Once, many, many years ago I walked into the garage and found an orange cat sitting with his back to me.
I frequently find cats I don't know around my home; I don't know exactly why. I theorize it's because so many cats live with me, but they are not very welcoming to strangers, so I discount that. I really don't know why they come.
I said to this cat, "Why, hello. What are you doing here?" and he turned his massive tomcat head and looked at me over his shoulder. When I saw his face I literally took a step back and caught my breath. I had never in my life seen such a disfigured face on an animal. He had a harelip that went all the way up through his nose and displaced his nostrils. He also had a cleft palate. He looked large and healthy because of his bushy, long hair, but when one touched him one could tell he was undernourished.
For a stray cat who obviously had not had an easy life he was very comfortable with most humans. I called him Frankie, for Frankenstein.
He preferred to remain outdoors, roaming around, but would always come when I called, for food. I left the garage door open a few inches, so he could seek shelter and protection when he needed to. One night it was very, very cold, icy and some snow, which is unusual for our area; so I brought him inside. The man to whom I was then married was not an animal person, one of the many reasons we are no longer married, but he never did anything cruel, even when Frankie used his tool box in the garage for a potty box.
That night when I forced Frankie in he roamed around so that I had to let him back out, making a warm bed for him in the garage, where he could feel free. I was reading in the living room when that husband went to bed and I heard a horrified yell from the bedroom. I ran in there and discovered that he had discovered that Frankie had peed on his pillow. Now cats will do that when displeased, but what the man kept asking was, "Why my pillow? Yours is right there. Why my tool box, when he could have gone to the yard?" Obviously no one not an animal person could realize how psychic cats are.
Once, Frankie got a cold, which was not good for one with nostrils like his. I took him to the vet and got him some antibiotics, etc. The vet was fascinated with him, as was I, because usually in the animal world, such aberrations of nature do not survive, but he had.
I can't remember exactly how old the vet thought him, but not young, possibly seven or eight years.
Frankie didn't live with us long, less than a year. One night when I called him to supper he did not come; so I sent my older son out to look for him and he found Frankie, under some bushes by the side of the house, where he had laid down and died. It was not due to trauma, there was no physical damage and no blood draining from natural body openings to indicate internal damage. He had just laid down under the bush and died. He had not appeared sick to me in the days before his death. It seemed it was just his time to go to sleep.
I was very sad and comforted myself, as people do, that for his last days he was never hungry and had a safe shelter from the dangers of the world when he wanted or needed.
But the strange thing, as I remember Frankie, is that I cannot picture his disfigurement anymore. I think of him as a beautiful cat and although I can recall that I was shocked the first time I saw him; he became so familiar to me that I cannot recall the feeling of the shock.
I am reminded of a Jacques Cousteau show I saw about octopusses, or is it octopi? I never know. They are so foreign to me and their looks so strange that they frighten me. In the show, however, the divers held them and let them wrap around their hands and bodies and heads and when they took off in their graceful glides the divers swam along side and stroked them. I was charmed and wished I could stroke an octopus and I realized that I was only frightened because I had no usual contact with them. If I saw or touched one every day they would become familiar and familiarity, far from always breeding contempt, also breeds comfort.
And so it was with Frankie. To most, and to me at first, he was shockingly disfigured and startling, even ugly, compared to usual cats, but as I got to know him I never saw his public face and we found comfort in the acceptance of each other. To me Frankie was beautiful, with a quirky personality and desire to survive that I could only imagine, and he let me see the Frankie who really was, and let me stroke him, as the divers stroked the octopus. Thank you, Frankie, for coming to teach me such a lesson.
