Oscar.

Sometime during the month of September 1994, I walked into a pet store in my hometown of White Rock, BC and came face-to-face with a big pink nose. The nose belonged to a small, orange tabby kitten. Since I have always loved kittens, orange tabbies, and big pink noses on orange-tabby kittens, I was instantly in love. I paid a measly twenty dollars, took him home and named him Oscar.

From the very beginning, Oscar was a unique personality. He loved me, of this I am sure, but when he was little he was busy. Too busy to be held. He liked me to pet him while he was walking around, which meant I would literally have to walk around, bent over and pet him while he purred and rubbed his big pink nose against my wrist. At the time, I was living in a bachelor suite on the second floor of a house. There was a fire-escape ladder outside my bathroom window and this became Oscar's cat door. The ladder was straight up and down against the house, not slanted or tilted at all, and there was about a four-foot drop at the bottom to the ground. I would come home to have my neighbours tell me that sometimes they would just wait around so that they could watch Oscar jump up to the bottom rung and climb the ladder up to my bathroom window. Personally, I think he liked putting on a show.

As well as climbing ladders, Oscar also perfected his killing skills. I woke up one morning, swung my legs out of bed, rubbed my eyes, opened them and was looking at a full-sized dead rat lying at my feet. Oscar was extremely proud. During that time, he must have brought me at least twenty mice and fifteen birds. According to Oscar, I was well fed.

Oscar was a wanderer.  Neutering didn't help.  He was also a sprayer.  Neutering didn't help that either.  He was just too much male, I guess.


I moved to Salt Spring Island near the end of 1996, where I met Peter.  Soon afterward, I moved to Banff to be with Peter and Oscar came too.  It was his first time flying.  We lived in a tiny house in a tiny hamlet called Harvie Heights with three other people and three dogs.  Oscar would have none of it.  Minus twenty-five-degree weather could not make him stay in a house with three effin' dogs.  He disappeared for over two weeks and I was worried.  One day, an old man came to the door and started laying in to one of our roommates that our cat was systematically picking off the birds who were innocently feeding from his many bird feeders.  His pain was my gain, since I knew it had to be my cat.  Turns out while we were all crammed into a tiny house, Oscar was shacked up next door with another cat who lived in someone's beautiful, heated getaway "cabin".  It was huge and empty and it had a hot tub.  Smart cat.

When Peter and I moved back to BC, we drove from Banff to Victoria in a small Toyota pick-up truck.  Oscar was with us in the cab and we were completely coated in cat hair by the time we arrived.  When we moved into our one-bedroom apartment, Oscar flew the coop again.  This time he was truly gone.  Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.   My heart was broken and I couldn't believe he was gone.  Eventually Peter suggested we take one of his parents' kittens and we adopted Moe.  Moe was predominantly white with big orange-tabby spots.  He was just adorable and not too smart, which made him even cuter.


Five-and-a-half months after we moved to Victoria, I received a phone call from a woman who claimed to have my cat.  Apparently Oscar had made friends with her cat and she had been feeding him for a few months.  When she finally decided to keep Oscar for good, she took him to the vet to make sure he was healthy.  The vet promptly found the tattoo I had had put in Oscar's ear and traced it back to my vet in White Rock (I had called them to give them my new info when Oscar had disappeared).  So we had gone from one cat, to no cat, to one cat, to two cats, just like that.  It would have been great if Oscar and Moe had liked one another, but no such luck.  I think Moe would have been pals, but Oscar saw Moe as a lesser being who monopolized my attention.  They would never be friends.

Life continued.  Things happened.  Peter and I went our separate ways for awhile and I ended up moving to Montreal.  Once I was settled, Oscar and Moe joined me.  More airplanes.  They were city cats, prowling the alleyways of downtown Montreal.  When I left Quebec, it was early December and I was racing the weather, driving an old, rundown VW Fox sedan.  I had sent a bunch of stuff on the bus and put all my breakables in the trunk.  I loaded up the cats and left.  I drove for what seemed an eternity, white-knuckling through the twisting roads of Ontario with huge transport trucks bearing down on me.  I finally entered Manitoba and a straight, four-lane highway.  And then I was careening off the highway at around nine or ten at night, flipping over into the brush, landing upside down.  I still don't know what happened, but the car was totalled.  I managed to get out with nothing but a bruise on my leg.  A bunch of transport trucks stopped and the drivers helped me flip the car back over and gather up my cats and all my stuff.  I was in the middle of nowhere, about an hour and a half from Winnipeg.  Thankfully a family took us in overnight and drove us to Winnipeg the next day, where I put what was left of my stuff (thank goodness my breakables were "safe" in my car, right?) on the bus and then flew the rest of the way to Victoria.  

I moved to Vancouver and Oscar and Moe joined me.  Again.  I had a pretty nice place in Vancouver in a quiet neighbourhood, but the area was rife with coyotes.  When Moe disappeared one day, I was immediately worried.  He never wandered.  I still think the coyotes got him and I miss him to this day.  But the change in Oscar was instant.  I asked him if he had pushed Moe into traffic or something, because he seemed to know that he finally had me all to himself.  He couldn't have been happier.  And I noticed that as he had grown older, Oscar had become more cuddly, more of a homebody.  He wanted to be with me always.

When Peter and I got back together and I moved back to Victoria, Oscar moved with me once again.  He was unimpressed with moving back in with a dog, but he managed.  He just didn't take any crap from Jett.  Ever.


When Sonja arrived in February 2008, I was actually a little worried how Oscar would react, but he surprised me.  No, he blew me away with how patient and gentle he was with Sonja.  He has actually made it hard for Sonja to understand why cats can be nasty and scratchy.  Oscar was just the best cat with her, even at over thirteen years old.  

I often look back and wish I had given Oscar more of my time.  More of my quality, uninterrupted, one-on-one time.  He deserved more of it.  There was never a time when I caught his eye that he wasn't ready to give me one-hundred percent of his attention.  

While I was pregnant with Haven, Oscar developed a snore.  He just seemed to be snoring all the time, awake or asleep.  He actually kept me up at night and I had to kick him off my bed.  It was kind of humorous at first, but then I realized that something was wrong.  I took him to the vet.  The vet said that maybe he had polyps in his nasal passages, but at his age removing them might be too much for him to handle. They ran some fruitless tests.  She said that if he figured out to breathe through his mouth (not a natural thing for a cat to do), he may feel a lot better.  The snoring was getting worse by the day and Oscar was losing weight and looking gaunt and I realized he wasn't eating.  I noticed he was trying to breathe through his mouth and was still struggling to breathe.  What was going on???  I kept him on my bed at night and I remember being afraid that I would wake up and he would be dead.  

One night after Sonja was asleep, Oscar came downstairs to be with me.  Peter and I looked at each other and I knew it was time.  I carefully bundled my big-pink-nosed baby into his cat carrier for the last time.  I took him to the emergency vet hospital where they let me say goodbye.  They sedated him and I held him against my hugely-pregnant belly as he was put to sleep.  His fur was still so beautiful, so soft.  I cried and cried as the vet told me that when she looked in his throat after he was sedated, she saw that his throat was almost completely closed with tumours and he had been trying to breathe through a pin-hole.  With his age and his emaciated state, he never would have survived the surgery.  But it didn't make me feel any better, since I could have taken him to the vet months earlier.  I hadn't wanted to admit anything was really wrong.  I still think about it.  My baby-kitty.

The day after Oscar died, we took his body up to Peter's parents' place and buried him under an apple tree.  I get to see his grave often and I always take a moment to say something to him, to think about all the times I rubbed his belly while he purred and drooled all over my hand.

Two days after Oscar died, Haven was born.  She will never touch his fur, and I will never have a photo of them together.  I will never get to marvel how a sixteen-year-old cat can be so gentle with a baby who is trying to grab his ears.  Thank goodness I have some photos and video of Oscar and Sonja together.

I counted back and determined that Oscar and I moved together twenty times.  His twenty-first move was to his final resting place.  Thank you Oscar for always being my kitty, for always being gentle with my baby, for always being ready for a tummy rub.  I miss you.