Spoon

Two things I’ve written about our cat Spoon.
The First:

“Cat Fight, 4:00am”
Last night my cat got his ass kicked by the neighborhood ruffian cat. I awoke to the caterwaul then dozed for a moment until I recognized Spoon’s voice in one-half of the racket.
I jumped out of bed and ran out the door to find Spoon and the Ruffian cat tumbling across the neighbor’s yard and onto the sidewalk. Thump. The cats separated, turned, slowly circled, raised their hackles a little more, cast wary glances at one another and at me. It was 4:00 am and I was standing on the sidewalk in my skivvies waving at a couple of hissing cats.
I ran back inside and pulled on a pair of pants. Spoon was on his own. I ran back out and waggled my bare foot at Ruffian cat with as much menace as I thought prudent. Ruffian cat, with his battered tomcat face and torn-up coat, with his mouthful of shredded catfur, recently Spoon’s catfur, catfur that he couldn’t quite spit out, though he tried, ack-thphth, ack-thphth, appeared at least as menacing as my bare foot. I outweighed him by 180 pounds, which fact carried the morning, and Ruffian cat scampered away into the shadows across the street.
Spoon was nowhere to be found, having used the the opportunity my menacing foot offered to rush off somewhere. And hide. (He turned up later, a little balder, but probably not much wiser.)

The Second:

“It’s Easy to be Mawkish in the Morning”
It’s Saturday morning and just like every morning I woke up at 5:30am, but since it’s Saturday, I resolved to stay in bed for another couple of hours.
The cat, however, lacking a firm concept of days of the week, resolved to get me up at the appointed hour to let him out for his morning stroll. He stood on my chest and meowed in my face as he does whenever he senses I’m on the verge of forgoing duty.
During our contest of wills, I heard the deep low moan of a ship’s foghorn, sad and lost I dreamt, but more likely just big, slow and cautious in its blindness. Then I heard another, further off and in a higher key, a shorter blast, then another, it’s tone somewhere between the first two. For several minutes the three horns played through the fog and pre-dawn darkness, sometimes the blasts arriving in series, at others the tones falling all over themselves littler big littlest, big littlest littler.
The littlest of all, the nearest, and the one most confused by the shape of the morning landscape, fell silent and stepped closer to experiment with a light bite on the end of my nose. I got up and let him out.
Back in bed, I listened to the ships’ horns while I drifted back to sleep, somebody out there remaining awake, reminding others to be mindful of where they are.

Last Tuesday, after dinner, Spoon played with his fuzzy ball, and then he went to bed. Chasing fuzzy balls is hard work. He needed his rest. He mewed at me when I joined him there a few hours later, just as he has done nearly every night for the last thirteen years.
“Yes, Spoon, time for bed. Make some room.”
Sometime between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning his pancreas rebelled, releasing digestive enzymes into his organs instead of his intestine and nothing anybody did could stop his body from eating itself. Yesterday, Sunday, January 15th, they told us Spoon was too weak to survive surgery and too sick for medical treatment to see him through. His pancreas would not quit spewing enzymes. He was dying from the inside out. We instructed the doctor to end it.
And so she did.