Chicken Soup for the Cat & Dog Lover's Soul (35 page)

My little girl grew up, went to junior high and finally high school. Starry was ten and Rachel was sixteen. Starry and Rachel were still close, though Rachel spent less and less time at home. Starry spent most of her day sitting on the sideboard in the dining room, looking out of the window into the backyard. I loved seeing her as I’d pass, her glossy black coat almost sparkling in the sunlight she loved to seek out, the white tip of her tail brilliant against the shining black of her curled body.

One Sunday morning, early in November, Starry got out the door before we could stop her. When Rachel’s friend came over to study that evening, she came in the door with a worried expression. “Where’s Starry?” she asked.

When we told her we didn’t know, she had us come outside with her. There was a black cat lying in the street.

It was Star. The cat’s body was warm and she didn’t appear to be injured. There was no blood or wounds that we could see. It was after hours, but our vet agreed to meet us after our distraught phone call. Rachel was upset, but holding it together. My husband Burt and I told her to stay at home while we took Star to the vet.

Burt and I picked Starry up carefully and rushed her to the vet’s office. The vet examined her briefly before looking up at us and saying, “I’m sorry, but she’s gone.”

When we got home, Rachel could tell by our faces that Starry was dead. She turned without speaking and went to her room.

It had been a hard year for me. My father had died not long before, and I hadn’t totally come to grips with the loss. Rachel and I were in the midst of the delicate dance mothers and teenaged daughters everywhere find themselves performing—circling, pulling away and coming together in odd fits and spurts. I took a chance and knocked at her door. When she said come in, I sat with her on the bed and we cried together. It was a good cry, clearing out some more of the grief I couldn’t face about my father and bringing Rachel and I closer as we shared our sadness about Starry.

Life went on. Thanksgiving came and went. Rachel and I both found ourselves mistaking black sweatshirts strewn on chairs or floors for our newly missing black cat. The sideboard looked desolate, empty of the warm presence glowing with life I’d come to expect there. Over and over, little pangs of loss stung our hearts as the weeks went by.

I was out Christmas shopping, when I saw it. It was a Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a “cat angel.” A black cat with white wings and a red ball between her paws. I had to get it, but bought it wondering if it would be a happy remembrance of the cat we’d loved or a chilling reminder of our loss.

When I got home, I painted a white tip at the end of the angel cat’s long black tail and hung the ornament on our tree.

That evening, when Rachel came in, she flopped on to the couch. She sat staring at the Christmas tree, “spacing out” after a long day at school and after-school sports. I was in the kitchen when suddenly I heard her gasp. “Mom,” she called. “Mom, come here!”

I walked in and found her standing in front of the tree, looking at the cat angel with shining eyes. “Oh, Mom. It’s Starry. Where did you find an ornament with a tail like hers?”

She looked about six again. I gathered her into my arms and wonderfully she didn’t resist. We stood together, looking at the tree, feeling our love for Starry and for each other.

Our charming, nose-nipping cat was gone, but now Starry, the Christmas angel, would be a part of our family tradition for years to come.

Sometimes you can make your own miracles.

Pamela S. Zurer

Shorty

It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it has been nineteen years since a little ball of joy (and fluff) came into my life and changed it forever. I was working for a property management firm in San Francisco and was asked to relocate to Texas to oversee an apartment complex there.

Soon after my wife Linda and I arrived, the building maintenance man discovered a little mutt in a recently vacated apartment. The dog was in a closed closet with no food or water. The maintenance man and his wife were unable to keep her, so Linda asked me if we could do so. “Just for a little while,” I reluctantly agreed, but added, “just for a few days.”

I nicknamed the dog Shorty. And Shorty took to me like you wouldn’t believe. She followed me everywhere. She was closer than a shadow and when she lay beside me on the couch or in bed you couldn’t get a dime between us. Both Linda and I quickly knew that a “little while” was going to become a lifetime.

When our time in Texas came to an end, we returned to San Francisco where Shorty adjusted to being a city dog.

We’d take her to the park and for walks around town, but it wasn’t the same as when she and I went running out in the fields together just enjoying the day and one another. That was truly our favorite time.

In San Francisco, Shorty learned how to play baseball. She absolutely loved it. Linda pitched, I hit and Shorty fielded the ball. She would catch it in the air or at the most on one hop, trot up to Linda, give her the ball and then run back to the outfield and bark as if to let us know she was ready for more.

As time went on, Linda wished she had a dog that was as devoted to her as Shorty was to me. So one day we went to the SPCA. Sitting in the back of a cage was a terrier-mix a little bigger than Shorty but with the same coloring. He had the biggest brown eyes and was just begging to be taken home. And he was.

Shorty and Buddy took to each other from the beginning and people used to think they were brother and sister.

Some years later, we rented a little house with a fence and room for Shorty and Buddy to play in. By then in her old age, Shorty started losing her teeth, and her tongue used to hang out of the side of her mouth. She also lost her sight and her hearing.

But Buddy became her eyes and ears. He knew that when Shorty went to the front door and barked once, the way she had always done, she wanted to go outside. But now she needed assistance, and Buddy knew exactly what to do. He would take her ear in his mouth and gently guide her down the steps to the lawn where he would lie down and watch her roaming around smelling everything she could. When she was ready to come into the house, Shorty would stand motionless, bark once and again Buddy would go to her, take her ear and guide her up the stairs to her bed.

One evening the door was open, and Shorty somehow made it down the stairs unattended but she collapsed at the bottom. I carried her to her bed and she lay there for a day whimpering, just as she had seventeen years earlier in that dark closet. I told Linda that it looked like it was about time.

Linda knew what I meant and nodded. We took Shorty to the vet that night and as expected there wasn’t anything that she could do. She helped us feel better by asking us to think of all the positive things that Shorty had brought into our lives. I will always feel grateful for that.

I decided to remain with Shorty. The vet left us alone in a room, and I stood just stroking her. I think we both gathered some comfort in being with each other. When it was over I cradled her, not ever wanting to let her go.

Linda and I had Shorty cremated and today her ashes and her picture sit atop our dresser.

When the time comes, I’ve requested that I too be cremated. And Linda has promised me that she will scatter my ashes, together with those of Shorty, in the biggest field she can find.

Then Shorty and I will go running together once again.

Larry Monk

[EDITORS’ NOTE:
Larry Monk passed away suddenly just three weeks after
writing this story. In accordance with his wish, Linda Monk scattered Shorty’s
ashes, along with her husband’s, in one of their favorite fields.
]

Prince’s Golden Season

I first met Prince on a dark Thanksgiving Eve eight years ago when I returned from the city for the long weekend and went as always to feed my daughter’s mare. Following a few steps behind the mare came a giant face out of the darkness, a head hanging like a broken branch from a crane-like neck, a concave back and a pace so slow that each step seemed painful. I had no idea how he got there, this caricature of a horse, nor where he should have been.

“It must be Prince,” my daughter Jeremy said as we left him with a wafer of hay at his feet, his great neck lowering slowly. “My riding teacher told me about him. His owners are going to sell him at next week’s auction. They’ve already stopped feeding him.”

At sunrise on Thanksgiving I went to the corral to look at Prince. There, between me and the rising sun, he was even more incongruous. His color was orange, his winter coat long and standing out from his body, his sagging back holding the ball of the new sun. His face was camel-like below a straw-colored forelock, and his eyes, even as I approached, were tightly closed, as if another morning was too much to face. Tear streaks marked crooked paths along his nose. He walked only when absolutely necessary with an arthritic stiffness, and his conformation by any human measure of horse beauty was hopelessly wrong.

Over the long weekend, Jeremy and I fed and groomed Prince with gentle hands he seemed to enjoy. He accepted his first carrot, his private pile of hay with cautious disbelief. We called our blacksmith who put shoes on his front hooves to even out his sloping posture and to relieve the painful tilt caused by too much weight in front.

Of course, we could not just keep the horse. Nor could we return him to owners so utterly uninterested in his welfare. I called to find out what price he would have brought from bidders at the auction. The answer came quickly; Prince’s price was $112. At the end of Jeremy’s Saturday riding lesson I gave a check to her teacher. (I never knew nor wanted to know the identity of Prince’s owners.)

As the winter weeks passed, Prince began to change. Doggedly he followed Jeremy’s mare up and down the pasture, deeply in love. Now his eyes were open, russet pools in his barren homely face, and he stepped a little faster to keep up. He still looked like a huge, shaggy toy; a horse exaggerated for a laugh, but he held his head higher, he swished his tail as if it mattered, and the rows of his ribs, which once had corduroyed his flanks, began to disappear.

In March our mare gave birth to a pure white colt in a drenching rain. It was our firstborn horse, a memorable event for my daughter and me, but a much more satisfying one for Prince. Although gelded, Prince was certain the colt was his, and fatherhood became the final miracle. Now he led the mare, guided the wobbling colt and walked tall. It was he who chose their path, the patch of shade at noon, the green puddle of burr clover. He also found his voice, a deep ahem, and at mealtimes he rattled the aluminum gate with one shoe, impatient if we were late.

As his adopted son grew strong and challenging, Prince took over his discipline, never bothering to chase him, for nothing was worth the hurry, but administering necessary nips along the way. There was no longer any doubt that he had been properly named long ago when someone’s hopes for him were high.

As the days of spring warmed, his winter coat fell away in tufts, each to be carried off to line the nests of larks and red-wing blackbirds. He put up with little girls straddling his scooped-out back and now and then would carry them a few steps before stopping to close his eyes.

And so he lived, a once-again Prince, his self-respect restored, his days of ignominy long forgotten. He suffered Saturday shampoos, standing in a cloud of suds, feeling the squirt of the hose, drying off by noon. He stood long hours at the fence corner gazing off toward the mountains, then resting his chin on a fence post to nap. Caught for a moment each evening between me and the setting sun, he seemed a golden horse, a misshapen Pegasus pausing between heavenly adventures.

I returned early from a trip last summer to find Prince noticeably thinner. Tests revealed the presence of worms, which were quickly eliminated, but his weight continued to drop. A rich diet of mixed grains and molasses was added, served three times a day in a bread pan to fit his jaws. Still he shrunk before my eyes, his ribs reappearing, the sag of his back emphasizing the emerging crags of his quarters. He still walked toward me, but he allowed me to do most of the walking, and he chewed each mouthful with less and less enthusiasm. The pill he now took once a day, powdered and mixed with his grain, had no effect. He spent his days in deep grass seldom reaching down to graze, and more and more I saw his eyes turned toward the mountains far away. I spoke quietly at such times, reminding him how fortunate we both were, reassuring him that all would be well. He, as I, knew better.

The great orange horse was fading before my eyes, and nothing I did made any difference. His mare and colt stayed near, but they seemed forgotten. He seemed already to have left them. His tear streaks lengthened, and as I dried them with my sleeve to keep the flies away, he bowed his head to allow me to scratch his forelock.

On a morning in mid-October, Prince returned to the corral and lay down at last. By then he was the shadow horse I had seen long ago. He could not raise his head to nibble at the sweet-smelling breakfast I brought, and I called John, my friend and veterinarian, who skipped his own breakfast to come to us. There in the corral Prince went to sleep. It was all we could do for him, a gentle push toward the mountains he now could climb.