Three and a half years later I met my ex- and within 8 month I moved to Washington, DC to be with him--Buster was just part of the package. At some point in our relationship, From a life in the wonder, rural expanses of bucolic central kentucky, she found herself an indoor cat in a kingdom of three stories with two litter boxes. She took to it like breathing air. Nary a problem. She also accepted my ex- sans concern, and he loved her dearly, too. As a child, he was never allowed to have a "pet."
I think around 1999, a colleague of my ex-'s was forced to move and could only take one of her cats with her--(I have to this day found this story more than dubious)--and my ex- asked if we could give the other cat a home. I honestly could never say no to him. So, Miko joined our family. The other cat that his colleague kept was named Chico, ergo I christened her "Miko-sin-Chico". Cats deserve hyphenated names. Just sayin'.
Her transition to our home was traumatic to say the least. She'd never lived with men before. Buster thought she was a cat--and Buster thought she HERSELF was a dog--and dog's don't care for cats! Not long after arriving (30 minutes?), Miko just disappeared. Fucking disappeared. We tore the damn house apart and could NOT find her. After 6 days, my ex- just started crying at the drop of a hat over it. But I told him that she probably wasn't dead, because we couldn't "smell" her. And dead things generally really stink. (I know, not my best strategy!)
On the 8th day our friend Lisa came for a week's vacation visit. The next morning after breakfast my ex- and I left for work--but neither of us mentioned Miko to her--we didn't want to spoil her vacation. So that evening when we returned and Lisa said, "Hey, why didn't you tell me you had another cat?" we did a quick double-take and asked in unison, "WHAT!? You saw her!?"
Not only had she seen her, but after we left, she settled down on our couch to read a book. Within 15 minutes, Miko appeared and joined her on the couch, purrring and settling against her for a long desired cuddle fest.
Through the course of the next week, Lisa helped Miko to accept her new home and us.
Over the years, Miko-sin-Chico was by far my ex-'s girl. She grew to delight in him. She tolerated me. And especially when I was prone--that's how she liked me best. When my ex- up a split, he left her behind...just one of many complications that he abandoned. So we three brave souls did our best to make a family.
The pics are of me and Miko just the way she preferred me to be. The other is of the "Two Schmishkins": Buster-the-Usurper and Miko-sin-Chico. We always called them Schmischkins whenever they would act like "friends".
Miko's first companion was Noriko a jewelry-marketing
designer and colleague of my ex-'s at the National Gallery of Art. My bottom-line
theory of the case is that being a rather difficult soul psychologically (that
is Miko, NOT Noriko) Noriko took advantage of her move to loose Miko and my ex-
was the purrrfect patsy in the equation. Not that we and then I didn't try to
love her, we certainly did. But just like Noriko, my ex- abandoned her, too. I
kept her "for" him for over two years after he split. And she and I
did our best to co-habitate. But she destroyed things and fouled things and
never seemed happy, and made me most unhappy many times over. All the while my
ex- claimed he was trying to find her a home, and finally I threatened to just
toss her out and gave him a date certain for the event (not that I would have,
but goddamn it, he needed to man up and take responsibility, and years of
playing nice had gotten the situation nothing toward a resolution). So he came
by and got her. And then he emailed me that he had taken her to a vet and had
her euthanized. It's the most asshole thing he ever did.
2 comments:
Oh dear, that's horrible. Sorry to hear that.
It's even a little bit worse. I suspect that Jonathan's defense would have been, "My apartment wouldn't let me have pets." To which I would have countered, "You had over two years to do right by Miko, and that means more than posting her photo on a couple of bulletin boards on campus." He told me later that the next day a colleague came up to him and said, "I would love to adopt Miko...." Day late and a lack of diligence short on his part. I often wondered why he even bothered to tell me this--like if only I had mad the deadline (no pun intended) Sunday instead of Saturday.
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