The Wheeze

Wheeze:  A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.

My therapist is really pushing the concept that my dead cat is not getting enough credit as a trigger for my recent anxiety troubles or The Troubles, as I call them.  This probably doesn't make the folks of Ireland happy but what can you do?  It is, as you know, all about me.

"But my father died,"  I point out.  "My mother died."

"Eh, what's the big deal," she says.  "Everyone dies.  Get over it.  Quit whining.  But losing a cat, that's some heavy shit."

This animal came into our lives in the mid-1990s, rescued from an animal shelter in a small rural town near our home in The Old City.  SuperK selected her because she sat in my wife's lap and seemed to be happy doing it.  My wife always wanted an affectionate lap kitten.  Alas, the animal was sick, not docile - she became a rampaging bitch once she shook off her illness. This has been a great source of amusement for me over the years.

I was really opposed to getting this kitten.  Frankly, I was jealous for a while because SuperK took a great deal more pleasure out of her company than she did from mine, and this was fairly early in our marriage when we were getting along a good sight better than we are now.  SuperK was still at the point where she found all of my annoying control freak shit sort of endearing.

This was a grey tiger kitten with a weird pattern of black stripes running from her head down the center of her back.  Frankly, she looked like she was decked out with the kind of landing beacons placed on an aircraft carrier to guide supersonic fighter jets attempting to land on a stormy sea, at night.  So we called her The Lizard, although SuperK used Lizzie in polite company.  I insisted on The Lizard.  I liked the fact that we added "The" to her name, too.  It was necessary.  Like The Edge or Pele or "Here's Johnny!" she didn't need a stinking proper name.

Wheeze:  (slang) Something very humorous or laughable.

As The Wheeze grew older she did not grow larger.  She was a very small cat.  Runt-like.  And like many small creatures she feared nothing.  She was not afraid of other, larger cats.  She was not afraid of dogs.  She was not afraid of loud noises.  She would sit in the living room with a slightly annoyed, vaguely alarmed look on her face as I blasted Black Sabbath.  She did not run from the vacuum cleaner.  In fact, she would refuse to move as the roaring vacuum cleaner approached.  I could bump into her in an attempt to make her move, and she would not move.  It was like "get that thing the fuck outta here.  I'm not going anywhere."  On a couple of occasions she got outside when other, larger cats were around, cats with claws, cats weighing twice as much as she did, and she would throw herself at these animals.  I never saw one of them take a swipe at her.  It was as if they were so stunned by the chutzpah of this tiny animal that they were paralyzed into inaction.

I'm sorry, Cat People, but I'm supposed to do this writing.