Endless Love
Baby Lester
Growing up, we had lots of different kinds of pets. When we lived in the country, we mostly had country style pets: outdoor cats and dogs that called multiple houses home. These weren’t pets you got too attached to, as they would wander off, or in the case of one beautiful white long hair kitten, wind up in the carport with their throat slit open by what could have only been a wild chupacabra (RIP Fluffy).
We also had gerbils (or hamsters. Rodents are hard) that would escape and sometimes met their untimely demise in or around the garbage disposal in our 70s style condo. These were my brothers' rodents. I do not condone keeping them as pets, nor do I mourn them.
And then there was the one dog I called my own, Hartley. Hartley was a miniature schnauzer my father took me to pick out from a litter of puppies when I was 10. When I was 18, I came home from college for the first time to find him gone. My mother said he went to live on a farm. I preferred to believe that was the truth.
So, needless to say, as an adult I was not a “pet person.” I knew people with cats and other various pets, but they did not interest me. I had pushed my feelings about pets far down with my pusher downer machine and could even be mean about animals. This is what I believe scientists call a “defense mechanism” or a “survival skill” or a “reaction to your mother getting rid of your dog while you are at college.”
At any rate, I didn’t want no pets. When I started dating my husband, and learned that he had just rescued an entire litter of kittens from his workplace, I was less than interested. And when I met the two he would wind up keeping, George and Lester, I was nice to them, but not ecstatic. There was no special kitty voice or petting or anything like that. No kitty love.
Not long after we started dating, a neighbor’s pet brought fleas into my husband’s apartment building. They were so bad that the cats had given up walking on the floor and had started navigating the apartment via the tops of his book shelves, the desk, and the kitchen counter. They were resourceful and agile, I had to give them that.
I lived across town in what I will say was a nicer apartment, in that it did not have fleas or indoor/outdoor carpet in the bathroom. The latter was my husband’s solution to having to wash a dirty bath mat. I only showered there once. With no other course of action, we took the cats to my place to give them flea baths.
Let me tell you what I learned about cats that day: they fucking hate baths. But we got them washed between the two of us, and they went on to explore my formerly pet free apartment.
I was nervous having them there. What if I hurt one of them? What if I did something wrong? I didn’t love them, but my future husband loved them and I loved him, so I felt a responsibility to keep them safe.
I was working three jobs at the time, mornings, afternoons, and evenings, and would often nap in between gigs. One afternoon I laid down in my bed and fell sound asleep, and waking up on my side, I opened my eyes to find Lester laying on his side, looking right back at me. The cats hadn’t been in the bed as far as I’d known and Ray wasn’t home, so I just layed there and looked right back at him.
He gazed at me with his little furry brown face and brown eyes, paws pulled up under his chin. After a few minutes I saw something there – a consciousness, a being, maybe even a soul – and realized that he was a creature with feelings. And I realized I was too.
I know this may sound hokey or obvious or just plain dumb, but I somehow connected with this cat on that bed that day and from that moment on, Lester was my cat. This is not to say he wasn’t also Ray’s, but he became my Lester, my Lesties, my Lester Bunny, my MoLester, my baby Wubbins, my Wub Nubbins.
I was 29 and I was just learning to love a pet. I had never seen the thing I saw in Lester in any other animal before that day. Or maybe I was unable to see it. As far as I was concerned, Lester was a kind of a person and one I loved very much.
My father, definitely not a cat person, met Lester once and proclaimed him to be a “pretty cool cat” after Lester jumped up on his lap without permission. This was as much of a cat blessing as I could hope for from Joe Wall.
Lester was a small brown cat at first, but as we moved the first, second, third and then fourth time, he became a much bigger boy. And he was a smart big boy. When he figured out how to open a Twinkie, we put them up in the cabinet. This was how we found out that he could open a cabinet door, open a box of Twinkies, open the Twinkie wrapper, and remove the cream filling of the Twinkie with surgical precision. I’m guessing this is why he became the first of our cats to get diabetes.
Diabetes in cats is a weird thing and I know way too much about it. We didn’t notice Lester was losing weight until my in-laws came and commented on it. When he fell down the stairs not long after they left, we rushed him to the vet.
I hate needles and blood and all of the things that would have enabled me to be the doctor my grandmother so desperately wanted me to be, but when Lester was diagnosed with diabetes, I quickly learned to give him his shots. He took them like a big boy because he was big and strong and brave.
Lester was the only cat we had, and we wound up having three then, who sprayed. He mostly did this outdoors, but one fateful evening, I woke up, thinking I was being smothered to death with a wet, putrid fur coat, only to realize that Lester had backed up to me in my sleep and was “marking” me for his own. Love really does hurt sometimes, especially with felines.
He was also jealous. If one of our other cats sat in my lap, Lester would ever so ungracefully force himself onto my lap and take their place. He would get in between me and my husband if we were snuggling on the couch. He greeted me every time I came home and cried until I picked him up. I always picked him up.
Lester was the only cat I’ve ever known who could fetch. We found this out by accident one day when I threw the ring off a jug of milk and he brought it back to me. That was the only thing he would fetch, but he loved those milk rings and when we moved from our last house, we found them everywhere, squirreled away under rugs and behind furniture.
The other trick Lester could do was seemingly disappear into thin air. He especially loved to do this when we were out of town and someone was cat sitting. They would look for him everywhere, open every door, panic, call us, and then he would stroll out of a closet they had already checked three times without so much as a kiss my ass. I guess he had magic portals, but he never chose to share them with us or the other cats.
As he got older, his health started to deteriorate. The diabetes got worse and once while my in-laws were visiting he once again disappeared. This time he wasn’t in his portal, but under the guest bed having a seizure.
Now, I will admit that I made a lot of fun of someone I went to grad school with for taking time off because her cat had cancer. I now know I was an asshole, because that day at the emergency vet, I ugly cried at the thought of him suffering under the bed and, ultimately, of him dying.
Lester pulled through that day and we went through a few more similar incidents, each just as scary as the last. He bounced back every time and I continued to believe that Lester could go in and out of his portal and somehow live forever.
But we know no one or nothing lives forever (insert Keith Richards joke here). He started losing weight again and this time when we took him to the vet they told us his pancreas was shutting down and he had a mass growing somewhere in that area. They said surgery would be expensive and traumatic, as he was an elderly cat by this point.
They told us to take him home and we would know when it was time for us to end his suffering. This led to The Best Week Of Lester Trotta’s Life. All of the things that Lester had been denied after his diabetes diagnosis were now back on the menu: the milk left after eating Lucky Charms, Twinkies, ice cream, and as much parmesan cheese as he wanted. For a full week he acted almost like a kitten again: fetching milk tabs and bullying the other two cats like the big Bubby I had grown to love. He was having the time of his life.
Until he wasn’t. We knew late one night when we found him on the couch, looking glassy eyed and frail, that our friend needed relief.
It was snowing that morning, the day after my dead father’s birthday, as we drove him to our family vet. We sat with him and said our goodbyes and I let my Wub Nubbins go. They carried him off in an old towel we had wrapped him in. It broke my fucking heart.
During those years I became known as a crazy cat lady and told people I married into a crazy cat family. The truth is that I met a cat who taught me not just how to love, but how to be loved in return. As insane as it sounds, Lester taught me a lot about unconditional love. He could spray me in my sleep and I still loved him. I could give him shots and he would purr in my lap moments later.
Today we have a dog, who is truly like our child (Lester would be SO jealous), and two cats. I cannot imagine losing any of them. I can’t imagine making fun of anyone for having a sick pet. I would probably hurt someone if they hurt any of my animals.
Not long ago, my brother mentioned in a phone call that my mother had my childhood dog Hartley put down. He laughed when I told him I thought Hartley had gone to live on a farm. I mean, I guess I believed what I wanted to believe, but yeah, that’s a pretty worn out trope.
That night I had a come apart. I cried and held my dog, Jolene. I blamed myself for leaving Hartley alone with my mother and I promised Jolene I would never let anyone hurt her. I realized that I had shut off a lot of my emotions when I was growing up in order to cope with all manner of things, including dogs mysteriously going to farms. I also realized none of that was my fault because I was a child.
But then I thought about Lester. I loved that fucking cat as much as I possibly could and I let him love me right back. I let him allow me to become vulnerable again and to trust that I would be able to love and lose and be OK.
And then I thought about my husband, who rescued that little fuzz ball and brought him to my house to live in the first place. My husband loved and trusted me enough to do that. There’s a lot of vulnerability there.
My husband is my last human love, but Lester was my first kitty love and the animal who made me a pet person. I still use our special kitty voice to talk to him and somewhere on the farm on the other side of his portal, I know he hears me and purrs, hopefully in my father’s lap.
