For Dennis, Finally

There’s a joke I read not long ago, about dog owners vs. cat owners. When you ask a dog owner where their dog came from, safe bet there’s a touching story about a shelter visit, or a breeder, or a pet store. “From the instant we saw Pepper in the corner of that cage, we knew she was ours…”

When you ask a cat owner, however, you can expect something along the lines of: “Well, I saw something move in the dumpster when I was taking out the trash…” Cats tend to find their people, rather than the other way around.

My cat showed up in this manner, with the wind and the garbage. Dennis “The Menace” Nedry Thomas, who left this mortal coil in November 2019, appeared in our backyard in Harlem in the fall of 2011, sitting on the secondhand loveseat, chewing his foot.

When I went outside, Dennis would flee. He fled less and less convincingly, until finally, one day, he stayed on the loveseat when I sat down. He was skinny and had scabs on his head, but he had nice grey fur and a friendly white chest. He purred, absentmindedly.

Other cats from the nearby colony would hang out in our backyard and fight and scrap and scatter, but Dennis found his way to us and stuck around.

One night in late October, I opened the backdoor to an unseasonably early snow. The backyard furniture and grill were covered in the white stuff, and there sat wee Dennis, blanketed in snow and meowing plaintively in the moonlight. From that first night, situated on a towel in the corner of a bathroom, to our eventual move south to Key West, Dennis easily affixed himself in my life. He was my “little man.”  

Despite my doting, Den kept his idiosyncrasies and scars from his past life: some loss of eyesight and hearing, a thousand yard stare that would render his green eyes opaque. I didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d seen; I never tried to restrict Dennis to the apartment, because I believe we had an unspoken agreement, and he was free to go of his own accord.

My friend Richard used to do a bit about Den leaving Harlem: “This hustler used to live in the streets of Harlem, and he found himself a rich white lady to ease him into retirement in sunny South Florida! Now it’s catnip and piña coladas.” While I wasn’t rich, I was Dennis’s mark, in the way that all cats have a mark: they claim us, from their fire escapes and backyards and barns, and with that, they claim real estate in our hearts.

Dennis went from being a tough scrappy street cat to a sweet lazy island boy who barely batted an eye at the geckos and chickens. He was easygoing with me when I traveled and others took care of him. Den was mostly easy, but he could be demanding; he headbutted to request attention; he meowed loudly for food; he walked on me when it was time to wake up. And, he lay curled against my chest, purring, while I cried after a breakup.

I don’t know if he knew I needed comfort or he just liked the physical feeling of being close. But the result was the same. During my tenure with Den, Scientific American published an article about a Japanese study determining that cats understood their names being called by their owners; they just often chose not to respond. I found that to be reflective of Dennis: he knew who I was, and what I called him, and where he lived. When he wanted to.

Yet, I’d sometimes be walking home from work and see him darting through a neighbor’s hedge, or notice a familiar flash of grey fur under a car. I respected his autonomy.

In Key West, Dennis would follow me outside my apartment and down the stairs to go see Granny Jane, trailing quietly at my heels. He’d doze off in the flowerbed while we had tea. His constant presence over the last eight years provided a soft cushion to the regular despair of being alive. He served as a snuggly counterpoint to loneliness and chaos. At times, it felt like the world could burn and Dennis would remain by my side.

You know what I mean.

My little man died not long after I moved to Switzerland, while he was with another caretaker. I don’t know if his heart murmur caught up to him or if I didn’t realize he was on his 9th life. I’m sad I wasn’t there with him in his last weeks and even last moments, rubbing his head and telling him what a special little man he was to me, and as it turned out, not really a menace at all, in fact quite the opposite, despite his namesake.

The week after Den died, the big orange tabby that lives a couple of blocks away showed up in front of our apartment building in Switzerland. He followed me up the lane, to our backyard—another backyard apartment—and sat by the gate as I went inside. Not long after I had taken off my boots and poured a drink, I heard a “meow” and turned to see the tabby sitting outside the door, looking at me plain-faced: You should let me in, obviously.  

I haven’t let him in, quite yet, but I do look for him, by the gate and on his front porch. And I’m not saying that the spirit of Dennis is possessing an orange cat in Switzerland, but maybe cats do share a spirit and sensibility. Maybe the orange boy was able to identify a cat-sized hole in my heart. Maybe it’s one of their extra senses: a change in the wind, a twitch of their whiskers… someone around here has just the right amount of extra love.