Lamaga (Maggie), ????-2007. I wish I had a picture, but I don't here on the laptop. (Probably somewhere else.)
I never had animals in the house when I was growing up. We had plenty of outdoor pets, but thanks to our unfenced yard and busy neighborhood with lots of blind curves they typically didn't hang around long.
The first pet-friendly apartment I had was the hovel I shared with Marc and Tom on East Maxwell St. during my senior year of undergrad, 1997-1998. We discussed getting a cat several times; we all liked cats, our landlord was fine with it, and having a few boxes of shit sitting around couldn't have done the place any harm. Like most things we talked about doing to the place, we never actually got around to it; our primary approach to making the place livable was to keep it stocked with Old Milwaukee.
One night late in the spring Tom was wandering around the neighborhood and stopped to pet a cat in somebody's front yard. "Hey," said one of the girls on the porch, "you want that cat?" Turns out her roommate was moving and couldn't take her, and she was heading off for a long stay in Europe the next morning, so the cat had no place to go. "Sure," Tom told her; he was never one for deliberation on matters like this.
"Hey guys," Tom said a few minutes later as he walked in the door, "we have a cat." And just like that, I was a pet owner.
He named her Lamaga, after a character in a novel. (I still don't know the novel.) It almost immediately became Maggie. We realized that we had neither the equipment nor the knowhow to take care of a cat, but after a trip to Kroger and a call to Tamara we had the basics figured out. Our only mistake was that we grossly overestimated her weight and somehow figured that she needed 2 1/4 cans of food a day, when one was quite enough. She grew to quite the butterball over the summer.
Eventually Marc moved out and Tom left on his own European adventure, and since I was moving into a pet-friendly apartment a few blocks away on Woodland I was the obvious custodial pet parent. She was the perfect med school pet, because she mostly just wanted to be left alone. Visitors to the apartment wouldn't even realize that I had a cat until they noticed her dish or litter box, since she liked to hide under the bed and be anti-social.
When it was just me, though, she'd venture out and roam about the apartment, looking for new places to perch. (She liked trying out new textures on her belly.) At night she'd jump up on the bed; at first, this kept me awake, and I tried to train it out of her by keeping the vacuum cleaner next to the bed and starting it every time she jumped up, but it was easier for me to just get used to it. Most of the time she would knead my side for a while with her paws and then just drape herself over me and purr. Occasionally she liked to slap me in the mouth right as I was going to sleep just to piss me off, and it worked, but then she'd do her drape-and-purr thing and I'd forget about it.
There were only two times when she really got active. Once a day, right around 11PM, she always had "apeshit time", when she would run like a maniac from one end of my shotgun apartment to the other and back again. She'd do several laps like that, then stop to lick herself furiously. The other time came when my old, drafty duplex was inevitably invaded by mice; despite resembling a penguin in color, shape, gait, and lack of front claws, she turned out to be a surprisingly effective mouser. Not that she ate the mice, or anything like that. She instead brought them over to me, stood by them, and meowed loudly until I acknowledged what a mighty huntress she was. Then she'd toddle off for a nap while I disposed of her quarry.
Unfortunately, Maggie lived most of her life with us in exile. After Tamara got Dolly, our lab mix, she started bringing her to the house every day to "get me used to" having a dog around. It aggravated me a little bit, because the arrangement that Maggie and I had--mostly ignoring one another, with occasional brief interaction--was a darn good one, and Dolly's attention whoring just didn't fit into it. But I was not nearly as annoyed as Maggie. I began to find wet spots on the couch every now and then, and after a while actual piles of cat shit. Why the couch? I had no idea, but she was relentless, and eventually destroyed a couch that I paid a good $35 for. (It was a great couch.) After our move to Greensboro she did the same with our present couch, but after a vat of Nature's Miracle we were able to save it. Maggie, however, had to move to the basement, and when we moved back to Hazard she lived in Tam's sewing room. It sucked that we couldn't be closer to her, but really she never seemed to mind--after all, being left alone was her primary ambition in life.
(more later...)
