Max did not go gently, and I was not there to help him along. It appears that I needed one last urgent service from his brief life.
I negligently let him go out at night (he was always so insistent) in a strange new place, where I dragged him against his wishes. He didn’t want to go to begin with, being quite happy right where he was in Redding.
His face was crushed by a passing car and distorted, much like my father’s some years later in a car crash on the Beltway.
Max was special. Aren’t they all? The Grey Max, we called him. He was master of the rooftops of Philadelphia.
He had come to us at the insistence of the man (Marty) who was installing an alarm system in our Philadelphia row house on Bainbridge Street. God knows why we thought we needed one. He had heard, then found, three kittens in the ruined lean-to shed behind the house next door (Dr. Levine’s clinic). Marty insisted that we must rescue them. After crashing the shed (the good doctor never said a word), we retrieved the three kittens, one grey, one black, and one mottled white and black. That last one went to live with Ms. Mary across the street. We never saw Marty again, and the alarm system was quite useless.
The grey Max and the black Slick stayed on, soon to be joined by a white kitten from North Philadelphia, Nellie. She had six toes and two different eye colors. She was very sleek and lived for twenty more years.
Max and Slick’s mom came around for a while, but soon gave up. The dad, the old tom, stayed around. It was his territory, after all. He had three legs. How he lost the fourth leg, no one will ever really know. But he managed.
Max then proceeded to adopt the shaggy Muffin, our generally useless guard dog. He used her for kneading, and soft warmth on cold winter nights.
Max also got to know my old Pinto car. When I would return at night, the sound of the exhaust was easily recognized and he promptly appeared at the window in tender greeting.
Max was the truly clever one. The light in the basement of our house was always on, mysteriously, even when we knew we had turned it off. One day, we waited and watched, quietly, in the dark. Suddenly, the light went on, in a flurry of sound. There was Max, guilty, with the pull string wrapped around his paw, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do. The basement was his space, after all. On the other paw, he never turned it off. Ouch.
Before long , the teen-age Max discovered the hatch in the roof, and the ladder under it, that I used to go out onto the roof, for repairs or just to see the city skyline. He was out there like a flash, and lured the others with him.
Soon, it became a routine summertime excursion, with all three cats roaming the roofs of the entire block of adjoining attached houses. When it was time for breakfast or dinner, I would ring the triangle bell, and shortly all three would come clambering down the ladder, and down the stairs all the way to their basement food stop.
Did I mention that it was the happiest time of my life?
Alas, it was not to remain so. My mother hadn’t liked my choice of mate, and tried her best to break us up. She made her older sister plead to me about how lonely she was in Ohio, and couldn’t I, please, please, come and visit with her. Sure, bring the cats and dog along, I love animals.
Like a fool, I did what she asked. But it was all a lie. My Max died that first night I was there. My aunt saw my grief, and said I should have children. She never had any herself. My mother, having showed up to hector me about leaving my unsuitable mate, had no interest in hearing about the cat. She failed in the attempt to separate me from Manya.
Slick and Nellie were now lost forever; they didn’t wander the roofs anymore. The shaggy Muffin lost her purpose. The basement light stayed off.
Manya and I went to the Ritz in Madrid, where she wrote me letters from Max in which he said, Je ne regrette rien. I still looked for the grey Max everywhere I went.
My first son was born a year later. A redhead, go figure, not grey? That man is now thirty-two, and he nursed his own dying grey cat, helping him gently cross over into yet another life.
