Fun fact: It’s called “dream chasing” when your cat’s leg muscles or face twitch while he sleeps.
Jo was a very good cat. His full name was Jo Jo Precious, Tiger Kitty, a name he was barely able to tolerate, much preferring the single syllable. Unlike Jo, our dog Sir Corwin the Beautiful Dog-faced Dog, Brindled Beast of Sylmar, is very proud of his long name but is willing to tolerate our tendency to call him Corwin. Jo, though, was far too dignified and practical to be bothered with anything as ornamental as a lengthy and descriptive name.
Jo was far smarter than cats are generally presumed to be. I used to say that he did my taxes, but this was just a fanciful joke. Jo was smart, but he couldn’t hold a pencil or work a calculator. No opposable thumbs. Jo’s intelligence expressed itself in other ways. Jo could, for example, tell time.
I’m not saying that he knew the rhythms and patterns of our life so that he knew when it was time to eat and when it was time to go to bed, though that was all true. I’m saying that he could actually tell time.
My wife is a schoolteacher. We lived for many years in a small apartment in Studio City. Nancy’s alarm would sound at 5:00 a.m. every weekday, and she would get up and open the sliding glass door so that Jo would be free to wander the courtyard and relieve himself in the flowerboxes. If she did not get up right away, Jo would stand on her and say, “Now, now, now,” until my wife slid out of bed and opened the door.
The natural and common awareness of life’s rhythms allowed Jo, on weekends, to know when it was 5:00 without the alarm. He would announce it on Saturday morning until one of us got up to let him outside. We didn’t love that. We wanted to sleep in.
It occurred to us one Friday to tell him what was going on. He came to bed in the evening, and Nancy spoke to him about it. “Listen,” she said. “Jo… Leave the fly alone for a minute and listen to me.” He did. He was a very smart cat. “Tomorrow is Saturday. We don’t have to get up. We’d like to sleep late. So, if nobody’s up by 9:00, you can wake me up. But no earlier. Okay?” Jo slid his tail back and forth across the bedspread, looking at Nancy until he was certain she was done talking and then curled up to go to sleep.
The following morning, an odd chorus dragged me from a confusing dream about a doorway in the middle of Hollywood that led to a bright green forest. Jo was singing, “Now? Now? Now?” And Nancy was saying, “Dylan. Dylan. Seriously, Dylan, you have to see this.”
I slipped back from dream body into waking body and rolled over to find out what was so urgent. Nancy was holding up her clock for me to see. It was 9:00. I said, “Wow,” and then it was 9:01. We got up, and she let Jo outside while I made coffee.
Thereafter, we were able to tell Jo with confidence what time he could wake us and, indeed, he proved a reliable furry alarm clock on days when our needs were not so urgent that we required the security of an electronic backup. We experimented: 9:30. 8:05. 8:37. I’m not kidding. The cat could tell time.
Nancy said once that when she told him the appointed time, she would imagine the numbers so that he could see the symbols. She suspected that he didn’t actually read a clock but rather read her mind and then waited to see the shapes she had shown him. I have no idea why, but I find that far less credible than the theory that he was able to tell time.
Nancy and I both wanted a dog, but the apartment building wouldn’t allow one. For years, we imagined that some day we would have a place where we could keep a dog and that we would get a puppy so that Jo could be dominant and train it to behave respectfully toward him. We knew he was capable of using both his claws and teeth as training tools. He had very quickly trained us to keep our feet under the blankets at night and not to pet him when Jeopardy! was on TV unless it was the part where Alex questions the contestants about their personal lives. He didn’t care about the players’ anecdotal ramblings at all and frequently used the interview segment as he did the commercials, to practice his impressions of Ed Asner and other grumpy-but-kind hearted character actors.
In 2002, Nancy and I decided we were ready to own property. Jo was fourteen years old when we moved to our townhouse in Sylmar. The vet told us that moving is one of the most stressful experiences in a cat’s life, right up there with falling in a swimming pool and getting divorced. We felt we should give him a month or two to adjust to life in the new place before we confronted him with a puppy.
Six weeks after we moved in, Jo started dying. He had some sort of stroke or seizure. He couldn’t meow properly. Instead of doing impressions of Charles Durning and Walter Matthau, he began to do Marlo Thomas. We took him to an emergency vet, who kept him overnight and then told us that they didn’t know what was wrong. They charged us several hundred dollars for the overnight visit and suggested that we have them conduct thousands of dollars worth of tests over the next few weeks to figure out what was going on with him. They implied that if we did not spend thousands of dollars on these tests, we simply didn’t love our cat enough. They admitted that there were many probable causes of the illness for which they would be able to do little or nothing.
Jo had always hated the vet. We couldn’t imagine that he would want a series of trips to the vet in his waning days. We took him home and swore that if he seemed to be in real pain at any point, we would have him put to sleep.
He ate less from then on and lost weight quickly. He never got his proper voice back. He stayed fairly near to us when we went from room to room and up and down the stairs in our new, beloved home. He grew steadily weaker and sadder. We made an appointment to have him put to sleep on a Saturday morning when we would both be able to go with him to the vet.
The night before he was to be put down, Jo told us he was done. Unable to stand up properly, he meowed at us in his sad, whispered voice. We called the vet to ask if we could bring him in right then rather than waiting for the morning appointment.
Leaving his travel crate in the garage, Nancy held Jo in her arms, wrapped in his favorite blanket as I drove us all, weeping, to the vet’s office. At the reception desk, Nancy filled out paperwork while I held Jo in my arms. We handed him off to a veterinary assistant who said she would take him to the back room, and they would bring us in momentarily when he was set up so that we could be there when they gave him the final injection. A minute later, a vet came out to tell us that the injection wouldn’t be necessary. Jo had died naturally as they set him on the table. As always, he knew when it was time. He could tell, with or without a clock.
He had held on just long enough. Nancy got to hold him lovingly and say goodbye on the car ride. I got to hold him lovingly and say goodbye at the reception desk.
Then he died without an injection, saving us fifty dollars.
Jo was a very good cat. Smart, dignified and eminently practical.
~Dylan Brody
