Let’s Just Be Glad for the Time Together

Avery the Cat, not acting as if he’s doing the author any favors.

Avery the Cat, who said goodbye to Stephanie and me on Saturday night after more than 16 years of lighting up a room in ways Fred Wilpon and Art Howe could only imagine, hung in there long enough to learn the identity of the new Mets manager. Steve Cohen tweeted that Buck Showalter was his choice. I looked over to Avery after relaying the news. Avery seemed comfortable with Buck. You might even say Avery got to see Showalter manage the same number of games he saw Carlos Beltran manage.

Avery, the fourth of our cats overall but the first of our cats to choreograph an offseason departure, showed up at the Prince abode on a Friday night in September of 2005. Pedro Martinez was pitching for the Mets and shutting out the Braves while Avery acclimated himself to his new surroundings. Pedro needed two hours and four minutes to dispose of our rivals. Avery needed about two hours and three minutes less than that to feel at home with us. When we adopted Avery’s future brother Hozzie three years prior, we followed expert advice and quarantined Hozzie for about a week-and-a-half before intermingling him with reigning Prince cat Bernie. It was sound advice and it worked for Hozzie.

It wasn’t the script to follow for Avery. Avery would not be contained to one room for ten whole days or, really, ten whole minutes. We gave up on the futile quarantining by Saturday afternoon. Released from kitten purgatory, Avery bounded into the living room and commenced taking up residence. He lived rent-free in Hozzie’s head. And anywhere else he damn well pleased.

The arrangement was ideal for everybody. Even Hozzie got on board with having a little brother. They formed a cordial working relationship in 2005 and maintained it until Hozzie’s farewell in 2017. When we were down to one cat previously, as happened when Casey left us in 2002 and Bernie said au revoir in ’05, our instinct was to begin the process of pairing up anew. Our first pair of cats could never be replaced, but, we reasoned, they could be succeeded. We didn’t do that post-Hozzie. Stephanie and I agreed Avery preferred life as a solo act, the total focus of our feline-directed attention. He wasn’t looking to add “welcome a new kitten into my sphere” to his portfolio of eating, sleeping and running around like a kitten himself. We knew that not having a spare on hand might come back to haunt us — and maybe it has (“solo act” is almost an anagram for “cat loss”) — but from July of ’17 to Saturday night, it was the right call. We were cat people, singular.

Now we are catless people. Avery’s still here in every sense but the physical. You don’t stop having Avery with you just because you stop having Avery with you. I sense his presence everywhere. I imagine that will wear off somewhat, but not for a while. Avery stayed close to Stephanie and stayed close to me and stayed close to us. He was better at proximity — laps, chests, heads, rides on my right shoulder like I was the driver from Kitty Uber — than any cat we’ve experienced. He was as interactive as he was wired. He never acted like he was doing us a favor, either, for Avery the Cat didn’t do us any favors intentionally. He just happened to be warm for our respective forms and if we happened to like that he liked us, good for us.

Great for us, actually.

In baseball terms, Avery was Hank Aaron. Bernie, you see, was Babe Ruth (forgive me for invoking Pinstripe mythology here). Bernie, Stephanie’s and my first cat together, actively roamed our hearts for nearly 13 years, set what seemed like unbreakable records and changed the game completely. Before I met Bernie on Halloween 1992, I didn’t realize I was a cat person. For his deeds, of which we still speak in awe today, Bernie earned the nickname The World’s Greatest Cat.

Then comes Avery to succeed (not replace) Bernie, and Avery, quite frankly, surpasses the records set by Bernie. He was, after a while, clearly the No. 1-ranked cat in the world. Our world, anyway. He put up bigger numbers than the Babe. He’s Hank Aaron, in other words. What was it Hank Aaron said about trying to withstand the pressure of chasing and bettering the all-time career home run mark?

“I don’t want people to forget Babe Ruth. I just want them to remember Henry Aaron.”

Needless to say, we remember all our cats fondly and thoroughly. And we’ve loved all of them equally. But, per George Orwell, some animals are more equal than others. Avery earned that top ranking of his. No cat was smarter, whether he realized it or not. No cat was more fun, whether he meant to be or not. No cat was better equipped for having his people shelter in place during a pandemic. Avery might not have gone for quarantining when he was a kitten, but he was delighted to discover Stephanie and I planting ourselves on the couch, presumably for his playing pleasure, in the spring of 2020. Presence made everybody’s hearts grow exponentially fonder.

I’m a cat half-full person. I don’t notice the effects of cats getting on in years. I don’t notice when a cat’s shape isn’t quite what it was. I didn’t notice Avery losing weight at a precipitous rate as 2021 progressed. Stephanie would point it out to me with a raised eyebrow. I’d point out Avery was just on my shoulder this morning…and on my shoulder again twenty minutes after that for another ride. He had his medical conditions, but we were treating them. He’d outlasted all his predecessors. Let’s not question his longevity.

In late November, we took him to the vet for a checkup. The weight loss I’d looked past…the litter box-related discomfort I’d looked past…this thing the doctor was feeling that was probably something…there was no looking past all of it. Winter had arrived. Without much drama, we were told Avery was on the clock. Maybe he’d be around long enough to learn the identity of the next manager. Spring Training was listed as doubtful.

Last week it became apparent Avery’s ninth inning was underway. By Saturday morning, I was insistent that he was still fouling off pitches, stepping out of the box (so to speak), adjusting his wristbands, looking to the third base coach — delaying the game. I wanted it to go on a little longer, but that was probably me being selfish. Avery had given us all he had to give over the 16 years and three months since entering our home and hearts as a kitten with a Kitler mustache that I must admit I found offputting, but he grew out of it soon enough. I just wanted him to last the weekend, not to soak in the news of Buck Showalter, but to extremely reluctantly get him to the vet when the vet was open and the vet could do that “make him comfortable” euphemism for euthanasia — because, I swear, I thought Avery had a couple of more days in him. We could’ve made that trip Saturday morning, but he seemed to me in relatively decent shape Saturday morning. He was drinking water. He was visiting with us a little. Cat half-full. I’m not taking Avery out of the game before he’s ready to go.

Avery’s final swing came Saturday night, shortly before nine o’clock. He wandered around the house in strange ways. He sought refuge in a closet where Hozzie regularly hid but Avery almost never frequented. He prodded himself upstairs, which was usually too much of a schlep for him in recent weeks. He was being a cat, and cats nearing their end go off by themselves. They do that in the wild to elude predators, Stephanie reminded me…and they do that in a duplex where he was vulnerable only to our petting and stroking and telling him, in so many words, that he was our Hank Aaron.

He settled in under the dining room table, just off the kitchen. That had become one of his two spots of choice of late. There was a blanket on a recliner that became his and there was under the table, which he cultivated as his de facto office after Stephanie had taken to using the table for doing her job from home. Day after day, she’d be on her laptop, he’d be at her feet. When she’d shut down her workplace, he’d follow her to the couch and drape atop her lap. Or my chest, if it, too, was nearby. We were a full-service Avery buffet.

Saturday night, it was the table. His people gathered around him — two fiftysomethings sitting cross-legged on the floor like kids — each of us trying to soothe him, each of us failing miserably. Blessedly, there weren’t too many minutes of this, though it lasted too long for comfort. We had SiriusXM ’70s on 7 on in the background. I wondered what song what would be playing when the inevitable occurred, what song I’d hence never be able to hear again without associating it with Avery. Though it wasn’t the last number we’d hear with him, the one that has now become Avery the Cat’s song was delivered to us by Diana Ross: “Touch Me in the Morning”. Avery touched us in all dayparts. We never walked away.

After the final pitch — Pedro Martinez to Buck Showalter via Hank Aaron, if you will — well, we still had Avery in our midst, and no matter what was playing on our favorite satellite radio station, he wasn’t what you’d call the life of the party. That would be a bit of an issue on a Saturday night when your friendly local vet, who’s equipped to handle such details, is closed until Monday morning. Stephanie ferreted out some Hefty bags from under the sink and brought our handy Coleman cooler out of storage, I ran to the Superfresh for a couple of bags of ice, and…let’s just say Avery was one cool cat.

This morning, we brought him to the vet, where they handled the last detail. Maybe Buck Showalter would be proud to know we were detail-oriented. Or perhaps he’d fine us for not having prepared for every last eventuality. I can assure Buck that in our minds, we did. But you never want the game to be called until you’re absolutely certain your Hall of Famer can’t play any longer.