Warning: This story will most likely bore you. I don’t care.
Posted: July 7th, 2008 | Author: alexiarudolph | Filed under: Animals | Tags: basil, cats, stories | 2 Comments »Last night I came home around 10pm after spending the evening at my mom’s house to find our front window open. We usually leave them open a tiny crack, to get a breeze when it’s hot out, but I have told Aaron before to be careful not to open them too much and tempt the cats to squeeze out. But, as often happens with Aaron, my words had fallen on deaf ears. Basil was sitting there, in the windowsill, sticking his head out, looking at me. Instantly, I was struck with fear. Fear of our house getting broken into and there being a serial killer waiting inside for me? Oh no. THE CATS GETTTING OUT! Oh no! Right on cue, out of the corner of my eye, I see a cat dart at me from across the courtyard. Oh, hi Mia! Hi Mia, you indoor-only cat you. How nice that you are outside here, and not safe on the inside where you belong. I grabbed her, unlocked the door and immediately started yelling at Aaron. Everyone knows the one rule of our house, and that rule is DON’T LET THE CATS OUT! He was asleep, and I yelled at him a little but decided to save my official scolding for the morning (This morning, approx. 5AM, as he is getting ready for work, I yell from my room, “Aaron! Come in here so I can yell at you!!” He knew he was in trouble.) Luckily, everything was fine and really, my cats have no desire to run away. Anyway, the point of this rambling is that this past weekend was the one year anniversary of the origin of my fear of losing my cats. One year ago was the Traumatic and Horrible Week that Basil Disappeared.
Last July I was about two weeks into a new living arrangement with a girl I didn’t know at all. Things were going fine, and the cats were happy. I left the weekend before the Fourth of July to go camping with my family at Detroit Lake, and she said she would feed the cats for me while I was gone. I came home the night of the 3rd. I walked in the door and Mia instantly starting acting weird. I could tell something was up. Basil was gone. I looked everywhere in the house, and then started roaming the streets calling his name (wearing a bikini and a bathing suit cover up, at 11pm). I called my roommate and she told me that he had been there when she left (I later found out from our other roommate that that wasn’t true.) I finally gave up and went to bed. The next morning I woke up and it hit me all over again, like a bad dream. It was the Fourth of July and it was about a million degrees outside. I made about 100 fliers and spent the day plastering the neighborhood with Emily’s help. I immediately started getting calls from friendly neighbors (I love Sellwood) who thought they had seen Basil. These all turned out to be false leads, sadly. I attempted to go out to a friend’s party that night, and ended up having to leave because I started crying uncontrollably when I thought of Basil being alone outside with all the loud fireworks. He was only nine months old, and had never been apart from me before since my brother had rescued him from death when he was only four weeks old. The next couple days were honestly some of the most difficult of my life. And yes, I know, my life has been extremely easy in terms of tragedy that I consider my cat disappearing to be so high on the list. But I even rank it higher in crappiness than finding out I was pregnant and dealing with all that. Animal craziness runs in my family. We can’t help it. We take it very seriously. Anyway. I walked around the neighborhood, drove around the neighborhood, spent hours calling his name. I visited the humane society and every animal shelter I could find. I did everything I possibly could, and I still didn’t have my cat. I was absolutely, completely heartbroken. The evening of Friday, July 6th, I came home from work and started contemplating moving on with my life. Aaron (my current roommate, you’d think he would have learned) called me to see if I was planning on going out that night, and I went outside and sat on our front steps to talk to him. In the middle of our conversation I heard it: Meow. Meow. Meow. Loud meowing. Not Mia’s meowing. Sidenote: The morning after I got home from camping I had heard similar meowing outside in the same place, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Then a loud car drove up and some people walked up the stairs and it stopped. This time I was DETERMINED to find the source. I dropped the phone, still on, mid-conversation, and ran down the stairs to the bottom of our townhouse. Second sidenote: Our townhouse was connected to another townhouse, and on both sides there were these square holes that went to underneath the house. We left ours open, for the stray cats that lived under there. Our neighbors had theirs blocked with styrofoam cubes (guess they hate cats). Anyway, I ran down there, towards the noise that increasingly sounded just like my cat. I pulled the styrofoam out of the hole, and yelled “BASIL!”. Instantly, he popped his head through the hole. I grabbed him and ran inside and collapsed from relief, with him still in my arms. It was, hands down, the best moment of my life (again, don’t judge me). I was so relieved, so happy. And so was he. Also, hungry. So, basically, I am not sure what happened to Basil, or how he got out, or how he got under the house, but then wasn’t able to get back out. It’s all a big mystery, and until he learns to speak (we are working on it) I will never know. The result of this experience was that I am now the most paranoid person in the universe about my cats. Part of me thinks that the reason Mia was out having an adventure last night and Basil was sitting nicely in the window is that he doesn’t want to get accidently separated from me again either.
He loves me.
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