats and go on her merry way without ever stepping foot into it. The last time I got her into the carrier--for the June trip to New York--I had to use a massive spoonful of Reddi-Whip to coax her inside, and she still put up quite the fuss.

But this time, she was having none of it. Reddi-Whip wouldn't do it. Treats or toys wouldn't do it. I even tried a bowl of heavy cream. She simply looked up at me with eyes that said, "Mama, do you think I'm an idiot?"

Thus began the struggle. I tried to place her in the carrier, but Abbey suddenly morphed into a flailing toddler and found a way to block the entrance to her carrier with a tangle of limbs. Nothing I could do could hold her down or fold her limbs under her so she slid inside. She cried.

I won't lie: I cried too. I imagine I was feeling a little something like what mothers feel when they have to send their babies off to daycare or school and the kids just don't want to go and they scream and cry until their voices are raw. I wanted to tell my cat I was just kidding, that we didn't have to go anywhere, and that we could spend the rest of the day in bed watching all the best episodes of The West Wing. But that wasn't true. We couldn't. We needed to get our asses in gear.

So then I had TLK hold the carrier and I tried to drop her down into it in one slick motion, but once again she turned into a wild, clawing thing. She sliced my pinkie open and TLK had to perform emergency first aid to stop the bleeding. And by that time it was clear: She was not getting in the carrier. She was crying. I was crying. TLK was trying to tell me it was okay, it would be fine, he could take care of her when he flew back to Maine after the wedding.

He'd be back in five days. The longest I'd ever left her with her extended feeders was four days, while I was in Washington. And when I came back from that trip, the cat vaulted at me and climbed up my leg and wouldn't let me go for two entire days. What would she be like after five days?

But there was no choice. We needed to get on the road, and we couldn't get the cat into the carrier, so I loaded up the feeders and we headed off to New York.

And while I was in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I got sporadic cat updates, but none of them were glowing. Abbey was mostly ignoring TLK. She was sleeping on top of the fridge and hissing whenever he came near her. If his friends came over, she was similarly unpleasant. But then, a few days before I came home, there was a shift. By the time I arrived back in Maine, Abbey was feeling more loving toward TLK, and she was following him around, letting him pet her, pick her up, kiss her. "Come here, kitten!" he'd call, and she'd come over and rub up on his leg. It was miraculous.

The good attitude has even applied to people beyond TLK and me. When TLK's best friend came over the other night, he called us into the living room and whispered, "I have been petting this cat for five minutes, and she hasn't hissed once!"

It was so clear: TLK cat-whispered Abbey into good behavior.

Then, this morning, the crowning glory: TLK came back home after an early meeting, and I was still in bed. Abbey had been under the covers with me, but she'd leapt out when she heard her boyfriend come through the door. She trotted out to meet him, and when he climbed under the covers with me, Abbey hopped up on the bed. It was the first time she'd even dared to step on the bed when he was in it with me.

We both held our breath. And then Abbey draped herself over his legs and snuggled in to sleep with us.

"Oh my God," I whispered. "My heart is full to bursting." And it wasn't an exaggeration.

The Mourning

So, back when I had moved home for that year between grad school and Maine, I had quite the impressive little string of vehicular bird homicides. Now, it's not like I wanted to kill those birds, and it's not like I tried to kill those birds--I certainly didn't swerve to ping them, to clip them out of orbit--but it happened anyway, and I always ended up shrieking as I heard the thunk and saw the feathers fly. For a while, my car even drove around with a little feather headdress sticking out of the grill on the front because I couldn't bring myself to clean up the evidence.

And I wasn't the only one on a bird-killing streak that year. My father was too. The worst--the one I'll never, ever forget--was the mourning dove.

It was early evening. My father and I were on our way to town to get some dinner, and we were sailing along the back country roads, the ones cutting through long, tilled-up corn fields, and that's when the fattest mourning dove I had ever seen flapped its way into our path. You could tell this dove was exhausted from hauling its fat bulk around. His flight path was ragged. He appeared drunk and belligerent. Maybe he was a little suicidal. His wings gave out and he sagged near the road, hitting the hood of the car.

And then he exploded.

I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. That bird hit the car and exploded like a water balloon. A great gush of liquid--water, blood--washed over the windshield, and my father and I screamed. And then my father turned on the windshield wipers because there was just so much liquid.

And so, now, whenever I see a mourning dove, I can't help but insert sound effects when I watch it waddle around on its toothpick legs. Slosh, slosh, slosh, I think as the fat bird thumps around the deck. I picture its stomach like a mini-washing machine, just without clothes, the water swirling in a perpetually full cycle.

Now, here at home--I drove back to Buffalo a few days ago for spring break--there are mourning doves everywhere. There are a few that like to perch on the back porch, where my father, who, after he turned fifty, decided to take up one of his mother's favorite hobbies (feeding and acquiring certain level of inside information about birds, their habits, and their preferences in suet), puts out many different feeders. This hasn't always gone well for my father. He's battling certain tricky elements--two of which are Fat Squirrel and Fat Raccoon.

Fat Squirrel is fat because he simply climbs up into the bird feeder and parks it there while he fills his stomach with seed. Fat Raccoon does the same thing, just with a little more violence. He's been known to break the feeder, knock it over, kick it off the deck so that it falls and splits in two on the ground.

But sometimes actual birds dine at the feeders, and this afternoon those birds included two huge black birds and one fat mourning dove. You know who's particularly interested in this, in what's going on on the back porch? My cat. Abbey. She's obsessed with these birds. She will sit in front of the back door for hours, her eyes as big as saucers, her limbs tense with the desire to spring through the screen door.

It doesn't make it any better that the birds taunt her. The black birds tittered at her and bounced around on the floor of the deck just so she could get a better look, just so they could say, Fuck you, cat. You can't get out of there!

And then there was the mourning dove. She waited and waited and waited for the black birds to be done with their feeding so she could get in on the free food, but she got tired of waiting and she drifted down to the floor of the deck and planted it there. She folded her legs underneath her and nestled down, turning squarely so that she faced Abbey. The two of them were separated by a few feet and a screen door, and they would stay that way--just staring at each other--for hours. I'd never seen a more lazy (stubborn? cruel? taunting?) bird. She just locked eyes and gazed upon my cat until she finally tired and got up, turned a circle, squatted low, and shit out one tiny pellet onto the deck.

Abbey looked back at me and whined. She wanted me to open the door. Of course she did. I'm just not sure why. I don't know whether she wanted to be let out to make friends with the bird or to eat the bird, but either way I was half tempted to do it, to see what would happen if Abbey decided to leap into the afternoon sun and land on the bird. I wanted to see if it would explode instantly, leaving my cat standing on nothing but a pile of moist feathers. But I didn't. I figured that was probably too much trauma for any one cat to handle. After all, I know it was a little too much for me.

The Rot

Let me tell you about maggots.

Maggots are gross. Maggots are foul. Maggots are things that crawl around my grandfather's kitchen because he has stopped cleaning. The man can get up, shuffle across the living room, put a porno in the VCR, and then shuffle back to his easy chair to do God knows what in, but he doesn't feel capable of going into the kitchen to run a rag across the counter. And so? Maggots.

And, sure, good old George Edward can summon maggots like no one's business, but his oldest granddaughter--and, yeah, that's me--also knows how to bring them about, apparently.

Remember when I told you about the fruit flies? Remember when I blamed them on that night Emily came over and we got drunk and very seriously discussed over fifty rounds of bellinis the boringness of this season's Project Runway contestants? Remember how I said I left all the food out and then the next morning--poof!--the fruit flies had arrived in my apartment, which was now their own miniature Boca Raton? Yeah, well, they were probably there for a while, just out of my view.

Tonight I bent down to grab a book out of my school bag--a multi-compartment green croc number--and I reeled backward after breathing in the air around the bag. It was rank. It was rotten. It was everything bad in the world.

"What the hell?" I said.

Abbey, who was sitting a few feet away, looked up at me and blinked. Duh, she said.

I reached into the bag--a mistake!--and rooted around in the front section I don't really use. At the bottom, my fingers sunk into sponge. Dark, fragrant sponge. I yanked the bag open and held it up to the light. And there it was: a completely rotted banana tucked deep into the folds of my bag. It was studded with maggots--mostly dead, but some not completely.

I reacted the way most people would if they'd just gone ahead and stuck their finger into a nest of maggots and moldy banana: I shrieked and tossed that bag. A cloud of fruit flies fluttered out from it.

Immediately, Abbey lost her mind. The flies had hightailed it to the nearest surface--which happened to be the mirrored doors that close my washer and dryer off from the rest of the apartment--and Abbey lunged at the doors. When the flies scattered farther up, she pinned her ears back and chattered at them before leaping up far enough to pin a few under her paw.

I was busy standing very still and hating myself. I had let a banana rot in my bag. I had been carrying maggots around with me everywhere I went for God knows how long. When I got into my car in the morning? Maggots. When I set my bag down in the corner of the office? Maggots. When I stepped into my creative writing class ready to discuss metaphor? Maggots. Maggots and rot everywhere I went.

What kind of girl was I becoming? A girl who lets rot descend on her life, that's who.

While Abbey continued her tactical assault on the fruit flies, I took everything out of the bag and sprayed it down with cleanser and scrubbed-scrubbed-scrubbed. I set out new dishes of balsamic vinegar. I got so disgusted at myself and at the bag that I opened the door to my patio and tossed it outside. The door hadn't been open more than five seconds, but in those five seconds Abbey had decided to abandon her plan to stalk and kill the flies that had been coughed out of the bag, and she shot through the open door. She wedged herself between slats on the deck and she stared out into the night, out into the dark, and she raised her nose to smell the cold in the air. I bent to get her and hugged her against my chest, and for a minute we stood out on the porch, next to a recently de-wormed bag, and we listened to absolutely nothing.

Let's not lie: Symbolically, this does not bode well.

Snore

The Boy From Work left yesterday morning. This immediately made Abbey a happier kitten. Although she loved the BFW the first day I brought her home--in fact, she loved him much more than she loved me--she is now not a fan. When the BFW first walked through the door of my apartment last week and tried to shower a little love on Abbey, she recoiled and hissed. Then she swatted his hand away with her paw. This happened every time he came near her. If he managed to pick her up and cuddle her against his chest, Abbey would emit the lowest, saddest, ugliest noise from deep in her chest. It was a noise that said, If I were a human, I'd cut you, bitch.

All that anger wore Abbey out, and yesterday, when I came back from the airport and immediately sat down to write, Abbey collapsed across the top of my monitor and fell asleep, and she would stay asleep until I left the room to watch Dancing with the Stars later that night. She was so out of it, so deep in sleep, that she snored the cutest, squeakiest snore I'd ever heard. And I managed to capture it:

I Think She Expects a Mention in the Acknowledgments

This is where you'll find Abbey most times I'm in my office. She loves the warmth of the top of the monitor, so that's where she'll be if I am filling my weekly allotment of Sims time (which is what you're seeing here) or if I'm writing.

Not surprisingly, her favorite spot has its drawbacks: it's sort of hard to type when there are two paws blocking the literary gem you're trying create. Still, you'll never see me move her. No way. It's just too cute. And when she puts her head down so it looks like she's reading what I've written, it's possibly the cutest thing I've ever seen.

If She Were a Human, She Would Be Employed at UPS

There are not many things Abbey loves more than packing materials. She loves boxes, peanuts, shredded paper, styrofoam inserts, and bubblewrap. In the picture above, you can see how pleased she was when I unpacked my new Christmas tree, which came tightly bound in rolls and rolls of bubblewrap.

The Ass. Head Cashier Approves of Abbey

This picture was taken the very first time my brother got to meet Abbey. It was over Thanksgiving, and he popped into Dad's for a few minutes before we had to go next door to my uncle's for dinner. When Adam walked in the room, he gasped like the woman he is. "Oh! My! God!" he said. "She is the cutest kitten I've ever seen!"

And then they became best friends forever.

(Side Note: For those of you who have developed a crush on my brother over the years, you might be interested to know that he was recently promoted from Assistant Head Cashier to Head Cashier. That means he gets the keys to the store. Fancy!)

More of Abbey's Obsessions

What I like about this picture is that it combines two of Abbey's favorite obsessions/hobbies: earplugs and burrowing.

She will crawl under or into any stack of blankets and stay there until you do something interesting enough to warrant her retreat. Abbey routinely sleeps under the covers at night. Sometimes she'll stick her head out the top, by the pillows, but usually she won't. She prefers to be completely burrowed underneath the covers on my bed, and I often wake up in the morning to see a strange lump down by my hip. That is Abbey, who has chosen to spend the night pressed under the weight of a sheet, a blanket, and a comforter.

As for the earplugs, the cat is crazy for them. I don't know which she likes more--earplugs or Q-tips. She chases and fetches both. Just this morning, right after the sun came up, I felt a thump! on the bed and knew that Abbey was sick of playing by herself and wanted me to join in. Sure enough, when I rolled over, there she was, and she dropped an earplug down next to me. She gave me a look that said, Play with me! Play with me! Play with me!

I threw it once and went back to bed.

Abbey's Current Obsession

Abbey, seen here with my father, who is carrying her around in a wicker basket because, well, she let him, loves to be lifted into the air. In fact, the current object of her undying love and affection is a box top I brought portfolios home in. Now that it's empty, she will sit in that thing and look up at me with those giant kitten eyes until I do one of two things:

(1.) Hook my finger in a corner and slide that box top--at a very fast pace--from one end of the room to another

or

(2.) Heft the box top up and balance it on my right palm, then carry it around the apartment like it is a waitress tray. Abbey stays inside the whole time, her chin hanging over the edge, her eyes soaking in what all of her stuff looks like from people height. When I told my father this the other night, he said, "But doesn't she jump out?" And the answer to that is no. She'd ride around on top of my shoulder for hours if I let her.

What Anne Wants, Anne Shall Receive

When Anne heard I wasn't going to be around the blog for a few days, she requested that Abbey make daily appearances to keep her amused. I said that could be arranged.

And so, to kick off six days of Abbey, here's a flashback to one of her baby pictures. Tomorrow I guarantee you'll be thinking, Holy shit! That cat's huge now!

Yeah, she's huge alright. She's a huge earplug-fetching, grape stem-carrying, macaroni salad-loving cat whose first birthday is just a little over a month away.

Maybe She's Got a Touch of the OCD

Let me tell you a little something about my cat.

Abbey has a lot of interesting and funny habits. For instance, she has a very distinct face she makes whenever she smells something she does not like. She makes this face when there's some gross foreign scent on the carpet, when there's orange or orange peel or orange-scented dust spray around, and when she gives herself bath in the ass area. The face is one of true revulsion. It is a face that says, Oh just what the hell is THAT? She wrinkles up her nose, separates her jaw so that her teeth show, and stares off into the distance for a minute, hoping that smell will leave her nasal passages before she has to take another breath.

It's also true that my cat might have some obsessions, some compulsions, and that maybe she needs a little therapy because a day doesn't go by when she doesn't engage in this:

No, I'm not talking about the kneading of the cat bed that she absolutely refuses to sleep in. Cats knead. I know. My old cat would knead anything--a bed, a blanket, my head--with the hopes of making it just the smallest bit more comfortable before she settled down on it.

No, what I'm talking about is the thing hanging from her mouth as she does the kneading. That is batting from the underside of my recliner. Abbey no longer has her front claws, but she's a resourceful girl. She gums and nips at that batting until there are giant piles of it stored up under the chair. For a while, I was gathering those piles up when they got too big and started peeking out from underneath the chair's edges. I gathered them up and put them in the corner, on her cat bed, the one she never sleeps in, the one that instead of being used for sleep is used for storing her various toys: mice, ribbons, jingle balls, and that creepy G.I. Joe figurine she dragged out from some unknown nook or cranny in the old apartment.

For a while at night, when I was watching television or reading a book or something, I'd hear a tinkle of the jingle balls as Abbey puttered around near the cat bed and her toys. I didn't really think anything of it. And then one night I actually watched what she was doing. She was digging her nose deep into the mountain of batting and holding it in her mouth before kneading the cat bed beneath her.

It is her favorite thing to do. She won't knead unless there's fluff. But if there is fluff--and, since she pulled out quite a bit of the extra stuffing from my chair, there is plenty of fluff--she will go to town on that bed like it's nobody's business. She looks like Santa Claus. She looks a little wild-eyed and crazy. She looks like she's two seconds away from being shuttled off to the loony bin.

I love it, of course. It's one of my favorite things to watch. It's ridiculously cute. It makes me want to get down on the floor next to her and examine the ritual from all angles because maybe I'll figure out why she loves it, why she has to do it, why she needs to look so much like a miniature Santa Claus while she kneads a bed she will never sleep in.

Blocked

I have no pretty words right now. I feel useless.

Let's watch Abbey play fetch with a Q-Tip and marvel at how disgusting my voice sounds when I do the shrieky Talking-to-the-Kitten tones.

In Honor of the Long Ride Back to the Land of the Chicken Wing

Today Abbey and I making the long trip back to Buffalo for our extended holiday vacation, and the video below--carefully crafted by my father--accurately expresses just how we feel about that.

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Three from the Move

I didn't take many pictures during the whole moving process, but here's what I did manage to snap:

That's Abbey after we emptied my giant bedroom of all its books and clothes. She was not amused because now there was nothing for her to jump on and kill.

And that's Abbey checking out the new digs. She's standing in the living room, which looks out onto the porch, which looks out onto woods. Those woods are home to many things--squirrels, birds, chipmunks--that Abbey would--no surprise here--like to jump on and kill.

And that's what my father and I look like after we've been driven insane by moving. He's wearing my headband and I am wearing the hat of my best boy from grad school, the hat I put on sometimes when everything sucks, when everything blows. That hat makes me feel better about everything.

At Least I Have Help Packing

Abbey is in love with the obstacle course that is my apartment right now. She loves dashing around boxes, over boxes, into boxes. She loves burrowing under the heaps of packing paper. She loves that things are messy. And things are messy. Very, very, very messy.

Distempered

Today Abbey had an appointment--her first--at the veterinarian. There are a lot of vets in town, so when it came time for me to pick one, I picked one based on location. I picked the one closest to school.

I picked poorly.

Let me put this into perspective. There's a scene in Dirty Dancing, right after Penny, who's been knocked up by that creepy waiter, has come back from having an abortion, and she's sick, she's cramping, she's moaning. The guy who'd gone with her to the appointment grabs Johnny and says, "He had a folding table and a dirty knife!" It was not what you'd call a professional atmosphere.

The room I walked into today reminded me a little of what I imagine that whole setting had been for poor skinny, knocked-up Penny. There was a stainless steel table that didn't look all that clean, an old fridge humming in the corner, a glass container full of needles, a few cotton balls scattered underneath a bench near the wall. There were rubber hoses and machines that were broadcasting temperatures and numbers and seemed vague of purpose, old.

Now, it's true that I don't have a lot of experience with vets, mostly because my last cat, Dusty, was a tough indoor-outdoor cat, and we only took her in on the rare occasion that she got herself into some tough scrape--that time she got an infection in her foot and it swelled up to three times its size (I traced its shape and girth onto a blank piece of paper before we left the house so we wouldn't forget how gross it had been) or that time she got in a fight with something much bigger than she was, and it almost tore out her eye. But what I do remember about those trips to the vet is this: crispness, whiteness, lab coats, bustling waiting rooms filled with kenneled or leashed animals.

This particular vet's office was attached to his house, and no one else was there. When I arrived, the lights were off, and I had to ring a doorbell before entering. And then I stood waiting near the reception area until an old man eased a door open and stepped inside.

He didn't say anything, so I did.

"Hi," I said. "I had an appointment for one o'clock."

"Ahhh you Samanthaaah?" he asked, his voice thick with Maine accent.

"No," I said. "I'm Jessica."

He looked confused. "Whahht ahhh you heahh for?" he asked.

"Shots," I said. "Shots for my kitten."

"Whahht?" he said.

"Shots for my kitten," I repeated.

"Ahm hahhd of heahhing," he said. "Whahht ahhh you heahh for?"

"SHOTS!" I said. "SHOTS FOR MY CAT!"

"Whahht?"

"SHOTS! SHOTS! MY KITTEN NEEDS SHOTS!"

"Ahh kitty?"

"YES! A KITTY! SHOTS FOR MY KITTY!"

He nodded, finally understanding what I was there for. He told me to go around the corner so we could get down to business, and I did. I don't know what I expected to see, what I expected to happen. I guess I expected to see a crisp white room, a crisp white jacket he could shrug into. I guess I expected him to prepare himself--wash his hands, check a chart, give Abbey a look-see--before he shot her up with shots for distemper, rabies, and leukemia, but he didn't. He just asked me to put her on the table, and then he turned to rummage in the fridge--the type you'd see in a dorm room--for the appropriate vials.

I was two seconds from picking up the cat carrier and dashing out the door. The only reason I stayed was because I was busy trying to make psychic deals with my kitten. I was looking down at Abbey, who was looking up at me like, WHO THE HELL IS THIS GUY AND WHY IS HE WEARING A COSBY SWEATER?, and I was trying to tell her with my eyes that it was okay, it was fine, I was going to get her her shots and boosters here, but for the declawing and everything else I would take her somewhere else, somewhere with vets in lab coats, somewhere with people in the lobby, somewhere that didn't look like a scene out of a horror movie, somewhere that didn't remind me of the dentist's office my parents used to go when I was little--the one with the dark wood paneling and the world's most terrifying macrame owl decorations on the wall. I did not psychically tell that cat that that dentist was a butcher and that I, a little girl sitting in an owl-ed waiting room, could often hear my mother crying out in pain while he worked on her without Novocaine. I didn't think she would want to hear that part of the story, especially since I had the same kind of feeling in my bones that I used to have when I entered that dentist's office.

I unzipped Abbey's carrier and was fairly impressed when she didn't immediately bolt out of the room. She let me pick her up and hold her and kiss her forehead. I did not want to put her on that table, but I summoned the strength and placed her paws to the steel.

It was over pretty quickly--one, two, three--and she only cried a little, right before he stuck her scruff with the third shot. After that, he wrote out a payment slip and a card that had Abbey's booster shot appointment on it, and then we were gone, gone, gone.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I whispered as I walked down the steps, down to my car. I talked to Abbey the whole way home, telling her we were almost there, we were so close. I told her I was going to give her treats and some of her favorite wet food. I told her she could pretty much do whatever she wanted all day, and I wouldn't say one thing about it. If she wanted to bite my ankles because I took her to see a man who grabbed her by the neck and thrust a sharp needle into it, so be it. I would take my lumps. I probably deserve them. Poor little kitten.

As Clean as a Kitten Can Get

Here is a list of things my kitten loves:

1. Climbing my curtains
2. Sleeping under the covers
3. Scratching my school bag
4. Chasing her tail
5. Leaping from my bed to the back of my desk chair
6. Dancing across the radiators
7. Being made into the bed each morning
8. Watching me shower

Abbey is obsessed with the shower. Each morning she comes bounding into the bathroom the second she hears the faucet turn on. She hooks her two front paws over the edge and watches the water rumble into the tub while I get the temperature just right. When I switch over to the shower, she scoots herself onto the ledge and takes up residence between the liner and the curtain.

When I am finally in the shower and soaping up, that's when Abbey peeks her head around the corner and settles in to watch me shower. She can't get over the things I do in there. She's especially impressed when I shave my legs.

Well, over the weekend Abbey got a little too impressed. She was beside herself with excitement over an unexpected night shower--I was getting ready to go to stuff myself with sauerkraut and kuchen at the department's Oktoberfest party--and she got a little too antsy. One of her paws slipped in some water and then she was in the tub and being pelted with water. It was an unlucky time for that to happen, too, because I was at the point in my shower where I was washing my face, and I'd soaped my eyes up good and was still washing them out when I felt a tangle of fur and claws tumble into my legs. I shrieked. Abbey shrieked. I scrubbed at my eyes. Abbey lunged out of the tub.

When I had stopped the water and gotten a towel around me, I peeked my head out of the bathroom and found Abbey sitting across the hall in the spare room. She was shivering and looking sad. Poor kitten. Poor, wet, spiky kitten.

And let me tell you this: she did not like the towel-down she got after that picture was taken. She didn't like that one bit.

Don't Tell Me My Closet Is Repulsive. I Already Know.

Regular posting will resume shortly. For now, check out just how naughty and wild my kitten is.

This morning I was getting ready for work when I realized Abbey was nowhere to be found. Usually when she's nowhere to be found that means she's on the other side of the apartment, doing Rockette kicks across the kitchen table because she knows she's not supposed to be up there and she loves to prove that she can do it even if I say no! no! no!

But today she wasn't anywhere near the kitchen. She was in a whole new spot causing trouble.

She was in my closet, where she'd managed to somehow get up onto a high shelf. Once on that high shelf, she was hesitantly extending a paw at a time to see if the row of hangers was stable enough to walk across. After all, in Abbey-World, something's not worth doing unless it's dangerous and sort of stupid.

When I saw her, I started laughing. It was funny. It was ridiculous to see such a tiny kitten up that high. And when I started laughing she just looked at me and said, Mew?--all like, What? What's so funny?

So I had to bring her down and banish her from the closet, lest she try to tap dance across the very, very, very tiny space that serves as storage for my clothes.