“Sweet soul in a little cat body,” that’s what my sister Laura used to say about her cat Pushkin.\u00a0 Pushkin was the first cat I ever really knew; he was Laura’s first pet in her grown-up life, acquired when she moved off to medical school in Rochester — “Ra-owr-Chester,” she called it, as if it were Pushkin saying it.\u00a0 Pushkin was one of those black and white cats, whose markings formed a black cardigan buttoned down his front, and a perfect little black mustache under his nose.\u00a0 He was a tiny Russian aristocrat, as dignified as he was cute.\u00a0 He was lethal — I once saw him bring down a bird flying low over a garden — but hilariously adorable.<\/p>\n
Laura getting Pushkin was a new phase for us.\u00a0 He was adult life.\u00a0 She had just gone and adopted him; I don’t know what her thought process was, but getting him was a statement of independence.\u00a0 Younger sister that I was, I did not have nearly the same sense of independence — at least I didn’t think I did — and so I was in awe of the entire cat-acquisition-and-raising process.\u00a0 How did she know what to do?\u00a0 I guess she read stuff about it.\u00a0\u00a0 She knew to have the litter box and the food bowl.\u00a0 But what else were you supposed to do?\u00a0 How did you know it was okay?<\/p>\n
I think perhaps a lot of people go into adulthood less consciously than I do and so, like Laura, maybe they just do these things without worrying about “am I doing it right?”\u00a0 Until they finally meet their match, and then they have some thinking to do.\u00a0 Pushkin was not Laura’s match, however.\u00a0 Soon after she had him, she got Sweet Pea, who was all black, and my favorite cat in life so far.\u00a0 Sweet Pea had a dumb look, because you could not really see his face, other than his always wide eyes — the mouth and nose were lost in the darkness.\u00a0 Sweet Pea looked unintelligent, not smart like Pushkin, but Sweet Pea could talk.\u00a0 He could communicate with his loud, enthusiastic purr and his expressive meows.\u00a0 One famous family story is that Laura was upstairs and Sweet Pea was downstairs, looking for her.\u00a0 Meowing, ra-owing.\u00a0 Finally she heard him say, “Ra-er are you?”\u00a0 And she replied, “I’m up here, Sweet Pea!”\u00a0 And Sweet Pea came running upstairs to her.<\/p>\n
Laura had her cats and then I had my baby.\u00a0 I think she may have felt, perhaps unconsciously, the same way about my having Nat that I had about Pushkin, like how do you know what to do?\u00a0 I remember feeling a secret small smugness that he was mine, that I had the rights to him, that it was up to me.\u00a0 I think she knew about that because we once had a terrible, bloody fight over him, over who got to sit next to him in the back seat.\u00a0 It blew up into the ugliest episode in our life together.\u00a0 I wonder what we were really fighting about.\u00a0 We were always so close.\u00a0 Sometimes it felt like we were a unit, a pair.\u00a0 We were not twins, but we were 19 months apart, in a Family of Four that did everything together, intensely.\u00a0 She and I fought like cats and cats growing up, but also shared the exact same sense of humor and perceptions of many things.<\/p>\n
Laura helped me make my Labor Tape, the cassette I was supposed to listen to while giving birth to Nat — I was trying to have the birth my way, but it turns out that’s only for hamburgers — and to this day those songs bring back a satisfyingly complicated blend of emotions.\u00a0 Laura also attended me during Nat’s birth, with Ned on my other side.\u00a0 Laura and Ned had become close during our college days, so much so that even they fought sometimes, which back then was a true sign of closeness for us, whether you could have awful fights and then totally make up moments later.<\/p>\n
Laura was there that day when Nat first became truly alert, a few days after his birth.\u00a0 We laughed and laughed over it, how his eyes were just crazy-wide open.\u00a0 There are so many pictures of her playing with him and as the years go by it is hard to tell if some of those pics are of her or of me.\u00a0 Recently she confessed that she used to go into his room sometimes when he was sleeping and wake him up so we could play with him some more.\u00a0 Every phase of his life is marked for me with memories intersected with Laura.<\/p>\n
There was that terrible big secret we shared, too:\u00a0 what was going on with Nat?\u00a0 We didn’t discuss the possibility that anything was wrong.\u00a0 Our lives had not yet wandered out of that protective circle of our childhood.\u00a0 We had our fears, sure, like all children, but in the morning you would wake up.\u00a0 I would bring all of my questions to her about his development, as if she were a sage.\u00a0 She was merely doing her big sister thing, reassuring me without really knowing anything, but just confident that all was well based on her enormous love for him (and me)\u00a0 Why wouldn’t everything be well?\u00a0 It always had been!\u00a0 That was childhood.\u00a0 That was how it went as adulthood began, too, with Pushkin.\u00a0 You moved into new phases, you didn’t have to think about it so much.<\/p>\n
Ned and I just finished our will and special needs trust last week — about time, considering Nat is now 21.\u00a0 We had to figure out trustees, guardians, all of those soul-grinding questions, those scenarios with Ned and I being no longer here.\u00a0 All those impossible answers.\u00a0 But the answer for us was pretty clear:\u00a0 Laura.\u00a0 Laura who now has four cats she rescued, two amazing children, and who tears up with pride over every single thing Nat does.\u00a0 Soon after he was born, and her cats were still young, she referred to Nat as a “Sweet little soul in a little Nat body,” and we laughed.\u00a0 She still does, minus the “little.”\u00a0 When I told her about the will, she said, “Of course,” just like I knew she would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Sweet soul in a little cat body,” that’s what my sister Laura used to say about her cat Pushkin.\u00a0 Pushkin was the first cat I ever really knew; he was Laura’s first pet in her grown-up life, acquired when she moved off to medical school in Rochester — “Ra-owr-Chester,” she called it, as if it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-tj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1818,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817\/revisions\/1818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}