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May 25, 2006

I'm losing you and it's effortless

It wasn't until Herself and I were sitting down to watch House on Tuesday night and I realized I wasn't being plaintively meowed at, that I really noticed (noticed and thought about, that is) how I hadn't seen Bob since morning.
"Have you seen Bob?" I asked Herself. No.
"Have you seen Bob?" I asked Moo. No.
Jack and Spike refused to answer.

We started looking. Under the beds. In the closets. The basement. The bathrooms. Moo's room. Under the pool table. Under the bushes in the front yard. Under the deck in the back yard.

In the kitchen, Bob's dishes were untouched and full of food. That was when I had to admit that Bob was not anywhere I could find him. I leave the door open to the upstairs deck during the day so the herd can enjoy the sunshine--Bob must have seen something interesting and jumped off the deck to investigate. I relayed this theory to Herself, who got wide-eyed and teary. "He's never coming home," Moo said, with a satisfied finality.

I fished the flashlight out of the junk drawer and went out to search the neighborhood. Calling a cat by name is pointless, so I walked the dark streets making a noise like I was sucking on a lemon, hoping Bob--if he was in hearing range--would hear it and come running. When I got home, the flashlight's batteries were dying and Bob was still out on the town. I left his dinner on the front porch and went to bed with Herself, who cried as she fell asleep and then moaned all night in her dreams.

Every night noise convinced me it was Bob and I slept badly, and when I got up he was still not home. I printed some flyers and when Herself got up and dressed, she canvassed the neighborhood and dropped them off in mailboxes. She ran out of flyers, but wouldn't go back out after I printed more because "the birds sound like Bob."

They went to school and I went to work, and when we all got home Bob was still gone. "He's not coming back," Moo pronounced, exasperated with Herself and me and our stubborn refusal to Face Facts, and already planning the arrival of our next pet, more acceptable: a kitten next time, not something already half-grown with irritating quirks. Herself and I walked the neighborhood again Wednesday night, getting down on hands and knees to look under parked cars, chatting up the neighbors, combing the bushes down by the lake. When she went to bed, she said to me "How will I have a good time in Orlando [a month away] when Bob is gone? His head is so little and he's out there all alone."

At four-thirty this morning the meowing woke me up. Nobody meows like Bob, and the sound had me out of bed almost before I was conscious. And there he was on the deck downstairs, crying for his breakfast.

Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)