The Dog With the Old Soul (12 page)

Jennifer O’Neill-Pickering

I had always thought of myself as a dog person.
This was because of a country upbringing, where our dogs performed double and even triple duties: herding animals, policing the property and serving as a family member before this was fashionable. I didn’t grow up with cats that were pets. Cats took care of varmints in the barn.

This changed in my early thirties, when my friend had to choose between her apartment and a kitten that, her landlord said, “wasn’t part of the rental agreement.” She called on the phone in tears, asking if I’d consider adopting her half-grown cat, Lady.

“Well, I’m not exactly a cat person,” I said. “Let me think about it after I meet Lady.” We made a date for me to meet her pet the next day.

I sat in her studio apartment, looking down at Lady, who had already done loopy loops around my pant legs, marking
me as part of her territory.
What a sweet cat,
I thought as she jumped in my lap and curled up into a purring ball.

“Well, it looks like someone’s already made up her mind,” I observed.

The next day I called my friend to say, “Yes, I’d take her.” As we drove away, I thought about all the positives of having a cat. People with cats had lower blood pressure, and didn’t cat owners live longer than people without felines? I recalled a story my supervisor had shared. Her pet had the habit of using her as a human trampoline and had discovered a lump in her breast, which turned out to be a cancerous tumor. The cat had saved her life. With these thoughts swirling around in my mind, I drove Lady to her new home. My friend had assured me that Lady was not a “hunter” and that no “feathered” or “furry” gifts would be deposited on my front porch or on bed pillows. Thankfully, she was correct in this prediction.

When Lady first came home, she stepped right out of her crate, walking like she had just graduated from kitty-cat charm school. She jumped up on my favorite living room wingback chair, a queen on her throne. She was stubborn and wasn’t going to give up the chair. If I sat in it, she’d join me and then climb on its top and pretend she was a warm scarf, wrapping around my neck and shoulders. I decided she might need her own chair and so I bought another—for myself. She also decided quickly that the bed was a more comfortable place to sleep than the cat bed I’d provided. If she slept on the bed, she deserved a soft pillow to spin dreams on.

She was called Lady because she walked like a lady in four dainty white boots. These contrasted with her jet-black coat and the white diamond pinned on her chest. She also could have been named Diamond. Her eyes were almond shaped and the color of amber and seemed to read minds. Chatty might have been another suitable name for Lady, because she always had something to say and talked nonstop from the moment I stepped through the door.

She was quite the social butterfly, which was a surprise, because I’d read cats were solitary in nature and territorial. Not true of Lady. She had two neighborhood chums: a rotund tabby and an enormous Russian blue. The pride liked to hang out on top of the garage and watch the goings-on of the neighborhood. Each night, when I pulled into the driveway, Lady greeted me feetfirst, jumping on the hood of my car from the roof of the garage.

Eventually, I met a wonderful man and we bought a house in a new neighborhood. Lady was not pleased and sulked in one of the bedrooms for several days. She finally forgave us and quickly claimed her new space, marking all the furniture and doorjambs about the house. We did not yet have a cat door, but Lady soon adapted. One evening, as we sat with friends over glasses of wine, there came a knock at the door, followed by another.

“Are you expecting more guests?” one of our friends asked.

“Yes, just one,” I replied. “Would one of you mind getting the door?”

Before one of them could reach the door, there was another knock.

“Whoever it is, is impatient,” said our friend who’d offered to get the door. She opened the door, and there sat Lady, one paw lifted behind the screen door, ready to “knock” again.

Lady stopped, looked up with blinking amber eyes that asked, “What took you so long?”

Not long afterward, we introduced a new cat into our family, Mr. Peach. Lady soon taught him to knock on the door, too.

My husband was a musician and a music teacher. We had a piano in our living room for his students. Each week an assortment of them filed in and out of our house for their piano lessons. Lady was an astute student, too, and took a seat on top of the piano during the lessons. We soon learned she had a good ear, because cats can’t read music, can they?

One blistering mid-July evening, we sat in lawn chairs on the back deck, sipping lemonade and fanning ourselves. The Delta breeze from the coast had finally begun to rustle the old walnut tree, announcing autumn’s arrival and the promise of relief from the heat. The screen door was open and we heard the tinkle of piano keys. The music stopped and started again, this time with more bravado. We crept into the house, curious to see who the musician was. Lady strolled back and forth across the keys, playing her dissonant repertoire, and then stopped and took a bow, pointing her head toward her two outstretched paws.

Over time I learned Lady had eclectic tastes in the arts. I had studied fine art at SUNY Buffalo in New York and had finished up my degree in California. I especially enjoyed watercolor for its fluidity and immediacy. But the one drawback of
painting in watercolor is that once the color meets paper, the marriage is forever. I put a great deal of planning and thought into my paintings before putting the brush to paper. Sometimes my paintings take several months to complete.

I had been working on a large painting with complicated patterns entitled
Seated Woman with Camellias
. The color palette for this painting was purples, reds and blues applied in delicate layers of glazes. The painting was to be hung in a few days time in a local gallery. I often kept my tools of the trade—brushes, palette, paints and water—set up on my drawing board to make it easier to get right to the task.

The painting was complete and I decided to go out for lunch to celebrate with a friend. When I returned, I again looked at my painting to see if there were any finishing touches that needed to be made before it was framed. To my horror someone
had
made some changes. My eyes followed a trail of small muddy paw prints that led from the drawing board onto the painting. The tracks, of pale mud, thankfully were erasable. But what of that purple blotch on the neck of the woman in my painting? My eyes went from the purple blotch and then back to Lady, who sat in her chair, fastidiously grooming her paws. She looked up at me with her beautiful amber eyes, which asked, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like the improvements I made?”

Kathryn Canan

A recent article in
Parade
magazine
compared the intelligence of cats and dogs. According to the author, Kalee Thompson, “dogs are ahead by a nose” since they recognize more words and can be trained to do intricate tasks, serving as sheepherders, police dogs and service dogs. Okay, I’ll concede that point. Anyone who tried to use a cat as a guide would end up at the top of a tree or burrowed under the covers of the nearest soft bed. I do take issue, however, with defining intelligence as the ability to be trained to do particular tasks. Our orange tabby, Chewbacca, takes the prize for ingenious, complex problem solving and weird psychic talents.

Unkind family members have described him as a “basket-ball with a Ping-Pong ball for a head.” Certainly Chewie defies the purpose of his prescription-diet cat food: he seems to be missing the off switch that tells him to stop eating when he is
full. We recently had to purchase a new raccoon-and squirrel-proof automatic cat feeder for use on short vacations because he had learned to open the old feeder; he would use one claw to delicately pull aside the trapdoor and let the food out whenever he wanted. He had also developed Fonzie moves to set off the feeder—a good whop of the paw in just the right place would send a shower of food down the chute. This new feeder was developed by a man with a similarly ingenious cat. My husband and I are taking bets on how soon Chewie will be able to hack into it.

A helpful cat, our Chewie. When he began marking the carpet in several places near the south wall of our house, we thought he was showing his age or reacting to cats and squirrels running along the top of the fence outside. But no. Turns out we had severe dry rot on that side of the house, and if we had listened to Chewie sooner, we would not have had to buy my husband a whole new wall for his birthday last year. I appreciate Chewie’s taste in interior decorating, too; the new oak flooring is a huge improvement over the dingy gray carpet.

Chewie’s psychic abilities showed up early in his life. It’s true that cats don’t fetch the way dogs do, but our cat does have an uncanny ability to find lost objects. I play early music on recorders and early flutes, and although Chewie rudely escapes under the bed at the sight of my soprano recorder, he still tries to participate. Before a performance one year at a local Renaissance fair, I rushed around the house, madly looking for a piece of music I wanted to play that day. It was nowhere to be found. Finally my husband noticed that Chewie was sitting on top
of a tall file cabinet, on which he had never jumped before. Slowly swinging his tail to get our attention, he was carefully guarding the very piece of music I was seeking: “A Catch on the Midnight Cats.”

Even better than detecting dry rot or locating missing music, Chewie is able to read my emotional wrangling and provide succinct answers to my dilemmas. There was one night in particular when during dinner—nothing Chewie does is unrelated to food—he solved a particularly thorny problem for me.

Growing up, I played the modern flute and piccolo, but in my early thirties I discovered the vast and gorgeous early music repertoire for the recorder and early wooden flutes. I soon joined the local chapter of the American Recorder Society to meet others infected by this bug. I learned about repertoire and style from those who had immersed themselves in Renaissance and baroque music for many years. One woman in particular took me on as her project. She came to my house when my youngest child, Robin, was just a few months old, and we formed an ensemble called Robin’s Nest, which rehearsed while Robin napped nearby.

Soon others joined us, and the members of this ensemble nurtured my new enthusiasm and became my closest musical friends. In many ways, a musical ensemble resembles a marriage. Several musicians may “date” each other in informal playing sessions, assessing both personal and musical compatibility. Once a group gels into a regular ensemble, members make a commitment to show up, practice and always give their best. The friendships that form can be intense, since the object of all our
work is to create beauty. Leaving an ensemble, then, can feel like a divorce.

Eventually the time came when I was no longer musically satisfied playing with the members of Robin’s Nest. We seemed unable to solve problems with intonation, rhythm and ensemble skills, and our repertoire was limited to a narrow period of Renaissance music. I wanted to explore other genres of recorder music—medieval, baroque and contemporary—and I was ready to play at a more professional level. I had already begun to play with other musicians who challenged me in new ways.

It was an agonizing decision. Could I really leave these talented people who meant so much to me? I talked to other musicians about it. I talked to my husband, to my son who is also a musician. I talked to the air, talked in my sleep and I talked to the cat. Everyone listened politely but in the end reminded me that it was my decision alone. The image that kept coming up was of a bird ready to spread its wings and leave the nest. Certainly Robin’s Nest had nurtured me for several years, and I was profoundly grateful for that. Month after month I put off the decision, coming home from rehearsals tired and frustrated.

At last one night my husband and I sat at the table, dinner over and the dishes before us. Once again I brought up the topic and said sadly, “I am so ready to leave the nest, the Robin’s Nest.” My husband sighed, dreading another evening of worrying over the same old topic, to go or stay. He was tired of the discussion. And apparently so was Chewie. In a sudden rush of loud movement he came through the cat door, jumped up on the table and deposited a dead bird on my now empty plate. Placing
one paw on the dead bird, he sat up and looked proudly at me. “The bird has left the nest,” I choked out when I had stopped laughing uncontrollably. My decision was made.

And it wasn’t so bad, after all. My ensemble imported a new member who also played harpsichord. They added baroque music to their repertoire and two members took up the viola da gamba. My departure let them grow in new ways, and our friendships have stayed strong. Recently I have found myself remembering that episode, because I am now facing an empty nest of my own. Robin has just left for college, and Chewie’s blunt nesting advice is useful once more.

My husband and I saw all the signs of a teenager ready to leave home during her senior year of high school. Senioritis hit hard, and we sympathized with her tirades over “stupid English poetry packets.” She observed curfews but came home not a second too early. Family meals gave way to quick bites grabbed at fast-food restaurants or her own creative pasta concoctions. Somehow I found myself asking permission to use my own car, since her schedule was so full with swim team, film projects and an intricate social life. The college decision was really quite easy; Robin gave serious consideration only to colleges more than three hundred miles away. She wouldn’t be popping home on weekends.

Chewie took to sleeping on Robin’s bed.

My cousin once told me that when your kids are ready to leave home, you’re ready to let them go. I repeated that mantra to everyone who asked me how I felt, hoping I would manage to believe it. When the day came at last, we drove nine
hours to her new home and, feeling a bit like rats in a maze, navigated the tightly scheduled move-in procedure. We finished hauling her stuff upstairs to her dorm room, helped her make up her new bed and met her roommate. Suddenly the awkward moment arrived.

“So,” she asked, “how long do you want to hang around?”

Chewie and the bird flashed into my mind. “I think we’re ready to go.” And we were.

Chewie is fourteen years old now, limping slightly from arthritis, and I doubt if he can ever again catch a bird or jump up on the table. But I look forward to his sage advice again, should I ever need it.