I already knew what I wanted. I desperately wanted to bring two kittens home with me to New York at the end of the month. But I had to let Jared have time to think about whether it could be a good idea. Cats were occasionally mentioned in our nightly phone chats. To Jared I can sometimes seem impulsive, and to me, he can sometimes seem very slow to decide. In the end, I made a verbal agreement with the cat lady that on the final Sunday of my program I would come in the afternoon between the final concert and the dorm check-out to pick two kittens. I drove out of town to the Walmart (small rural town- this was the only option for these supplies) and picked up a cat carrier, dishes, cat food, litter box, and litter.
When I went to get my two kittens, I learned that most of them had been given away the previous evening. There was only one little, fluffy black fellow left, as he was too shy to have been caught, who was currently asleep in the sun on a wicker coffee table on the porch. I could have him. I was also offered an adult cat, but I took all my heart in my hands, and in an act of bravery I may never have mustered before, reminded the cat lady I really had wanted two kittens. She must have seen the passion behind my anxious and easily overrun demeanor, and she offered me the aforementioned outgoing grey kitten whom she'd planned to give her mother.
There were the small challenges that day of not having cats present during inspection of the dorm room at checkout (which my friend Jen Drake helped me with,) and driving across three states on the throughway with one particularly restless kitten.
I walked into our old, scuzzy 3rd floor high rise apartment in downtown Rochester late that evening, set the bag down on the living room floor, unzipped the cover, and watched Gregory prance - and Black Bean scuttle - into our lives.
I could write chapters about their unique personalities and adventures, and I probably will. But what I want to write about this morning is how a shy little kitty and a shy little boy became such good friends.
Black Bean settled in with us after a few weeks. He was skeptical of new sounds and smells and also, the litter box. But he adjusted and came to love us dearly. Strangers, though, were not of general interest. For more than ten years of his 15 1/2 year life, his modus operandi was to make himself scarce when people showed up. Many students of ours did not even know we had a black cat. Any changes in place and personnel would set him back a few weeks.
The first big change was our move to Huntsville, Alabama. He and Gregory and Jared went first, and they stayed a few days in a terrible apartment where Blak Bean found a hole in the wall and stuffed himself into it to avoid everything that was wrong about moving. Jared had to work hard to get him out when he vacated to camp in his university office for a week while waiting for an apartment at a more suitable complex. A few months later, we found tiny Nutmeg and Feathers, and he sort of saw these two infant kittens as ugly rats which could vaguely be tolerated if they did not get too close to him. Thanks to Gregory's instant embrace of them and the kittens' persistence, they eventually became good friends, but it took most of a year.
And in the mean time we had moved to Birmingham. We had to stay a few weeks in a friend's apartment (it had a closet to hide in) and then a funky, semi-communal subdivided Victorian rental house with a quirky modern interior, owned by a university professor from Europe. While Gregory busied himself finding ways to break out of our unit and make friends with the other residents, Black Bean installed himself under the furnished bed and behind the sofa, only coming out to meet important needs in the dark. When finally our condo was ready, it was a couple more weeks of hiding before it became home. And then Ran, a college student from Beijing, moved in with us for a semester. Ran, thankfully, was quiet and boring from a cat perspective, so he and Black Bean became friends.
Our tenure in Birmingham was also much shorter than planned, and Gregory, sadly died that year due to a heart condition. We found ourselves packing up and driving cross country to Kent, Washington. This whole ordeal was terrifying for Black Bean, and I got him a sensory vest for the car rides. He cried as we were going over the pass in Wyoming - he was purported to have a heart condition, too, and the elevation took it out of him. After nights in cat-friendly motels in Tennessee, Nebraska, Idaho, and Wyoming, and several nights at Jared's parents' house in Oregon (they made the drive with us in our second car, hauling house plants and instruments), we finally landed at an apartment Linda had scouted out for us. (Finding a rental which would accept us with our three furry family members was tricky, but it was the perfect neighborhood for Anne, who was born a few months later to find kids to play with, and for our noisy neighbors to not care about us teaching music lessons in our apartment.) Black Bean eventually settled in there, too, and befriended Roy, a teenage violin student from Costa Rica, who came to stay with us for a few months.)
One hot morning in the summer, Jared had been up early, and opened our sliding door to let breeze through the screen before going back to bed. We we got up later, the screen was open (we later discovered Nutmeg's method of jiggling it with her paw until she could push her nose in the opening and escape), and all three cats were missing. When we stepped outside and called, Nutmeg and Feathers came rushing back, but Black Bean was nowhere to be found. We, and Jeff, and neighbors searched all day and into the night. Eventually at 2 am, he appeared on the back porch, waiting to be let back in. I am sure that some noise, combined with the unfamiliar environment, frightened him, and he has stuffed himself deep into an unknown cranny to wait for nightfall.
Anne was born that Spring, and he was pretty skeptical, though he started to tolerate her when she was a toddler and wanted to befriend him. He was less offended when Lazarus was born, though that may been because Lazarus was offended to have been born and tried to sleep it off for a month.
Then we moved house to Renton, a terrifying ordeal for Black Bean, and an uncomfortable one for Lazarus, too. When Laurel showed up, Black Bean just did not care any more. Black Bean got to hiding from strangers less and less, and partly I wonder if his hearing and sense of smell had mellowed out with age, so the "This is different; high alert!" signals were weakened. I kept rearranging furniture and he dealt with it.
One more recent change that did not impress him was the arrival of NASA. Black Bean decided to start marking the house as his, which meant a lot of clean up. We tried to keep NASA indoors for safety, but it quickly became an impossible feat. So NASA gained free reign. And Feathers decided if he got free reign, she did, too. We tried to keep her in, but again it became untenable. So we eventually decided to even the score and let Nutmeg and Black Bean into the fenced back yard where they could be supervised. They would not get out, as Nutmeg has a bad knee and is overweight and Black Bean does not like adventure. After watching the others go out and his first timid forays into the back yard, Black Bean found true happiness there in his last Summer. He had his routines and spots, and spent some specific effort marking the zone next to the swing set as his. At first light, he would be next to the back door, waiting to be let out, and at night, I would have to go out with a flashlight to find him and bring him in for the night. His new domain brought him into contact with students coming to their lessons in our back yard studios, and he was ready to make friends of them now. Even when the gate to the driveway was open for these musical comings and goings, he did not venture forth. He knew where he was happy and saw no reason to enter the scary world beyond. When we absolutely could not find him back there we learned that he was under the small studio where he could see all the comings and goings without being detected himself.
Lazarus was not born loving cats. He wanted familiarity and predictability, and cats, among other things, were too unpredictable. Except for that one cat, Black Bean. After six years of sizing up the situation, Lazarus declared Beaner his favorite cat. With some parental encouragement he started talking to him and even touching him. Eventually he figured out that he could make Beaner happy by petting him, and he incorporated visits with Black Bean into his daily routine. Black Bean was such a gentle, patient, predictable friend that Lazarus was ready to branch out to petting first Nutmeg, then Feathers. NASA is still too unpredictable to be of interest, but Beaner taught Lazarus that cats can be friends, too.
So Lazarus was among the most devastated when Black Bean finally succumbed to poor health and old age this past week.
There was an old book floating around called All Cats Have Aspergers. I don't know if that's true, but Black Bean and Lazarus were two very special friends, because they really "got" each other.
