Kitty Carlisle

Carlisle came to us in late 2004 as a stray in Robert's Redwood City neighborhood. He was an adult stray with some history.

His clipped left ear told the story that he had been trapped, neutered, and released in the course of someone's management of a feral colony, so we knew he had been on the streets for a while. At first we knew little else because he wouldn't let us near him, but he acted curious from his distance, like a fearful, long-stray pet, not with the real people-aversion of a true feral who had never lived with a great ape like us.

I started feeding him. At first he wouldn't even eat while we watched from afar but after a few weeks he occasionally let us pet him while he ate. A few months later he was a real companion, flopping almost daily while Linda and I petted him on top of the fence that had a great covering of morning glory vines. Sometime during this period Linda named him Kitty Carlisle.

Now we were able to check him out up close, and his broken right canine told us he had some kind of big story that we would never know about. He was probably hit by a car at some point; that's how cats' long teeth usually get broken.

He didn't show up every day for food so it seemed clear he had other connections in the neighborhood. I put a collar on him with a little capsule containing a note with my phone number. After a few weeks I got a call from a nice neighbor, Beth, who had also been feeding him as a stray. Beth called him Barney. Besides Beth, Linda, and me, we never found evidence of any other humans in Carlisle's life.

When I started preparing to move in late 2006 or early 2007 I checked with Beth to let her know I planned to move Carlisle to a new place, indoors, in San Francisco with Linda; Beth was OK with it as long as it was a good home, and I reassured her I thought it would be a real step up in lifestyle for him compared to the streets of our Redwood City neighborhood where I'd seen and heard other cats get injured, fight with racoons and opossums, and squabble with each other.

In July, 2007 the big move came, and Carlisle had a tough initial adjustment period. He was in an unfamiliar place and suddenly indoors, too, after years of being outside. He got the hang of things, though he still hid in a drawer in our bedroom closet from every new visitor to the house.

Gradually he grew less fearful and more at ease with new people. By the end, he would sometimes calmly walk into a living room full of loudly chatting visitors and ask to be petted. He never stopped hiding from the house cleaning crew, though!

What Carlisle loved most:

Making each meal an adventure of a hundred small snacks, each snack a trip to his bowl that had to be picked up and put back down every time to keep Olbddddy, our other cat, from gobbling up Carlisle's food;

Being held across a shoulder in the perfect way that he taught us was his favorite. He never seemed to get tired of being held like that as we stood, and he would stay in our arms as long as we could hold him, especially if we didn't sit down;

Lying on the warm terra cotta tiles of our patio, rolling in leaves and dirt optional;

Napping after negotiation with Olbddddy on the Poäng or another chair;

Sitting and getting petted in the lap of a person watching a movie in the living room.

Carlisle never seemed to mind when Linda and I voiced the thoughts we imagined for him in our high-pitched best imitation of Michael Jackson. It always seemed like the right voice for Carlisle because Carlisle was a lover, not a fighter.

He liked to come into the bathroom when anyone had just stepped out of the shower so he could rub against a person's wet legs. This was also a favorite time to get petted and flop on the bath mat, something he rarely did otherwise. I'm not sure we ever understood Carlisle's dominance or submission to Olbddddy; Carlisle would stand near a napping Olbddddy, put front paws on him, and knead in a display that seemed like a hybrid of familiar behaviors, mixed in a combination I'd never seen. I liked to say Carlisle was feeling stand-onnish when he did this.

In early August, 2018, we noticed Carlisle's breathing had grown noisier and Linda took him to the vet Monday, August 13, where endoscopy revealed thickening of the mucous membranes around his larynx. Biopsy results came back on Thursday, saying the cause was squamous cell carcinoma, and there's no humane surgical nor medical treatment available for this. Over time the cancer's growth would obstruct his breathing more and more, eventually leading to asphyxiation at an unpredictable time that could be the next day or that could be weeks in the future (but probably not months). We didn't want to put him through that, so we opted to euthanize Carlisle on Saturday, August 18, 2018.

He was probably somewhere between 15 and 18 years old, most likely 16 or 17, and except for the one thing that made us decide to end his life, he was healthy and happy to the end. It's hard to know the mind of a cat, but to us he always seemed like the most kind-hearted soul, always gentle, always wanting to be nice.

Carlisle was a cat.