In pursuit of flavor

On the loss of a friend

I named him Vonnegut, after my favorite author Kurt Vonnegut, because I thought that would be a distinguished name for what I hoped to be an intellectual cat.

It proved an unwieldy mouthful, difficult to shorten in a way that felt right. Von? Vonny? Both turned my stomach. Fortunately, I lived with my brother and his wife at the time, and their adorable children couldn’t get the name straight. They could only remember the last bit: “What’s his name again? Nugget?”

So it goes.

I didn’t find him, really. He literally walked into my life.

There was no shelter, no pet store. I came home one night from a grueling restaurant shift to hear my brother shouting to me from the bathroom, “Deeda? Is that you? Come in here!”

I opened the door and immediately saw a tiny pair of yellow eyes, which I followed to a fuzzy black body, perched on my brother’s shoulder.

“He was outside! I opened the door and lured him in!”

Living on farmland, it was not uncommon to see the odd cat milling around or making itself at home in the barn. But a lone kitten? I immediately burst into tears. Being 18 and feeling lost, I immediately recognized this as some kind of sign. I begged to keep him, and my brother and his wife agreed, as long as I took care of him.

And I did. I spent my meager restaurant earnings on toys and food and treats. I took him everywhere with me: to friends’ houses, trick-or-treating with my nieces, for small car rides to hit a drive-thru for a snack to share. I was warned that loose cats in the car were a hazard, that they could weasel in front of the driver’s seat and under the pedals. But this little guy was perfectly happy sunning himself in the back window. 

As with all cats, he had his share of silly habits.

He loved to roll over on his back and meow at whoever was around, and he would lay like that for hours. And at a certain hour of the night, he would launch himself to the top of the cat tree and stare at me menacingly, at which point I would reach out to him and he would attack me playfully in a game we called “Fighter Biter.” He also enjoyed “going shopping” in the toy basket, wherein he would pull out whatever toy piqued his interest and immediately send it under the couch.

dickholedannis

A post shared by @dickholedannis

Instead of a cat bed, he had a Fisher Price baby rocker that he commandeered from one of my nieces and which my brother sent with me when I moved to Chicago.

And he loved, loved, loved to fuck with the blinds. He would try to paw them open, or just sit there and lick them. I asked Dennis once why he thought Nugget would do that, and he answered me, very plainly, “He seeks Flavor.”

This answer was certainly consistent with Nugget’s ravenous curiosity. There was a host of foods he adored: noodles, seaweed, Dennis’ mom’s pajeon. On his birthday, my restaurant coworkers would fry up a single fish stick for him, which I would feed him without the breading, and I would have to fight him off from licking my greasy work shoes. Once, I skimmed some foam off a beer and tentatively held my finger out to him, and he immediately licked it off. In his quest for Flavor, there were no limits, and it was my job to save him from himself, such as when I caught him making short work of an unattended stick of butter. It’s comforting to know that even as I attempted to rein him in, he never went without.

His willingness for adventure also extended to travel, as of course, he had to come with me when I moved from Wisconsin to Las Vegas a few years back. Most buddy road trips involve a carefully curated playlist and sightseeing, but mine involved having to spritz my buddy with cold water to make up for my broken air conditioning, and Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) on a loop to pass the time (it’s almost exactly an hour long.) And he fared surprisingly well, only complaining when he knew it was late and time to rest. He also didn’t mind when we arrived and I had to put on my swimsuit and give him a bath in my standing shower.

Eventually, I met Dennis and moved back home to be closer to him. He flew out to accompany me on the drive home, and we stayed in Chicago for a while, where Nugget met Cricket for the first time. They exchanged hisses, and when it finally came time for the four of us to move in together, I was terrified that they wouldn’t get along. And for the first few months, they didn’t.

But eventually they warmed to each other, and I would catch them snuggling.

They would still fight, nipping at each other’s butts and occasionally entering paw-to-paw combat, but there was a clear camaraderie for the rest of Cricket’s life. When we took her to the emergency vet for the last time before she passed away, as she lay in her carrier while Dennis and I prepared to leave, Nugget settled down in front of the bars and watched her soberly. I like to think he was telling her, one last time, that he loved her.

I made everything in my life about Nugget.

I would dress up like a witch on Halloween to honor my mythos of us as a bonded pair. He inspired my first Dungeons & Dragons character (a lazy, wisecracking Tabaxi I imagined he would be like if he could talk and could also do martial arts). And I littered my social media with pictures and musings about how much he meant to me. Naturally, he also became a part of Dennis’ writing, sharing some of the foods Dennis made and even becoming an ordained minister to service a bit. I worry that any future Food Is Stupid endeavors that might feature a new, non-Cricket, non-Nugget cat would feel a little bit like Sublime with Rome, but I suppose that remains to be seen. At this point, doing anything at all without Nugget feels wrong.

Over the years, I made him perhaps a larger part of my personality than I should have. When the diagnosis came in and the possibility of losing him arose, one of the first things I said to Dennis was, “I don’t know how I’ll ever be a whole person again.” I haven’t figured that part out yet, and I’m sure it will take some time. After all, he was what got me up in the morning. I worried about anything ever happening to me, because then, who would take care of Nugget? But after years of him being by my side in some of my darkest moments, I now wonder, who will take care of me? But that’s a lot of pressure to put on a cat, and I tried very hard not to let him see me cry more than he had to, and instead made sure to thank him profusely for being my best friend.

Still, I wish I could have given him more. More time, more love. As he was in the hospital, I flew into an angst I tried to explain to Dennis as feeling like Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith. And I wish I’d known to take some time off work or something to be with him. (Cue Harry Chapin.) I wasn’t even around for most of his last day.

But if there was one thing we were able to give him, it was Flavor.

As his energy dwindled, we would give him anything he wanted to eat, which included brisket, pork belly, Culver’s fried shrimp, ham, and clam juice. And on one of his last days, we ordered lunch from our good friend Ethan’s place, Hermosa Restaurant, and he included a side of fish, just for Nugget. He loved it.

The last day, or what I saw of it, was hard. But he was thrilled by the hard-boiled eggs Dennis was making, so after we made the call (in which I stupidly told the receptionist, “My cat! He’s got to go.”), we let him gorge himself on those, and two types of cheese, and butter. And he was happy.

It’s very common for pet owners to refer to their companion’s passing as “crossing the rainbow bridge” into some Thomas Kinkade afterlife. And that really is a beautiful visual, which I think suits a lot of pets wonderfully. I believe Cricket crossed the rainbow bridge. But Nugget, with the resiliency he showed in adjusting to indoor life and then moving across several states, followed a different path. His trip to a paradisal afterlife was hard-won, and his getting there was merely another leg on his journey in search of Flavor.

Humans fear death because it is unknowable, unfathomable. Unlike life, its depths cannot be plumbed for meaning. But I know Nugget, and I know that as he traverses the void, he will pursue what matters to him most in the absence of meaning. Everything will have Flavor, and nothing will hurt.

---