To err is human, to purr is feline.
~Robert Byrne
When my wife Diana and I first started dating, she said, “Love me, love my cat.” There were two obstacles to this, however. First, I was a dog person. Second, Oliver Twist was an excessively grumpy cat and rather possessive of his “mom.” This wasn’t going to be easy for either of us.
My first extended encounter with Oliver was coming home from visiting Diana’s mother. I had taken the train from Springfield, Illinois, to northwest Ohio to meet her family for the first time. Diana had driven out earlier in her tiny Toyota RAV4 and had taken Oliver along, as was their custom. I rode back with them on the seven-hour drive to Diana’s house in Decatur, Illinois.
Since I didn’t speak Feline, I wasn’t aware that Oliver had called shotgun. He was less than ecstatic that I was in his place, so he spent most of the trip sulking in his kitty carrier in the back seat.
Along the route, I did learn some cat language while being introduced to a couple of his travel quirks. He would yowl in annoyance when we hit the rumble strips on the turnpike that warned of the approaching tollbooth. He would also let out a comparable yowl, the difference perceptible only to Diana’s trained ear, when we got close enough to smell Decatur. To me, it was the stench of processed soybeans, but to Oliver, it smelled like “almost home.”
Once in Decatur, he climbed up into my lap, which had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that he wanted to be in the front seat for the final stretch of the trip. My lap just happened to be occupying that space.
Suddenly, Diana had to swerve around somebody who had stopped short in front of her. Oliver did what comes naturally to cats. His claws came out, and he grabbed on tight to keep himself stable. Except that he was on my lap at the time.
Unaccustomed as I was to being stabbed in the legs with sixteen curved needles, I yelled in pain. Oliver turned and barked at me. Yes, barked. Like a dog. I had never heard a sound like that come out of a cat before, but even with my limited experience with cats, I could tell it was not a happy sound.
We arrived at Diana’s house a few minutes later. She went inside for a moment to replace Oliver’s travel litter box and left me in the car with him. The instant she was out the door, Oliver jumped into her seat, turned back to me with a look of deepest loathing, and gave a loud, theatrical hiss in my direction.
Being unloved by an animal was new territory for me. Dogs are easy. All you have to do is be there and they think you’re awesome. Cats, I was learning, take some work. Particularly this cat, who I later learned had been found abandoned in the woods when he was just a tiny kitten. Nevertheless, I believed that this half-feral ball of gray fur and attitude had a soft spot somewhere, and I was determined to find it.
The ice between Oliver and me ended up breaking in a rather unexpected way. Diana had bought some coffee to keep at her place for visitors. One day, I was brewing a pot when I heard an inquisitive meow behind me. There was Oliver, looking at me for the first time with an expression other than one that suggested a desire to kill me in my sleep. He hopped up onto the counter and began sniffing at the coffee pot. When it finished brewing, and I poured myself a cup, he kept following me around, meowing insistently, and trying to get at my cup. At first, I thought, What a pest! Then I had an idea.
I went back to the kitchen and found an old dishrag. I poured some coffee on it and dropped it onto the tile floor. Immediately, Oliver began to roll around the floor with the rag, purring delightedly. Apparently, coffee was his catnip!
I wouldn’t say that we immediately became besties, but Oliver did tolerate my presence after this incident. I referred to him as my “stepcat.” He was always really Diana’s cat, but he gradually became more cordial to me. When I would greet him after work with a “Hey, Oliver,” he would nod in my direction and give me a short meow. I always had the feeling that he knew exactly what I was saying at any given time.
Then one night several years later, as I sat in the recliner, Oliver hopped up on my lap, stretched out diagonally across my chest, and laid his head on my shoulder. He stayed for several minutes, letting me pet him and purring in my ear. That was when I knew I had finally won him over.
Not long after that, Oliver became very sick. After a few days of vomiting, we took him to the vet and learned that poisoned gluten from China in his cat food had caused his kidneys to fail. We took him to the animal hospital to flush out his kidneys to see if they would rebound. However, our vet had already put two cats down that week for the same problem, so he was not optimistic. He left some time open for Oliver’s final appointment and waited for us to call.
We didn’t make that call, though. After about a day and a half, the animal hospital called and said to come get Oliver because he was doing better. This did not mean, however, that he was in a better mood.
Upon arriving at the hospital, we heard him before we saw him. You could hear that howl from the lobby. His eyes were huge, and he was not letting anyone get near him. But he was alive, and to us, that was worth the hassle and the vet bills.
Oliver lived another seven years after this incident. In his old age, he developed diabetes, and had to take insulin injections, which he allowed me to administer without complaint.
His body finally wore out at the age of fifteen. When we finally did take him to the vet to have him put to sleep, he was still growling, being fractious to the very end. Even so, that crabby, old kitty did manage to do something I never thought possible: He turned me into a cat person.
~M. Scott Coffman
