Animal People

Noah, carrying someone else’s newspaper to the park

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Over the years, I’ve noticed that people often speak of themselves as “cat people” or “dog people.”  For years, I was one of those people who referred to myself as a “cat person.” I’ve had a cat – or several – ever since I was in college. My parents had a dog when I was growing up in Venezuela, a long-haired dachshund who was a sweetie, but she was their dog, not mine or my sister’s. 

When Rob and I got married, we each brought a cat to the marriage. My cat was Damian, whom we nicknamed Doolittle. I had rescued him from a shelter in Tallahassee when I was in graduate school, and he was with me for 16 or 17 years. Rob’s cat was a beautiful Persian, Shelley. 

When our daughter was born, we had Damian, Shelley, and Fox, a tiger cat, so Megan was always surrounded by cats. When she was seven or eight, Fox had passed on and Megan’s friend, Amber, asked if she wanted a golden retriever, Jessie, that she and her family were fostering. The owner had to give the dog up because their young son developed allergies to it, so Amber’s family had taken the dog in. Amber’s dad, a school cop, put Jessie through a training program to sniff out drugs in school lockers. Jessie had washed out of the program, so they couldn’t afford to keep her.

Megan and I drove over to Amber’s place one afternoon to meet Jessie. We decided to take her for a trial period to see how she acted with our cats – Tigerlily,  Whiskers, and Powder. Needless to say, she settled next to Rob and was with us for eleven years.  She developed a beautiful relationship with our white cat, Powder.

Jessie was one of those golden retrievers who loved everyone, unconditionally. Every human she met, she befriended. For her, there was no such thing as a human enemy. Nor were there any cat enemies. She was even friends with Kali, the dusky conure we had at the time.

Enemy simply wasn’t in Jessie’s vocabulary.

On a night in 2007 before we had to put Jessie down, Powder stood vigil. She knew her buddy was ailing. When we came home that afternoon without Jessie, Powder went looking for her.

Between June 2007 and November 2009, we were dogless. But we had three cats – Tigerlily, the oldest, Powder, and Whiskers, our tuxedo male. He was born in our backyard to a feral cat whose five kittens were rescued and brought to our back porch. The mother eventually joined her kittens on the porch to nurse and care for them. We gave four of the cats to “cat people” and kept Whiskers.

He was a character, always feisty yet loving, the king of the block who sometimes followed us when we rode bikes down to our neighborhood park with Jessie. One morning in late 2007, Whiskers suddenly began to convulse on Megan’s bed. Megan and I swept him up and sped to the vet’s – only to realize it was a Sunday.  We didn’t get to the emergency animal clinic in time  He died in Megan’s arms and is buried in our backyard with Kali, Tigerlily, and an idiosyncratic hamster, Garfield, who was part of our menagerie over the years.

After Jessie died, we were dogless for nearly two years. But Simba, an orange tabby, joined our crew, and is still with us.

Then in November 2009, it struck me that I missed having a dog. Cats don’t leap up and dance when you come home. They don’t meow. They don’t grab the nearest toy and race over to you and drop that toy at your feet.

So I started my Internet search for a golden retriever and ran across the South Florida Golden Retriever Rescue Center. And there, I found Presley, a nine-month old golden retriever male, a reddish golden, like Jessie. We visited him at the home that was fostering him, and two days later, the adoption was complete. He was brought to our house. That name, Presley, didn’t fit him. We renamed him Noah.

And he was big. And powerful.

Tigerlily fled into the backyard and stayed out there for two days, hiding in the bushes. Simba fled every time Noah entered a room where he happened to be. Powder made friends with him and eventually, Tigerlily realized Noah wasn’t going to eat her and came back inside. And Simba now just struts around Noah, with his tail twitching.

In 2011, Nika entered our lives – Megan’s first dog. And she’s a whole other story, and is probably Noah’s secret love.

And this post doesn’t include all the baby ducklings we rescued over the years!

The point, I think, is that no one is really “a cat person” or “a dog person” or even “a bird person.” We are “animal people.” Our lives are enriched and even defined by the animals who join us on our journey – and whose journey we join. Our moments with them and our memories of them are intimately connected to our moments and memories of family, friends, events all of the peaks and the lows and the plateaus of life.

Perhaps these animals are linked to our past lives. Perhaps they are our teachers- or we are theirs – life to life. Who knows?

What I do know is that without them  I would be diminished, less aware, less whole, less compassionate.

Years ago, my dad gave me several  excellent pieces of advice:

1. Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make

2. Don’t bother with people who are indifferent to animals because they ultimately will be indifferent to people as well

3. Love what you do, whatever it is

I think he was right on all counts.