What greater gift than the love of a cat.
― Charles Dickens
With the NBA season coming to a close, the championship round between the Phoenix Suns and the Milwaukee Bucks already underway, I am coming to a long-standing and inevitable letdown.
Now my wife likes basketball, and has watched the last two Wildcat championships with me (did I mention we’ve won 3), but she is more balanced and healthy and does not set her emotional and social calendar to a hoop schedule. But I do. And in fact, early last year, the full effect of Covid’s impact on society hit me as I watched an NBA game, when the teams came out for warm-ups, and then were ushered back into the locker room after learning the season had been suspended after players started to test positive for the virus. It was surreal and scary and I remember sitting on my couch, stunned and shocked and worried about what was coming.
That seems so long ago. And while there is still plenty to be concerned about when it comes to the virus, the basketball season made it back and has been a great source of comfort to so many, providing fun and excitement and a much-needed sense of normalcy for fans like myself.
But like any addict (I am, by any definition, a hoop junkie), I wanted more, a way to further enhance my enjoyment of watching basketball. This did not mean buying a bigger television or adding more channels to my package, or any technological upgrade to improve my viewing experience. No, what I wanted was a cat. A furry bundle of love to sit on my lap and purr as I watched game after game after game.
What I was going for was to add a level of companionship and coziness to my hoop mania. But it wasn’t just that, my wife and I had love to give and a good home and we thought it time to add a cat to our current one pet abode – our dog, Gonshi (Happy New Year in Chinese), is 14.
So I went online, found a great adoption site, and in short order made an appointment to meet a seven-year-old female Calico named Magpie, whose human parent sadly had to leave her apartment in a neighboring town for an assisted living facility and could no longer care for her.
Our greet with Magpie went well (she was a little shy, but not standoffish) and we were blessed to be able to adopt her. We coaxed her into our newly bought carrier and brought her home soon after.
Now, I had a game to watch that night, a big game, between my favorite team (The Dallas Mavericks) and my favorite player on that team (Jalen Brunson, who won 2 of the did I say 3 Nova championships). As we drove home with Magpie, I had visions of my dream coming to fruition – her on my lap as I rooted for my team. But alas, as Robert Burns, the great poet once penned, “The Best laid plans of mice and men…”  Meaning, Magpie had a different idea of how to spend her night.
Basically, upon letting her out of the carrier, she dashed to our basement and found, unbeknownst to us, a high ledge in our laundry room which led to a narrow cement path that went behind our walls. We were horrified when she disappeared behind the ledge, and there was no way for us to track her in that confined space. Our greatest fear was that there was an opening inside to the yard and that she would get outside and be gone forever or suffer from exposure (it was freezing out).
For the better part of the next hour, I tried in vain to see a way to see where she was, but I couldn’t. Nor could I hear her. I began to panic, not helping the situation or my wife’s nerves. Finally, I came upon the idea of calling a neighbor, a retired fireman, who had lived in the area for many years, figuring he might know better about houses and their infrastructure and what we might do.
So I called, and he came right over. He also is a winemaker, and brought with him some wine, knowing by the trembling timber of my voice that I might need a libation. He was gracious and patient as he checked out our basement, eyed the ledge, knocked on the walls, examined the room. Finally, he gave his assessment:
“She can’t get outside. She’s behind these walls, somewhere.”
“Okay, so what can we do?”
He looked at me with kind eyes. And wise ones.
“Well,” he said, “in my experience, many years as a fireman, being called lots of times about lost cats, I learned one thing: the cat will come back when the cat wants to come back.”
He was right. My wife put some food out near the ledge, a saucer of milk, and we went to bed. I was still upset, but my neighbor had taken some of the edge off. The next morning, my wife saw that the food had been eaten, the milk drank. And sitting nearby, lounging as if she didn’t have a care in the world, was Magpie.
Since then, Magpie has never snuck away again. And pursuant to my dream, she watches every hoop game with me, including this championship round. She’s wonderful in every way and I couldn’t ask for a better cat or companion to watch the sport I love.
Plus, of course, despite her domesticity, she’s become a Wildcat fan – Villanova, that is.
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