1987
1988
1989. Note that Fidget is taking a bite out of my roommate's cake while she's not looking.
1989
1991
1992
1995
(I know I have some more pictures from this period, but have to find them.)
2004
2004
2004
Dorchester, MA
I adopted Fidget from an animal hospital in Boston when I was 22. She'd been rescued from a negligent owner of some forty cats and was suffering from malnutrition. The first time I saw her, she was in a cage with several other kittens. (Oddly, her fur at that time was gray and white - the gray spots darkened to black later.) Unlike the other kittens, who were just lying there mewing pitifully, Fidget climbed up the side of the cage and tried to swat me with her paw. I thought that was funny, so I chose her.
She was my first pet, and I was rather incompetent with her at first. I brought her to live in an apartment in Boston that I shared with two roommates. The first night, I tried to get her to sleep in her own little "bed," but she kept hopping onto mine. At one point I carried her, bed and all, outside my room and closed the door, but she kept scratching at the door and mewing. I don't remember exactly how many days it took, but eventually she wore me down and I resigned myself to sleeping in a cat-hairy bed. This was more annoying than you might think, since her favorite place to sleep was directly on top of my throat.
Fidget used to eat voraciously. I sometimes thought if I let her eat as much as she wanted, she'd explode. Her favorite treat was SmartFood, the popcorn covered with white powdered cheese. I would throw her a piece and she'd run and eat it -- thus getting nutrition and exercise at the same time.
My first maternal scare was when Fidget managed to wander behind the stove and get herself stuck. Her cries for help completely freaked me out - I'd never heard such heart-rending sounds before! My roommate helped me carefully pull the stove an inch or so away from the wall. What a relief it was when Fidget emerged safe and sound!
After about a month, I moved to another apartment - same house, different roommate. The house was old and had mice, and I vaguely remember putting mousetraps and poison pellets behind the sofa and various other spots. What were we thinking? Fidget was small and, being a cat, liked crawling into hiding places. She could easily have gotten her paw caught in a mousetrap, or eaten the poison, but somehow she managed to avoid injury and death. In fact, she proved quite useful in ridding the apartment of mice.
One morning, as I was getting ready to leave for work, I was in the hallway approaching the living room when she looked up at me from the living room floor -- a twitching mouse tail hanging from her mouth. Of course Fidget was immensely pleased with herself, and came galloping towards me to present me with the mouse as a gift. I'm ashamed to say I was too wimpy to deal with this the way I should have. Instead of patting her on the head and thanking her for the gift, I ran back to my room and closed the door. Fidget returned to the living room to play with her catch. Now here I was, stuck in my room when I had to leave for work - and I had to pass through the living room to get to the door. Every time I opened my bedroom door and peered out, Fidget would excitedly run towards me with the mouse in her mouth. Fortunately, our apartment was on the first floor, so eventually -- mortified at my own cowardice -- I was able to sneak out the bedroom window. When I returned home from work, there was no sign of the mouse, though I did find a little spot of something on the floor that might have been mouse remains. In a way, I hope it was. Every cat should have at least one opportunity in life to eat a mouse. It's only right.
Hingham, MA
When I was 25 I moved back in with my parents long enough to finish my last year of college. My mother isn't crazy about animals, and was not pleased to have Fidget move in. Fidget, blissfully unaware of my mother's feelings, managed to charm her -- somewhat.
Fidget and I shared the basement, and my mother didn't like Fidget to come upstairs. Thankfully, she was out of the house a lot running errands, and we used those opportunities to give Fidget some exercise running up and down the stairs, exploring the bedrooms, and generally nosing around the parts of the house she wasn't supposed to be in. My sister Katie, by the way, was a co-conspirator in this -- and was also responsible for some of Fidget's most popular nicknames ("ma petite Fidgitte," "my little meow muffin," etc.)
Silver Spring, MD
In August of 1991 I moved to Maryland to take a job, thinking this would be a temporary gig -- two years, tops. My father and I rented a U-Haul truck and drove down with Fidget between us in a large dog-sized carrier. Traffic was bad, and the trip turned out to be a long one: over twelve hours. Dad helped me move in, spent the night, and then drove back to Massachusetts in the morning. Never having lived by myself before, let alone in a strange city, I was pretty intimidated, but Fidget was a great comfort. She was such an adaptable cat that she made adjusting to new living quarters look easy. She needed only to be shown where the litter box was and where the food was, and she was happy.
Still, I worried that Fidget was lonely cooped up in my small apartment alone all day. I adopted another kitten from the local animal shelter, but after I'd had it for a week, the test results came back showing it had feline leukemia. On the advice of the shelter people I had Licorice euthanized. Next, because feline leukemia is contagious, I had to wait on tenterhooks for several days to find out if Fidget had gotten it. Thankfully she was okay. The following year I adopted yet another cat, Bobbie (short for Bobcat), who I made sure was healthy before I agreed to take her.
She and Fidget didn't get along well at first. Strangely, it seemed Fidget was afraid of the tiny kitten, who would continually stalk and pounce on her. Eventually they adjusted to each other and became partners in crime. I'm convinced Bobbie, the juvenile delinquent, was a bad influence on the normally docile Fidget, convincing her to do things she wouldn't have thought of herself. For instance, one day I came home from work and noticed a cassette tape -- Linda Rondstadt -- in ribbons on the floor. Then, to my horror, I saw the actual tape hanging out of both cats' asses! It would have been funny if it hadn't been so dangerous (and expensive to treat). I rushed both cats to the vet, who kept them overnight and managed to get the tape out of them with the help of laxatives. It could have killed them -- and for what? I can't imagine the tape could have tasted very good. To this day, I still can't figure out why they ate it.
Gaithersburg, MD
I met Mike in 1992. In the fall of '93, Fidget, Bobbie and I moved into Mike's house in Gaithersburg. Bobbie, always the skittish one, was terrified by the move, and christened her new home by peeing all over the basement carpet. Fidget, though, took to the place immediately. The split-level was much larger than my old studio apartment, and had stairs she could run up and down. She'd always been a sociable cat, and adopted Mike as her father immediately.
Since then, Fidget hasn't had many adventures. Partly because they were raised in city apartments, and partly because I'm overprotective, we kept both cats indoors. On nice days, though, we'd sometimes take them out into the back yard on special leashes made for cats, and let them sniff around and eat grass. Fidget always liked sitting on top of the refrigerator, or on top of the cupboards even higher up, and looking imperiously down her pink nose at us mortals. She also enjoyed having her chin scratched, and curling up next to Bobbie for a nap. She did not enjoy Bobbie's odd little motherly attempts to groom her, however.
Once I made the mistake of leaving out some aluminum foil that had been used to cover chicken, and had grease on it. Fidget ate some of the foil, and again I had to bring her to the vet, who told me it could have killed her. Again, somehow she managed to come through intact. After that scare, I took care never to leave used foil or plastic wrap lying around even for a moment.
All these near-death stories probably make Fidget sound like a pain in the butt. Actually, she was a godsend. No matter how stressed out I was from work (at the time, I had a job I hated), I could always count on Fidget to calm me down. I don't know what it is about a cat's purring, but it's very tranquilizing. Another nice thing about cats is that they don't care if you're a loser -- in fact, the more of a loser you are, the more likely you are to stay home a lot and pay attention to them, which they like, and get fat, which they're in favor of because it makes your lap more comfortable. Fidget loved being a "lap cat," and whenever I sat down to watch TV or read, she'd hang out with me. In keeping with her penchant for eating strange things, for the brief period during which I used hair gel, Fidget would awaken me in the morning by licking my hair. It was an effective way to ensure she got her breakfast served in a timely fashion, since I was so disgusted by the thought of her eating that stuff that I'd hurry out of bed to make her stop.
Fidget was a friendly, people-loving cat. When strangers would visit our home, Bobbie would cower under the bed while Fidget would come and greet them. For the first ten or so years of her life she liked to play Kill the Shoelace Monster with anyone who offered, but as she got older her interest in such games waned gradually and she became more of an odalisque -- a hedonist, obsessed with love, and happiest in comfortable repose. Also, as she aged she was still able to jump up, but didn't like jumping back down off things. Mike made a little ramp out of plywood and carpeting so she wouldn't have to jump off the bed. As the tallest member of the household, he frequently served as a kind of human ramp for Fidget, offering his shoulder to her when she wanted to get down from the refrigerator. I think Fidget grew to love Mike as much as she did me in her final years.
Last year Fidget was diagnosed with kidney disease, and we had to start giving her fluids subcutaneously twice a week to keep her from getting dehydrated. That is, not intravenously (in a vein) but with a needle under the skin at the scruff of her neck. We tried to do it ourselves a few times, but were just too wimpy and couldn't deal with it, so we hired a gal from the cat clinic to come by and do it for us. The fluids seemed to help for a while, along with various medicines we tried, but Fidget still wouldn't eat much, and threw up often. She lost weight, dwindling down to six pounds. On Saturday, May 1, 2004, our vet gave us the bad news: Fidget had inoperable stomach cancer.
That day I took Fidget for her last walk in the back yard. All the other times I'd taken her outside on her leash, she'd always wanted to snoop around under the deck, and I'd never let her because I didn't want to follow her under there. It was dark and dirty and cobwebby. This time, though it was a beautiful sunny day, and I couldn't imagine why she wanted to go there, I granted her request. I'm not sure how long the two of us hung out under the deck, but it was long enough for Fidget to lie down on the bare dirt and take a catnap. In the evening, I fed her the only thing I could still get her to eat: some tiny pieces of Monterey Jack. Seventeen years after her first taste of SmartFood, she still loved cheese.
The next morning, Mike and I took her to the animal hospital and had her euthanized. Then we took her body home in a small cardboard box and buried it in the back yard. Her grave is in the garden, near a butterfly bush and some ferns and Coral Bells.
I know some people think it's strange to get so emotional over the death of a cat. Those people can stuff it. Fidget was a part of our family, and a delightful one at that. She loved us, and we loved her. We'll never forget her, and we'll always be grateful for the time we had with her.