A cat by any other name

Sheila Hagel Zanghi.

When I was in ninth grade we moved to the sub-suburbs of Newhall, California. Actually, it was an area called Saugus where tract builders had rushed in ... members of a latter-day tract building gold rush. Houses bloomed up seemingly overnight with every house a clone of one out of four plans. The area reminded me of the Pete Seeger song, "Little Boxes."

Anyway, we were far from civilization. The first summer my younger sister and I would rise early once a week and make our weekly pilgrimage to our closest store, a very uninspiring 24-hour convenience store. It's saving grace was it carried frozen cheesecakes. So, we would leave early to beat the heat and carefully carry our prize back the three miles to our home. By that time the cheesecake was still a little frozen which, according to my calculations, meant the calories in the frozen dessert, were inert and harmless. We would hastily scarf it down so the calories wouldn't count.

While making our way home we attracted the interest of a tiny kitten. He was a trooper and followed us the full block home. He was quiet until we reached home and then started mewing pitifully. He was white with rust red splotches. It looked as though someone had spilled red rust primer on him. My sister went to the kitchen and brought out a saucer of water. The kitten lapped some up and started mewing again. We found him something to eat and he settled down to sleep.

When our mom came home from work, we pleaded with her to keep the kitten. She said he probably was a neighbor's cat and adamantly said "no" to us keeping him. She even told us not to give him a name under any circumstances because then we would get too attached.

My sister and I thought about it and decided to call him "Kissa." In Finnish it means "a cat" or just "cat." Mom couldn't complain because technically it wasn't a name, merely a label for a cat.

It was after meeting this cat I realized the saying, "Dogs have owners. Cats have staff," was very true. Apparently, I became sole employee of Kissa's Infirmary. It seems mom was correct; this cat did not belong to us but I'm not sure he belonged to anyone else. He was the lucky one, free to pursue his fate unhindered by any thought of anyone. However, whenever his wanderings ended in fights, bites and scratches, he would come to our house and wail and cry pitifully. The first time he showed up he was pretty torn up but he allowed me to pick him up and place him on top of the washing machine to tend to his wounds. After patching him up I would place a saucer of water (and a little food from a hidden bag) and make sure he was comfortable. It was no use to ask my folks if we could take him to the vet because the cat did not belong to us and he didn't have a real name. Kissa would hide in the garage until he decided it was time to venture out to more aggressive pursuits. Sometimes I would see him leave without so much as a backward glance a me.

It turned out Kissa was an equal opportunity bully as he terrorized cats and dogs alike. I saw Kissa lying in wait for a dog that decided to use our boulevard as a bathroom. As soon as the dog was in a vulnerable position Kissa attacked him, grabbing his neck with his paws and biting down. The dog took off like a shot and that dog never ventured near our house again.

Kissa's visits were purely for my medical help. Once he showed up with a collar so big he ended up just pushing it off. I think he was trying to make me jealous. But I had figured him out by then. This bad boy would never settle down and would always respond to the call of the wild. One day I realized Kissa had not been to my infirmary for months and I knew he was gone. Had someone captured his heart? Had something bad happened to him? I realized he had left an impression on the neighborhood as dozens of white and red rust splotched kittens seemed to be everywhere.

Was Kissa just a heartbreaker, able to bend strong-willed people like me to his will? Years later I saw a quote that fit this scenario to a tee. The person must have suffered a loss similar to mine, having loved and lost a bad boy cat. The quote summarized the heartless nature of certain cats. It said, "If cats could text back they wouldn't."