pameladean | My airy comedian cat

lydy found Aristophanes downtown on a beautiful day in May of 1995. She was standing outside the IDS building waiting for a bus to take her to work. He was running along the edge of the building, yelling and looking over his shoulder. She said that he was clearly saying to her, "You're a human! FIX IT!" Nobody else paid him any attention. He was covered with what turned out to be motor oil, slicking his long fur down like a fifties teemager's look and making him a color that the Kitty Klinic later described as "buff." She picked him up and marched into Kinko's in the IDS building and asked them for an empty box. They goggled at her, with the filthy cat purring on her shoulder. "A box! For the cat!" They gave her a box. She put him into it, and noticed that there was blood on his tail. She had planned to take him to the Humane Society. She had three cats in a one-bedroom apartment. David and I were catless, my Sukey having died in January of kidney failure; but I had made a very stupid agreement with David that I wouldn't have any more cats.

Lydy then called Joel Rosenberg, who was working, but who sent his sister Sharon to collect Lydy, now seriously late for work and with cat blood on her Laura Ashley dress, and take her and the cat to the Humane Society. When Sharon got there, though, Lydy told her they would have to go the Kitty Klinic, that she was afraid the Humane Society or the pound, if they were full up, would just euthanize him because he was hurt.

He had to have the last several inches of his tail amputated and a cast put on the remainder. Lydy received many dire warnings of how awful it would be if the wound got infected and the infectionr ran up his spine. He was given a cone, which made him very despondent, and came to live with David and me until he was a sight that her resident cats would accept rather than attacking. I was out on a date with

elisem when he came home. David had told me that he was "gorgeous," and Lydy that he wasn't eating properly at the vet's, so I had laid in six or seven kinds of cat food. He was under the futon sofa in the guest room when I came home. I put the food down. He came slinking out, considered the food carefully, and meticulously buried it in symbolic fashion by scratching vigorously at the floor next to each bowl. Then he went back under the sofa.

He smelled of motor oil for days. We were to brush him whenever possible, and we were absolutely NOT to give him a bath. I did give him baths later for other causes, and I should probably just never even have tried. His fur matted if you looked at it sideways, and he had strenuous practical and theoretical objections to bathing; also to brushing or to anything else that was not his idea. This included being pilled -- I have four syringes of transdermal Tapazole gel for him because he stopped letting us give him the pill form; it included being given subcutaneous fluids for his kidney disease -- we had to take him to the vet three times a week; it included being brushed or having mats combed or cut out -- he was pretty matted at the last. it included being upstairs when he wanted to be down, and downstairs when he wanted to be up. Most of my sleeping downstairs was interrupted either by his trying to knock over the Galileo thermometer on David's headboard, or banging the blinds against the window in the media room, depending on where I was. If he was with me upstairs and wanted down he would just sit on me and make raucous meows until I got up and let him down.

When he had the cone on so that he wouldn't mess with his injured tail, he would go up to the top of the cat tree and hang his head over the edge, looking despondent and not really all there, as if he were depriving himself of oxygen so that he wouldn't have to suffer such an indignity. Lydy and I took to taking off the cone when she came to visit, and we would just keep an eye on him. He used his tail to express opinions even when it was still in the cast. He banged it into the legs of the table. When he tried to lick or bite the neatly-stitched end protruding from the cast, Lydy and I would chorus, "No!" So he took to hissing at his tail instead.

He was clearly a well-loved and well-treated young cat. Lydy got in touch with animal rescue organizations and put ads in newspapers, but nobody ever claimed him. He must have taken a long ride under a car hood, getting his tail caught in a belt or something, and getting covered with oil in the process. I used to think that maybe his previous person had been mildly allergic to cats. If I put my feet up on the coffee table, he'd drape himself over my lower legs. Later on, for years he would sleep on my feet. He didn't much care to be picked up, and he would sit next to me, kneading the sofa cushion, and purr mightily, companionable but aloof. His favorite toy at this time was the cat dancer. He would signal the end of the play by snatching it out of my hand and dragging it off to the basement like a lion with a gazelle.

When he was young, he had amazing coppery eyes. They gradually faded to a more ordinary yellow, but here's a photo of a young Ari, on the old Multilogic printer, in which you can see the color fairly well.

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Once the cast came off and the fur grew back onto his short tail, Lydy took him home with her. I missed him. Less than a week after she adopted him, Lydy called David in mild hysteria. One of the cats had objected to the addition of a new one and shat right in her bed. She did not feel inclined to deal with this, so we took the cat back. We were already house-hunting by then, so she knew she would live with him in the end.

In June, Raphael moved to Minneapolis, bringing three cats. We put Beryl in the guest room because she was stil pretty feral at that point. We let Minou and Jordan meet Ari. Minou was fine with him, but he drove Jordan crazy. Quite early on, she wanted to go through a doorway, but Ari was sitting in it. There was room for her, but she didn't want to go past him. She indicated this fact with a series of remarks. Ari cocked his head at her curiously, but didn't move. She essentially never forgave him, and was still making banshee noises at him sixteen years later.

This photo was taken near the end of her life, when she had decided to sit on me and only then noticed that Ari was already there. Once Jordan had decided on something, though, that was that.

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A few weeks before we closed on the house on the first of November, Lydy brought her cat Lilith over to stay with David and me while she finished packing. Ari was extremely polite to her. If she wanted to play with a toy, he would sit down and give her a chance. Mostly, the way she liked to play with him was for him to run up and down, while she would occasionally put out a paw and tap him on the head or flank as he dashed by. Lilith was just as cranky and opinionated as Jordan, but for some reason Ari got along with her, or she with him. Here they are near the end of Lilith's life. They were often cozier than that, but the photographic record is a bit spotty.

David and I moved into the new house in December. We had a moving party to remove large, heavy, and just-happened-to-be-ready things, but there was a lot of stuff remaining. Our bed had been moved, so I ended up sleeping across the street in Raphael's apartment and spending my days packing the leftovers and cleaning up the house, while David was mostly at the new house, putting in new wiring and fixing the plumbing, with our friend Greg's help. Since Jordan and Beryl didn't like Ari, he went to live in the new house. I was hauled over there several times to visit my cat, who apparently wailed inconsolably when I wasn't around. This behavior continued for some years. When I did come home, he would come find me and run up and down excitedly, but if I picked him up he just struggled to get down again. The other thing that happened if I'd been away for more than an hour or so was that Lydy would say to me, "YOUR CAT -- " and recount some transgression, whether it was rolling around in the sink purring while she tried to brush her teeth, getting into the cat-free zone (a concept he utterly rejected for the next seventeen years), knocking stacks of books over, climbing into open drawers, or pulling the towels out of the linen cupboard.

I started taking him outside on a leash very soon after we moved. I think I took him out in the old yard a time or two. Raphael had some harnesses for Jordan and Minou, which they mostly disdained. They weren't right for him, though. He could wriggle out of them. Raphael found an online source of a harness that fastened on top rather than under the cat's belly, and I got him one from there. Here he is trotting down the sidewalk, ignoring the leash.

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He walked me, rather than the other way around, and was always dragging me into prickly undergrowth, running up trees and having to be gotten down again, and trying to get into the neighbors' yards, pulling on the harness until he made himself choke. One summer within the space of a month he twice darted suddenly into a flower bed and emerged with a mouse in his mouth, immensely pleased with himself. He rolled on sunny sidewalks, minutely sniffed all around the garage, sometimes tried to take off running down the alley, and hissed at me when I said the dread words, "Hey, babe, it's time to go in the house." For years, if I wasn't out all day, I took him for a half-hour session on every clement day, He stalked squirrels, chased butterflies, and once leapt high and struck a green darner right out of the air. I picked him up, got cussed at, and carried him around to the front. By the time he got back to his prey, it had recovered and flown off. In later years he was more sedate, but even late last November, he rolled on the concrete and checked out the entire perimeter of the house with his nose before deciding it was time to go in rather than making me annoy him by arbitarily collecting him.

Here he is in a more prowly mode:

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And here he is tasting a plaintain:

And rolling on the sidewalk:

In 2000, Lydy and I went to the city pound and came home with two kittens. They decided that Lilith was their main Big Cat, but he was a kind of uncle to them. If they got too obnoxious, he would just hunch his shoulders, as if to say, "Kids!" and go upstairs. Here he is with them in the stairway window, a very popular spot for cats in good weather. There's a bird feeder just outside.

Here's a photo from 2004 where they are all hanging out on David's waterbed:

Raphael once said in despair, "Everything happens to him!" I don't remember which incident prompted this. But he in 2005, he ended up with a broken toe because he darted into the middle of a Minn-Stf meeting just as a friend of ours knocked the blender off the edge of the dishwasher. His paw was in a splint for several weeks. I was told to limit his activity, but since almost his first move when I brought him home was to develope an amazing windup with his splinted leg, and jump into his favorite armchair, this advice was never implemented. For weeks we knew when he was coming -- thump, thump, thump. He had always used his paw to scratch at the door if he wanted to go downstairs or out on his leash, and to paw a window that needed to be open, or a cupboard door that wanted to be ajar. Now he banged things with his splint.

I can't find pictures of him in his splint, but here's one Raphael took of him in his favorite chair:

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He also, as best we could determine, pulled a muscle in his back by missing a jump between two eight-foot-tall bookcases. He had been the habit of sleeping in a box of styrofoam peanuts that we kept up there in case we wanted to ship something, but I had to block off his access while he recovered, and I decided that I didn't want a repitition of the injury and just left the blockage in place. For years after he would leap to the back of the armchair and gaze up at the boxes blocking his way onto the five-foot bookcase and thence to the taller ones. Treating this injury made us realize that opiates affected him oddly. He didn't sleep and focussed intently on things we couldn't see for hours and hours. He didn't have outright bad trips the way poor Jordan did on opiates, but we meant not to give him any more of that medication unless things were very dire. Unfortunately, when he turned up hyperthyroid, Raphael agreed to let me borrow a dose of Jordan's Tapazole so that I could start him on it right away rather than waiting to pick up a bottle of his own. But I picked up the bottle of Tramadol left over from a difficulty Jordan had had with her hindquarters. Raphael had told me there was a stash of already-quartered Tapazole tablets, and there was the bottle, with a name on it starting with T and containing an L, full of quartered tablets. We had an infestation of fruit flies at the time, and Ari spent twelve hours gazing raptly at them from one particular spot in the library. I felt horribly guilty for my carelessness.

His last major accident was a grooming injury, as the emergency vet called it, which meant that we weren't quite careful enough in removing a mat from his belly, and he had to have stitches.

He had been a twelve-pound cat at his largest, and seemed best at around ten or eleven pounds. But he lost weight gradually for four or five years as the kidney disease and his general fussiness about eating took their toll. He was never much of a lap cat except with Raphael, who referred to him as "lap fungus," and occasionally with Dvid. He hung out on David's bed quite a bit with downstairs cats, and graciously accepted pets from downstairs humans. He made friends with people who came over regularly, including

elisem. He remembered

arkuat between visits even when Eric was in California, and before he got too sick would come downstairs and require chin scritches.

He was affectionate and opinionated right up to the end.

Here he is at his largest, I think:

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And here he is in his usual spot; he slept with me in several beds, but always on the right-hand side. The other cat is Naomi.

Here he is being what Raphael called "leg spackle."

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This is from very near the end. He'd developed the habit of just climbing up me and settling on my collarbone. He didn't weigh much at all by then, and while I might complain once or twice, I could hold him for an hour or so of TV watching. He also did this when I was sitting at the computer, which made typing difficult. But since the inconvenience was accompanied by huge purring, I didn't usually evict him until my arms had gone to sleep.