How did you become mine, little man?\u00a0 I guess we should thank your lovely first mom Samantha, who intuited that I needed for her kitty to become my kitty when I moved out of the house on Ridgefield Road.\u00a0 Or we could back up and say it was Sasha, who decided I should to be roommates with her childhood friend Samantha when I came back down south after six years in New York.\u00a0 Or we could give credit to the New York City Teaching Fellows, who realized I would be a great teacher and put me in a program with the wonder that is Sasha.\u00a0 Or we could say it was that poster on the downtown A train, because without that, I wouldn’t have even known about the existence of the NYCTF program.<\/p>\n
Let’s do that.\u00a0 Let’s say it was the poster.\u00a0 I feel like you were a long time coming to me.<\/p>\n
What a handsome devil.\u00a0 Blue eyes and white feet.\u00a0 A pink nose with a splotch of black that spilled over onto your lip.\u00a0 Did you flinch when Mother Nature was daubing at your face?<\/p>\n
And the most non-discriminating lover there ever was.\u00a0 If Burt Bacharach had a code, you lived by it.\u00a0 If a lap was created, you’d climb into it.\u00a0 You were clear that everybody could use some of what you had to give.\u00a0 When Dad came stay with me, he’d call, “Amy!\u00a0 Come here and take a look at this!”\u00a0 I’d head into the living room to find Dad supine on the pull-out couch and you lying square on his chest, your face in his face.\u00a0 “This cat LOVES me,” he’d say.\u00a0 And you did.\u00a0 You loved my dad.\u00a0 Just so happens you loved everybody.<\/p>\n
You even loved Boonie<\/a>.\u00a0 And then Redford<\/a>.\u00a0 And they both kinda tried to eat you.\u00a0 What a mensch.<\/p>\n When I got you, at 12 years old, you were…well, let’s just say you would have shopped in the Big & Tall department.\u00a0 You lumbered.\u00a0 Over the next four years, you lost seven pounds and started to slink around like a German shepherd.\u00a0 A nine-pound German shepherd.<\/p>\n It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.\u00a0 You were my Renal Failure Kitty<\/a>.\u00a0 But coming home to your cold corpse was harsh.\u00a0 I wish I could say you were curled serenely in your spot on the back of the easy chair, but you weren’t.\u00a0 You were on the couch, stiff, with a look on your face like in the last moment you had glimpsed Death and wished you could turn around.\u00a0 I feel guilty I wasn’t there for you in your final moments, but I kinda get the feeling you waited until I left on purpose.\u00a0 You probably knew I couldn’t handle it.<\/p>\n So now.\u00a0 Well, now there’s no more scooping litter.\u00a0 I won’t miss that.\u00a0 No more sprinting, dripping, out of the shower to rescue you from Redford’s adoring maw.\u00a0 No more cleaning up piss off the floor, the bathmat, the kitchen table, Redford’s face<\/a>.\u00a0 No more having to erase your attempts to update my facebook status.<\/p>\n Hm.\u00a0 I miss you, buddy.\u00a0 I mean, my lap’s so cold.<\/p>\n Love,<\/p>\n Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How did you become mine, little man?\u00a0 I guess we should thank your lovely first mom Samantha, who intuited that I needed for her kitty to become my kitty when I moved out of the house on Ridgefield Road.\u00a0 Or we could back up and say it was Sasha, who decided I should to be … Continue reading Dear Maxwell<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7376,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/7376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}