Bennie
It always begins with this: She chose me.
I was walking to work one September 2000 morning, passing the three-story apartment building in the middle of the block that looks like a converted hotel, when I heard a kitten bellowing for its mother. I searched the grass in front and eventually found a tiny orange kitty, eyes still closed and squealing like a severe weather siren. It was wandering around, clearly lost and afraid. The mother wasn't anywhere to be seen. It was dangerous to do so, but I took a moment to reassure the little thing before continuing on my way. Poor kitty resumed its lost cries right after I left.
When I returned home that afternoon, I couldn't see the kitten anywhere and couldn't hear it. I always hoped it had found it's mother, but feared that it had simply died of exposure and neglect.
The third week of October, I was again coming home from work and stopped to play with a black cat that had befriended me earlier in the year. As I scratched him, a hand-sized orange tabby kitten wandered out from under a shrub, trying to cry out but with a voice that was both squeaky and scratchy. It sounded like long-unused hinges caked in rust. The black cat hissed, but the kitty was insistent on coming to me. She seemed particularly lonely and looking for someone.
We played around for an hour then I got up to go home. Kitty leapt onto my pants and started climbing. I quickly discovered that kitty had some unusually long and very pointy claws. They were like tiny hypodermic needles. She made it up to my shoulders and wouldn't budge. She settled in, brushing my face with her forehead. I gave up on leaving and we played some more.
When I made to leave again, she was still insisting on coming along. By this time, I was resigned. I had been living alone in my apartment for several years and had thought, off and on, about getting a cat for a companion. I had always resisted, not wanting to try to shoehorn two of us into that small space. But it seemed that this kitten had made up our minds for me. I had a new pet.
I got her home and let her down onto the floor. Head and tail up, she immediately set to exploring her new home. I started a bath in the kitchen sink. After the sink was full, I caught a whiff of the most foul, noisome odor I'd ever experienced. I followed it into the bedroom, where i found kitty scraping the carpet alongside her black, tarry, horrifyingly evil turd. It was the most foul, evil thing I could imagine, dredged straight from the bowels of Hell itself. I couldn't guess what she'd been eating up to that point to make such a stink. It was quickly disposed of and the carpet cleaned as thoroughly as possible.
Kitty was swept into the kitchen for her bath. Well, actually it took two to get her clean. The first bath left the water grey! She looked like a rat and pleaded most piteously the whole time. But she cleaned up quite nicely. She had beautiful tiger stripes along her forehead and sides and legs, a cream underside including her jaw, and cream rings on her tail tip and around her eyes. She didn't seem to have any deformities or broken bones, nor any skin diseases.
I'm not one to name cats right away. I like to let their personalities drive the naming, or to allow for circumstance to propose something. That's how I've ended up with cats with names like Wildman, Dirtbox (later renamed Mom after all my friends complained), Sir Richard Francis Burton, Black Diamond, Petey Wheatstraw, Sprung, Farley, Gigantor and Princess Grace Kelly. Unfortunately, this kitty came by her name through tragedy.
I had a neighbor, Ben Dees, who was a great if cantankerous guy. He was retirement age, a short bandy guy from the country who knew everything happening in the neighborhood. Ben's health was pretty bad -- he had a number of dangerous ailments -- but he did his best to live normally. During a rough period, he helped me out with food donations and keeping me socialised. Ben's apartment was packed full of things he collected, hoping to fix up and resell one day. Those "one days" never came, though, and his apartment was a mess. He was also prone to making solutions to problems around the house by making do with wahtever was at hand. You would find all kinds of Rube Goldberg solutions to normal situations all over the place. He was an odd duck.
One early Sunday morning, we heard ambulances at his place. It turned out his next door neighbor had noticed a truly horrible odor overnight. When the police came and went into his apartment, it turned out that he had died several days earlier. They found a bottle of nitro pills scattered around him; he hadn't been quick enough to save his heart. He had lain face-down on the floor until the late-summer heat -- Ben used fans instead of A/C to save money -- had done its work.
In going through his papers, trying to locate his family, I learned that his full name was Bennie James Dees. This was not even a week after I'd gotten the kitty, so it seemed perfect to name her Bennie in his memory. Some folks wonder at a girl named Bennie, but if you've lived in the South it's not so odd. I'v known Geraldines, Earlines, Raylines and some Bobbies, Ronnies and Jimmy-Lous. It's a Southern thing.
So, she became Bennie.
Bennie quickly got accustomed to the apartment. She explored every possible space and taught me the meaning of "cat proofing." She tried to sleep in the bed with me, but everytime I rolled over at night, I'd hear this frantic squeak! of warning because she slept too close. It took us nearly three years to work out sleeping arrangments.
Bennie's a quiet cat. She's never developed a meow like most cats have. At best, she will make that nasal nyooowr of a cat with a problem. Which is usually that she wants out. But most times she's very quiet. She's incredibly affectionate, always rubbing her head on me to get me to scratch and rub her. If I cross my arms while at the computer or in my chair, she immediately climbs on board to nap. She will climb into the bed at night and paw the covers to let me know she wants under them; if that doesn't work, she paws my nose until I wake up!
Bennie has, sadly, developed some of my fear. Rainstorms and thunder make her go to her special place: up on the water heater under the kitchen counter. Same for new people, loud trucks and startling noises. She'll stay there for hours after the trouble passes, napping safely away.
I've developed a theory of why she seems to have been abandoned, which I alluded to earlier. She had unusually long and very sharp claws. They don't fully retract, they're so long, so that they are always a danger. When she tried to knead my chest, as cats will do when they regress into kitten behavior, it's a painful experience I can tell you! I have the strawberries on my chest to prove it. I can't imagine that her mother would put up with the discomfort at all and so rejected her. We were just lucky to have crossed paths as we did.
We make a good pair. She doesn't wander far off when I leave the door open for her. Mostly, she stays on the breezeway or the first floor landing. She will go around the building, but if I make a certain whistle, she'll eventually make her way back home. Once she got the hang of her litter box, she has never made a mistake. Not once in four years now! I'm deeply impressed and grateful, believe me. I had a cat once who peed by the front door every day. Whew! Bennie doesn't scratch the furniture up. I made a sacrifice of an ottoman to her and she's satisfied with it, leaving all the other furniture alone.
She's not always the brightest cat. Even now, she still doesn't understand that just because a newspaper is flat like a chair or table top, it still won't support her. When she was little, she would leap onto the paper I was reading and fall straight through to the floor. It bewildered her every time. She still steps gingerly on newspaper to this day. Doors still scare her a bit, ever since she got her tail caught in one.
I still marvel at her ability to sleep for hours less than a foot away from the electric heaters in the apartment. I can only stay there a minute at most, but she's racked out all day long. Lay your hand on her fur, and it's hot. How can she stand it?
She's a catholic eater: only dry food for her. She likes to sniff everything I eat, but then will wrinkle her nose and turn away with disdain. Bennie only eats wet cat food if it's all that's left out for her.
Bennie can be surprising, though. One day, she kept making frantic noises and paced in agitation after a moth that had gotten into the apartment. It was staying higher than she could reach. Bennie would look to me, then the moth, then she'd make her irritated sound. I finally walked over to see if I could help. Bennie flew to the counter, up to my shoulders, then stretched out to the wall to slap the moth with her paw! She had somehow figured out, with no prior experience, to use me as a ladder. We've done something like that many times since. Smart girl!
Bennie is a mouser, too. She once caught one that was hiding in the kitchen under-sink counter, playing with it until I took it away. She's relentless with roaches, spiders, moths, crickets and other household pests. She once chased a bird into the apartment and almost caught it by herself.
I had worried that the apartment would be too small for the two of us. But "Casa Dos Amigos" has proved to be just right. She and I can each find our own space when we need it. She can make room nearby on the desk when I'm on the computer. We have more than enough room for "Where's Bennie?"
She's a good girl. A faithful companion. A loving roomie. A barrel full of monkies. A source of worry and joy. Surprise and delight. Irritation, sometimes. She's kept me from completely withdrawing from the world. She loves me, in her catty way. It's the pure and selfish affection of any pet for her "big guy." It keeps me happy.
And I always remember, with profound humility and boundless affection, that she chose me.
