“Pets only love their owners because they feed, shelter and scratch them,” somebody told me once. “You’ll quickly be forgotten if another provider comes along.” Sage as that advice may be, it never prevented my father and me from growing attached to Sumo, our behemoth of a cat, during some of the roughest years of our lives.
Less than a week after my father and I put down Gingham, my mother’s cat, mom succumbed to the cancer she’d fought off for years. My father didn’t want another cat and I, 12 at the time, was content with our inbred cocker spaniel, despite its nasty habit of peeing all over every guest that walked through our doors.
Nevertheless, our story quickly spread, and a coalition of my classmates’ mothers scrounged up a tabby kitten before the month was out and forced the creature upon us.
Things didn’t start out well. My father had often joked that if we were to adopt another feline, it would have to be female, spayed and de-clawed. We didn’t know it at the time, but this cat was male, fertile and clawed. We gave him the name Cuenca, for a city in the south of Ecuador, because we still thought he was female.
In his ignorance, my father took the cat to the vet for a spaying. The vet tried to tactfully to explain that a neutering was in order-”you know, sir, that 70 percent of all yellow cats are male…”-but eventually she simply spun the cat around, lifted the tail and asked my father, “What do you think those two things are, Mr. Richardson?”
As Cuenca grew, it became clear we had met our match. At over 20 pounds and three feet long when stretched out, Cuenca’s days were a mix of passive resistance and loafing, though the two often blended into the same act.
He’d won me over as a kitten, and became a role model of sorts. Cuenca understood what was important in life: food, relaxing and basking in the sun. All you had to do was play dumb and lie around in order to enjoy them. Someone would still feed you.
He would lie in the warmest spot in the house or on the high traffic kitchen floor, and block all passage. You could try and push him aside with your foot, but his long, amorphous body would conform to your shoe and wrap around your leg. The lazy bastard was just fawning for attention, it seemed. Or did he just feel apathy toward us?
He allowed me to torture him all I wanted, so I would wrangle him by his back legs and spin him in circles on the slick wood floors of our house, or flip him on his back and spread his paws out to either side, effectively converting him into a “crucifix kitty.”
Cuenca would tolerate these annoyances for a while and then suddenly snap; his outstretched body would clamp down like a mousetrap. He bit just hard enough to make a point, but never enough to break the skin.
During high school, the cat kept my father and I sane after my mother’s death, whether he knew it or not. My dad had retired young and become a recluse of sorts, cleaning the house and napping all day, and therefore needed the cat’s company the most.
“Sumo,” which was the name my friends coined for our behemoth, discovered that the warmest place in the house was between my dad’s legs, right in the crotch, while he napped on the couch. The cat produced so much heat that my dad would have nightmares of being on fire you-know-where. As long as he kept sleeping, though, Sumo was just fine with my father’s fitful naps.
That was the routine for our family throughout high school. But after graduation, we moved to Colorado and, once I was away at school, my father found the new love of his life. Unfortunately, she was allergic to cats.
We found a home for Sumo in the family, with her niece. She had two kids and three dogs, and the home was clearly a perfect fit: the kids could torture the gentle monster of a cat and he would never lack attention-and maybe get some exercise, we thought-not to mention some big, bay windows to bask beneath.
Now, whenever my father and I are at home together, my dad mentions how empty the house feels without Cuenca. It’s strange for our clothes to be free of cat fur, to walk through the kitchen unobstructed and to have no one to torture.
My dad sees him every so often, each time a reminder of how much the oafish ball of fur really meant to him. The last time my father saw him, Sumo was sitting with the kids while they drew in crayon; his back paws in the chair beneath him, the front two on the kitchen table, his eyes fascinated with the life all around him.
I don’t think he’s forgotten us, but in the end, if there is any one thing he was always good at, it was adapting. That advice was true, I guess; the cat moved on. I don’t regret becoming so attached to that cat, because, in the end, there’s nothing to be sad about.
