We said goodbye to Tim the Cat last night. She was known variously as: Timsy, Stim, Smitty, Mitts, Skibbitty, the Kid, The Boo, The Boodle, the Bandit of Love, Mean Little Kitty, MLK and the Baby Nurse Shark. She was rescued from under the Grand Teton Music Festival Hall, where I was working when Juliana were first living together in 1992. I was cleaning up at the end of the season and kept hearing a loud meow. An intrepid electrician named Tim Jacobsen crawled on his belly and rescued her from a hole beneath the Festival Hall. She was so small she fit in his pocket. She was black and white and matched our other cat Random, so we kept her. We named her for her rescuer though she was, of course, a girl. She had blue eyes, a little pointy tail and a mask on her face. She was only a few days old and had to be bottle-fed, but still had the loud meow that had first brought her to my attention.
When she was only a few months old, she took a stereo speaker to the head, which was nearly fatal. It left her dizzy, cross-eyed, averse to being touched or petted and frequently bad tempered. She once held Juliana’s mother at bay when the latter was in our kitchen baking a birthday cake. She gave my mother the kitty come-on and my mom, despite having been warned, reached in to pet her and was rewarded with a bloody scratch.
Though she wasn't too partial to me, or the other cats or the dog, she was somewhat overfond of Juliana. She liked to lie curled up in her armpit at night, growling if she dared roll over or shift her weight. She always had a favorite warm place: under the table by the heater in our first house, in the patch of sunlight that moved along the floor throughout the day at the Linn ranch and in front of the floor-to-ceiling radiator that we called The Wall of Fire in our place in North Beach. She would lie there contentedly with her eyes closed, growling slightly as I walked past and occasionally taking a swipe at my bare feet. She spent most of our time in Woodland under the daybed upstairs in her so-called Norma Desmond phase. Like the rest of us, she seemed to prefer Berkeley, and found new favorite perches and slept on the bed again.
Juliana had told me a while ago that Tim was undergoing kidney failure, though she seemed as cheerily ill-humored as ever. In the last week she stopped eating, not even tuna or scrambled eggs. She still could jump in the shower to lick up the water, an old favorite activity, and had taken up yowling in the middle of the night, the same famous meow that saved her life fifteen years ago. Last night was the end. It’s tough to lose a friend and we miss her.
I was visiting a friend in Berlin recently, and we went to Rotterdam to see the Cure. She is a huge fan, I was just curious (pun thought about and rejected).
