Still here...

Our cat, Izzy, has been dead a week.

I came home last Thursday to find him yowling in pain and unable to move his hind legs. He was agonizingly hobbled, dragging himself about in fits and starts.

As I was to find out from the vet later that evening at the emergency clinic, he had suffered the feline equivalent of a stroke.

“In humans,” the vet explained, gently breaking the bad news, “blood clots go to our brains; in cats they go to where the main artery to the legs divides.”

And so Iz’s hind quarters, starved of oxygen, had given out.

The prognosis was grim. Without exactly saying so, the vet was gently guiding us to a decision to euthanize our pet of eight years.

We said our good-byes, stroking him after he had been sedated to alleviate the pain and prepare him for the fatal injection. He died peacefully at age 10.

But, I’ve learned, he hasn’t gone.

Not Iz.

He was an indoor cat (after an ferocious outside brawl with an stray interloper) and an insistent presence. He took over the place...or, to be exact, places.... The back of the couch, the bed, the easy chair and vast expanses of our lives.

His presence was, and is, palpable.

It’s ghostly in a comforting way.

I don’t a open door leading outside without wondering where Izzy is. Will he bolt, as he so often did?

I come down for breakfast and expect to be greeted with the meowing reminder that he is to be fed before anything else can happen. Before I put the kettle on the stove or slice a banana or pour out my cereal.

There’s a sunny spot on our bed where I still expect to find him when I enter the bedroom.

On a handy kitchen ledge is the laser pointer whose red, glowing dot of light lured Iz to pounce and pursue.

The litter box that needs emptying, of course, no longer does.

As I read in my chair, I fully expect to be joined by “The Iz.” He had a habit of preempting whatever pearls of prose had seized my attention. Having nosed aside newspaper, book or magazine, he’d settle into my lap and work his way up my chest until we were eye-to-eye.

We’d commune, we two creatures. He’d set me to wondering about his world.

What could you be thinking, Iz? What goes on behind those amber eyes?

The joy of pondering the mysterious world that happened to be residing on my chest.

And now there’s the new mystery, the mystery of death. Where is Iz now?

The answer is clear when I open the door to the kitchen in the morning and still hear his reminder, when I settle into my reading chair and feel I’m being considered as a resting place, when I come up the stairs in the evening and look at the bed and know its shared comfort.

Where is he?

To my joy, he is everywhere.

Cat Diplomacy

Jacques Von Lunen, a former student of mine from PCC, has taken over the pet column in The Oregonian. Over coffee and croissant today, he shared that a whole new world is opening up to him. Covering the domestic animal kingdom is no small task. But for someone who once dreamt of being a vet, Jacques seems to have landed a dream job — at least as long at The Oregonian survives.

Part of his assignment is to contribute to the inevitable Oregonian “OregonLive” pet blog. While blogging, he’s discovered that the mere mention of the word “pit bull” is a reader magnet.

His weekly column appears in the paper on Tuesdays, and today’s topic immediately grabbed my attention. It is about getting a cat to accept new arrivals (nuisances, interlopers, intruders, mortal enemies) to its domain.

We have a cat, who now owns the house we once thought was ours. Occasionally I have wondered whether Izzy (seen above) might accept another cat. After reading Jacques' column, I’ve concluded that The Great One, who barely accepts me, would go ballistic if we tried to introduce him to a “new friend.”

But Jacques did offer some intriguing ways to try to get a well-established cat at least to consider allowing another cat — or dog, or baby — to enter its world.

As I read the advice, my mind wandered to diplomacy. I wondered whether Hillary Clinton might pick up a pointer or two from the column.

There are an awful lot of human beings out there who have trouble sharing real estate. They’ve been known to fight like, well, cats, to keep each other at bay — and, coincidentally to keep the arms industry thriving.

So take Jacques' suggestion that two strange cats initially should be placed on opposite sides of a closed door but let them eat near the door so they can hear each other munching away. That’s like putting human adversaries at opposite ends of the table. “Hey, he’s eating the same food; he can’t be all that bad. I wonder how he likes the shrimp cocktail?”

Then there’s the ploy of tying two cat toys at the ends of the same string and threading the sting under the door. The cats can both “play” with trying to pull the string away from the other without actually seeing the rival. In this scenario, the game’s the thing, not the rivalry.

Diplomats do this with agenda setting and preconditions. They never have to see each other during the give and take.

The suggestion that there be a “pheromone exchange” is a little hard to imagine. It entails rubbing a towel or sock over the cats’ faces and then putting one’s rubbed cloth in the other’s room. I suppose this is worth a try with humans. What if Shiites and Sunnis or Israelis and Palestinians took in each other’s laundry? At the very least it could lead to some serious cuts in defense spending.

The next suggestion is to open the door between the rooms but put up one of those protective, telescoping baby gates. I think the Pakistanis and the Indians have something like this along their borders. There’s a good deal of ritualized posturing, grunting and snarling, but nobody gets killed.

Finally comes the moment of truth when you put both animals in the same room. Jacques recommends keeping a squirt gun handy, just in case. With humans, squirt guns would be novel, but fire hoses, Mace or tear gas might work better.

Jacques adds that it’s also good to create an upbeat, good-times mood “with toys, treats and play.” With humans that might translate into bribes, beer and back rubs. Whatever.

Finally, he says, if none of this works “separate them again and start the process over.”

Patience is the order of the day. Think Ireland, Korea, the Holy Land, Pakistan and India.

Cat on my blanket

Cat on my blanket,

unblinking. His yellow eyes,

windows to another world.

Danger stalks the urban wilderness

Late last night—it must have been 11:30—I was driving home after a trip to Longview. Bleary-eyed, I came up Sunset Boulevard, made the up-hill turn onto 18th, climbed to 19th, crested the rise and there—square in my headlight beams—was a young coyote trotting across the road, before vanishing in a blink behind a neighbor's laurel hedge.

They're back! I thought.

I hadn't heard of a Hillsdale coyote sighting in six or seven years. My concern immediately went to our cat, Izzy, who balances a nighttime indoor sedentary lifestyle with his day job of outdoor neighborhood surveillance. All of which is good, nocturnal coyote-wise, though the dawn and dusk hours can be iffy.

When I got up this morning still troubled by my coyote sighting, Iz was nowhere in the house. I thought he might have gone out on dawn patrol when my daughter-in-law, who is living with us this month, set off for work. I had to leave myself, but wrote a note to my wife, Diane, about my concern that our Iz might have become a sacrificial link in some neighborhood feral food chain.

The "food chain" reference was my way of reframing and emotionally preparing myself for Iz's demise.

Loving cats came late to me, but these super-self-possessed creatures do have their ways with you. George W. Bush's 2004 re-election, or his election, or his managing to get the voting machines to work in his favor — whatever — sealed my admiration for Iz.

Our Iz, who slept through the network returns, was a like a rock the next day—utterly unflappable, even stoic about another four years of Bush.

I saw in his exemplary attitude an above-it-all nonchalance. I even tried to model my own reaction after his—until I remembered Cheney.

Still, in those terrible days, Iz demonstrated an admirable calm and insight into humanity in general, and Bush in particular.

So here it was dawn, hungry coyotes prowled the neighborhood and "the Iz" was nowhere in sight. I carried gnawing uncertainty with me through my day.

Much later, when I got back, there, of course, was the Iz, perched on the porch with that "where-have YOU-been" look on his white whiskered face. Indeed, he looked as though HE might have subdued a coyote.

Inside, Diane had left a note on the dining room table explaining that while I had been imagining the ghastly slaughter of our Iz, his catship, Sir Aloofness, had been sleeping on a folded blanket in our coyote-proof basement.