Cats!
Rossi Goldeneye Cat 2000-2016
A Tribute by his Human
Pauline J. Alama
One day in 2002, my husband and I went to the Humane Society of Bergen County to find a companion for our lonely only cat. They had a couple of kittens, too new to let prospective adopters handle them. We took a look at them, and they were cute, but we hadn’t made up our minds; after all, it’s a bit hard to commit to a cat you haven’t touched yet.
Then the Humane Society worker said, “Or maybe you’d like Rossi.” She started calling, “Rossi! Rossi! I don’t know where he’s gotten to. Sometimes he hides in the closet.”
While she looked around, I felt something bump up against my ankle. My husband says he felt Feline First Contact as a damp touch, a wet nose or a friendly lick. I looked down, and there was an enormous white cat butting his head against me. He stared up at me with huge golden eyes, looking exceedingly pathetic. You know how Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies makes his eyes get bigger and bigger until his opponents can’t withstand his cuteness? This cat could give the Puss in Boots eyes like nobody else.
When I first brought our son home from the hospital, both cats ran to greet me at the door, and I put the new baby in his car seat down on the floor so they could get to know him. My two fighting house-tigers, each of them several pounds heavier than the baby, took one look at the helpless newborn and fled.
But Rossi was not long deterred. Very early on, he adopted Sean as his pet. When Sean started to toddle, Crichton fled in terror from the tromping feet, the flailing arms; but Rossi pursued a sophisticated strategy of constructive engagement with occasional tactical retreats. He would hover just out of arm’s reach when the toddler was most active, then occasionally let Sean come near enough to touch his soft fur.
Pretty soon we were both petting the white cat. His fur felt terrible—thin and coarse as sandpaper—but he responded to petting with touching affection, and those wide eyes were irresistible. Before we knew it, we couldn’t stop petting him, and we had stopped looking at the kittens. Rossie had us where he wanted us. The Force was strong with this one. We signed the adoption papers.
We don’t know whose cat he was before he was ours, but we know his human lived in a No Pets Allowed apartment building. We were told he came to the Humane Society because the landlord found out about him. I bet the super came to fix something, and the cat came out to demand some petting. His basic outlook on life was that God gave humans hands so they could pet him.
We worried about Rossi at first. He was about two years old, but already he seemed to be wheezing. When the vet prescribed medication, we found we couldn’t make him take it. He was so big we couldn’t scruff him to put a medicine dropper in his mouth. We decided that he’d better be as healthy as he could without medicine, since there was no way to make him cooperate.
He and Crichton Cat fought a lot for a few days, till gradually the fighting became playing. He stopped wheezing, ate with gusto, plumped up, and flourished; his thin, coarse hair grew out, replaced by thick, downy fur. Always big from nose to tail, he became as fat and contented as any Kliban cartoon cat, till his personal trainer, Crichton, ran him around the house to shape up.
We started to notice that Rossi was, in certain ways, much smarter than Crichton. When they fought, Crichton would run around like a maniac with much energy and little direction. When Rossi got tired of wrestling, the clever beast would find a strategic defensive spot and stay there until Crichton exhausted himself running in circles and went to sleep.
Still, Rossi was the only one who ate rubber bands, bits of ribbon, and the occasional cotton ball, so “smart” may not be the precise word for him. He went through a phase of fighting battles against his own tail. He’d bite his tail, then get angry at the cat who bit his tail, and bite it again in revenge: “Bite my tail, will you? Take that! Ow! and that! Ow!” At times even Crichton would look at him disapprovingly, as if to say, “That’s your tail, you dumb hairball.”
Rossi quickly became one of the family.
Rossi was one of Sean’s best teachers. Once, when Sean’s primitive petting got too rough, Rossi placed a paw lightly on Sean’s arm and delicately unsheathed his claws. Without drawing blood, he made an unmistakable statement: “These are my claws. I am not a toy.” He taught Sean the right way to serve a cat and anticipate feline needs and desires.
Sean always seemed to have special feeling for Rossi in return. One of the first things he ever wrote by himself was a letter to Rossi. I think I had told Sean that Rossi couldn’t speak English, so he decided that he needed to communicate with him in writing. The letter went something like this: “PURR PURR PURR MROW PURR...”
Drawings of Rossi also featured prominently in Sean’s early artwork.At one point in Sean’s childhood, he even speculated that Rossi might be God in disguise, because even if you stepped on his tail, he was quick to forgive.When Sean was old enough to go to school, Rossi would stay in the bedrooms most of the school day, then rouse himself to go downstairs and greet him at the door when he came home. When Sean got bigger, Rossi got in the habit of sitting in his lap while he did homework.
Rossi loved his daily rituals. By the end of his life, he had trained us to an evening routine that let him cozy up to each of us in turn. He would visit each human’s lap while we watched a video, to settle in Paul’s for the duration, turning to liquid. When we left the living room for bed, he would visit Sean’s bedroom for a little evening petting, then curl up for the night on or near my legs. He trained me to leave a space for him in bed.
Rossi was a real character. He seemed to like music, and come toward me if I sang, eyes wide. He was fascinated by water, but hated getting wet. He had an adventurous attitude toward the food we ate. I could be cutting up vegetables, but he’d still crowd round to see what I had there. I’d tell him, “It’s just peppers, Rossi. Cats don’t eat peppers,” and he’d silently think at me, “I’d keep an open mind about that.” We caught him licking the sides of olive oil bottles.
He remained an active cat till late in life, and loved to charge up the multi-story cat climber that Paul put next to the stairs, sometimes hovering vulture-like at the top to ambush humans descending the stairs and demand petting. He loved to chase anything: real bugs, toy mice, stray bits of popcorn, the plastic tear-off strips from milk bottle caps. His energetic activity made it hard to believe that he was quite sleepy enough to spend the whole day curled up while we went to school and work. We imagined he must have a double life, escaping through some hidden portal to adventures as a covert operative. We pictured him sneaking out for a secret rendezvous with Pussy Galore or other legendary feline agents.
We knew for a couple of years that he had kidney problems--he silently protested the change to prescription food, eating less and less except when he could beg table scraps of cheese, fish, or chicken--and for several months, his weight loss worried us. Nonetheless, it shocked us in September when he suddenly changed from a playful, active cat to a dying invalid. We can’t help wondering whether some enemy agent hastened his decline. It’s still hard to believe he’s dead. In a way, he’ll never really be gone: we’ll never get all the white fluff out of the corners of the house, the gouges out of the couch, or the deeper territorial markings out of our hearts.
He especially loved Paul, who defended him from Crichton in their early fighting days, but I remember when I came back from four days away at a science fiction convention, both cats sat on me simultaneously as if they wanted to hold me down and make sure I wouldn’t go away again.
