is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Feline Existential Angst and Disappearance.
Some of you may be wondering about the cats. The four Fleetwood-Mac-style alley cats, and Tiger-who-got-lost. Well, of the four alley cats (Rump, The Bagel, Cowboy and Ladycat), only Ladycat comes around anymore. I would like to think that the other three got adopted by kind human beings in the neighborhood. But I'm sure that is not the only explanation for alley cats who go missing in Brooklyn in the winter.
And then there's Tiger. He's still living in the trash heap in the courtyard outside my window. I saw him this afternoon, and he is notably skinnier than he was before. He hides his affliction with his mass of fur, being a large-framed Maine Coon cat. But I'm not sure he'll make it through the winter. It's sad, because his loving owners live right upstairs. The reason why he isn't back home with them yet is a fateful combination of his own skittishness and their apparent total lack of understanding of how cats work. But, as Liz Dunn said to me about Tiger, well, if he'd rather live in a trash heap than in a nice warm apartment, maybe that nice warm apartment isn't so great? One never knows.
I've talked to his owners a number of times, casually, about Tiger. The older woman in particular has been really concerned and really misses him--I met her because she knocked on my door to tell me he was missing (which I already knew, since I heard one of her younger boys yelling for him all day, and it was heartbreaking).
But the Tiger-loving woman was also really offended when Tiger ran away from her when she screamed at him. Which is insane. A skittish cat is hiding in a pile of trash, and you are having your really large sons pull pieces of trash away from the pile to get at him, he peeks his head out, and then you scream at the top of your lungs? And then you're mad that the cat runs away? Like I said, there is not very much cat-knowledge in that family.
I suggested that she should leave food out at regular intervals, and then slowly lure him back in with the food. I myself tried to do that a few times, thinking I would capture him and then walk him upstairs myself. But he doesn't know me at all.
However, Tiger looks a lot like The Rhombus, my old Maine Coon cat, whom I still miss very much. So it's sad to see him wasting away, living in a trash heap. Especially when I myself would really really love to have another Maine Coon cat. They are one of the best kinds of cat you could ever hope to live with, what with their sunny dispositions, their ability to stand up on two legs, their forever-young attitudes, the huge furry massiveness, and their trilly meows.
[But why, oh WHY, you might ask, is there a TRASH HEAP in the courtyard outside my window, where a cat (and who knows WHAT else) might live? It is debris left over from remodeling various apartments in the building. I was told that the trash would be moved away by two Augusts ago. Things do not happen at New York pace in this building. It's an island pace. And if you want something done relatively quickly, you have to be really pushy about it. So I choose my battles.]
Ladycat still looks fairly robust. None of the alley cats ever really got skinny looking before they disappeared. Who knows.
Funny story: on the day when my upstairs neighbor had her sons pulling trash off the heap to get at Tiger, for some reason they were all wearing plastic shopping bags on their heads? Like the kind you get at a drugstore or grocery store? The sequence of events was like this: I saw her in the hallway and mentioned that I'd seen Tiger that morning. She got her sons and went out there. I leaned out the window and said I thought he was in the trash heap, and pointed to roughly where he was. They looked at the heap and she said something about needing protection. So I thought they'd get rubber gloves or something? But they all come back downstairs with bags on their heads. Totally mysterious. And HILARIOUS. I'm not sure what I was missing from the plot line to their story, but at the time my main aim was to write a Beckett-inspired play about it. Never got around to it. Maybe that's the version by Camus.
4:43 p.m. - March 07, 2009
js - 2009-03-11 16:56:46
to anyone who is wondering: this blog entry really is about a bunch of alley cats living outside my apartment windows. no hidden meanings.
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