Dog Blog #4: The Dog and the Cat Come Back

…to continue their conversation.

Note from Audrey and Lisa:

During the pandemic, Audrey’s cat, Joshua, accepted the challenge posed by Lisa’s dog, Ruby, and responded. Now in a very different phase of life, dog and cat return for a final conversation here and on Audrey’s blog.

Ruby to Joshua

Joshua, Joshua, Joshua. 

I just remembered our earlier correspondence. It was not so long ago, but we are pets, and in the intervening time we have both aged. Both 13 years old with not all that much time left to us. I’m falling apart. How about you? 

I limp, stumble, slip, can’t get off the floor. I was stuck there, legs splayed out, for hours while my people were out. It was sad. So sad. So bad. I will spare you the details.

Now I have booties on my hind feet. I look like a has-been ballet dancer fallen on hard times. Really, fallen on the floor, but the booties try to prevent that happening again. Everything’s so slippery! They make a funny tapping sound. Except I can’t actually hear. I’ve gone mostly deaf. My depth of vision is wonky; I keep walking into dark corners and getting stuck. I am old, not what I used to be. Even my fur is shaking loose. Forces working upon me that I do not like or agree with. 

But nobody asked me. Nobody warned me. Nobody warned them, either, my people. They are dismayed as well. Though they forget themselves (forget me) and curse me when I am stupid: when I weave back and forth across her, and she doesn’t want to damage her knees anymore. When I get stuck behind a half-closed door and he helps me back out. When I walk the other way instead of toward the leash. When I get stuck halfway through the doggie door. When I clatter up and down the hall at night and knock into the gates, panting. 

I am a heavy panter now. My walks are no longer walks. They are tours of smells across the street, always in sight of the house. I used to love my walks and running around. I miss my friends on the other end of the neighborhood. It is too far. They must come to me if they want to see me again. 

I am old.

And you, cat? How do you fare? You never did take walks so you haven’t lost that. What have you lost? Just your appetite? I still have mine, wolfing down my food the moment it is put down. You cats are overly fastidious and picky. Stand up for yourself! Don’t let your brother cat eat your food. 

I can’t believe I’m allying with a feline. But we are both old. We share that now. The young ones with all their energy and spring won’t understand.

Write me back. I have little to do these days. I sleep, I dream, wherever I land on the floor, clunking down onto my old bones. I eschew my soft dog beds scattered throughout the house. I can’t get up out of them. I am compromised.

Ruby

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Joshua to Ruby

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.

Well now, doggie friend. This is a heavy load you carry. I am indeed sorry to hear of your decline.

Yet it is the natural order of things.

We are born. If we are lucky, we hunt mice or birds—unlike me, who is chased down and returned to the inside if I slip out. We nap and stare out windows. We amuse ourselves with curtain pulls, backpack straps dangling off of chairs, pencils left on the edges of tables begging to be knocked to the floor. We eat the toilet paper from the rolls our humans forget to hide. We prowl the kitchen countertops when they are sleeping, knowing we are not allowed there and knowing they know what we are up to. We sit in laps and purr, which our people seem to like. We remind them when food is due. 

Then we decline, and die.

It is the natural order of things, and there is no use in fighting against it. Although you age me prematurely with your assumption of my age. I was born in 2012 and will achieve the age of 13 next April, fate willing.

Of course, we felines are lucky to be dealt nine lives. Is it true canines have only one? 

In any event, I believe my decline, which has taken the form of an affliction called hyperthyroidism, may skirt the limit of my nine lives. Several years ago, my humans discovered the affliction only after my formerly portly frame shrank from nearly 16 pounds to ten. They thought for many months that the cause was the upstart they brought into my home, the one called Ozzy, who was eating my food. And indeed, I caught him at it. He is not picky! He will eat anything—animal, vegetable, mineral, and plastic (which almost killed him, but that is a story for another day).

But something else was wrong. My heart ran faster than a jet plane, pounded like a freight train. No matter how much I ate, it was never enough. And when they finally brought me to be checked, they said I was lucky. Had they waited even a week more, I might have died right then, of a heart attack.  

Now I get pills twice a day. I do not object. The pills are rolled inside little balls of paste that taste like salmon.

As for food, I eat mostly the wet kind now. I find it difficult to chew the hard nuggets of kibble, although sometimes I try if it is covered with special sauces and gravies. Am I picky? Pickier than my brother, but I simply wish for variety. I do not want the same food at every meal! This annoys my female person. “What do you want?” she is always asking. 

The thyroid disease, under control for now, may usher in my ultimate expiry. It is possible that I also have thyroid cancer. My humans decided not to find out, because they already have decided not to treat me. That is fine with me. I do not want to spend my last days in strange rooms, stuck with needles and confined within strange walls.

When my ninth life is over, I will go. My humans have promised a quick and painless end. Already they are looking for a way to make that happen in my house, in their company and the company of my exceedingly annoying and dumb-as-a-doornail younger companion. 

I suppose this may be our last exchange, given the circumstances in which we both find ourselves. I wish you well in your remaining time. I hope that you will enjoy for as long as possible going out to smell the smells and sitting beside your humans. And I hope for you that when the burdens and indignities grow too great, they will offer you an easy road out. 

And who knows? Perhaps we will meet again. We know not what awaits us. Perhaps a place where dogs and cats cavort together, where the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid. 

We can only hope.

Most sincerely, 

Joshua

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Ruby to Joshua

Joshua,

I do not know how many lives I have or have had. I remember some things that are not mine exactly. But only what comes into this very moment counts. 

I do not know how cat senses work. Dogs can smell a thousand times more than humans. Most memories come from there. We stick our long noses into other people’s and dog’s business, a.k.a. butts, to find out more. Dogs don’t mind. People do. 

I am sorry to hear you are no longer fat.

It is funny they don’t always understand us. They just need to put an ear to the ground.

This talk of mortality is only a piece. Even now, it is the moment, heightened by a thousand smells (though truth be told I can only smell a few of them now), heightened by a thousand other things that come into the moment, that count. 

And yes, they will not prolong me past when I am ready. We have talked, me and my people. We talk. It is not time yet, that is all I know. It is just what will get me first. Which really we already know. 

It would be strange, would it not, Joshua, were we to meet in some other place when we did not meet here. Pen pals. 

I had a friend, a beagle. At the end, he slept so many hours a day it was as if he were already in doggie heaven. It eased his final journey when it was his time. He’d already made most of the trip.

This is all too somber. I don’t have much else to say. Did you know that dogs have fur and cats have hair? 

It is fall now, the rains are beginning, harbinger of many smells that we may have to leave for others. 

All the beginnings, all the middles, all the endings. Here we come, paw in paw. We may even go together, Joshua. But please don’t say “cavort.” I don’t believe that’s your word. 

If we do meet, we may not recognize each other. Say “cookie” and I’ll know it’s you. Say “pal.”

Let’s not end on sadness. Dogs are not made to be sad. I wish you balls of yarns and pencils aplenty. And I’m sorry your brother is so dumb. Many people like their dogs dumb. I am not dumb. Maybe when it is your time you can slip past them out the door and be outside at last.

Mice and birds,

Ruby

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Joshua to Ruby

Dear Ruby Cat,

That endearment came to me just now, though how or why I should feel endeared to a specimen of the species that so often torments mine, I do not know. Perhaps it is the bond of our humans, reaching across to us. Perhaps it is the softness of age.

Ah, the moment. My female human yammers on about that incessantly, and yet constantly leans into the future, imagining that she must move from task to task unceasingly. It exhausts me to observe! I try to stay her progress by seating myself on her lap. Even then, she sometimes removes me so she can rush on to the next task. 

I beg to differ on the fur/hair distinction. I sent my human off to research and she found this helpful explanation from something called The National Kitten Coalition, which no doubt will make your fur stand on end. Cats, I am assured, have both hair and fur. “Although people may use the words fur and hair interchangeably, fur more accurately refers to a collection of hairs that protects a cat’s skin from cold, heat and ultraviolet light damage, helps regulate body temperature and conceals the cat from prey and predators. Cat breeders often refer to a cat’s fur as a coat.” Perhaps all unnecessary to an indoor cat. However, I wish to set the record straight.

I am sorry that you no longer can smell the thousand smells with your thousand-fold sensitive nose.

My senses, too, dwindle. I sometimes forget why I have come into a room. I forget that I have just eaten and pester my humans for more food, although, in my condition, I can never get too much. I, like you, no longer have the acuteness of hearing that once alerted me to the opening of the cans from clear across the house. 

I complain of the now-enlarged pipsqueak, yet, truth be told, I enjoy his company upon occasion. My human has captured photographs of us sleeping side by side on the sofa in the sun. Sleeping, sofas, sun are things we can agree upon, he and I.

“Here we come, paw in paw.” Now that is a mighty strange image. And yet it suits the moment, this time of near limbo for us both, each with three paws (or perhaps, in your case, only two) in this world, and the other(s) in the next, squeezing the most from each moment. 

I wish you a thousand thousand scents multiplied by a thousand. 

Until we meet again, 

Joshua

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Ruby to Joshua

Joshua,

Thanks. Though I think on the fur-hair debate you and your human are really splitting hairs. Do cats take everything so seriously?

Rolling over and out!

Ruby

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