On the eve of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I clandestinely visited an animal rescue center and nuzzled with a 10-week-old black lab. When the shelter worker asked what I wanted to do I said I would take him.
I have partial paralysis in my legs due to surgical complications from a 2014 spine cancer operation. I walk haltingly with a leg brace and two heavyweight forearm canes. The shelter associate, a young man with dark hair, was respectful but clearly worried. I tottered with my balance and couldn’t bend down from a standing position. He politely informed me it was agency policy to get approval from both adult members of the household. Could my wife call him when she was through with work? Of course, I said. That evening, I called back to say we had agreed the time wasn’t right.
Author Jim Harrison had once written about his love of walking with his dogs: It is good for them; it is good for you. Our first dog, Ruby, was a purebred spaniel who ran with me along the Lake Michigan waterfront. Cole was a lean jet-black mutt who followed me on my mountain bike on the tight and twisty woodland trails near my home in Massachusetts. After my disability worsened and a stroke cocked Cole’s head so he looked like he was perpetually curious, we simply walked to a neighborhood ball field, cane for me, a leash for him.
Getting a new dog had been the subject of household tension and debate. Patty had taken on all the chores I used to do. It was hard to see how a dog wouldn’t fall into her column. When I drove home from the rescue shelter, I knew she was right.
It was a low point. Not having a dog was yet another “new normal” milestone, another reason to hate the ubiquitous recovery phase that always came paired with lifestyle changes you wished not to make.
That August, my daughter’s friend in Manhattan needed help finding a temporary home for her two cats while she hastily relocated from the city at the peak of the pandemic.
We discussed the arrangement. Maybe in the back of my mind I wondered if the cats might soften up Patty for dog owning. She was hesitant. We were taking in not one but two cats for an indeterminate time.
But in a few days, the deal was done — I was empathetic to the owner’s situation, and she was sure I would love them. I hear you have been wanting a dog, she emailed.
Patty and I had both dogs and cats for our 30-year plus marriage, and after our dog Cole passed in 2019, along with our cat Wendell, we were down to one feline, an 18-year-old three-legged calico named Florrie. She had lost her leg at birth.
I wasn’t sure I needed a cat, and in fact, I had turned my attention to service dogs. But I also saw little trouble with a couple of cats and imagined Florrie, now without her brother Wendell, lonely for late-life company. I imagined wrong.
Florrie greeted her new buddies by trying to kill them. For a cute cat seemingly on her last legs, she seemed renewed by her murderous mission. The big fluffy black one, no fool, went AWOL for four days.
After several assaults we ordered Wayfair room dividers and 8-foot-high door gates, effectively partitioning our home into two safe zones, upstairs for the interlopers, Yonce and Idris; downstairs for the matriarch. Peace was restored, though Florrie stayed vigil at the gate waiting on a carelessly left open door, and in a hard bargain, refused to eat anything except fresh salmon cooked with a modest glaze of virgin olive oil.
We had become a new household. Three cats, a tense demilitarized zone, and pages of instructions for neighbors who sometimes looked after the tribe. We were that household. We were crazy cat people.
In subsequent weeks the cats eased up on each other, still indignant at the situation we put them in but no longer role-playing a B.F. Skinner sequel.
I began to key into strange personalities among us. Yonce, 7, liked to lick my hand with her raspy tongue; Idris, 3, would do a trippy dance around a rubber band each time one was left on the floor. Florrie used her powerful forepaws to clamber up the sheets of a daybed where I recuperated for several days from another surgery.
I recently thought about the unexpected gift we were given in a time when we and everybody else braced for more of the worst. The previous owner hadn’t offloaded her cats but had given them to us, thinking of them and, I believe, us. She knew that when Patty and I lived in New York before we married my first gift to her was Onyx, a rescue cat who lived with us in early apartments in Boston and Chicago and eventually our first home.
Florrie quietly passed several months later. The other two pandemic refuges went from long-term guests to permanent. The gates and partitions came down. When I looked at my phone I laughed. Dozens of cat photos, a few cat action videos, a screen grab of a New Yorker cat illustration. At Christmas my daughter presented me with a “CAT DAD” coffee mug.
In a decade of living with disability I often felt I didn’t have a change in me. It wasn’t a good feeling. In my earliest physical therapy session, I told my therapist I “wanted to do what I used to do.”
I’m not sure adapting is ever going to be easy. But sometimes I’m surprised.
Recently I was doing an Instagram Live relating to a newspaper column I wrote when Yonce wandered close to my rolling laptop camera. I apologized and softly fended her away. “Show us the cat!” the suddenly enlivened IG crowd demanded.
I showed them my cat.
Todd Balf is the author of several books, including the memoir “Complications” and the forthcoming “Three Kings.”
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