Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

This past Father’s Day was not the type of day I’d envisioned, wanted, or was pleased with. Sick with a head cold, one hand wrapped up in gauze from a deep sheet-metal cut, facing major changes to my work and domestic patterns, I spent the day at the veterinarian’s office, saying goodbye to our seventeen-year old cat, Mouse, euthanizing her after she’d suffered acute kidney failure.

Not a good day.

But it did get me thinking, specifically about my dad. Apropos.

At heart, my dad was a taciturn country boy. He was born in the small, rural town of Point Reyes Station in west Marin County, California. His parents were a truck driver and a housekeeper, his grandparents were gardeners and charcoal burners and boarding house matrons, and the town he lived in was quiet, remote, and full of independent, practical-minded, deeply conservative folks.

Dad’s rustic, back-country upbringing during the 1920s and ’30s was the source of many eye-popping tales of cultural dissonance. I’m pretty sure Dad told us kids some of his stories purely for their shock value. He took pride in his pedigree, his gruff, hardscrabble roots, and much of his identity was tied to a story arc anchored on the picturesque shores of Point Reyes and Tomales Bay.

With this as preamble, it’s not surprising that Dad’s philosophy about pets was . . . different than mine. They were animals, like livestock. He would tell of neighbors who put unwanted whelps in burlap sacks and disposed of them in a cruel and despicable fashion. When it came to the cats and dogs who shared our home, he cultivated a facade of casual disinterest. They were just animals, he’d say.

But it was a lie.

My first clue to this deception came early, from Blue, the massive grey tomcat we had when I was very young. Blue was huge; a silver dollar would fit edgewise in his mouth when he yawned. Blue was scrappy and incorrigible, but he loved my father with the fierce and conflicted passion of one alpha male living in respectful détente with another. This was exemplified every day, when Dad came home from work. Dad would open the door, step across the threshold, and halt.

“Blue?” he’d ask the room.

When he did this, Blue would slink out from wherever he was hiding—behind a drape, beneath a chair, around the bookcase corner—and walk over to my dad, face-bonk his shin, and go on his way. But if Dad ever forgot, if he ever came in through the front door and headed to the kitchen, Blue would spring from hiding, ravage that shin, and zoom off to hidden corners. Dad never yelled, never scolded. He would just shake his head, smile, and go dress his wounds. It was just Blue being Blue.

There were other cats in our family history—Pelakia, Cricket, Tigger, Scaredy & Feisty (my brothers named those two), and Ivory—until, in his last years, Dad adopted my brother’s cat, Miki.

Miki was a tortoiseshell queen, already well on in years when she came to live with Dad, and like him, she was gruff, taciturn, creaky in the joints, and stubbornly independent. For years, Dad would gripe about her, her alley cat ways, staying out all night, sometimes for days. He’d complain about how finicky she was, with sentences that often began, “For a gal who licks her butt all the time . . .”

Naturally, this was all an act, bluster to cover his affection. And then, in his last years, Dad finally dropped the pretense. One day I accompanied him on a grocery run, and waited in silence as Dad stood before the myriad tiny cans of cat food, trying to decide what brand, what flavor, what consistency. He muttered as he scanned the bewildering array. “Not chicken, not unless it’s grilled. And salmon, yes, she likes that, but not Friskies. Dammit. Where’s the fancy meal brand. I thought it was . . . oh, there it is.”

If it hadn’t been clear to me before, it would have been then. Dad loved his cats. And they were his cats. For his own, secret reasons, he hid this softhearted chink in his armor, but he did adore his cats, one by one, as they shared his home, his life, his heart.

One day, Miki went on a final walkabout and never came home. It was a blow to Dad, who’d lost a wife to cancer the year before, and who saw the end of his own life waiting for him just a few blocks down the road. Miki had given him much, not least of which was something precious to love and care for, a reason to get up in the morning. I wanted little more than to get a new companion for him, a rescue cat of mild demeanor and advanced years, but with assisted living looming in Dad’s future, it was not an option.

I hadn’t thought about Dad and Miki for a while, not since Dad’s death, actually, but just this last Father’s Day, as I stood in the cat food aisle, picking out a selection of itsy cans with flavors that I prayed would entice our ailing Mouse to eat again, it came back in a flood. Bittersweet doesn’t come close to describing the emotional gale that nearly knocked me over, but I was glad of it, and remain so, especially now, as I walk the floors of my own, suddenly empty house.

k