Prester John

1.

I'm 90% sure that my wife would agree with me (though then, she also sometimes thinks about what to do by thinking of "what would John say", and although John was the greatest cat (Abyssinian, of course), he died 6 years ago. And neither my son (now 19) or I think this is really all that weird. We all think of John.

He was that kind of cat. My mother the "I can't stand cats, they're evil and sneaky" person in the family ended up liking him better than anything else she'd seen in the genus(?) Felis. (Although, when he rode around on my shoulders, and reached around to lick my nose, my mother was never really able to get over the notion that that was really disgusting.

2.

Counters: we spent a lot of effort teaching John (the Abyssinian) to stay off counters. He learned it well, but would also in our old house as Beverly mentions, just bypass them on the way to a window. He was a jumping fool, could easily do a standing jump and land on something five feet in the air.

Anyway, when we adopted Moonlight, (a little all-black female who showed up on our porch, and may very well have ridden home with my wife by jumping into the car while my wife was loading groceries into it), she was almost a year old, with not much manners, which John proceeded to teach her. We have seen him yelling at her when she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. She learned about counters and tables without us doing much anything. (Though she also learned about dining room tables, but got exactly John's final and fully-evolved theory, which was "you are not allowed on the table when people are eating.")

(This gloss on the rule also applied only to active eating: if you just sat around at the table long enough afterwards, he'd come up and look around, on the grounds that the table was legit again.

3.

Well, with John the Original Cat and King of All, just to get him into a cat carrier required my father's old leather coat and my welding gloves. Though he was fascinated by water, and in our old house with minimalist water pressure would stand in the bathtub as water ran in, feeling the water, slowly retreating. He also did the weirdest thing I've ever seen a cat do water-wise. He often sat in the bathroom and watched us, and we're bath people, not shower people. Anyway, one day I had started running water at its feeble level, and John got into the bathtub, went up the "head" of it, sat down, lay down against the back, and turned himself so he was in exactly the position that a person is in the bathtub -belly up, legs out, back against the end. He sort of sat there for a while as water ran in. I'm staring at him. I said, yes, John, that's how we sit in the bathtub. And he just sat like that until water was well onto his hind legs, and then jumped out, and never did it again. Apparently he wanted to check the experience for himself, but it remained unclear as to why we wanted to do this.

He was an Abyssinian, and they are weird, but I have to say that a cat checking out bathing was about as good a thing as I have ever seen for being simultaneously crazed and funny.

4.

We took him up north once, and he loved it once he got there(watch an Abby creep off the end of a dock into the woods at dusk). But, the trip (5 hours) was utter hideousness. A very loud cat. Who had very different ideas as to what should be going on. And was willing to stand up and speak to power. (Well, curl up in the back of the carrier and SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER). When he finally got on the boat and came out of hiding, he drank about a pint of water, which we figured he lost through evaporation from having his mouth open for five hours.

5.

When the Glorious John was about 17, he figured out that he could go over to the neighbors. Now at this time he was on a special diet because he had kidney problems and something associated, roughly, low grade congestive heart failure. So he was getting this extremely healthy food. But he wasn't eating much of it.

We would, as we had done for years, let him out in the back yard, and he'd go around and stalk birds and so on. (He wasn't great on birds, but he was Death With Wings for mice). After about a month of this, we happened to talk to the nice retired couple who lived just to the east of us one afternoon. Al said, "why don't you feed that cat of yours? He's always coming over here and trying to get in the back door, and then Fran, well, she lets him in and feeds him because he's so pathetic."

6.

I suppose it wasn't quite fair, but years ago before a fancy dinner at home we took dinner and introduced it to John (the Abyssinian).Dinner was a lobster. The standoff was hilarious. Armor and force vs. mobility and flexibility.

Then again, if we'd done it by tossing them both in the bathtub, I suppose it would have been even more interesting.

7.

He died just short of 20, it turned out from the autopsy that the U of M wanted to do that he had cancer of the bladder, liver, spleen, kidneys and stomach, and had had for some time. (He had been under the care of the U for about 3 years, they had got him improved, but never could find out the underlying problem).

When they called to suggest that maybe we put him down, the guy from the U who called in the morning said that he had had the bilirubin test rerun three times with new samples since 8 the previous night, because the level was 12 times normal, and he figured that someone had messed up a decimal point so that it was really only 1.2 times normal. He said that he had never heard of a cat being alive with that level, and in fact couldn't figure out how the cat was alive at all.

So we went off to Erik's school and dragged him out of first period (he would have been thirteen then), and we all went off to see John. We did, and he wasn't in good shape - hadn't really been for a month or two, despite everything U of M could think of. But he could barely move now.

So it was. Someone had, of course, to stay and hold him while he died, and I sort of got selected, because it'll wreck me less than anyone else. (My best friend died when I was 13, my father died when I was 17, and that's the significant two out of 8 various relatives..those of us who are burned get to be the firemen..)

Anyway, I held him and he looked at me, and I could tell he was hurting without the physical strength to act on pain. I told him, "It's okay, John, we'll all be happier now.", and then, hadn't even thought of it, but he's looking at me and his eyes start to close and the line came straight from somewhere, and I said "Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of angels sing thee to thy sleep". No idea why it came tome exactly then, but it was right.

Shit. 6 years and I can still see his expression exactly. Only here would I say this publicly, but I think it was a cross of trust and thanks.