Reflections On Becoming a Cat Lady

I’m afraid I might be moving in the direction of becoming the neighborhood "cat lady." I might be going there involuntarily, but I'm still going there. My life is carpeted with cats.

A feral female cat brought her litter into my house, one-by-one, in the wake of a heavy rainfall. She carried each one by the scruff of the neck through the pet door I’d installed years ago for my own, my one-and-only cat. The feral stowed her kittens in a cupboard whose door I’d carelessly left open. Two of the litter of six were dead – apparently drowned, as if the mother might have ill-advisedly made her original nest behind a downspout somewhere. But that left four kittens plus the mother herself for me to feed and tend to. All the City’s animal shelters are full up, what with the bad economy. None of the no-kill shelters I contacted had room for one more cat - much less for four or five. So anyplace that would have accepted them would no doubt have euthanized them immediately. That's left me to soldier on, caring for this superfluity of cats as best I can.

The shelters told me that my best option was to go the "catch-and-release" route. In recent years, this has been deemed the best way of dealing with the growing population of stray cats. You get a larger Have-A-Hart trap (or else the shelters will loan you one) - then you set about trapping any stray. You make an appointment with the clinic, then you set the trap and hope to catch your target animal. If you succeed, you take the animal in to be fixed, then you re-claim it and, after tending to it through a convalescent period, you release it back into the alleys. While the animal is in the clinic, it also has one ear "tipped," that is, it has a part of one ear cut off to identify it to animal control workers as a cat that is being monitored through this program. You promise to put out food for the cat a couple times a week for as long as you see it in the neighborhood.

So I set to work. After the kittens had gotten old enough, I lured two of them into traps and shuntled them to the clinic early the next morning. (Operations are performed first thing, just as in hospitals for humans.) I was lucky. Both kittens turned out to be males, so the cost for "fixing" them was minimal. I was criticized for having brought one of the kittens in a carrying case. (I only had one Hav-A-Hart metal trap.) The attendant at the clinic told me that they usually require you to bring animals in the standard traps, so they can inject them with anesthesia right while they are in the cage. With carrying cases, the clinic attendants are put in the position of having to decant the animal into the open where it can be injected - and many strays are extremely aggressive, inflicting injuries on the attendants in the course of their attempts to restrain and inject it. However since I was there, they agreed to go ahead and fix both animals.

While I hadn't been able to socialize the kittens enough to make them readily adoptable, they were somewhat tame and posed no threat to the clinic workers. So all went well. They were fixed, tipped, and also had ID chips implanted. I came back to claim them at the end of the day.

Males only require a 24-hour period of convalescence. I had prepared one of my bathrooms as a recovery room, spreading the floor with clean towels and newspaper. I put bowls of food and water around and released the two into the dimly lit quarters.

When I carefully peeked in on them six hours later, my heart almost broke. They were wedged behind the toilet, hugging each other for dear life. They looked dazed, in ultimate despair. At that moment, I felt that burgeoning cat population or not - this was just too cruel a trauma to inflict on any creature.

However things quickly improved. Towards the end of the 24-hour recovery period, they started coming out from behind the toilet, nibbling at their food a little, and looking more like themselves. I gave it a little more time. Then I heard an insistent "meowing" coming from the bathroom. When I checked on them this time, they bounced out, ready to greet the world again - seemingly none the worse for wear. What's more, they didn't seem to hold a grudge against me. They were as tentatively friendly as they had been before, apparently not quite associating me with the rigors they'd just endured.

They had already been used to playing outside on my patio before their operations. Now with spring having fully blossomed, they wanted to go outside where their siblings and their mother were already spending most of their time.

I was soon forced to ban the mother and "Gang of Four" from the house altogether because of fights with my own cat and because of their general obstreperousness. But I doubt that these cats will ever truly be "alley cats" in the sense the catch-and-release program anticipated. In reality, I’m destined to be much more involved with them than merely monitoring their alley prowlings.

I set up quarters for them in my garage - complete with heater, blankets, litter boxes, and two or three delectable meals a day, always including some treats such as sardines or broasted chicken. The kittens have thrived into sleek, plump adults under this regimen. They rarely stray into the alley, but instead have become affixed to me. Only one will let me pat him, and that only in skittish snatches. That’s probably all to the good, because if these cats were to try to buddy up to other humans, there would likely be horrible consequences.

I named the friendliest of the cats "Tux," in reference to the way his black-and-white patterning looks like formal wear. He and his siblings now generally confine themselves to my yard and to my garage, with access through a pet door I installed in the garage. Their mother, an extremely savage, savvy, always on-guard alley cat, also comes back into the fold quite often now – along with several of her suitors and several other strays who have discovered the free eats I’m handing out. So I repeat - I'm carpeted with cats.

At night, the cats play happily with each other. They climb up to my roof using the ladder I have permanently in place and chase each other merrily from one parapet wall to the other and back again. I can hear the pitter-patter of their little feet overhead into the wee hours. I’d always hoped to have the pitter-patter of little feet around the house – but I never thought it would be cats’ paws!

The man who is renting a room from me is an animal-lover and tens to the crew when I'm away. I'll have to get busy myself though and trap the other cats who are becoming regulars in my yard in order to take them one-by-one to be fixed. I’ll especially have to try to corral the Mama cat – or else come next spring, I’ll have ANOTHER litter deposited with me. This means I’m facing virtually living at the veterinary clinic. I might as well bring a tent and set up camp in their reception room.

Most days, all this responsibility and the new, unwanted identity of “cat lady” makes me feel a little like Tux and Cumber (after his similarly formal cummerbund appearance) did after their operations – frozen in maimed futility. I don’t know where this can lead or where it can end. So I just take it day-by-day.

There are moments of grace though. I've tried practicing what Oprah preached about ending each day with a recounted list of things you were grateful for that day.
Even as I was experiencing a recent moment with the cats, I knew it would head my list of moments to be grateful for that night. Dusk was just fading into darkness and I was hurrying to re-attach some privacy fencing that the winds had flung loose from the chain-link fencing surrounding my yard. This involved hoisting 30-40 pound panels of plastic privacy fencing into place with one hand, while tying them to the chain-link fence with the other. It was almost an impossible task for one person, but two people could have accomplished it easily in seconds. However, I saw my renter slip past me through the yard wraith-like, to take refuge in his own digs – well away from the work he saw afoot in the yard. So obviously, I wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter.

I continued to struggle. I just wasn’t strong enough to hold a panel in place with one hand. But then I hit upon a system of leveraging the panel into its proper position using pole extension sections from one of my pruning saws. The job was still difficult using this technique, but it was do-able. It was cold out, but not bone-chillingly cold. It was more the bracing coldness that spurs a person to a task. The gang-of-four and even their mother cat rallied around in curiosity over the proceedings. I’d never seen them so friendly! They seemed to enjoy watching this project take shape – privacy panel flapping, rope curling out of my overall pockets. Tux even came forward next to me and rose up, putting his forepaws on the lower part of the panel, adding his little bit of weight to help hold the panel in place while I tied the top of it to the chain-link fence. I felt we were a team. The cats’ company was encouraging. We were working in tacit harmony to accomplish a goal, there in the spicing night air, with a full moon rising.

When the job was finished, I sat down on a plastic patio chair and let myself feel the glowing warmth of satisfaction at having completed a necessary job. It was as good as having a campfire in a pine-tingly woods. The cats seemed to feel the same sense of satisfaction at having participated in a job well-done. Now they could play! They started to chase each other in circles across the patio, into the undergrowth. Now Tux was in the lead, now Cumber, now Mama. When one caught another, the two would roll joyously over and over – become one furry ball of exuberance.

It was indeed a moment of grace. In addition to the sheer sensuous delight of the moment and the satisfaction of having secured my privacy fencing – I also had the satisfaction of seeing the animals' sheer joy-in-living. All the months of inconvenience I'd had and will have, tending to these cats that were obtruded into my life – had some meaning. Through it all, I had succeeded in fostering some little creatures into a full and healthy life. I’d given them the epitome of feline felicity.

Farewell Al Capone; Fade to Oprah

Al Capone used to be the symbol of Chicago. Wherever Chicagoans went in the world and announced themselves, they would be gleefully greeted by the rat-a-tat imitation of a Tommy gun.

Many people deplored this association. They pointed out how Al Capone and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were black marks on Chicago. They’d scold people for reducing Chicago to these most brutal moments of the City’s past, when Chicago is so much more and has so much better to offer.

But somehow the association stuck. Al Capone reigned as the quintessential emblem of Chicago, despite its invention of everything from skyscrapers to atomic energy to the urban blues - despite its Magnificent Mile, its lakefront, its Art Institute, its hundred ethnic neighborhoods. Al Capone was still the icon that stood astride all that other.

Gangsters have often been mythologized and elevated to the status of heroes. But Capone’s apotheosis seemed even likelier, even more appropriate. Hadn’t Carl Sandburg memorialized Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World… Stormy, husky, brawling… City of the Big Shoulders.” And Al Capone was all that – from butcher to brawling. On his Big Shoulders there rested the summary image of all things aggressive, vigorously self-assertive and claiming. Al Capone and Chicago fit together.

But over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed a change. When I travel, I’ve rarely been greeted by references to Capone any more. The air Tommy gun has been stowed away in people’s air violin case and forgotten. Now whenever people anywhere in the world hear I’m from Chicago, they instantly squeal, “Oprah!” and clap their hands.

People clamor around me, wondering if I know Oprah, if I ever met her. They ask if I can get tickets for her Show. Even more urgently, they wonder if I can use my influence with her as a fellow Chicagoan to get all sorts of favors granted from her.

One European woman I met immediately started to tell me tearfully about the horrible oppression her mother had suffered as a Basque native in Spain, especially during Franco’s regime. The woman had written a book about her mother’s suffering. She tried to impress a copy of her manuscript on me so that I could carry the precious pages back to Oprah. “Maybe Oprah can get it published? Maybe Oprah could even make it a ‘Book of the Month?’”

When I was on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and a tour guide heard where I was from, she immediately spoke up on behalf of the children of her village. “Do you think Oprah could come here and start a school, like the one she started in Africa?”

As I settled in to have lunch at a neat, prosperous little restaurant in Canada’s southern Ontario, I thought I would be safe from having to transmit any major, heart-rending appeals to Oprah. So I didn’t gird myself as I usually would have when the pretty woman at the next table started a conversation with me and asked me where I was from. But the word “Chicago” was barely our of my mouth, when she shrieked, “Oh, Chicago! Oh, Oprah! Do you know Oprah? Do you think you could get her to help me? My teeth are bad. Oh, I’ve been suffering so! I need some caps, some implants, something - and our social insurance refuses to cover it. And I just can’t afford to have it done myself. Could you get Oprah to help me - maybe through her ‘Angel Network?’" the woman smiled appealingly at me, revealing a chipped front tooth that listed a little at cross-purpose with its neighbor.

Yes, it’s clear that Oprah has become Chicago. The mention of Chicago evokes immediate worldwide association with Oprah, and consequent hopeful appeals for everything from tickets to teeth. Al Capone’s star has been dimmed by the sunshine glare of Oprah’s popularity and largesse.

I can’t help regretting this at least a little. You see, as Al Capone’s star has declined, so has mine. I have no claim to any connection with Oprah whatsoever. I never met her, never was able to get tickets to her Show, never even passed her on the street - whereas I can lay claim to some connection with Al Capone. Before Oprah, when my announcement of my Chicago citizenship would evoke the predictable excited references to Al Capone, I could be a crowd-pleaser by regaling my audience with my personal knowledge of the man. Well, it’s my personal knowledge once removed. My father worked with Al Capone.

My father helped Al Capone design, print and apply, some of the labels he put on the illicit bottles of whiskey he was producing in his stills. Perhaps their association was a glancing one, but it was enough for me to make capital of when Al Capone was Chicago to the world.

My father was a singularly taciturn person, even more taciturn than most husbands/fathers have a reputation for being. He was an “older father” when he had me, and he had lived a varied, knock-about life that had included the trenches of World War I, piano-playing in silent movie houses and in brothels, a stab at raising greyhounds for racing, as well as his bootlegging and Al Capone interlude. When he met my mother, he would court her in a modified version of the classic gangster pin-stripe suit. And he wore a Panama hat, jauntily tilted to one side in the same way Al Capone wore his signature Panama hat. Capone perhaps tilted his hat to put in shadow the scar on his cheek that he was so ashamed of having become his brand, an integral part of his public identity – Scarface Al Capone. My father tilted his hat as a rakish homage.

So my father reflected and perhaps imitated the times he’d passed through. However he had no gift for narrating them – no aptitude for weaving his life into anecdote for us. There was so much it seemed he could have told my mother and me, even if his participation in these gaudy enterprises was exaggerated and had actually only been tangential. But whatever he had seen, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, relate.

The only information we got out of him about Al Capone was his assessment that the gangster had been “an amiable guy.” That singularly repeated adjective “amiable” seemed ironic to my mother and me, being applied as it was to one of the most notoriously brutal mobsters of all time. But that probably really was an accurate description of Capone’s demeanor when he was just in casual conversation with his family or friendly associates.

The actor Rod Steiger portrayed Capone in a brilliant 1950’s movie about the gangster. Steiger’s depiction of ruthless, vulgar self-assertion was mesmerizing, but probably not very accurate if applied personally to Capone. Steiger’s performance captured the times more than the individual. It captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties in general, with all of that era’s diamond-studded, acquisitive, un-corsetted excess. But it wasn’t specifically true to Al Capone. Capone’s family objected to the movie portrayal, saying that quite unike the loud, raw, table-pounding, commanding figure Steiger had projected onto the screen – their uncle/brother/friend had really been a very polite, soft-spoken individual. Putting that picture together with the few general hints I’d gotten about Capone from my father, it did seem that in ordinary conversation Capone was likely a quiet, mellow, polite, and above all “amiable” individual.

I had this personally confirmed information of Capone to retail to the enthused world when Capone was King. I had shaken the hand of someone who shook the hand of … Now I have nothing. Never having met Oprah or having met anyone who met her - I have nothing to tell people who clamor “Oprah” at the sound of my “Chicago.” I don’t even have a nugget of inside information about the amiability of our current icon. I come off a complete disappointment.

But in addition to the diminishing effect this change of Chicago icon’s has had on my status, I have other reasons for being a little regretful about it. Yes, Capone’s influence and actions were reprehensible, while Oprah stands as a benevolent, enlightened symbol for Chicago. And yet, something about the adoption of Oprah as Chicago’s symbol doesn’t seem to be wholly positive. When people used to imitate the action of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre at the drop of the word “Chicago,” it was unlikely that many of them were expressing any aspiration to go on a shooting spree themselves. Nor were they expressing any admiration for the actual act of killing people. I don’t think most people were even considering the bloody real-life consequences of firing submachine guns at adversaries. Most of them probably wouldn’t really consider breaking the law in any way. No, Al Capone, like all gangsters and outlaws, lit people’s imagination in a more general way.

Al Capone represented the epitome of the can-do, take-charge attitude. While most of us are caught in a Gordian Knot of restrictions and complications, Al Capone simply blasted through all barriers. And oh what fun, oh how exhilarating it would be to assume that kind of right-of-way. You want something? You’re responsible for making it happen. And you CAN make it happen – not by literally disabling or killing other people – but by cutting through all the trivial demands that other people want to tether you to. Does the world say you are too fat, too poor, too dumb to accomplish your goals? You don’t listen. Does the world try to hobble you with endless tasks and taboos - wear a jacket to work, don’t smoke within 100 feet of the condo swimming pool, keep your dog on a leash at all times, sit up straight, smile – and on and on? You blow all that away and clear the field for what you really want, for what’s really important to you. Massacre all the mealy, all the mundane. That’s the kind of empowerment that most people relished in Al Capone’s example. Al Capone was a metaphor for the possibility of rising to command one’s fate by targeted indifference.

Oprah on the other hand has come to stand for acquiring things not through one’s personal, positive action, but through supplication. Whether people make their entreaties to God, to “the energy in the Universe,” or to Oprah herself, she seems to have fostered a passive expectation of deliverance. Oprah assumes and plays into a world of neediness. (More about that in another one of my blog essays). Rather than achieving potency by arrogating to oneself gritty, in-the-world authority – Oprah is the symbol of gaining favors by asking. By contrast, Al Capone, whether rude or polite, whether belligerent or amiable – somehow stood for a vital kind of self-empowerment. He had the image of a man who “Never asked nobody for nothin'.”

So yes, for several reasons I’m a little regretful that Al Capone is no longer the symbol of Chicago. Since Oprah replaced him as emblem of Chicago, I’ve lost considerable cachet. And we’ve all lost something of the proud energy that characterized the early part of the last century.

As I walk down Michigan Avenue, I sometimes picture Al Capone walking ahead of me, with his Panama hat jauntily cocked. But the distance between us gets longer and longer. He at last fades into a barely perceptible figment – off into the mistiness of Chicago history.

And now that Oprah is ending her Show, as she is leaving her most public platform – I wonder who will in turn, in time, replace her as the symbol of Chicago.