It was a dark and stormy night …

Some days, I think this blog is growing, despite my long periods of absence from it … and my mere 44 followers.

It grows in my head. I think on it, like I think on my novel (also long dusty from lack of writing), and I consider how it is organically becoming … well … not a normal travel blog. It’s more that I travel a lot – so there’s automatically a lot of travel discussion on here. Yet this blog – in its pock-faced, 13-year-old, stumbling baby giraffe kind of infancy – is learning to be its own thing.

“I’m not a travel blog!!,” I hear its teenage voice scream down the stairs of my mind. “I’ll be whatever I want to be!!! I HATE YOU!” Dramatic door slam.

So, in an effort to let my blog grow up and be whatever it wants to be, I thought I’d share storytime with you guys. This post has zilch to do with traveling. Here we go …

“It was a dark and stormy night …

No. Seriously, that’s how the story starts. It’s one of my all-time favorites to tell, because it makes our family sound like Tim Burton could be my dad’s brother and that we are all one pair of gardening shears away from Running with Scissors.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” my mother told me. “Cupcake was in the bed with us. She was having what I believe were small strokes or seizures.”

At 16 years old, my cat Cupcake had been around in our family longer than most things. I was barely 21, so her arrival is honestly one of my first memories. I remember begging for a fluffy white Persian like I’d seen on the commercial for Fancy Feast. My mom went to the Humane Society and brought home a skinny, hella ugly, grey tabby with no neck. This cat’s lack of neck was so obvious, my father called her “No Neck” for years. Like it was her Indian name. I named her Cupcake Elizabeth Adams. Cut me some slack. I was five.

“We lay there on either side of her, discussing what to do,” my mom continued. “Really the only thing to do was wait until morning to take her to the vet. But given how old she was, I didn’t really think the vet would be able to tell us much. So we just tried to make her comfortable. She didn’t seem to be in any pain. You’re father always claimed he hated her, but in the last years of her life, they grew close. She would sit in his lap while he read the paper, provided no one else was looking. That night she started having seizures, and he was pretty upset.”

The first time I heard the first portion of this story, my cat of 16 years was freshly deceased, and I was a hot mess on the phone. A sobbing, hysterical, couldn’t-make-it-home-in-time-from-college hot mess. If you had seen me, doubled over with a cordless phone … gasping for air between heart-wrenching sobs, you might have thought my mother had died. It was just a cat. But that cat was my oldest friend, in that wonderful way your first pet is. First pets teach us about unwavering love. Brutally, they are also usually the ones to teach us about death. Unless your grandmother kicks it first, chances are your 13-year-old Golden Retriever is dying sometime around your college years. Chances are it’s the first time you lose a very close family member. That combination of total love and first lose is a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the heart.

However, this story doesn’t end with my cat simply dying in a bed. Otherwise, if it did, it’s unlikely I’d spend a whole blog discussing it.

Pretty morbid, pretty short blog post.

“My cat died. I cried for days. The end.”

Nope. This story continues some weeks later, when I was finally home and able to think on her without fallin’ all to pieces, as we say about overly hysterical women down South.

“Where is she buried?” I asked my mother, standing in the kitchen on a fall afternoon. Normally, this would seem like an average question, but it wasn’t. It was loaded. You see, in our house there are two large, antique urns in the living room. When these particular blue and yellow urns were purchased, my father looked at one and said rather wistfully, “Someday, we will put your no-neck cat in there. We can have her cremated. Maybe we need to put a sticky note on the urn that says ‘Cupcake’ as a placeholder.”

We all laughed at the time. These were the days when my dad still disliked the cat. The days before I ran off to college seven hours away, and my father and my cat learned to read the paper together … bonded by missing me. The urn discussion was  funny and often joked about around our house. That day a few weeks after her death, I was curious if he had gone through with it.

“Where is she buried?,” I repeated. “Is she in the urn?”

My mother got cagey. She took a deep breath. She walked over to the sink, turned her back to me and started washing her hands for no apparent reason.

“Well … um … no. She’s buried in the backyard. But it was kind of an ordeal.”

“An ordeal?”

“It was a dark and stormy night.” Oh, here we go again, I thought.

“Man, it was really raining,” mom continued. “It had been raining for days. When we woke up, the cat was dead. I mean, it was obvious to me. Her legs were stiff and sticking straight out.” My mom shoved her arms out in front of her like Frankenstein, still dripping water from the sink.

“She was like … rigamortis dead. Your father – being your father – started insisting that she was still alive and just sleeping. I kept saying – ‘No Tommy! She’s dead! Look at her stiff little cat legs. Cat legs don’t stick straight out like this!’ Again, she thrust her arms forward to illustrate death.

“After much discussion and investigation by poking her and actually picking her up, your father finally agreed that, yes, Cupcake was dead. I figured we would head for the vet and have her cremated. You know … put her in her urn. But your father wouldn’t hear of it. I think he felt bad, now that the joke was coming true. Plus, like I said … your cat and your father had actually learned to be friends. He was genuinely upset she was gone.”

“So, what happened?,” I said, sensing something strange coming. This dark and stormy night business was too much pre-discussion to simply explain where she was buried.

“So, it was raining hard. And lightening. It was lightening!” Now my mother was beginning to sound more like a defendant pleading a case than a mother consoling a kid over a dead pet. Curiosity levels were rising.

“And there was no way to go out and dig a hole in the yard for her. The ground was like soup, and I certainly wasn’t going to go hold an umbrella over your father’s head in a lightening storm while he dug a hole with a metal shovel. After some discussion of our options – of which there weren’t many – your father came up with an idea. He said we needed to keep her fresh until he could bury her properly. We weren’t sure if that would be a day or two days … or even three. So. Well. What could we do but put her in the fridge?”

“YOU WHAT?!”

“We put your cat in the refrigerator for a few days.”

“You just like put her body in there? Like … there was just a dead cat next to the tomatoes and the mayo and the bread?!”

“No, no … we put her in a Piggly Wiggly grocery bag first, obviously. Then we put her in the downstairs fridge. The one in the basement where your dad keeps his beer.”

It should be noted here that my mother was – at this weird juncture – actually a bit indignant that I would insinuate she didn’t know the rules for keeping a dead feline fresh in a fridge. Clearly, should you have this issue, the rules are:

Step 1: Always select an easily identifiable grocery bag. For example, a grocery bag with a logo from a particular store will let you know quickly and without opening it that “Yes – this is the bag with the cat and not the bag with the potato salad for that company picnic next week.”

Step 2: If you have a second fridge, it’s preferable to use that one. This will limit the number of times the fridge is opened and closed in a single day, ensuring the cat stays cool. It’s also less likely a guest will accidentally open a bag with a dead cat in it, raising rather unpleasant questions and risking your reputation as a fine and upstanding Southern woman. If you do not have a second fridge, we suggest you repeat Step 1, but use your freezer.

I’m not sure that Emily Post’s Book of Etiquette deals with this. Maybe it’s Vol. 2 or something. It’s gotta be covered somewhere, because my mother was fairly miffed that I could believe she might cram a cat in with some celery, without first following proper procedure.

“Cupcake was in the fridge for a few days … chillin’ out in that Piggly Wiggly grocery bag till we could bury her properly,” she finished up. “Which we did. In the backyard.”

To this day, my cat’s grave sits silently in the backyard, under a tree, marked by a rock my father rolled over the exact spot. I can’t open our downstairs fridge and not think about her. Apparently my parent’s neighbor Lynn Bradford heard this story and now refuses to drink or eat anything that comes out of that fridge. As for my feelings on the whole “My parents stuck the body of my cat in our fridge for a few days” thing?

I suppose it’s a pretty damn good story. And, in a really disturbing way, it’s a testament to love. Your parents probably once had a little funeral and flushed your goldfish.

Mine? They loved me enough to refrigerate a cat corpse.

This blog? It might be growing up to become a serial killer. Have a great Labor Day everyone!