Category: Personal (Page 1 of 5)

Truman, our most reclusive cat, has gone onward tonight to what my grandfather would call “the Church Triumphant,” and I hope we gave him a life that he enjoyed in his own weird way.

On a chilly evening in late December of 2011, Aimee and I were getting into our car after dinner at Panera when we heard a kitten mewing. After some rustling around in the bushes, we found a small black-brown ball of fluff who could fit in one hand.

I’d like to say that we fell in love with that cat immediately and brought him home, but we tried first to find him a different one. We were already flush with cats and we weren’t sure we could take care of yet another one…but eventually we discovered that we could.

He was a skittish little boy, though perhaps not so young: the vet who neutered him told us that his teeth were too developed to be younger than four months. We had no idea what he lived on or where before we found him at Panera. Rats? Lizards? It couldn’t only have been bread.

We called him Truman Cat-pote, continuing our theme of cats named for authors we liked. He seemed to like us more or less in return, though his raging anxiety disorder kept him from curling up on our laps for long. He preferred when we were lying down, and throughout the night, he’d paw through Aimee’s hair or bat either of us on the cheek for attention. He didn’t settle when we’d pet him, pacing back and forth instead.

In that way, Truman was our most Norman-like cat: skittish, rumpled, inconveniently weird, sometimes annoying, but still somehow needy for affection. When he got used to friends who visited us, he’d make an appearance in the living room like a cryptid, and a Truman sighting was always an honor for them.

We managed to get him to the vet maybe twice because he would writhe and fight when we tried to place him in a carrier, clawing at your head like a facehugger from Alien. I feel terrible that we didn’t get him better medical care, but he was impossible to pill or otherwise medicate, and we were terrified that his heart would explode on the way to the doctor.

He seemed content to live in our house and be weird, sometimes leaving a tooth or a clump of fur for rent.

We don’t have many stories about Truman. It wasn’t until we installed cat-calming diffusers in outlets around the house that he began to lounge in the front window or on the couch. Mostly he hung out in the bedroom like a strange stoner roommate, not contributing much but amiably showing up to be social when it suited him.

We had no idea what he wanted from us, so we did the best we could by sitting still and petting him until he dozed off.

For the last few weeks, he’d been eating less and less, and today when we tried to take him to the litter box, he couldn’t quite stand on his back legs. Harlan had taken to sleeping near him as a guardian this week, and we knew this evening that Truman was ready for whatever’s next.

I’m sure my mother is waiting to greet him when he crosses over, though God knows how she’ll catch him. Maybe there’s no anxiety disorder over the Rainbow Bridge.

In his memory, take some time over the next day or so to show some love to a challenging weirdo in your life who doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Like Truman, they need and want it anyway.

There are two video games I play through probably once a year: Borderlands 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2. They’re long and complex and rich with lots of experiences, much of it seemingly superfluous.

When I play a game like that for the first time, I’m always full of anxiety over whether I’ll succeed, whether I’ll “win,” whatever that means. There’s a lot of desperation in my character’s actions, taking shortcuts and completing the required missions however I can with whatever I’ve got.

Now the second playthrough – that’s where things actually get enjoyable. Once I’ve lost that anxiety over whether it’s possible for me to succeed, I can dawdle and do all the side missions and optimize my character with all the best gear and explore all the easter eggs. I can pay attention to all the things I missed the first time, and usually succeed even better.

You might see where I’m going with this.

I’ve had a stressful several months, scrabbling to finish the missions any way that I could. The ones coming up may or may not be better.

I hope I can remember to act (and more importantly feel) as though this is the second playthrough.

• Act with the confidence that I’ve already won this game in many ways, and even the big setbacks end up being part of that story in the end.
• Do all the side missions, gathering skills and experiences.
• Optimize my character, fixing what’s not working and leaning into what does.
• Explore the world a little more, looking for easter eggs and grace notes left for me by the designers.
• Know when to pause, when to shut the game off and do something else before returning re-energized.

That all sounds surprisingly positive for me, I know. Sometimes I have to remind myself of things that are obvious to everyone else.

But really the advice holds for all of us: ALWAYS stop to pet the dogs and cats.

On Wednesday the 6^th, it will be twenty years since I went to see my father for the first time after sixteen years of no contact.

(Oh, no. He’s talking about his father again? Yes, he is.)

If you don’t know by now that my father was a terrifying and chaotic presence in my family’s lives during his reign, let me offer this brief anecdote:

For years, my father swore that if my mother ever left him, he’d find us wherever we went and kill us. It ended up that my father left my mother for another woman instead, but we were still terrified that he’d come looking for us one day.

One incident that reinforced that threat happened during a hearing for my child support after the divorce. There had been an altercation in another courthouse a few days prior where someone had attacked a judge, so there was a newly-installed metal detector at our courthouse. My mother and I went through to the other side, and we watched as my father walked up to the metal detector, looked it over, and then left.

He preferred to get a contempt of court charge than to walk through that metal detector.

So we all stayed as far from him as possible for sixteen years after the divorce, following his life as best we could as a matter of security. Luckily for us, his criminal activities made his status and location easy to find in the state offender database.

So sixteen years went by, and I grew up in a slow, circuitous fashion, still believing that I should one day confront him as Luke Skywalker did with Darth Vader. I didn’t want to reconcile with him or save his soul…mostly, I wanted to gloat that I’d turned out okay despite his best efforts.

In 2004, I decided it was time. The state database listed his address (back in Arcadia) as a condition of his parole, so I took a day off from work and drove the five hours down to see him (and also some friends who still lived there at the time).

I pulled into the driveway of his mobile home, decorated to disguise that it was a mobile home, and I parked. I walked up to his front door, which was ajar behind a screened door. From inside, I could hear hymns playing loudly on a radio.

I’ll say that again. Hymns.

I knocked a few times and got no answer. On my way back to the car, my shoulders tensed expecting him to shoot me in the back, but he didn’t.

I visited with my friends and then on the way out of town decided to try once more. This time there were no hymns and my knocking was louder, so I heard heavy footsteps coming to the door. I realized that I had no idea what I intended to say or do.

For years, I’d considered decking him or even shooting him, but I wasn’t armed and I’ve never been much of a fighter.

An old man squinted out at me through the screen door. He was thinner than my father had been and his face was bloomed red with broken capillaries from years of drinking.

“Can I help you?”

I didn’t have a line prepared. One good choice might have been, “Hey, go fuck yourself.” Another might have been to say, “Karen and Mother send their regards,” while jabbing my knee into his groin.

I settled for, “Hello. I’m Will.”

He squinted harder and then threw open the door. I braced for a swing, but instead he wrapped his arms around me in a terrifying Klingon bear hug that my arms were too pinned to return, even if I’d wanted to.

He pulled back weeping, which wasn’t something I’d seen him do before. He shook his head and pulled off his hat and rubbed the white stubble on his scalp and then replaced it. He kept doing that, apparently amazed that I was there.

We chatted on that porch for about two hours. He had a slight Southern accent which faded away the longer he talked to me. He said a few half-hearted things about Jesus. He told me that his second wife had died of cancer recently and he was by himself, that he was tired of all the rubes and rednecks in town but at least they left him alone, and that he was looking into finding a lawyer to prove he was innocent of the crime he’d been sent to prison for.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers about that,” he said.

I did do some gloating, mentioning my fiction publications and graduate school, and—always class-conscious and into cars—he admired my parked Volvo.

He said he couldn’t drive a stick shift anymore because of arthritis, and though it could have been one of his cons, the man standing in front of me looked like every single member of my family including my youngest toddler niece could beat him to the ground.

That’s what I’d come to see: that this figure who’d terrified us for decades was now weakened by his own choices, living a life far worse, far emptier, than any punishment we could have wished on him.

People think that karma is some magical ironic force that sweeps in to serve justice, but the meaning is more about “suffering the logical consequences of your actions.” Karma had indeed come for my father, and it was all self-inflicted.

He was still strange and creepy and bizarrely tone deaf to feelings – “I wish I’d thought to run up my wife’s credit cards before she died because they can’t come to get you for that” – and there wasn’t much sign that he was aware of anything he’d done wrong. He asked about my mother and my sister, and I gave vague answers to protect their security.

He asked if I’d ever gotten to Eagle Scout and was disappointed when I said I didn’t.

By then, it was getting late and I’d gotten what I hadn’t known I’d come for: assurance that justice had come for my father and we’d all far outgrown any threat he could make.

We traded phone numbers and I said goodbye. He waved as I drove away, and years later when we cleaned out that house after he died, I saw that he wrote my name with an exclamation point on that day in his calendar.

I drove home in a weird kind of relieved euphoria. Yeah, he was still a predatory shark in his heart, but he had no teeth.

More importantly, I’d done something I’d always sworn I’d do.

My mother and sister were horrified that I went to see him, and an ebullient blog entry that I wrote about the encounter didn’t help. I unintentionally implied that we’d reconnected for a new beginning when the truth was much closer to discovering that the Soviet missiles in Red Square were just empty metal tubes.

I’d gone to find out that he couldn’t hurt us, and though I knew that now, it wasn’t my place to risk other people on the gamble.

I was his informal parole officer for the rest of his life. For the next several years until he died, we had stilted awkward phone calls every six months or so. He asked computer questions. He tried to sell me his mother’s wedding ring. He talked about lawsuits he wanted to file and encouraged me to go to law school.

He deftly avoided all questions about what he thought about his actions or his crimes. The closest he ever came to admitting his abuse was to say that living in Florida away from the life he’d known in New York had made him anxious and angry: “flapping in the breeze” was his expression for it.

I didn’t see him in person again except on his deathbed from colon cancer, where he asked me how my car and cats were doing and complained about the ambulance ride to the hospice while ignoring my sister standing next to me.

Not the most contemplative man in the world, certainly not one who’d write this much on the twentieth anniversary of something.

I’m not sure what good my reckless visit did. It was handy to know about his doings from a safety perspective, and that thin channel of communication perhaps sated his curiosity enough to prevent him from looking for us.

Maybe I needed to look at him with adult eyes and know I was different than he was. Maybe I needed to know I’d “won,” ignoble as that is. Maybe I wanted to give him the slightest chance to show any growth of consciousness.

Unlike Darth Vader, he never did.