A Furry Mackerel-Colored Memory

 Last night, I wrapped up the first draft of an all-ages manuscript with the working title of Anna. It's not ready to publish yet—for one thing, the first draft of the first half of the book was done via voice transcription on an iPhone to set a simpler, more fundamental style and structure that was easier to evaluate if I heard it out loud, but the vagaries of voice transcription require a lot of correction—but I was proud to put the word FIN at the end of that last paragraph.

This wasn't an easy book to write, because the inspiration for it is the life of the most remarkable cat I've ever had the joy to share my life with.  I've owned cats since 1964, when almost-eleven-year-old me welcomed a black and white cat named Tyger (I know the color was wrong, thanks) into my family's home. She was with us for several years, even though she suffered injuries and lost an eye in a gory fight with another animal in 1966 and we weren't even sure she would recover. 

Since then, I owned (or cared for) four different cats between 1971 and 1973, then went cat-less until 1975, when Meade Frierson invited Susan and me to an event at his house and encouraged everyone to take a kitten home with them (I think the event was the front for a cat-distribution scheme, to be honest). Her name was Stormy, and she stayed with us until 1990, when she passed.

A week after Stormy's death, Susan and I welcomed two cats, a mackerel part-Persian named Asia and a blue-cream full-blooded Persian named Tisha, into our lives. Asia developed a fast-growing injection-site tumor and left us to soon; Tisha outlived her by two more years before succumbing to the accrued effects of old age.

Then came Anna. We stopped a pet store on a whim and saw this mackerel half-Siberian half-Ragdoll in a cage with four white Ragdolls, and I fell in love with her almost immediately. Previously, I had gotten kittens, not cats, but she was too irresistible to pass up. Anna was a joy from the day she entered our life, even though she was sickly and undersized at the time we got her.  She settled into our home and our lives right away, but seemed a bit lonely (after all, she had grown up with other cats). So three months after we got her, we brought Mischa into our house—a robust mackerel Siberian with black points and paws like snowshoes. 

Mischa passed at the age of eighteen, while Anna lived until just a week before her twentieth birthday. Anna was the only one of my cats to get to know and love Karen (Mischa died just a couple of months after Karen and I met), and it was quite touching to see her become so attached to Karen almost immediately. She followed Karen from one end of the house to the other, and settled in right next to her whenever Karen sat down. So Karen was just as devastated as I was when we realized that it was time to say goodbye to her.

We learned after Anna's passing that, while Karen was allergic to cats, they were a catalyst for a couple of dozen allergies that all went away just a couple of weeks after Anna's passing. So we decided that Anna would be our last cat—and that was a decision I had already reached before we learned of the allergies, because I realized that I am to obsessively devoted to my cats and I couldn't both own cats and travel or pursue other activities that I had put off for so many years.

But the week that Anna passed, I knew that I wanted to tell her story in an all-ages book. I can't say if it's a good one or not—I hope so—but I can say that writing it was an unforgettably moving experience for me. I'll keep you updated as to the progress of the rewrites, and perhaps you'll have a chance to read it on our own in the near future.