all the cats i've known and loved: gandalf

part I

It’s time to talk about Gandalf.

Everything I’ve written about Gandalf—on paper and not in my mind, as I’ve carried around his history, our history, for sixteen years inside my head—has been about his death. About the leaving. Any part of him that seeped into my short fiction (which was quite a bit) was actually about his end. I realized this recently, that I hadn’t written just about his life or about the funny memories.

I started a notebook after he died to record our history together and the little things he did in life, the way he tucked himself behind my knees as I slept or that he escaped into the snow for an entire Colorado winter night only to return for breakfast unscathed. I’ll never know who or what he encountered on that lost night. I wanted a written record partially because I no longer trusted my own memories, a combination of writing fiction spun from my reality and a noticeable (to me) decline in my memory the past few years. What if I forgot our nicknames for him? What if his youthful existence escaped me and I only recalled how he was in his final years? This became overwhelming, and I stopped trying to record every single memory in the notebook.

I didn’t name him that—Gandalf. My old roommate/good friend named Gandalf when he adopted him, though his shelter name was “Kyle.” Definitely not a Kyle. Gandalf Kyle was a Siamese-tabby mix, though the adoption paperwork handed down to me lists him as a lilac point Siamese. Sometimes I used to google images of Siamese-tabby mixes and giggle at the results, versions of him with stripes but sea-blue eyes, lost brothers and sisters and cousins. The first thing anyone noticed about Gandalf was his appearance, which was gorgeous. I’ve never been hit on as much as he was: by pizza delivery people distracted as he peered around the front door, by neighbors. They would comment on his striking looks: blue eyes which I have to say were indeed the color of deep pools—azure, if you will—and a gray-white-brown coat which darkened with age but was, per photos on his paperwork, mostly white in kittenhood. I knew he was the same cat in the photo because he had a single small brown mark in one of his eyes, his poop mark. I liked that mark because it was like I’d permanently dotted him with a pen, though of course how would I not know it was him. His fur was bunny-soft, which led to the running gag that his birth father was obviously a bunny. He got away with a lot because he was so attractive and because his meow sounded like a sad baby cry.

I met Gandalf at my coworker’s apartment. I slept some nights on his couch, not willing to drive back to my apartment on the other side of town, and was pawed awake first by the too-bright desert morning sun, brutally persisting through the dusty window behind miniblinds, and second by Gandalf dancing on top of my body as he moved into the window above the couch. He also used to pose next to a mug of beverage mixed by my friend, pause, then smack the ceramic piece to the linoleum floor with a bored pat. These were my first encounters with Gandalf.

My friend, L, planned to move back to Colorado during a summer when it felt like all my friends announced they were moving back to their hometowns. Phoenix can be a transitory place, an in-between on the way to somewhere else, just as I wasn’t really from there either. The store where we all worked closed down, and a shuffling of jobs and apartments began. Four of my friends moved away that summer, and I remained, the one who hadn’t received some message. I had nowhere to go back to. L worried about taking Gandalf back home where he’d be staying with an older cat, and he asked if I was serious when I joked that I wanted Gandalf. Did I really want his cat?

I lived alone in an apartment post-breakup. I was fresh out of a move back to my parents’ home after failing to succeed at adult life, then back out again. “Do you have a cat carrier?” I asked. He didn’t, so I purchased one, then drove Gandalf across the valley and back to my apartment via surface streets since my anxiety was already semi-bad in those days and I refused to take the freeway. He scream-meowed the whole way from the dark back seat, but at least we were together.

In those early days, we were more like roommates, orbiting each other but not spending much time in the same room, certainly not cuddling or sleeping together. He was about a year old. I was still trying on being single and trying to survive on my own salary which was proving futile. The leasing agent shouldn’t have rented me the apartment; I qualified on a discount but knew I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent once it returned to the regular monthly cost, which it did after a period. Gandalf wandered the apartment at night, crying or knocking things to the floor. I read cat memes via my stolen wifi from the fort of my bed, my mattress one of my few pieces of furniture. One day someone pulled the fire alarm on one of the buildings, and in a panic to evacuate, I grabbed the cat carrier and tucked Gandalf inside, then carried him to the parking lot. I sat on a bumper and met a man from another building who I never saw again. Afterward, I was proud of myself, having saved Gandalf and I from potential emergency. It was instinctual, to grab only my cat and rush him to safety. I’d had a dog previously (don’t worry, nothing bad befell her, but I did give her to my parents), and assumed my irresponsibility had carried forward.

Within a year, I moved to Colorado, and Gandalf was sort of L’s cat again as we became roommates, all 3 of us. But by then it was understood that Gandalf was mine. A mutual friend drove Gandalf and me and all my belongings in a U-Haul from Phoenix to Boulder. Gandalf cried from his carrier while we listened to CDs on a boombox when the radio didn’t work. Gandalf and I were finally leaving Arizona.

more soon…