My childhood cat Dabney was named after Dabney Coleman , of Nine To Five fame, one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. He was born in the backyard the summer I was twelve. My cat Sirithew (her name is a whole other story), had him and his littermates under a lawn chair, by what is now my mom’s banana patch. Mom came and woke me up very early one morning, telling me there was something she wanted me to see in the garden. “I don’t want to see a stupid flower, Mom, it’s Saturday morning.” “You’re definitely going to want to see this,” she said. So I grumbled my way out of bed, exchanged beleagured glances with my sister, who had also been roused, and stumbled out to the backyard. “Oh, kittens!”
Twelve is a very good time to have kittens. You’re old enough not to kill them by stepping on them or by opening their eyes before they’re ready, but young enough to be sort of besotted by them. They’re so little! So furry! So cute! Twelve is an excellent time to have three newborn kittens in various flavors of stripeyness underneath a lawn chair in your back yard. It’s a wonderful time to squabble with your sister about which one is yours, and to decide to name him after an actor who plays, almost exclusively, crusty old misogynists. Dabney. What a great cat.
It was a very exciting time, cat-wise, because you know that Sirithew had her three kittens, and then not one but two stray cats came into our yard to have their litters. So we had nine kittens, four or five of our regular cats, and then some extra strays, adding up to a grand total of about fourteen cats, all of them outside, thankfully. It was the greatest summer ever. I had a horde of little girls come home with me after school to see all the kittens and play with them and (occasionally) dress them up in Cabbage Patch clothes. Before the hurricane there were all these Australian pines surrounding the house and they dropped their needles into a pretty solid cover over the back lawn, out by the swingset and playhouse (which we called “the summerhouse” for some reason and where I pretended to be the heroine in a very age-innappropriate book), and you could sort of scoop the pine needles into little huts for kittens to sleep in. You could watch them nurse and learn to open their eyes and bite each other. You could compare our kittens to the stray kittens that lived in the yard. You could bring them into your room and make forts for them out of pillows. You could carry them around in a basket, or in your skirt, or in a little yellow crocheted hat your mom made for you when you were five. You could make them act out stories. Good times, kittens.
Dabney was the only one we kept, out of that litter. He stayed in that yard for his whole life, with one notable exception: we took him to Michigan with us that summer. Carry-on. Mom just popped three kittens in her tote bag and sailed past security and on to the plane with no fuss whatsoever. We passed them around on the flight. He did pretty well in the Midwest (I recall his mother beheaded a lot of gophers and left the bodies in piles) but in his heart, I think, he belonged in the backyard, under the heart tree and the lime tree and what we called “lily plants.” He chased lizards and birds. He became a very large cat with a pretty insistent voice. You know how parrots make that really loud “RAAWWWWWWK !” noise? Dabney did that, but in cat language: “RRRRRRRROOOOOOWWWW!” Over and over again. When I went away to college I called my mom a couple of times a week my freshman year, and I’d always ask to talk to the cat. “You can hear him in the background, can’t you?” Mom would say. “RRRRROOOOOOOWWWWWW!” I could.
I haven’t lived at home for ten years now, but whenever I went home for vacation Dabney would meet me on the front walk and demand that I pet him. He liked to sit on my chest and purr. He was very heavy. Even though he only saw me once a year he was still sort of my cat…I think maybe he recognized me when I was home. This last couple of years he was sleeping on my mom’s bed almost every night, and she said he was an excellent substitute for a duvet cover.
Last Friday there was a sad message on my answering machine when I got home from work. It was from my mom. She said that by the time I got the message, she would have put Dabney to sleep. He had developed a very sudden and severe tumor in his leg (right after a clean bill of health from the vet the week before) and it was terminal and he was sixteen years old. Our old family vet from when I was a kid was going to come to the house to put him to sleep so he wouldn’t have to get in the cage to go to the vet, which he hated. Mom said he didn’t have any pain the last couple of days of his life. She and I had had, oddly, a conversation about this very issue just a couple of weeks ago…I told her I knew he was getting old and that I wouldn’t ever want him to suffer. My sister tried to keep her childhood cat alive for a long time, longer than was probably necessary, and it was very difficult for everyone. I thought it would be best if he could just live his days out in the yard he was born in.
That’s exactly how it happened. Mom made the decision, bought half a pound of sirloin and fed it to him his last couple of days. She said the tumor was bleeding but he didn’t seem to have any pain yet and was walking around okay. He went outside just as he always did and even beat the other cats up a little. He was asleep on my mom’s bed when the vet came.