Lucy Tobias

My people left me next to a dumpster. Why? I don’t know. It was scary. Did I do something wrong? I’d never been outside before. I missed my mom, my human people, the familiar rooms, and meals.

Food for the eight to ten weeks of my life had come from nursing my mom or a bowl. There were no bowls near the dumpster. I was afraid all the time, especially at night.

Then I saw someone carrying boxes to the dumpster. My people threw boxes away when they left me. I got hopeful and followed the box lady. She turned around, saw me and picked me up. I was put in an empty apartment and given some food. It wasn’t my home but it was better than the dumpster.

Turns out I lived in an apartment complex. My people probably moved out and abandoned me. The lady who found me was in the process of moving out of the complex. She overheard the landlord saying, “there are too many cats” and he was going to get a trap. That meant I’d be history. That’s why she picked me up.

The house where she was going to, as a temporary roommate, already had two cats. She asked if I could be adopted by this new home. The answer was “yes”.

And so I arrived at Lucy’s house. After a good night’s sleep, I missed the breakfast call. Didn’t hear it. My new mom, Lucy, looked at me in a thoughtful way and then took me to the vet to confirm what she already suspected.

It was the first time he’d ever seen a tortoiseshell cat that was deaf. No wonder it was so quiet all the time. Sure, I hear huge sounds like lightning or a fire engine, but those are vibrations so big they ripple through the floorboards. It is every day talk that I don’t hear. The vet said I can never go outside or I’d be dead within 30 minutes, never hearing what came up behind me.

Being deaf, I don’t twitch my ears like cats do listening to sounds. Instead I use my eyes. In fact, I stare a lot.

I soon learned that if I saw a procession of cats and dogs going down the hall towards the kitchen, just follow them and breakfast would be served.

For a long time, Mom went to work every day. I had a problem with that from day one. I’d pace up and down the counter and cry (well, in my case, I just open my mouth, very little sound comes out). You see, I’d been abandoned once. I was terrified it was going to happen again.

Mom would say something to me before she left each day. I didn’t hear a word of it.

Then Little Bit, another cat who lives here, started speaking to me in cat familiar, which is street talk with a feline twist.
“Yo, big eyes,” Little Bit said. “ You eat slow, I eat fast, and I make moves on your food. You do nothing about it. You catch my drift?”
Yeah, I got it. But I still ate slowly. That’s just how I am. Mom came to my rescue. She now stands by me so no one, including Little Bit, gets to make moves on my food.

One day I asked Little Bit what Mom was saying as she walked out the door every morning.

“She always says the same thing ‘I’ll be back’,” Little Bit, replied. “It is some famous line from a movie.”

“Does she mean it?” I asked.

Little Bit seemed surprised.
“Sure, Mom always comes back.”

That very day, I stopped pacing on the counter.

Mom is home a lot more these days. Wherever Mom goes in the house, I follow her. She sits down; I curl up in her lap and that is the perfect place to be.

On sunny days, we get to go out on the screened porch. I like to sit in a pot that used to have a spider plant, but it got a bit squashed because I use it as a bed.

All that eating slow must be catching up with me. I’m 11 years old now and losing weight. Mom took me to the vet last week because I had a big lump on my cheek and I was thinner.

Whatever the vet said, something about a tumor, it made Mom sit down real sudden and it looked like she was crying. The vet hugged her.

Now I have medicine to take and that is no fun at all. Mom even wakes me up from naps to give me food and more food. I don’t have a whole lot of teeth. It is slow going. But it is nice to have salmon.
Little Bit is really bent out of shape. She says Mom is saying I can have anything I want and Little Bit is jealous.

I want every day to be a day at home, where I feel safe and loved. I want to take a sunbath, curl up in Mom’s lap and eat salmon. But then, like Mom says, I march to a different drummer, a drummer only I can hear.