Dewey's Nine Lives

My dad was a lot like me. Or maybe I was a lot like him, at least when it came to nature. He was a farm boy. He loved to be outside, loved to garden, loved animals. I was the kid who held beetles in her hand and stuck worms up her nose to scare her Care Bears-loving sister. My mom took my sister’s side; she was not an animal lover. My dad understood. Plus, he might have been a little guilty about Puff. I don’t think he expected me to take the cat’s death so hard.

Whatever the reason, it was pretty easy to convince my dad to let me keep Bowser. He put a heat lamp in the garage for her, because the Minnesota winter was brutally cold (the heat lamp was the only way to keep her water from freezing, even in the garage), and Bowser was not, under any circumstances, on Mom’s orders, coming into the house. After the heat lamp was in place, Dad moved the old dresser, where he kept his tools, underneath it and put a cardboard box and a blanket on top. A few weeks later, Bowser had kittens, which surprised us both. She gave birth to them outside, right underneath my bedroom window. You aren’t supposed to move newborn kittens, but my dad decided to transport them from the window well to the box in the garage. After all, we had a cat condo, penthouse floor. Why would they want to roll in the dirt?

Marshmallow, I must admit, wasn’t the best kitten in the litter. In fact, he was probably the worst. He was the runt. He was shy. His hair was poofy, like he was rocking one of the bad perms floating around my small-town Minnesota elementary school in the fall of 1984. He was almost pure white. Almost, I say, because unfortunately his fur had a yellowish undercoat that made him look stained. Think of a sheep. Then think of a sheep floating in a giant ball of static. Or think of a dandelion with its white seed fronds sticking straight out, ready to fly. That was Marshmallow.

As part of the condo project, my dad ran a board from the dresser to the ground. Bowser would stand at the bottom and coax her kittens down one at a time, like a momma bird teaching her babies to fly. Marshmallow was always last. He would stand at the top of the plank with his eyes bugging out, shaking with fear. His mother would meow. His brothers and sisters would get bored and start fighting each other. Marshmallow would just stand there shaking.

“Come on, Mawshmawow,” I’d coax him. “Wun down. Just wun down. It’s easy.”

Finally, he’d take one tiny step, then sort of collapse and slide-tumble in slow motion down the board to the floor. “That’s okay, Mawshmawow,” I’d tell him. “You’ll wun tomowow.”

But when it was time to give the kittens away, Marshmallow still wasn’t weaned, and he still hadn’t worked up the courage to walk (or wun). He was still sliding in slow motion from his drawer to the ground. So my parents let me keep him. I think they figured, in his condition, he wouldn’t last long.

“Don’t give that cat milk,” my dad said, when he saw me sneaking the carton out of the refrigerator. “He’ll get a taste for it, and that stuff is expensive.”

So, like a doting mother, I whipped up a substitute: water and flour. It sure looked like milk, but Marshmallow took one sniff and looked at me crooked.

“What’s wong, Mawshmawow? You don’t wike it? You need to dwink to get stwong, Mawshmawow. I need you.”

He never did drink that wet flour, but Marshmallow got strong. When the snow melted in the spring, he started following his mother around the yard. And I followed them. Pretty soon, we were crossing the road to the median near the golf course (in my little kid perspective, it was a forest), where we would turn over leaves and rocks to see what was underneath. “Look at this wowm, Mawshmawow,” I’d say, letting the worm crawl along my wrist and down my arm. “Look at this wock. Look at this buttafwy.”

That year, I was finally old enough to walk to school by myself. Marshmallow followed me to the corner, then watched as I disappeared down the block. When I came home, he was always waiting for me at the corner. “Mawshmawow!” I’d yell, running across the last yard. I didn’t care who saw me with Marshmallow. I was proud of him. When my grandmother, who often came for long visits, told me she saw him traipse down to the corner at exactly 2:30 every day, I was even more proud. “Mawshmawow waits faw me aftaw school,” I told my friends. I bet they thought that was cool, but I can’t remember for sure.