Dale

I mentioned before that I used to change my avatar and the "About Me" bit on Blogger every once in a while, as a stand-in/substitute for blogging.

This is one I wrote last year. The laid-to-rest avatar is below it.

Dale the Cat has been my baby for sixteen years. He is one year older than my younger daughter, which makes him a little bit of a middle child. Dale is a beautiful and needy boy; high strung, afraid of his shadow, a wonderfully sensuous sleeper. He is without meows; he emits only a warm, soft purr or a high-pitched whine, depending upon his mood. In this picture he’s perched on one of his favorite seats in the back of our house, in a section of our living room. He sits here when he wants to get away from my daughter and her friends, when her gaggle of girlfriends gets to be too, too much for Dale’s sensibilities. It’s quiet back here and no one bothers him. Behind Dale, on the hearth, is a dulcimer my father made a long time ago.



Dale became our pet in 1991. He was born in a lovely crackhouse part of town in Kansas City. We adopted he and his brother, Chip, when they were barely six weeks old, and took them back out to the Army post town where we were living at the time.

My older daughter was then my only daughter. She was three at the time - and she named her new kittens after the chipmunks in her favorite afternoon cartoon. Chip didn't make it a year - killed by a car. Dale lived until yesterday.

Dale was always retarded (truly), scatty, afraid of his shadow, and loved being petted only by women. He was afraid of men. And he'd never sit on my lap, or anyone else's. He'd sit about a foot away from you, so you had to do some hard work to love him.

He used to be quite a hunter. He was beautiful. He was virtually vacant inside. He liked tuna.

And he got lost all the time, through the three states and several neighborhoods he's lived in. He'd climb up on places and he couldn't get down again, and then off would go the high-pitched help-me cries. I've retrieved him by climbing three stories up a firetruck ladder and grabbing him off a flat roof, by climbing up extendable ladders with a bucket in my hand and holding him in it all the way down, by skinnying under the deck of a neighbor's, and grabbing him, because he was afraid to come out and walk the thirty yards or so home past some fenced-in puppies. I've fought off cats trying to get him.

One time at 2:00 am or so, when he was three or four years old, he scratched on an upstairs bedroom window to be let in (he used to go in and out of it by climbing onto a ledge) and when he woke me up and I opened the window for him, he popped on in, with a live mouse in his mouth. After a few minutes of the three of us scurrying around the bedroom, with me trying to keep all of us quiet enough not to wake up both girls (I was alone a lot then, my ex was a military officer, and out more than he was in)- I finally saw the mouse hiding in the folds of an overnight bag under the bed - I opened the window and tossed the mouse and the bag onto the ledge, holding Dale so he couldn't go on outside and finish his killing.

He'd lost a lot of weight - several pounds. His mind was gone, was essentially, in absentia, and we decided better to go out peacefully than cornered and killed by a fox in the yard, or tortured by the new kitten, Madison, that Blondster received from friends on her birthday. So, my husband and I took Dale to the vet yesterday, and had him 'put to sleep'. In other words, we ended his life.

It was a heartrending experience. Dale lay on a soft warm towel in the office, and he was anesthetized. He hates going anywhere, so some part of him remembered mama took care of him, and he butted his little head up into my stomach as I stroked his back, and he got his shot. That act of his just about took me out.

Then they came in a few minutes later, when he was asleep with his eyes open, and they shaved a small section of fur off his leg, and inserted a tube and into the tube inserted the drug that stopped his heart. That heart-stopping part only took maybe five seconds.

There's one damn thin line between life and death, between existing and not existing. We all know this, and we all do a pretty good job of blocking that out, because we have to. Because it's one of those things you can't dwell on if you want any peace at all within yourself.

But when you do see it, you find yourself stepping back and doing some hard thinking.
I've seen it before. My guess is, most of you have. I saw it in my father's eyes just before he died, when there was no longer any blue in his beautiful blue eyes.

I noticed that color loss again yesterday in Dale, when his blue eyes drained of their strong color, when he was dying, and then dead.

We should celebrate life while we have it - and I guess we mainly do - but breathing and blinking and walking around sure as hell is more tenuous than we like to face, isn't it?