The Tale of the Frozen Cat

Johnny R.We had lots of cats in my family when I was growing up. We had dogs too but not many of them; somehow the canines just didn’t seem to last as long for us. Our hound Louie promptly ran away right after a four-week cross-country road trip in which he and his family lived out of a Volkswagen bus. (Had it been too much for him?) Maggie the beagle died of very old age but she was already plain old and worn out when we adopted her. And the regal collie Penny just disappeared. (Stolen perhaps?) But there was always a cat or two around the Robinson house throughout my upbringing.

Among them was the pure white Sugar, who was so sweet and cuddly, and the mottled black and white Dixie who was proud and distant, the smart grey Smokey, the incredibly playful Lincoln, and the fearless little, orange-furred Dante. Black-with-white-feet Bootsie was so very affectionate and would sleep in my bed and wake me by rhythmically pushing her paws into my neck.

And there always seemed to be a coal-black cat around, and one of my favorites of them all was Inky. Oh did I love Inky. He was such a fine, respectable and good-natured feline, he endeared himself to all he met. Puff was one of my most favorite cats, and she was part of our lives for eighteen years. A small Persian with a mess of black and brown fur, she looked like a rat when we gave her a bath. That must have been a little humiliating for her. But Puff really knew how to thrive and survive and led a happy life.

And then there was another solid, night-black one we named (surprise) Blackie. That tomcat was like another sibling to me, only better. Blackie was around when I was quite small; he features in some of my earliest memories.

I well remember one very cold overcast winter morning when I was about three years old. Bundled in my typical hand-me-down garments I ventured outside to play in my backyard. Here’s when things get interesting, for in the middle of our next-door neighbors’ back yard lay Blackie. I called out his name as I approached but he continued to lay motionless.

“Hmmmmm this is odd,” I thought as I stood over my beloved cat. Was he sleeping? I reached out to touch him, to pet him, and realized he was very cold and very stiff.

Without missing a beat I knew what to do. Full of purpose I picked up my frozen-solid, hard-as-a-rock pet, hugged him to my body and marched to my back door with the intent of warming up the cold Blackie.  Into the house and straight to the kitchen I headed with my pet. Once there, I placed the cat on the floor in front of the oven to free my hands to open the creaky door of the old Hotpoint. I may not have known how to turn on the thing but I knew that when it was operating that range was by far the warmest – nay hottest – place around.

As I was carefully and confidently placing Blackie on the center rack in the oven my quiet and ever-thoughtful mother walked into the kitchen, no doubt a bit taken aback, with the equivalent of an, “oh my…,” on her lips.

I’ve since learned firsthand that raising children is an endeavor full of surprises, and decades later my mom assured me that this episode was a particularly outstanding one.

Mom proceeded with tenderness to explain – perhaps accompanied with a certain amount of hand wringing – the situation. Namely that no amount of “warming” in that oven was going to make Blackie wake up – that he, in fact, had passed away and was completely dead.

Blackie had no doubt come up short in a struggle with another male cat, and that was that. One might have assumed that I would have been devastated at the news and reduced to fitful wailing, but since I wasn’t old enough to fully grasp the meaning of life and death, (come to think of it I’m still not old enough for that), I was only mildly upset over this development.

The fact that Blackie was gone for good and that no amount of well-intentioned warming could have brought him back was something that gradually seeped into my understanding in the weeks that followed. In subsequent years I would be present for many a backyard pet burial ceremony but I don’t recall Blackie’s. I was mercifully saved from the pain of loss of a loved one and it wasn’t until years later that I would first experience the profound nature of grief.

Yes, the time that the frozen cat episode occurred was during that brief period of my childhood when innocence prevailed, that time when I was immune from genuine sadness. And since I was surrounded by a family grounded in steadfast love – a fact which to finally and fully appreciate took me a couple of decades – I was gently nurtured into eventual understanding of some of the various stark realities of life.

One of them being that you can’t bring a frozen solid cat back to life with oven therapy.

– Johnny Robinson

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