all the cats i've known and loved: smooshie

smooshie // phoenix, az

As far as GOAT cats go, one immediately comes to mind, and he wasn’t even mine. He was my inspiration for All the Cats.

I named him Smooshie because he napped in the middle of our suburban Phoenix cul-de-sac and didn’t immediately move when my father approached with the car. Smooshie started hanging out in our front yard under the mesquite tree or using the odd stucco shelves under my childhood home’s front windows as perches. His long fur was black and white (to this day, my favorite cat color) with bits of desert debris in it so that when I held or petted him, my hands came away dusty. He was gorgeous, a big cat. I didn’t understand the concept of ownership, or I just didn’t care. I heard the neighbors calling him Damien so I knew he belonged to someone nearby but that didn’t stop me from trying to bring him inside.

I thought I was helping him, saving him, though he didn’t need saving. While my parents were at work, I lured him into the garage with cat food from our two actual pet cats, and later lured him with food into my bedroom. I’m not sure what I meant to accomplish by bringing him inside. Did I think my parents would suddenly let me keep him once I carried him over the threshold, like some kind of kitty vampire bride? Something about bringing him into my bedroom and placing him among my stuffed animals and Cabbage Patch Dolls felt intimate, more so than feeding him secret kibble in the hot garage. I think I just held him in my room, didn’t try to dress him up like we did with our pet cats.

I took pictures of him, too, which is odd behavior. I documented several of my not-pet cats as a child and later as an adult, which…I wonder what I was trying to capture. Maybe having tangible evidence that I once knew these cats made me feel something. As a kid, I took a lot of photos of random things, like my dolls posed in dresses or the pool water or seemingly random objects like balloons I really liked.

I remember this Joan Didion quote, I remember writing it out in a notebook during undergrad, and I had to search it just now to remember it correctly because I recall the physical act of recording it more than anything, but:

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

I think I wanted to save these items and memories and cats forever, like this desire to photograph a balloon because I loved it so much as a child, and I knew it would leave so I tried to keep a piece of it forever. I knew Smooshie wasn’t my cat.

So now I’ve kept photos of Smooshie for 35 years, prints I had developed at the Smitty’s and now can take a cell phone picture of so I can share here. If someone cared to look at the physical photos, they might think, oh sweet, must’ve been her pet cat…nah, just a neighborhood cat I knew and loved.