No blog post has been harder to write than this one. But I have my kleenex close by. So here goes.
A pet is hard to lose.
A pet that showed up at a special time in your life is very hard to lose.
We called him the Great White Cat. His name was Nuz.
He would have been mortified if he knew that it was short for Nuzzle. We named him that because he would stand on his hind legs like a pony and give us strong head butts until we thought he was going to knock us over.
Extreme nuzzles.
How Nuz found us
Some of you have heard the story. Bear with me because I need to tell it one last time.
It was April 1993 in Ocean Shores, Washington. Bob and I were giddy with excitement. We had spent hours and hours thinking of a name for the graphic design business we had just created.
We had scribbled dozens of ideas on post-it-notes and pressed them on the white board. The notes stuck, but none of the names did.
Until Bob turned to me and said, "Cat's Eye."
The cat's eye conjured up the ability to focus, attention to detail, curiosity about new things—everything that would make a design company sharp.
It was decided. Cat's Eye it would be.
Just hours later, in the midst of a wild spring storm, through the sound of the wind and pelting rain, I heard a faint cry. I opened the patio door and there was a tiny, frail, soaking wet, white kitten, shaking violently.
I brought him inside, dried him off and turned him around. It was then that I saw the cat's eyes. One was green and the other blue. It was a sign.
He was all kinds of sick. Fleas. Worms. And an upper respiratory infection that left him on IVs for two days.
But he was spunky and he survived.
Quirky Nuz
He was quirky, this cat. It was as if he had searched for us because he knew he would fit right in.
He was several animals in one and could take on the personality of each. Kind of like a writer does.
Early on, when he jumped up on our bed, we learned that if we threw a small object, say a wrapped cough drop, he would fly through the air, catch it in his mouth, trot back up to us and drop it. Then came the stare that meant, "Throw it again. Please throw it again."
He learned the command, "In position!" and when one of us would say it, he would scramble to the end of the bed and sit up, at attention, waiting for us to throw it again.
He could fetch. He was a dog.
Sometimes he would jump up on the bed in the middle of the night and we would hear a plop. It was Pépe, his furry purple hand puppet. He had carried him in with his mouth, fully expecting us to play.
Other times he would scale our stone fireplace that went from floor to ceiling—without the harness a climber uses. He was a mountain goat.
He climbed to the top of our Christmas tree one year and knocked it over. Okay he was just being himself that time. Bad cat.
For a few months, our daughter's cat Alex stayed with us. Not exactly the perfect role model, he showed Nuz how to pull food from the cupboards and refrigerator.
One day after Alex was gone, we came home to a mess. Nuz had climbed up onto the kitchen counter, opened the cupboard and dragged an opened bag of potato chips onto the floor. Bad cat.
He loved cantaloupe and corn and Pudding Pops. Yes, he was a little weird.
He had great taste in music. We moved three times with him and the only thing that would calm him down in the car were the sounds of James Taylor, BB King or Pavarotti.
Business partner Nuz
He was the Cat's Eye mascot from day one and took on the role with class.
He was in our print ads. In one, he was sprawled out on the carpet on his side. The ad's headline said, "Relax. Cat's Eye will take care of it."
He was fascinated by the fax machine and waited by it, as if he was our assistant, watching the paper until it finally came through on the other side. Never could quite teach him to bring us the fax, though. Sometimes he got tired of watching and would fall asleep.
The press loved him. In 2000, when Cat's Eye won the Best in the Northwest Family Business of the Year award, his photo was on the big screen as the master of ceremonies told the story of our name, and of Nuz. A day later, he was in The Puget Sound Business Journal.
He was unimpressed.
The day that was different
Monday, November 2, was a typical day. Except, come to think of it, for a week or so, Nuz had been spending more time on our bed at night. More than he usually did.
That night, he left for his own soft bed in the living room at 10.
At 2:30 Tuesday morning, a strange crinkling noise woke me up. I turned on the light and there was Nuz, pawing at the cover of the New Yorker magazine I had left on the floor.
He didn't look right. I pulled him onto the bed. He couldn't stand up. His eyes were dark.
I wrapped him in the soft UW Huskies blanket he loved and called the vet hospital. Our problem: the first ferry from the island to the mainland didn't leave until 6:30.
When I described the symptoms, the woman on the other end of the phone, said,
"Wrap him in a blanket. Turn the lights down low and hold him."
I did. He died in my arms at 4:45am, Tuesday, November 3.
He wasn't destined to catch the 6:30 ferry.
I like to think that he managed to somehow make it to our bedroom that night because he wanted to tell us that he was leaving us. And because he did that, I got to spend his last two hours with him.
He was a good cat.
Rest in peace, sweet Nuz.
