Cynthia

What can I say about Cynthia? That her eyes were blue (not red, that was the camera), bluer than the Caribbean, bluer than the Miami sky just before Hurricane Katrina, bluer than this font...

Cynthia was the cat I most loved in the world. She was a blue-point persian. At least that's what her papers said. She had class, she had style, she had pedigree papers. She was the creamiest ivory color with blue-gray on the tips of her ears and on her face (which my sons always said looked like someone had hit her head on with a frying pan) and on her paws.

I got Cynthia when my then-boyfriend (long gone, thank gods) brought her home to placate me after another one of our fights. He had come upon her in a pet store. She had been kept in a cage with one of her sisters and it seemed that no one had noticed how beautiful, how sweet, how perfect she was. So he bought her and brought her home, to me.

When I saw her I promptly told him "The last thing I needed was another cat" (ok, I'm a bitch, I admit it). I told him that I would NOT keep her, as I was already struggling with a huge golden retriever (Yeller, which my mother calls "Yellow") and the cat we all call Mama even though her name is Oreo and her legal name is Jinx, but that's another story. I told him that he could have gotten me any of a number of things that I really wanted and needed (like a new air conditioning unit to replace the one we have that keeps us awake at night clunking, drawing its last breaths). I said a bunch of (mean) things to him, and then I really looked at her. I fell in love with her and she became part of our lives.

I have always had pets all my life. I've had countless and unforgettable dogs, cats, birds, turtles, hermit crabs (yes, hermit crabs), fish, etc. Once I even had a pair of mussels of some sort, that had beautiful orange lining on their shells, in a salt-water tank. But nothing prepared me for this cat. She took over our lives as if nothing, as if we had been waiting for her all this time. As if our lives necessarily revolved around her.

As soon as we met her we adored her. Cynthia was a cat that, as my sons said, "Loved love." She didn't want anything from anyone except love. She craved love more than anything else. If we were eating at the table she would hop on it and pester us until we held her and scratched her little chinny chin-chin. She never went after the food, all she wanted was our attention and our love. If we didn't immediately cater to her she would sit there and stare at us with her little mad-sad face until someone was caught up with her loveliness/sweetness/cuteness and scratched her pink belly. It never took very long for this to happen.

She had a chin that a plastic surgeon could have done liposuction on, it was that chubby. And it had a harlequin pattern to it, half of it light cream-colored and the other half gray. Like my boys called it: "Fucked up, but so cute."

I had never nor since seen big teenage boys talking baby talk to a kitty. The picture above, left is one we call "Dominic Eating Pussy" in which Cynthia is allowing him to kiss and adore her in the way that she was accustomed to. My sons even made up songs for her. "Twenty Padded Fingers and Toes" comes to mind. Another one was "I Second that Emiaowtion." They were smitten with her. Sometimes we would sit around the table thinking up hypotheses as to why she was the perfect cat. What had made her that way? Was it the months of cage living in the pet shop? Would our black cat, Mama, be reformed if we put her in a cage for a few months? Would that make her as sweet and friendly and loving as Cynthia? We would have tried it except that we didn't think it would work. And Mama would probably have scratched the hell out of us if we had tried to do it.

Cynthia loved it when we rolled up paper into a ball and threw it down the hall. She would skid on the tile until she could get some traction and then she would be off after it. Sometimes she crashed into the door at the end of the hall but as my boys said, that could only fix her face, it couldn't bash it in any more than it was. She loved playing that game and she would never tire of it. She would bring the wadded up paper ball back to whoever had thrown it, over and over until you had to hide from her because your arm was tired.

We had Cynthia for about a year. She slept with us, she lived on top of the dining room table (which I had never allowed a cat to do, even Mama would look at me like saying "You don't let ME on top of the table and I'm the senior cat and yet look at HER? What the hell?"). She would take turns sleeping with one or the other, whoever had the warmest bed that night. When we got home, she would be waiting for us with one of those rolled up paper balls, begging for us to play with her. She was totally adorable and good and sweet.

She died about a year ago. My youngest son and I were bathing her as we did every so often, and she must have had a massive heart attack. She started having convulsions in the bathtub and we quickly wrapped her in a towel and tried to revive her but it was no good, she died in my arms. My son and I cried like little kids and we buried her outside in the yard and marked her grave with a huge coral rock for eternity. We all went around mourning her for a long time. We will never forget her, the best cat in the world.