by Eric Miller
I noticed the other day that one of Olga's teeth was starting to rot. She was apparently the victim of an abscessed tooth. I was told there was little that could be done about it. Soon it would fall out. How did my once young new friend I rescued from the wild through a classified ad get to the point of having a rotten tooth like an old lady? Had that many years passed? Was it really time to start counting down the last years of one of the two most constant figures in the last decade of my life?
Olga didn't seem to notice the changes in her tooth or mind its disfiguration, slightly pushed above her gum line. An evolutionary remnant of live animal killing used only by feral cats and for the occasional random mouse dinner, the pointy lower fang wasn't used much for nibbling on dry cat food. Olga crunched away as normal. Still energetic, bright-eyed, with an occasional spurt of energy, she didn't seem to dread old age or death the way humans do. Cats live life by the moment. As long as there are leaves blowing, birds pecking, and a warm, sunny spot to lie in, all will be well.
Still, I guess I haven't been watching closely. I haven't been paying enough attention to life. I'd been too immersed in the details, the schedules, and the race to notice Olga wasn't the young cat she used to be.
There have been other cats in my life. The cat my parents had when I was a kid. My short-lived energetic friend I adopted when I was in college, a black mean-spirited evil messenger from the underground we got one year for Easter, and the fat round and generally dumb black cat I bought for my father when the devil died and went back to hell. And then there were the cats that seemed to live off the land where my parents built their house and who treated it as a natural extension of their woods.
But Olga and her son Gustauff have been with me for as long as any cat. They've been where I've been, welcomed me when I came home from most every job I've ever had, looked out the same windows, and been annoyed at the same neighbors. We've shared the adventures of moving to new towns together and flown on the same planes. They know me and I know them. We can't talk to each other, but we certainly communicate. Like any persons who live together, we know how each other will act and what each other expects. We know just when the other wants company and when they prefer to be alone. I suppose it may not be too many more years before Olga and Gustauff won't be here to share life anymore. That will be a sad day.
People can have a special relationship with cats. They say a dog is man's best friend, but really a dog is man's best servant. Cats treat other creatures as equals. There is no hierarchy in the cat world. The cat may be smaller, but the level on which we deal with one another is the same. You have to be on the same level with someone in order to be true friends.
A dog may be friendly, but if you want a friend rather than a subject, befriend a cat. Be warned it won't be as easy. The cat will choose to look at you as friend, enemy, warming pad, or useless object cluttering up its kingdom, while the dog will slobber and happily obey your commands. If the cat stays around, rubs against your leg and gently bites your skin, you'll know it really likes you.
When the master to a dog dies, it has nowhere to turn. When a dog dies, we feel emptiness, just as we do with a cat. But as friends, Olga, Gustauff, and I know each of us is our own leader. We are born alone and die alone. We connect and cooperate along the way, but we live with the other, for good or bad, but not for the other. We will miss our friends when they die, and though the world often turns darker with the passing of a friend, our world is one that will continue as long as we are alive. This is as it should be. After all, our friends aren't really gone as long as we are here to remember them.
