Almost 20 years ago, I was working in St. Louis. I pulled into my parking space at work and noticed a stray cat in front of the car. It was a tiny, dirty black kitten and it was very skinny. I am a lover of cats and approached it. When I reached it the cat clung to me like it wanted to be picked up. It looked to have been badly abused. All the fur on the top of its head was burned off. And there were little wounds and scabs all over its body. The radio station didn’t have much in the way of cat food but we had a guard dog, a German Shepherd. I took some of the dog’s dog food and fed it to the poor kitten who ate it like it hadn’t eaten in a long time. The other people I worked with wondered how I had been able to get close to the cat. They said they had been trying to help it all day. It seemed the cat had picked me to be the one to help it.
When I left to go home, the cat followed me to my car, calling after me. I stopped and picked it up again and it clung to me and purred. I said, sorry girl, I already have too many cats, and went home. That was a Friday night and the cat stuck in my mind all weekend. I wished that I had taken it home and felt guilty about it.
I had forgotten all about her when I arrived at work on Monday. And there she was sitting in my parking place. My fellow workers said she had been there all day as if looking for me. Again no one had been able to approach her. But again she nearly leaped into my arms. That cinched it. I decided to adopt her. I gave her another helping of dog food, and she fell asleep on the desk next to me while I worked that day.
We named the cat Zombie. It was something about her eyes that always seemed to be wide open and checking everything out. Zombie eyes. The name stuck.
She turned out to be an amazing cat. After her wounds healed and the hair grew back she was beautiful. She was all black and her hair had a glossy sheen to it. And her eyes were gorgeous. I always thought she had a beautiful face. If cats had beauty contests, she would have had a great shot at Miss America. And if the story of black cats crossing your path and bringing you bad luck is true then I should have been besieged by unlucky times. She crossed my path a hundred times a day.
Zombie had been traumatized by whoever mistreated her. She didn’t trust people, especially children. But somehow she had picked me out as her companion. She was more affectionate to me than any cat I ever owned. She followed me everywhere and watched everything I did. When I sat down, she usually landed on my lap and went to sleep.
She was by far the smartest cat I’d ever been around and I have had around 20 cats in my life. She trained herself to do a remarkable trick. She liked to play with superballs, and I was tossing one of the high bouncing balls to her one day when it went down the basement stairs. Zombie bounded down the stairs after it, caught in her mouth on the bounce and raced back up the stairs and dropped it at my feet. For the next two years, she performed the trick flawlessly. Whenever I tossed the ball down the stairs she would track it down and bring it back to my feet.
One day I was showing off her trick to a group of friends. When she happily brought the ball back up the stairs and gave it to me, the group burst into applause and bravos for Zombie. She looked around and you could just see the realization in her eyes that she was being used by these humans. And she never did the trick again.
Zombie died last week. According to the vet, most of her body just stopped working at once. She was 19, a remarkable old age for a cat.
Many men don’t like cats. But it’s usually guys who are constantly trying to prove how masculine they are to all of us and probably to themselves as well. I am learning, after she’s gone, just how important she was to me. For over 19 years she was hardly ever out of my reach. Whenever I was sad, angry, disturbed, frustrated or any of those bad emotions, a couple of strokes of the beautiful black cat and the sound of her purr would take me right out of it. She got me through a divorce, three long periods of unemployment, money difficulties, and a host of other problems. She was a very effective mood-altering drug, one that I am taking the cure from cold turkey. The first night she was gone I was watching a hockey game on television. Everytime the game got tense I reached for Zombie for reassurance and was reminded that she was gone.
I have another cat who is a great cat but her personality is different and she’s not interested in learning new duties at this point in her life. And I have adopted a new tiny black kitten. She doesn’t know it but she has big pawprints to fill. I think everyone ought to own a black cat, just for the luck they bring.