A cat tale

The scrapblog editor had an awful, abysmal, unbearable day, so naturally her first impulse was to share it with you-all. Noah and I have two cats. Lucy, 11, is slender, fastidious, brilliant and highly social (unless you're a toddler -- sorry, Izzbee). Turtle, 10, is fat, sloppy, goofy and erratic. Despite her faults, she has a harmless, sweet, fat-Buddha-like nature. (She's pictured above as a kitten, back when she and the scrapblog editor were smaller. I had just rescued her from a ball of twine, and about an hour before that had rescued her from a large crow that was trying to pick her up and fly away with her. Even as a kitten, Turtle used up a few of her nine lives.) This past month, Turtle has been sick and sloppier than usual. Part of it is she's obese, but something else was clearly wrong. Last week, our vet did lab tests that found abnormal liver and pancreas numbers. Fearing cancer, I made another appointment for Monday, this time for X-rays. I had decided that if the X-rays showed cancer, I would have Turtle put to sleep instead of watching a long decline. So it was an excruciatingly anxious morning. But the X-rays showed no cancer. They did show some intestinal irritation (Sprick-style diverticulitis??). The vet did "a procedure" I won't go into and prescribed some medicine and special food. Elated to have another chance for newly spiffy, extremely traumatized Turtle, I wrapped her in a blanket and took her out to my car. Put her in the car, walked around to open my door, opened it and -- Turtle bolted out. No biggie, I thought. She was under the car. I started the engine briefly to scare her out. When I got out and looked under the car again, she was gone -- and nowhere to be found. To make a long story not too long, I looked for her for hours and hours, with the help of the vet's technicians and various kind residents of the rather rough neighborhood around the vet's, which is at W. Broadway and 27th Avenue N. in north Minneapolis. No Turtle. I looked at the two busy highways running past the vet's, the tangled nearby neighborhoods, the pit bulls I had seen being walked by, the drizzly, cold skies, and thought, I will never see my old cat again, and she is going to die a terrible death. I felt very, very bad. I went home and made some "Lost cat!" posters and tacked them up everywhere. Then I went to work, where I moped to cousin Chris and all my work friends, called Noah in Duluth (he was very buoying), almost cried at the news huddle presenting the day's local news and put several things in the Tuesday paper upside-down. On my dinner break, I rushed back to north Minneapolis and wandered around, hollering for Turtle over the din of cars rushing by and handing fliers to kids running around and possibly shady characters standing on street corners. All were quite nice. But still I thought, Lord, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, about an hour ago, past midnight and into early Tuesday, I got home from work and decided to give it one more try. I drove over to the vet's, stood out in the middle of the dark street in the clammy fog and hollered for Turtle. A man passing by in dreadlocks and gravity-challenged pants rushed over to ask if I was OK. As I was talking to him, I HEARD A MEOW! And who comes out of the bushes and runs under my car but Turtle?? I was so happy I cried. The passer-by helped me get her out from under my car. I'm sure he thought I was a crazy woman. Turtle is home now, muddy but OK. I will not be putting her to sleep. She will die someday, but of natural causes. Yeah, she's just a cat, and a freaky one at that. But life is too short to poo-poo any kind of love at all, even love for and from a freaky old cat, I've decided tonight.