fbpx
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
    • Get Home Delivery
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
    • Advertise
    • Submit Your Event
    • Customer Support
    • Submit A News Tip
    • Send Letter to the Editor
    • Where’s My Paper?
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial
Hudson Valley One
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s UP
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Subscribe to the What’s UP newsletter
  • Opinion
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Log Out
No Result
View All Result
Hudson Valley One
No Result
View All Result

Johm’s book of practical cats

by John Burdick
April 30, 2020
in Village Voices
0
Johm’s book of practical cats

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer
.
— from Jubilate Agno, Christopher Smart,  1722 – 1771

Weeks after her mother passed away last year, my wife decided it was time for us to re-cat. The cat of our life had been Arguyle, a mercurial, brilliant, athletically gifted, violent and vastly misunderstood medium-sized tortoise shell who spent 17 years with us in five residences, and waited for me to get home before dying, flashing a single paw in the air when I came in the door and then releasing the last of the light from her eyes and the urine from her bladder, never to stir again. I still see her peripherally, skirting the porcelain bathroom sink that was the only way she would take her water — running, cold.

The New Paltz Animal Hospital — Liz once spied — had written “Watch!” in large, urgent characters on Arguyle’s chart, for she was uninhibited of tooth and claw. But she was tender also, a lap- and chest-cat who would receive affection as long as it didn’t implicate 17 and two-thirds  of a cat’s 25 and five-eighths elliptical zones of rotating inviolable selfdom, in which case there would be blood.

Invariably. Arguyle hissed at everything, and for no obvious reason.

After Arguyle, there had been only Buka, who came to live and die with us at the age of 16, lame and sweet and generally asleep, and Luther, a seasonal visitor from in-family for a few years, a distinguished, and buttoned-down gentleman, handsome and low-maintenance if standoffish.

We went to the shelter to claim us a rescue. Snowflake jumped out his cage an onto my lap. It was a done deal; we had been drafted by him. But Liz’s attention had been directed by Jeff Almquist, one of the shelter’s dedicated volunteers and a former colleague of mine, to a cat that looked more like a dirty towel bunched up in a cage, face buried in the back corner, still and insensate, a traumatized non-interactive lump of cat in total emotional lockdown named Dario.

Liz was drawn to Dario, and I imagine, to his story, whatever that might be. Following Jeff’s lead, she reached into his cage and petted his chin. She thought she felt a reciprocal purr or head-butt gesture of some kind. The next day we took him home, a thick, heavy male cat with a face so squinched and sour we changed his name to Grumper the Puppy Fish.

Dario decamped to my small office. Sometimes I couldn’t find him for days at a time. When I did, he would always been in the same position — face buried in his forepaws and in a corner, composed and motionless like someone who really needs to be invisible and believes wishing can make it so. I would gently stroke him and score a purr. When he did escape from the room in which I write now — we’re still not sure when or how — he moved forthwith into a literal hole in the wall in our basement laundry room, where he based his solitary operations for several months. I had to buy a sheet-rock saw to enlarge that hole so I could lie between the washer and dryer and shine in a light to ensure a different hole in a different wall hadn’t allowed him to escape.

They told us he would come around. It really took some time to believe it, but sure enough Dario began to present. Dario began to allow approach. Dario began to speak. He has now revealed himself to be nothing less than a glutton for affection, though the rules of it are catty and complex, just as you would want them to be. He is a hero to me, an animal who endured horrors we can only imagine and still found within himself the will to relate, the will to receive love. He is, in this time of enforced hunkering, a cat in full bloom and one of my greatest inspirations in this isolation.

Am I wrong to believe that Dario knows Arguyle?

Read more installments of Village Voices by John Burdick.

Join the family! Grab a free month of HV1 from the folks who have brought you substantive local news since 1972. We made it 50 years thanks to support from readers like you. Help us keep real journalism alive.
- Geddy Sveikauskas, Publisher

John Burdick

Related Posts

Village Voices are on hold
Village Voices

Village Voices are on hold

November 17, 2020
A liberal education
Village Voices

Keeping it all together

August 24, 2020
Writing about oneself
Village Voices

I need a day off

August 24, 2020
Saugerties initiative combating addiction and suicide adds more events
Village Voices

Time travel

August 24, 2020
Where to buy face masks locally
Village Voices

A story of three states

September 2, 2020
The kids talk politics
Village Voices

Stories on the ballot

August 23, 2020
Next Post
Saugerties village saves $30k on insurance

Village of Saugerties government adapts to coronavirus

Weather

Kingston, NY
82°
Partly Cloudy
5:28 am8:34 pm EDT
Feels like: 88°F
Wind: 6mph S
Humidity: 60%
Pressure: 29.93"Hg
UV index: 7
FriSatSun
88°F / 70°F
86°F / 70°F
84°F / 70°F
powered by Weather Atlas

Subscribe

Independent. Local. Substantive. Subscribe now.

  • Subscribe & Support
  • Print Edition
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Contact
  • Our Newsletters
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Free HV1 Trial

© 2022 Ulster Publishing

No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • Schools
    • Business
    • Sports
    • Crime
    • Politics & Government
  • What’s Happening
    • Calendar Of Events
    • Art
    • Books
    • Kids
    • Lifestyle & Wellness
    • Food & Drink
    • Music
    • Nature
    • Stage & Screen
  • Opinions
    • Letters
    • Columns
  • Local
    • Special Sections
    • Local History
  • Marketplace
    • All Classified Ads
    • Post a Classified Ad
  • Obituaries
  • Subscribe & Support
  • Contact Us
    • Customer Support
    • Advertise
    • Submit A News Tip
  • Print Edition
    • Read ePaper Online
    • Newsstand Locations
    • Where’s My Paper
  • HV1 Magazines
  • Manage HV1 Account
  • Log In
  • Free HV1 Trial
  • Subscribe to Our Newsletters
    • Hey Kingston
    • New Paltz Times
    • Woodstock Times
    • Week in Review

© 2022 Ulster Publishing