was an alley cat. I don't know where my mom found out about him – probably in the Advance newspaper in Wyoming, Michigan – maybe the Grand Rapids Press – I don't know – but we drove over to some house when I was nine or ten years old to pick this guy up. After we got there, the people told us that he was an alley cat, he was skittish (scared of being inside, maybe), and that he was frightened and was tucked somewhere in their house and wouldn't come out of hiding. If I wasn’t a kid I probably would've asked questions. Like,
Did he want to be taken off the streets?
Does he WANT to be an indoor cat??

Anyway, we left that day without the cat. They said that once they could get ahold of him, they'd bring him over.

My mom and I came home some random-seeming afternoon and there was a black trash bag on the back porch. It was writhing around. Again, if I wasn’t a kid, I’m pretty sure that the operations of my brain would have created a different response than I actually got. I could have helped my mom out. She was as horrified as I was and was very angry that that was the best these people could think of.* Current me would have said, “Well you could have waited until he came out, like you did, and then instead of trapping him in a garbage bag, you could have trapped him in a bedroom." But like I’ve said, I was a kid. I didn't seek all those details. Still, a garbage bag. Damn that hurts just saying it.

We brought the bag in the house and opened it up. This big orange cat bolted out, ran around the house all freaked out for a little bit, found the basement stairs, scuttled and quick-crept down there and went up into the exposed rafters. Michigan basement, gigantic octopus furnace, spiders, boxes, and dust,
and meows. Like
mrayowmrraaaayowwww, so insistently,
and periodically ayoww?

We didn't see him for a few days. We would hear him meowing from the rafters down there. We were leaving out food and water. He had a litter box. It was clear that when we weren't down there that he would come down from those rafters. He would eat and drink and do his business. But we didn't meet him for a few days. 

I don't know how many days it was, but neither do I know how many days a few is.> I feel like it's three. Some people say five. Some say seven. It certainly isn't a month.

He finally came down and joined us upstairs, and my mom gave me the task of giving him a name. Now, this must have been something like nineteen eighty-five or nineteen eighty-six. I'm not attempting to be funny here, so please bear with me all of the way through. When we got this big cat back then, he really was a big cat. He was about fifteen pounds, and the veterinarian even exclaimed about how big of a boy he was. It seemed like everyone that came over exclaimed about just how big he was. I am not being an old person when I say that I think times have changed. I have a feeling that as we have gotten (bigger), our domesticated indoor animals have likely gotten bigger along with us. I think that a fifteen pound cat in 2026 is a “good-sized cat” and likely to only receive comments about its size from strangers when they are the kind of people who also verbalize other noticings like –
You got a t.v. in the bedroom! and
That’s a five dollar shake?? or
The kids are getting phones younger these days…

We only had cats when I was growing up (well, until we got Houdini~). I think this was maybe the third or fourth, maybe fifth one we had. We had a few before him. And he certainly was the biggest cat I had seen up to that point in my life. I take such great delight in coming up with names for things now, and I know I did back then as well because we had a female cat around the same time (We actually had the two of them together, but I don't remember who we got first), and her name was Teela, named after a female character in my favorite fantasy series. But the name I came up with for him was Big Kitty. It seems atrociously lazy, and I can imagine from the outside simply describing what I saw might seem like a goofy name that wouldn't develop sticking power or induce warmth. But you're wrong. You are definitely wrong. It wasn't like calling him Two Ears or Orange Fur. It was something like how when you're an adolescent boy and you're coming into your muscles and height, how people like to exclaim about how big you're getting and you feel so good inside about it. It was like giving him props. It was worthy praise for this alley cat who now had the opportunity to become domesticated. To no longer live behind garages or on the street. To now travel in a Chevy Vega rather than a black trash bag. To not have to fight all the time.**

In time, we developed a nickname which sounds just as lazy, but I can promise you it carries even more affection. Otherwise, I wouldn't have named this whole piece after his secondary name that eventually became his true name, his fuller name. It's like Big Kitty was Jack, but Jackson came in the form of Kitty Boy.

I had long-distance grandparents who would send me a $100 bill every birthday. (Can you imagine sending cash in the mail? That’s from an era of “fifteen-pound-cats-are-big”.) Every year I would get a reminder that the $100 in the card was being accompanied by $100 put into a bank account for my future college fund. As a child, I didn't walk around just talking about college or a college fund, but I grew up with an understanding that someone was planning for my future with what would add up to $1,700 (plus the interest that was explained to me once). I didn't dwell on it or think that it was something unheard of, but it certainly felt impressive when I was young. And I was reminded about it every single birthday. I know that I brought it up to people over the years when talking about future plans.

There was even this dreamy time when I was 8 or 9 and one of my fading buddies from an old neighborhood came to visit me for a weekend in our new home. He was a friend I used to be enemies with. That's for another day. But Mason and I became friends. I don't know what he had going on at home, but Mason had concocted this elaborate story about how his dad was going to buy him and his closest friends ultralights – those little one-person dune buggy lookin things that fly – and we were going to – Oh man, I can’t even tell you yet, but we had some plans and dreams, us young guys, as to what our world-protecting endeavors would be with those tiny little airships. It's very embarrassing now, but not too embarrassing to write about. It’s just that it’s for another day.~ I am trying to talk about a cat right now.

So I had this stack of money from birthdays that was stacking up getting bigger. I didn’t know what happened to it in banks if they are just keeping it safe. But it was getting bigger and getting to be a lot, like 15 pounds. Those other boys that Mason and I included as he and I talked about our heroic plans were going to be amazed when they heard about the possibilities we were building. Well, Jude was amazed, but George had a lot of questions. Anyway –

That kind of talking about fanciful things turned into talking about practical things when I got into high school. I was not academically devoted, but when I tried, I did great. And I did start looking down the road and thinking about what I might want to do. I had a few teachers who were very influential in my life, and I decided when I was in ninth grade that I wanted a particular career, and it would require some college. Now that tuition was implicit in my future, I thought differently about that college fund. 

I don’t know when I stopped having the ultralight fantasy but it didn’t last long. I don’t know what killed it and I don’t recall that being difficult. And I didn’t think of that college money often – mostly for a little while around my birthday – but when I did, I had become a little like George.

+

OK, where was I? Oh yeah – I grew up on a busy road. I don't remember the names of all the cats we had who were killed on that road, and I think there's one that I'm missing, but it went either Jake or Somebody, then Teela, then either that Somebody^ or Jake. Kitty Boy got hit too but survived. After all, he was a big kitty. Those guys don't die easily. Still, he was pretty messed up.

Mom and I came home one day to find Kitty Boy laying on the back porch. He had been outside when we left since we had indoor-outdoor cats. (That was the reason my mom would only have their front claws removed. She didn’t want them ruining the furniture, and she wanted them to still be able to climb trees well so that they could have most of what it means to be a cat working for them when they were outside. And I’m telling you, they sure brought a lot of animals inside of the house for being front-clawless. Especially Teela, but that’s another day, too~.) (That was also the reason we had four cats hit by cars, I know.)

Kitty Boy was no longer in a trash bag – just in a pile of himself. There was a trickle of dried blood from his mouth going down the center of his chin, and he wouldn't stand up. My mom took him to the vet. 

When she came home to tell me about the prospects, she tearfully and regretfully told me that she was going to have him put down. I protested loudly. I was angry. I yelled about it. I begged. I wept. I could see that she felt terrible, but I felt worse, and I could not act on what I noticed in her and was very consumed with my own sorrow. 

Anger did not even have a life of its own. You know how anger so often, maybe always, is this expressive reaction that we have because of fear? That's what I was having. I was scream-crying, telling her she couldn't do it, begging her to not do it, and it came to me. I found my solution, the thing that could make it work. I begged her to please use my college fund. This is during the period of the childish dreaming. This was before I got to high school. I was still young. Maybe I was ten. Maybe nine. And I begged her to please use my college fund if that would help.

She eventually said okay. She managed to get Big Kitty put back together. I don't know how she pulled it off – what she had to move around – but she told me she didn't take any of my college fund. I was pretty amazed that she managed to do it however it was. Kitty Boy came home from the vet, and his back leg was wrapped up in gauze held up to his body. There was a silver needle, almost like a skinny crocheting needle, sticking out of his hip up into the air. He hopped around three-legged for a while until they were able to unwrap his leg. He was back to pretty much normal.

He lived a good life. He was an affectionate cat. He would look at you right in the eyes and meow like he was talking directly to you as an individual who he was addressing by name. I'm saying he did that with meaning, kind of like the names Big Kitty and Kitty Boy have meaning. Sure, an animal looks at you and makes a sound, and yes, of course, it's looking at you and making a sound. But he looked at you with his giant green eyes and he meowed and he looked like he was saying,
Delores!
Walter~
Phyllis+
Howard?

His leg was pretty normal. You could see at times that there was kind of an indentation on his hip, but otherwise, he could still jump up onto the table, jump up onto the stereo receiver, jump up into your lap, and curl up and purr happily with gratitude. Grateful to not live outside all the time, but to be able to go in and out. Grateful to not have to go to cat heaven just because he got hit by a little car. Grateful to have you in his life. Maybe he thought of me as Big Buddy or Buddy Boy.

If my mom was at the kitchen counter cutting up something for dinner and it smelled good to him, he would do as cats do, where they get up on their back legs and put their front paws up on the cupboards and look and meow, their tails arching out this way and that to help them keep their balance. His tail would have to do extra work because that one leg was a little bit shorter, and he'd be up there in that begging position with that leg swinging freely. It was only a tiny bit sad because it was mostly super cute and kind of funny.

He wasn't just big; he lived to be pretty old as well. I want to say 13 or 14. Not earth-shattering but that's a pretty good run for a cat. At the end, his tiny little non-canine baby-looking front teeth began to fall out one at a time. He would drool sometimes. Eventually, my mom had to put him down. That was probably a decade after he got hit, so he lived a long, good, indoor-outdoor life. And he was able to do that because I advocated for him in desperation, because I promised the use of my college fund. Mostly, of course, it was because my mother had compassion and she somehow pulled it off, paying for this large extra expense as a single mom who delivered letters and worked six days a week for all of our needs and some of our wants to be taken care of. There is no question that she gets the most credit. Kitty Boy only had our common Mother to thank. But it remains true that she was responding to her supplicant. My wet-faced prayers drew her compassion to Kitty Boy. I learned something about prayer that day that I have continued to learn up to today (and it is not about the crying and the begging).

It was probably near the time that Kitty Boy had to be sent to cat heaven that I learned that there really never was any college fund. That might have been a little bit later. I'm not sure. A few or several months or years different. A few units of time different. It didn't really matter at that point. It didn't feel like a shattered dream – like a dream that needed to be bound up in gauze, held close to the body with a silver pin sticking straight upward. I didn't weep or rage or beg. I guess it went to dream heaven and it was pretty easy to let it go.

Kitty Boy, too, was far easier to let go a decade later after he got hit. I wonder how much of that is because the first time his death seemed imminent I was a child and the second time I was an adult. I think it would be wrong to assume that that accounts for all of that difference in response. I am more than twice as old now as when he was put down, but thinking backwards, I'm quite convinced that it was much easier the second time around because he had had a chance to live a fuller life. His life didn't go
alley—>trash bag—>rafters—>lap—>street—>grave
all quick and wasted like that – each stage a staccato step in a short, sad, big kitty dance. Instead, he got to go alley~~~>trashbag~~~>rafters~~~>lap~~~>indoors~~~>outdoors~~~>indoors~~~>lap~~~>Teela~~~>kitchen~~~>Aunt Mary’s, well, you get it.

Big Kitty lived a long, full life, for a cat. Don't we tend to be far more sad about a life not yet lived or hardly lived than a longer one lived with some fulfillment?

Between two of the futures I believed in as a kid, one of them came true. The other was a myth that ended up making the first one come true. That’s what I think, anyway.

*It would be a mistake to rush to use words like “animal cruelty”. A minor and unintentional cruelty, delivering a kind-of-rescue§ cat in a black trashbag? Yeah, I guess so. Like, careless. Kind of dumb, even. I don’t know what they people were working with, either in terms of thinking or communication with my mom or with the way in which they wrapped him up. I don’t know whether they called my mom before we left for wherever and said, “Hey we will drop him off at noon,” and I don’t know whether they tied the bag in such a way that he had sufficient air. It was an ugly site, but it seems that it was the best that they could think of…
_____
§If there is a cat outside and it mrayows outside of your window every night, and if you give a cat a (cookie), what follows? Is the cat saying, It’s very uncomfortable, you know, sleeping on sidewalks and on the hoods of cars. Cold, too. And good food is hard to come by – let alone any food at all. Most of what you can find is rotten, and I’m a cat, not a dog. I do not prefer rotten food. Or is it saying, Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat? And if you feel like the first one is closer to the truth, what do you make of the fact that the (rescued) cat hides in your house, scared? I guess I should just tell you to go back up and there and keep reading.
_____
**Although I could tell you that you can take the cat out of the streets, but you can't take the streets out of the cat. We always had indoor-outdoor cats, and Big Kitty got in a whole lot of fights. And because he was so big, as I've already said, I'm pretty sure he always came out on top. I don't think I ever witnessed one of his fights, but he never looked messed up the next morning when he came back inside. In fact, he kind of walked in like he understood what his name was.