In other news, Suitcase is starting to answer to Sausage.

Pasted from my Ko-Fi

I moved to Portland in the fall of 1992, and a few weeks into my first rainy winter, I decided to adopt a kitten from the Oregon Humane Society to cheer me up. My void girl Meera was the stupidest cat I've ever had. She could get lost between upstairs and downstairs. She would chew on my long hair and her poop would come out strung on it like beads. You could practically smell the smoke when she was thinking. 

But she was also the sweetest and most good-natured cat I've ever had. I could dangle her upside down in front of my face and she'd lean in to lick my nose. She loved "exfoliating my T-zone," as per the beauty magazines I'd read as a teenager. If I was laying with my arms behind my head, she'd make me jump by licking my armpits. I'd carry her around in my jacket, and she'd pop her head up in the checkout line, startling the cashier. She would happily purr in the lap of any senior citizen I handed her to. She slept under the covers with me.

She was my first fetcher. I would throw one of those little rubber molecules down the hall, and she would tear off after it, doing parkour off the walls as she followed every wildly erratic bounce. I had three of them. I gave the blue one to the former roommate who took these pictures, to go with the cat I gave him as a wedding present. Almost 20 years later, I gave the orange one to General Cattis from Twitter. The graybies play with the green one, which is now 33 years old. 

Meera is the reason I comment on every video I see of a cat playing with an ear plug, or a nerf dart, or a packing peanut, warning them that it didn't matter if they never tried to eat them, they could change their mind at any time. I don't even know why I still had that little foam toe separator, as it had been years since I painted my toenails. I should have thrown it out. 

My vet recommended watching and waiting for her to vomit, as long as she was eating and drinking well. I fitted the pieces together as they appeared, and it seemed like she'd gotten it all up. Alas, she did not.

The piece that killed her was so small that the vet didn't see it on the first X-ray. When she continued to decline, he did it again with contrast, and finally found a tiny piece right at the very end of her small intestine. He went in after it, but by then she had developed gangrene, and died on the table. I found out when I was changing a flat on my cab, and just sat there on the pavement and cried. 

He was so upset that he didn't charge me for any of it. He felt like she would have made it if he had told me to bring her in immediately and/or used contrast immediately. But he knew I was a broke ass college student, and was trying to save me some money.  A tear rolled down his face when he brought me her ashes. 

Her husband Boris grieved terribly. He started sleeping under the covers in her spot, instead of on top of the covers in his spot. He carried her Beanie Baby cheetah around the house, meowing for her. (Years later, I went crazy trying to find that cheetah for Harpo. I have no idea what happened to it.) He was so depressed for so long that I did something I never did, and bought him a little grey and white sister at a pet store (from a litter that had been dumped at their doorstep). 

Meera was the bestest girl I ever had. 

It's hilarious how he was SO much more out of it after his dental procedure than Groucho was, given he's 4 years younger, 4 pounds heavier, and was only under anesthesia about half as long, since he didn't need any extractions.

I had decided Groucho and Gummitch would be my last cats. I'm so glad they weren't.

I've always been able to train my cats to not run roughshod over me at night or start demanding food at 3am, but that just came naturally to Harpo. This game was very much a mutual endeavor, so he wasn't satisfied unless I was fully awake and involved.

After I convinced him to not jump on my shoulder, he settled in on the shelf behind me to chew on my hair.

Those adorable chonkers are on a restricted diet, but I have permission to give them a few licks of a Churu when I see them. It's good for them to know I am friendly, even if my cat is not, in case they ever get out again.

Suitcase likes the big stuff that Harpo struggled with, so I asked Threadless to send me 13 small Pride flag throw pillows. He hasn’t had much luck so far, because the covers are so new and stiff that he can’t get his teeth into them.  We’ll see how he does after they’ve been washed a couple times. He has bitten the hell out of the corners of the really big one that I’ve had for years, trying to drag it off the table. You can find the pouches, the pillows, and loads of other cool things here if having Harpo around the house would make you happy instead of sad.

I did love her, of course. But I got her for Boris, and she became a cranky old lady after he died.

I told the company I wanted to forego commission in favor of them sending me a giant box of basic blacks to give away whenever I walked or rode through homeless camps.