After my childhood cat, Ziggy, died in 2019, Maddee asked me if I would ever adopt a cat again. The creamsicle tabby of my youth was a special case in the chronicles of catdom — a social, not-so-evil feline.
“Nah,” I said. “Ziggy was one of one.”
Ziggy was so relatively perfect that, for years after his death, I vowed never to replace him. The very thought of rolling the dice on a new cat made me ill.
Well, like an amputee at an ADA-compliant craps table, I had the dice thrown for me.
Just a few days after I returned from my grandmother’s funeral in Pennsylvania, Maddee called me in a panic. She had borrowed my car to get to class and was evidently hearing strange sounds.
“There’s meowing in your engine!” she shouted. “How do you pop your hood?!”
She pulled over at a Circle K in South Central L.A., where I remotely assisted her.
Two minutes after hanging up, I opened my phone to a photo of the culprit:
It took one hour, and the assistance of two grown men meowing into my engine bay to finally remove the stowaway. When the kitten was captured, a minivan full of children parked nearby applauded.
“Please don’t take it home,” I texted.
Maddee’s response was simple:
Without treats, toys, or litter, the stranger in our home survived by shitting in our houseplants, destroying our couch, and eating leftover takeout.
“You’ll like her,” Maddee texted. “She likes your General Tso’s Chicken.”
“Great.”
From the start, I was against adopting Glove Box, as we called her. Beyond the logistics, the expenses, and the commitment, it just felt weird to have a kitten.
I’ve never considered myself a cat person, per se. If anything, I’m just an animal person. I was raised by a Horse Girl, who was raised in turn by another Horse Girl. Through the generations, my family has at times possessed horses, dogs, a barn cat, a barn litter, a non-barn cat, a bird, a fish, an owl, and a wolf hybrid.
And that’s not even counting our neighbors’ sheep, cows, alpacas, emus, and deer fawn.
With so many close encounters of the four-legged kind, I never singled out Ziggy and declared: “Yep, I’m a cat person.”
In California, far from the pastures of my youth, Glove Box’s arrival triggered an identity crisis.
I bargained with myself… Perhaps having a cat made me more attractive, more interesting?
But when I researched this claim, I was shocked to learn that studies have shown that people find “cat guys” less masculine and more neurotic.
In fact, women are far less likely to date men with cats.
“You don’t find me less attractive with this thing, right?” I asked Maddee, Glove Box dangling from my arms like a live wire.
Maddee stared us up and down. She cleared her throat.
“Well…”
I gasped. Glove Box stared dumbly, a hint of offense on her face.
From that point forward, I promised not to become a “cat guy.”
I drew a firm line between me and the neurotic, emasculated cat men of the world. I bought a food bowl that reads Good Dog, an Eagles collar, and a hiking harness.
When we turned to toys and treats, Glove received a photo-realistic flopping fish rather than balls of yarn or warm milk. None of that namby-pamby sissy kitty shit for my cat!
Even her full name was an attempt at humor: Glove Box Moses Malone Wesner.
I mean, who names a kitten after a car component and an NBA player?
Surely not someone suffering from neurosis!
Of course, all of these bargaining chips crash from the table when I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror, burdened with a pipsqueak fuzzball in my arms.
“The fuck are you looking at?” I ask my reflection, before rushing off to play with that stupid fish together.
Beyond all doubts, irritations, and expenses though, the thing that keeps me coming back to Glove is my firm belief that she’s a gift from the universe.
You see, after my grandmother passed, we visited the funeral home only to find that she was joined in her casket by a toy cat that we’d never seen before.
A beady-eyed, inanimate stuffed kitty sitting atop my dead grandmother — it would’ve been hilarious if it wasn’t horrifying.
After twenty minutes of speculation, the funeral director strode in, confidently declaring that the cat had arrived from the hospital in a bag of my grandmother’s things.
“Things? What things?” my mom asked. “We got all her things.”
My aunt opened the bag, only to reveal that it was full of some other dead lady’s shit.
The startled director plucked the toy from my grandmother’s body and rushed it out of the room, likely to another casket, for another confused, grieving family to discover.
By the time I returned to Los Angeles, I’d almost forgotten about the stuffed cat completely.
That is, until a living, breathing kitten nearly the exact same size and coat appeared, screaming and meowing inside my car.
I haven’t been able to get rid of her since.
When I told my mother I was keeping Glove Box, she had four words:
“You’re such a jackass.”
Despite the patchwork of coincidences, Mom had reservations about Glove. Like Mom Mom before her, she preferred dogs and horses.
But, much to my amusement, all of Mom Mom’s old horse friends were on my side. After hearing the story of the casket cat and the tiger gray stowaway, the people who’d known my grandmother from her years showing horses agreed that my new kitten was a sign from above.
“I wanted to tell them that it should’ve been a dog,” Mom texted me.
“Or a stray horse,” I said.
“I almost said that!!”
The laughter at the notion of a horse wandering in off the streets was a nice reprieve, though not nearly enough to fill that familiar hole in my heart.
But soon a feral, purring creature was curled up on my chest, trying her best to make things better.
Shouts out to…
Glove Box, obviously.
The “Eagles Pillar Guy,” for dedicating his body to this Eagles Super Bowl run.
Maddee, for helping to lead Architecture+Advocacy, an amazing organization that’s raising money to aid a performing arts nonprofit. Learn more and consider donating, if you have the means.