girl in greenwood

My parents called me this morning to tell me that my cat Hoover died last night. He was 14 years old. He had recently started having episodes where he'd lose consciousness, and we'd discovered that he had an enlarged heart and an excessively fast heartbeat. They'd tried medication but it wasn't effective - so my parents brought him home to die in peace. My dad said he did not suffer, and that as he faded, he kept checking to make sure his people were there with him. I’m grateful that he could have that comfort.

We found Hoover in the barn where I boarded my horses when I was a teenager. The barn cats on the farm were part Manx - they had rabbity hind legs and stubby tails. Hoover's mom was a big white stub-tailed cat. She kept her kittens in different locations around the barn, so we found Hoover all alone in the corner of the arena in a pile of hay. He was just a little white ball of fluff with blinky blue eyes, and a tail with a kink at the end. He was screaming bloody murder, but quieted down as soon as I picked him up. He was so tiny and cute, I didn't want to put him down, so I zipped him up inside my coat and rode my horse with him in there. He was so little he didn't know how to purr yet, but he definitely knew how to snuggle. Mom and I had a big talk about how we already had four elderly cats at home, and that this kitten would just be our barn cat friend. So we weren't going to name him or anything.

After a couple of weeks, we brought some friends out to the barn to see my horse. The little girl was entranced with the kitten, especially after she zipped him inside her jacket and he snuggled with her. She wanted to know his name, and we told her he didn't have one, he was just a barn cat, and did she have a name she'd like to call him? She said "Jacob!" which we thought was kind of a dumb name for a cat, so we asked her "why Jacob?" She said that was her best friend's name at daycare. We asked what Jacob's last name was, and she said "Hoover". So we named the kitten Hoover.

Soon after Hoover got his name, we tried to catch his littermate, another little white fluffball. My dad put on leather gloves and tried to pick him up - but he bit so hard he drew blood through the gloves! We christened him Hellhole and left him to seek his fortune in the barn. I think he was Hoover's evil twin.

Within a couple of weeks, we discovered that Hoover had been injured. He had a bad bite mark near his tail which looked infected and awful. I still don't know if one of the other barn cats injured him, or if it was some kind of predator or what. I'm sure his habit of screaming for attention every time he heard someone approaching didn't help keep him safe. When my mom saw his injury, all the rhetoric about him being just our barn cat friend went right out the window – we took him home that night and quarantined him in my parents’ bathroom. The next day he went to the vet and got his injury cleaned up and got antibiotics… he was a very sick little guy. The vet thought he probably had meningitis as a result of being bitten so close to his vertebral column. He had a high fever and could hardly stay conscious. We would set him in the litterbox so he could go to the bathroom and he couldn’t even lift his tail. Looking back, this is where he probably burned through Life #1 of his 9 cat lives. It wouldn’t be the first.

But, he pulled through, and announced that he was feeling better by unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper all over the bathroom floor and skating in it. This was just the first sign of what a fart he was going to be. It was wintertime when we brought him home, and in our chilly house, Mom and I both wore long flannel nightgowns to sleep in. When we’d go into the bathroom to visit Hoover, he would bounce toward us and ascend our nightgowns like a miniature mountain climber. That was cute when he climbed up the outside but sort of alarming when he climbed up the inside! He got let out of quarantine after finishing his medication and slept in my bedroom with me at night. I frequently awoke with a tiny cat standing on my face, grooming my eyebrows and making “snucksnucksnuck” noises. If he wasn’t standing on my face, he was sleeping on my chest or wedged under my chin. I liked that a lot because I knew I wouldn’t roll over and squash him in the night. He learned how to purr, which seemed to astonish him – he would make a little throat-clearing noise and then purr like a jet engine! He also learned to bite, which wasn’t nearly as cute. He’d latch on like a crocodile and refuse to let go, even when thwacked on the nose.

As Hoover got a little bigger, we started to notice some of his weird genetic issues. His breastbone didn’t curve in at the bottom – instead, it stuck out so he had a little bump below his ribs. Only one of his eyes changed color and became yellow, while the other eye stayed kitten-blue. The kink in his tail became even more pronounced as he got older and looked like a pom-pom or maybe even a finger. When we took him to get neutered, the vet found that his testicles hadn’t descended properly so he needed some extra surgery. She thought he might have a heart murmur, but it was hard to tell because he always purred through his examinations.

We also noticed that he was not a normal cat in terms of his personality. He liked to fetch things, like wadded-up pieces of paper or rubber bands. He put his favorite treasures in the wastebasket, meaning we would find paper balls and pens and rubber bands and the plastic rings from milk jugs in the trash. Who knows how many treasures were thrown away before we caught on? He would pull tissues out of a box of tissues one at a time, and shred them. Hoover also liked water more than any cat in the whole world. He would splash his hands in the toilet if someone left the lid up. He would routinely knock over his water dish. He’d help himself to a drink out of anyone’s glass of water. He learned that he wanted to drink out of the bathtub, the sink, or the filtered water tap in the kitchen, and would constantly invite people to help him turn on the chosen faucet. He thought ice cubes in his water dish were swell. He’d sit on the edge of the bathtub when Mom or I took a bath, and stir the bathwater. Sometimes he’d even get in the shower with us and lick water off the shower curtain. Once in a while, he’d get so excited about having a drink, he would stick his head all the way into a big plastic cup and get it stuck on his head. Then he would stumble around waving his giant cup head while we laughed and laughed. Being a mellow guy, though, he never seemed to hold our laughter against us.

Hoover was weird in other ways, too – he liked to ride in the car and never seemed afraid of the vet like most cats. He went camping with my parents for years – he’d happily ride in the car with them while driving, then happily adjusted to staying in the popup trailer at a campground. Two summers ago I went on a camping trip with my parents and Hoover, and rode in the backseat with Hoover installed next to me. He was thrilled that I was so kind as to feed him pieces of cat food one at a time. He also relived old times by standing on my head while I slept in the trailer. He would tolerate a harness and leash so he could go outside and chew grass and play in mud puddles.

During the course of his life, he had several more health scares – a bad viral infection that left his mouth so ulcerated he refused to eat (I think he caught that from me by drinking out of my water glass, because I had terrible ulcerations around the same time), bad allergies that caused him to wheeze and huffle, diabetes brought on by the steroids used to treat the allergies, gout brought on by high-protein food… I’m sure I’m forgetting something. It’s amazing that he lived as long as he did. I will miss him terribly, but I am glad to know that he is buried in my parents’ yard under the birdbath that he monitored daily from the window.