It's raining and I'm listening to my cat, Big Lini, nap behind the armoire in my office. She goes in and out of snoring just like anyone would, old or young. I know when she stops snoring that she’s heard something, a gust of wind or my fingers tap-tapping across the keyboard. The Noodle Monster dog is curled up by the door, and her tummy is making wide-mouth yawning sounds. I am transported back to my childhood bedroom.
“When I grow up I’m going to have as many animals in the house as I want!” I scream at my mother who is downstairs and out of earshot. She has just discovered that I snuck my cat, Fluff, up to my room, and she has confiscated Fluff and banished her to the backyard. I am crying, shaking my head sitting on my bed alone, wondering how my mother could have been raised on a fruit ranch and never allowed an indoor pet.
“The dogs were Grandpa’s,” she tells me, “They were only for hunting and they stayed outside. We didn’t know what kind of diseases they might be carrying.”
“But, didn’t you ever play with them?” I begged.
“No... I didn’t like the way their hair felt on my skin,” she answered.
How could this woman be my mother? How could I possibly be related to a person who didn’t love animals? A person who didn't want to touch or play with them? At eight, I didn’t understand. In many ways, I still don’t.
The nice white carpet behind the armoire is covered with Big Lini’s calicoed hair, and I couldn’t care less. She is still asleep in her safe place, her secret getaway, and I would like to squeeze in back there with her and nap, too. She lets out a few more snores and settles into her breathing pattern, curled up and at rest, while her nose sings a low, soft rhythm to the rain that hits the windowpane. A cat’s internal clock knows nothing of time and tolls or rules and schedules. How I wish my mother had a cat to keep her company, to sleep alongside her, as she counts the days down in her weakened bodily form.
How I wish I could bring her old Big Lini, my calico, or the young, dashing Great Gatsby, our tuxedo, or even my eleven year-old puppy-dog, Noodle Monster, and have them each lay beside her in quiet slumber as they do near me. Their bodily sounds self-soothing them deeper into the world they are visiting, out of their failing bodies, and into a place of dreams. What would she say if I did bring one of my pets to her room to nestle with her? If my Noodle Monster was there at her feet, her sweet, shaggy face warming the blankets that cover my mother’s immobile legs?
Would she still say that she didn’t like the way their fur felt? Maybe so... But, then I see my mother, a woman who gave birth to eight children, holding that newborn puppy-dog eleven years ago in the passenger seat of my car on the way to Tiburon, her 'once lost' wedding ring diamond in a small brass box covered in jade, sitting in her purse in the backseat, patiently awaiting appraisal by an antique jeweler overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
That day she held my baby puppy-dog just like a newborn. She cradled her in the nook of her arms and maybe realized for the first time in her life that a pet's fur could bring comfort on a rainy day, because it had softened a long bumper-to-bumper ride across the Golden Gate Bridge.
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