Johnny Cash and the Great Outdoors

Tom and I did not do the usual sort of honeymoon. We pretty much just bummed around Chicago for a couple of days and went back to work. A monthlong backpacking-through-Europe kind of thing was not in the cards at the time and anything else seemed uninteresting by comparison. So we spent a day at the Art Institute, did some much-needed relaxing and kinda called it a day. But the following weekend we drove to Indiana to meet Tom's best man Justin and his now-wife Maggie to go apple-picking, and right about there is where we begin our story.

The apple-picking itself was the usual mix of good old fashioned fun and binging on cider donuts. We finished the day with a late lunch trip to the local Culver's, and when we were nearly finished with our meals, I spotted an orange cat outside, just beyond the patio dotted with picnic tables. He was squatting in the mulch and doing his catly business. I pointed him out and hoped aloud that the chocolate lab laying at the feet of the folks eating outside didn't see him and eat his face, since he seemed like a nice orange fellow.

We bussed our table and headed out to the parking lot, and the orange cat was still lingering near the scrubby mix of daylilies and spirea that live in nearly every commercially engineered green space. I knelt down and made little smoochy noises at him, and he trotted right past me and proceeded to rub himself against Tom's leg. I should've known then he'd forever and always be Tom's boy.

I knew I had to have him. He seemed so loving and so lost--an angry pink bald spot on his shoulder made him all the more pitiable. I scooped him up in my arms and he immediately sunk his front claws into my shoulder.

Once in the car, Tom and I looked at each other and said something like, "Now what?" We had second thoughts. We already had two cats at home, a bossy female Russian Blue who had laid guilt trips on us since the first day we brought home a male kitten who grew into a Maine Coon mix with the sweetest little personality you could imagine. We drove to the county animal rescue to turn him in. They were already closed for the day.

After the attempted drop-off, during which the orange cat sprang from Tom's arms and tried to make a break for it, and we all somehow managed to herd him back into Maggie's car, we'd resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to take this cat home with us. Maggie offered up her dog's carrier for the trip back to the city. We'd get him fixed up and find him a good home, we agreed. We work with tons of cat lovers. Someone will want him, we said.

On the ride back we decided the cat should probably have a name. As if the universe itself had decreed it, the iPod switched on I Walk the Line by Johnny Cash, and I was done. Johnny Cash the Cat was on his way to the 24 hour emergency vet at Belmont and Clybourn to get checked out before we brought him home.

The veterinary assistant who set us up in our exam room gave him a once-over and said to Cash, "You found a couple of suckers, huh?" before leaving us briefly, to reappear with the doctor who said he was 2 to 3 years old, and was pretty much healthy aside from the intestinal parasites, which we affectionately dubbed "buttworms". He sent us home with a two week course of antibiotics and instructions to isolate him from our other cats, a neat trick in a one-bedroom apartment. And of couse, after you bond with a creature over buttworms, he's yours forever.

***

Needless to say, the more humble and downtrodden the beginning, the more loyal and loving the beast. Cash the Cat is a love machine, and is generally very much content to be a housecat who constantly begs for attention. But despite his now-domesticated ways, he often yearns for the outside world.

In the apartment, Cash's wanderlust was an issue--the landlords had a large dog that was not cat friendly, and we are generally opposed to an outdoor cat scenario in an urban environ regardless. So there was a quite a bit of him scooting past our legs on the way out and getting halfway down the stairs before throwing himself down deadweight like a political prisoner when we tried to pick him up and put him back in our space.

Now that we have a yard which is mostly secured, he gets short, supervised visits, and it is the BEST THING EVAR, PEOPLE. You would not believe how happy this cat is in these pictures. Fuzzy cuteness:

Cash gives the milkweed plants the hairy eyeball.

That shit growing all over that looks like grass, by the way? Garlic chives, that came over from the neighbor's yard. They're freaking everywhere. Luckily, Cash likes garlic.

And he likes catnip, Precious.