My Wild Irish Rogue

The best cats, I think, are the ones who find you, the ones who turn up bedraggled and pitiful with faces only a mother could love. That was certainly the case with our Mickey. One evening in June 0f 2002 Eric and I went for a walk. By the time we huffed and puffed a fast three miles around the neighborhood it was already dark. Back then we had an orange and white cat named Jazz who came to live with us in 1992 against my better judgment. Somehow I had folded like an origami crane to the pleas of our younger daughter, Catie. And as fast as you can say Fancy Feast the Queen of Everything was ours. So when I heard an inordinately loud, insistent meowing as we walked up our driveway I thought for sure the Queen had engineered an escape and was having serious second thoughts.

But as soon as I began searching for her behind the plants at the front of the house, Eric cried, “Whoa! Look at THAT!”

Flying like the wind down the middle of the short street that intersects ours almost in front of our house was an enormous mangy-looking cat -- the sort of cat you’d find roaming the docks of Dublin, hanging out with stevedores, and tossing back pints of Guiness. But there he was in suburbia cutting a sharp diagonal across our street with no heed to traffic. Up the driveway he ran, still hollering like a dock hand.

“Well, look at YOU,” I said, leaning down to scratch his ears. The next thing I knew 18 pounds of hairy beast had jumped into my arms. I admit I was a little flattered, but his fur felt like an old bottle brush and probably harbored enough fleas to start a circus. I set him down, petted him awhile and bade him a good evening.

He didn’t bid me one back. Instead he started carrying on, one minute rubbing up against me, the next keening like a banshee. He even tried crooning a few bars of "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" and when that didn't work, broke into a rousing chorus of "Finnegan's Wake." Finally we reached a compromise. We’d provide kibbles and water and prop open the door to the screened porch so he could come and go at his leisure. He, on the other hand, would enjoy a short vacation and then shut up and go back to wherever he came from. We lived up to our part of the deal. The Irish thug did not.

The next morning I went out to get the paper and there’s HIMSELF ensconced on one of the wicker chairs. Every day for a full week he’d go off roaming for awhile, come back with a nice present – a dead mole, a dead bird–– deposit it in front of the door leading into the house, and then lie down on one of my antique wicker chairs again like he owned the place. After seven days and nights of this he wore me down. Once again I folded like an origami crane, hauled him off to the vet, gave him a flea bath, and ushered him into our lives -- his missing teeth and middle age not withstanding.

The Queen of Everything, however, was not amused to be sharing her digs with a hooligan. Every opportunity she had she’d hiss viciously and whap him across the nose. He’d whap her back and the fight was on. I spent most of that June playing referee to Beauty and The Beast. It all came to a head at the end of the month though when we woke to caterwauling so loud the inhabitants of the cemetery at the far side of the lake behind our house got up a petition. But this was the KO round and I knew it. On the stairs between the first and second floors it ended with a bleeding scratch across the Queen’s nose. After that the War of the Roses turned into the Cold War and remained as such until the Queen passed on to her castle in the sky a few years ago.

For his part, my wild Irish street thug grew beautiful – silky soft and handsome as a rover with formidable white whiskers, a spring in his step and a crook in his tail. He could always be counted on to entertain guests and workmen and when new books arrived he immediately jumped into the boxes and sniffed out their worth. No matter how many times I’d tell him to keep a civil tongue in his head out would come the sandpaper to lick my hands and face. At night when I read in bed a huge paw would creep up under the book as though to mark my place. And I rarely took a bath when he didn’t parade around the edge of the tub until I gave him handful of bubbles to bat around.

He loved the fireplace, the Christmas tree, people, a snooze in the sun, an evening on the porch to scope out the wildlife (we called it kitty TV), and did I say people? He LOVED people. That’s not to say that his manners would ever have impressed Emily Post. He nipped -- well, make that BIT when he got a got bug in his ear about something, but never hard. He was a messy eater, scratched so furiously in his litter box it looked like a dust storm at the O.K. Corral, and did not share my love for my miniature grandsons. But he loved ME with all his huge Irish heart and I loved him back the same.

Today my Mickey died.