You Can’t Change a Cat’s Stripes

When my oldest son, Cameron was three, I decided he should have a pet. A cat, instead of a dog, because I worked full time and was a single parent. Cats didn’t need two walks a day and for the most part preferred to be ignored.  Thomas was a tiger tabby with brown and gray stripes, a little pink nose as soft as felt, and claws.

Thomas was a gremlin. He waited until I went to sleep each night and then pounced on my face.  He hissed at any human he encountered.  And the well-meaning cat-loving friends of mine who thought of themselves as cat whisperers, who reached out to pet him and offer him a hand of friendship, got bit.

I was a neophyte cat-owner. I’d read too many stories about cats curling up in laps and purring their owners nearly comatose.  Thomas was a loner.  He disdained human company. Or at least mine, it seemed.  But I kept trying.  I put out bowls of milk for him — because didn’t all cats like milk? Thomas was lactose-intolerant. Need I say more? After he’d bitten three of my friends, I determined that his hatred was not limited to me alone, but that generally speaking, Thomas was not a people-person. I didn’t want the next person he bit to be my three-year-old son. So, being the weenie that I was, I asked my dad if he would take him to the Humane Society so that some more tolerant, cat-literate family could adopt him.

And for decades, that is how I pictured Thomas: living the high life in a cat-loving family full of catnip and Whiskas Temptations. And I would have been perfectly happy to continue in this delusional world until my dad decided to come clean, thirty years after the fact.

Flashback to that fateful day.  My dad picked up Thomas to take him to the Humane Society where he would be adopted, most assuredly, by a family that would love, admire, and respect him. But you can’t change a cat’s stripes.  My dad put Thomas in the seat next to him. He drove down the highway to the nearest Humane Society. Thomas, being Thomas, suddenly pounced on my Dad’s head. The car swerved to the right and then the left, as my dad clutched at Thomas’s wiry frame, plied him from his face, and held him down on the passenger seat to contain him so that he wouldn’t hit an oncoming car and kill a family of four. Dad (firmly) held Thomas down. And suddenly. Thomas. Stopped. Moving.

Did I tell you that my dad grew up on a farm?

Dad pulled the car over to the shoulder and walked around to the passenger door. It opened with a squeak. He lifted Thomas’ limp body from the seat and threw him into the ditch. With a sigh, Dad got back in the driver’s seat and started the car, wondering what he should tell me.  When I asked him later how things went, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Fine.”  Okay, I thought, everything went fine.  Dad was a man of few words.

All those many years later, for whatever reason, Dad decided to come clean.  As he pulled away, Dad said, he saw a flash of movement and looked to the right, just as Thomas rose like a Phoenix from the ditch and leaped across the corn-stubble field to his freedom.

Dad passed away seven years ago, and I will never stop missing him. I imagine that Thomas is on his eighteenth or nineteenth life somewhere, bounding through fields of corn, and quite happily evading all human interaction.