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Caelan Walker

257 Gundry Drive

Falls Church VA

Dear Caelan,

Your mother brought you to visit me several times when you were a toddler. She was somewhat frustrated in her plans and I had my feelings hurt because at least as much as you cared about visiting me, you cared about visiting my cat. Because of allergies passed along to you by your mother, you were both miserable for significant parts of your weekends with me here in Wilmington. I know little about tiny folks' immune systems, but believe that your mother could have taken Benadryl and stopped radiating stress.

Wednesday, my feline companion 9/76 - 7/95, was an exception to most cat allergies. Bred to be a miniature housecat, she had typical Maine Coon markings and four white feet with large tufts of hair between her toes. She ate brewers' yeast every healthy day of her adult life, which went far in flea-proofing her, gave her a shiny coat and kept down the cat dander that effects the sensitive. Allergy or not, you loved petting Wednesday, whose name came out as "She-She" when you were first learning to talk.

Old, gentle, patient and virtually mute, she was usually within easy reach as an object of your attention. Scurrying to get Wednesday's food dish and large clumps of shed fur out of your inquisitive path as you followed the cat around with watering eyes, runny nose and increasingly blotchy face, your mother tensely tried to run interference throughout your visits.

Wednesday came to me as a kitten from a bordello in Virginia Beach where a high school friend of my then fiancee worked and lived. Said fiancee, Marianne, became my wife in early April, 1977, under two weeks before my 21st birthday. We separated 19 months later in Richmond, where we had moved to attend Virginia Commonwealth University, and Wednesday and I moved in with an old friend of mine, Steve Arnold.

As mentioned in other correspondence, Marianne named my introverted nature as primary cause of our incompatibility, and I had a hard time discussing my separation with Steve. I remember starting to announce the news and open discussion of sharing an apartment several times, then blurting out, "Steve, I've got the blues. I've got to pack my cat and go."

Wednesday, at least as introverted as I was in addition to having the tiny brain that will fit in a cat's skull, was not always charming in the eyes of others, but Steve tried to develop a friendly relationship with her, especially after we'd mailed cat shit to a mutual friend at Virginia Tech and he'd seen how useful a cat could be. She could be frustrating, though. I remember a rainy afternoon during which Wednesday kept coming to the window (we lived upstairs and she spent a lot of time on a roof that overhung the downstairs front porch) looking as if she wanted in. Steve got up at least three times to cross the room and open the window for her, at which point she retreated to a far corner of the roof and looked at him as if he had pinworms in his eyebrows. Telling Steve, "Wednesday thought people were gods before she met you," I was as callous as testosterone permitted. Actually, he was as good with that cat as one could wish.

I was divorced at 21 and attending a college where women far outnumbered men, and it was the '70s. "Safe sex" still meant "not falling out of bed," and Wednesday thought for a long time that my purpose in life was to bring women home to feed her. She was a good hostess, watching guests to see what they wanted though rarely doing anything about it, what with lacking opposable thumbs and so on.

Even without opposable thumbs, she could brush herself with either of her two hairbrushes, though she preferred the one with stiffer bristles for flossing her teeth. Other than the self-brushing, her repertoire of tricks was almost barren. Until she was about 14, she could be persuaded to stand on her hind legs and spin 360 degrees for a piece of turkey breast, a game we called, "Degradation for Lunch Meat."

She was a good traveler, riding in my Volkswagen van from Richmond to Shreveport, New York, and Denver. I remember reaching over to the passenger seat and waking her up as we reached the Vicksburg bridge once, suggesting, "Wednesday, Wednesday, most cats haven't crossed the Mississippi," to which she responded by putting her little white forefeet on the dashboard and looking intently out the window until we'd crossed into Tallulah, Louisiana, then lapsing back into slumber. Maybe she was just fascinated by the bridge girders that seemed to be flying by, or maybe she was trying in some vague way to humor me, but I think she was taking my suggestion under advisement.

Cats in general are wonderful beasts, and I believe all of the statistics about them lowering their owners' blood pressure and lengthening their lives. More direct lessons may be learned from them, as well. Not only do they not mind the ethnic and demographic differences between people, but actually forgive us for being such poorly designed creatures over all. Two legs? Massive frames that keep us out of all the good hiding places? Booming, low voices that don't articulate subtly enough to get important points across? Horrible manners? What upper echelon deity would create or smile upon such creatures as humans? Yet cats consistently find tolerance, patience, trust and affection for us. It is very sad to me that your allergies prevent you from having pets. Especially cats. Especially when you fell for "She-She" so readily and thoroughly.

I told people from early in this decade on that I could easily predict the date on which Wednesday would die, based on the observation that she was sleeping an extra minute each day, which she seemed to be doing as she aged. In the early summer of 1995, her appetite began to wane and she often sat at the back door, plainly signally me that she wanted out. Because of fleas, briars and her increasing frailty, I didn't want her outside, but finally acquiesced.

She could barely make it back up the steps. The veterinarian could find nothing wrong with her, but she continued to decline, refusing to eat and continuing to want out. I think that she reflected on her life one day and decided that it was no longer worth it; that she had had all of the fun that she was going to have.

It wasn't until last winter that I felt myself to be ready for another cat after Wednesday, who had been with me for all of my adult life and met all of my friends and family members, both two-legged and four during that time. Last December, though, I began preparing for a cat. I got out Wednesday's old dish, purchased a covered litter box, and began to buy a few cans or a box of cat food or maybe a bag of litter when I went to the store. Miranda thought I was crazy, buying supplies for a cat that I wasn't even trying to meet, but I said, "Cats will happen."

Scamper seemed to be happening in January. Ostensibly the pet of a young couple that had moved in next door to Miranda, this poor 12-year old beast who had exactly Wednesday's coloring and fur length lived his life in the apartment complex parking lot, being fed at irregular intervals by his humans. Miranda began letting him into her apartment to visit, and then we gave him some tuna, began brushing him, cut the mats out from under his forelegs, and basically started to feel attached to him.

After a couple of weeks, I took Scamper to my house, where he was perfectly happy to live on that cat route from food bowl to bed to litter box, being petted along the way by whatever big two-legged folks might be around. He never expressed any longing for his former owners or home; never even looked out the window. Nevertheless, said previous owners put posters with Scamper's photo and description up around Miranda's neighborhood and called him at dawn and dusk each day for a week until Miranda made me bring him back and dump him back in the parking lot again. His owners were happy to see him, fed him better, let him into their apartment once in awhile, then moved to Asheville. I thought that this whole sordid incident had shown unexpected prejudice on Miranda's part -- She had advanced the desires of Scamper's humans just because they were humans, even though they had proven themselves to be piece of shit humans regarding cats as far as I was concerned.

In any event, I continued to be confident that "Cats will happen." A week after I came to see you, I woman I was talking to during the workday about installing some railings on an outdoor staircase at the church for which I work asked me offhandedly if I wanted a cat. According to her story, this longhaired black female had appeared at her family welding shop as a small kitten about a year earlier and had since lived around the shop, eating there daily, sleeping on desks or in the workshop, but making do on her own at night and on weekends, since the welding family lived with a full complement of cats and dogs in a country home thirty miles away from the shop. I went and met "Blackie," as the cat was unfortunately dubbed, and took her home, where I renamed her "Catherine(actually Miranda's idea ... I thought she was quite bearlike and favored "Ursula" at first)" and made an appointment for her to be spayed and get all of her shots. Her former benefactors had, after all, assured me that she had no medical history at all in the time they'd been caring for her, which was since she was a small kitten.

One traumatic car trip to the vet's office, a strong general anesthetic, a close belly shaving, a long, deep surgical incision and nearly two hundred of my hard earned dollars later, it was determined that Catherine had already been spayed and that her approximate age was two and a half. My guess is that the welder woman had lied about the poor cat's age thinking that I would be more likely to take her if she was a kitten. In any event, the stitches were removed, the hair grew back, Catherine's tiny cat brain forgot about my part in her ordeal and she forgave me. Enclosed is her picture.

Love,