Dewey's Nine Lives

Yes, he was a handful. Yes, he was wild. But look at it a different way. His mad scramble for bacon, his crazed eyes, his fear of loud noises and aluminum foil, his extra furry pumpkin-pants thighs, and especially his demented karate dancing—they were hilarious. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a cat like Mr. Kittens? Despite his aversion to cuddling, Mr. Sir Bob Kittens was as close to Barbara as Smoky or Harry or Amber or Max or any of the other cats in her life had ever been. When she felt sick, he looked at her. When she felt weak one morning, he put his front paws on her knees and meowed in concern. When it was Barbara’s turn to collapse in the kitchen, falling first into the table, then clinging desperately to a chair, then slumping helplessly to the floor, Mr. Kittens was there to climb on her knees, look her in the eyes as she blacked out, and scream as loudly as he could.

The cause was bleeding ulcers. One had ruptured a blood vessel, and Barbara had lost three pints of blood. A short course of medicine and a new diet cured the problem, but during a follow-up exam, the doctors detected something not as easily treated: breast cancer, the disease that had killed her mom. Barbara’s comfortable life, the one she had worked so hard to craft out of a childhood of disappointment, came crashing down around her. She had surgery, followed by radiation. When the doctors told her chemo was recommended, but was her option, she thought of her mother in those terrible last days. Barbara was forty-one; she didn’t want to be on a ventilator at forty-five, with her daughter standing beside her hospital bed, watching her die.

She chose the chemo. She’s still on it. She has lost her hair, but she figures, hey, that’s five months without shaving her legs. And a great excuse for getting out of all that dreadful holiday stuff. Her daughter, a typical teenager, used to tell her she looked embarrassing and needed some makeup, but now, so what? Who cares? Every day could be your last. If it makes you happy, don’t regret it. She eats cupcakes, not all the time but sometimes, and she doesn’t feel any guilt. She appreciates them instead. She tries to appreciate everything, even Mr. Kittens nudging her out of bed at 5:00 A.M. every morning. She feeds him and pets him—yes, he sometimes lets her pet him now—and sits in the kitchen and marvels at the morning and the coffee and how very cute Mr. Sir Bob Kittens really is.

She has her husband, James. Her marriage, always strong, is stronger now. She has her daughter, Amanda, and the overwhelming desire to see her grow up. She has Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, who has started sleeping at her feet when she’s recovering from her treatment and even, occasionally, cuddling up beside her chest. He may not be the world’s best cuddler, but through these simple acts, she knows he cares. She knows that life is good.

And when life is bad? Well, Barbara Lajiness still gets to see Mr. Sir Bob Kittens up on his hind legs, swinging his forelegs and hopping down the hall in that wild, wonderful, demented karate dance.

How could anyone, anywhere, not laugh at that?

THREE

Spooky

“I had a cat for twenty-one years. . . . He shouldn’t have survived . . . yet he did survive to bring so many hours of joy to my life for so many years. And to this day, you can sometimes feel his wet nose touch your leg as he still waits for my spirit to join him.”

Bill Bezanson grew up on a family farm outside the small town of Romeo, Michigan. Even today, Romeo has a population of only three thousand people, a newspaper that costs eighteen dollars for a yearly subscription, and a downtown whose claim to fame is that it has never been destroyed by a major fire, something apparently quite common in the old logging communities of Macomb County. After living for thirty years in Spencer, Iowa, a town whose downtown was destroyed by fire in 1931, I agree this is quite an accomplishment.

I also understand the isolation of the family farm, at least in the 1950s and early 1960s, when both Bill and I were growing up. In those days, you didn’t have television or video games or computers to keep you connected to the outside world. You had a radio—and a ham radio, if you were interested in that hobby. You had an old truck, which might have a CB. And you had a telephone. It was a party line, with a local operator, and half the time the connection was so fuzzy you couldn’t understand a word. When my family finally bought a television around 1960, my father mentioned it to his cousins in South Dakota. The phone connection was so bad, they thought our family had tuberculosis—TB. They prayed for us for an entire year.