Die Fledermaus

Dear Lord I cannot write,

What shall I write?

Cats are impossible to draw. Dürer couldn’t do it, Da Vinci couldn’t do it. These worthies were so hung up on the complexity of feline musculature that they could just couldn’t get the skin or fur right.

Long ago, at his place in the Creamery, Bodega, Wally Hedrick gave my father a spectacular compliment. “Rudolph was the best draftsman I ever knew.”  Yes, my bad Daddy could draw like God and here is an example. This is a watercolor of a neighbor cat named Chacoo and it was painted in the late 1970’s. I will stand flat footed and say, “This is the best thing of his I own.” The story of why the early intimates of Robert Parker Jenkins called him Rudolph is too long to go into now. 

There she is. It’s 2:30 am and there she is with her wet little nose and a purr that could wake the dead. Rosalinda wants attention. She wants skritches and belly rubs and she is going to get them. No aloof haughty feline is our girl. She wears a diamond necklace and sings the Czardas at the bedroom door when it is closed against her. For the first three months she lived here, we could not touch her. Hell, we couldn’t touch any of them. Usually cats in this house don’t get their war names until they have lived with us for a while. (Our precious Rocket J Baby was not with us long enough to get a war name. I was pushing for Red Sonja.) But these three got their real names right away.

It was time for kittens so last early June we went to the house built by PeopleSoft for the Humane Society, just off of Hegenberger. It’s where we got Geoffrey and Jōshū. It is where we got Ramses the Charioteer, son of Seti the Great. But now Ramses was gone and I needed a new black cat. And he came with a package of two sisters. The three of them were part of a litter of 13 and they were pretty feral. Gabriel is not all black. He is a tuxie and his black is denser than any cat I’ve seen. (Even Pirate Jenny looked brown in full sunlight.) So we bring these three crazy kittens home and I put the carrier on the counter. I open it up to check on them and Gabriel von Eisenstein comes flying out, like a bat. Well, if he is Die Fledermaus (the bat) then his sisters must be Adele and Rosalinda.

(Please find three impossible kittens. Adele is on the left in tweed and Rosalinda is in the white opera gloves. Gabriel is in the middle and butter would not melt in his mouth.) These guys were nuts. At first they hid, then they learned to romp and slowly, very slowly they decided we were kinda ok. Rosalinda has to be kept out of certain rooms because she still can make messes. She really didn’t want me to tell you that.

Dogs are loyal, brave and helpful. They will take the medicine from Anchorage to Nome. They will wait for their masters at the train station, they will spend their nights on the graves of their lost ones. They have hunted with humans since we were humans. The bond between us and them is undeniable. So what is it about cats? Yes, they control vermin, think of Dick Whittington. But cats have always been suspect. They are accused of being witches’ familiars and through them, in league with the Devil. Yes, in Egypt, Bastet, the lioness/cat goddess, has been worshiped since 2800 BCE. But they are sly and slinky and insinuating. They require very different care than dogs and will they say thank you? No they will not. In fact when they can be gotten into the carrier to take them to the vet, they will sing your funeral all the way there. But they are furry and cuddly and very purry. They tear ass around the house in the middle of the night, either alone or in pairs, for no apparent reason. They will sing the songs of their people loud enough to wake your guests. Yet no house of mine can be without a cat.

So we love them, we can’t help it. I can’t help it.They are so very hard to draw or paint. Tomorrow morning, there she will be, with her wet nose and purr that would wake the dead.