Inappropriate With A Dash Of Bad Timing

I don’t always have the best timing. I tend to fall in love with new restaurants just before they go out of business, arrive at boutiques during the 30-minute window the owner has gone for lunch and discover listings for events two days after they happened. 

Usually, my poor timing is just inconvenient. On other occasions, it’s downright awkward. 

Last summer, I took in a cat that I found in the woods behind the SO’s house. You might remember her.* She was declawed, skinny and nearly hairless, so I gave her a name that I thought was befitting of the time we would be spending together trying to get her well. 

At the time, the SO and I already had two dogs and a cat, and he made it clear we would not be adding to the menageries. (The SO has to draw the hard line on pets with me. Otherwise, we would have a zoo.) A couple of potential new homes for her fell through, and the days she was supposed to stay with me turned into weeks. 

In the middle of July, after months of having my house on the market, I decided to rent it out. I placed the Craig’s List ad and expected for it to take some time. Instead, I had three couples ready to sign a lease within 48 hours. Not wanting to waste time, I decided to move out as fast as I could. This amped up moving schedule also meant that  I needed to find a new foster home for my rescued kitty ASAP. 

A very kind friend helped me find a foster family. All I had to do was run the cat to a particular vet for her second round of shots. (I mention this only so that my vet doesn’t think I was cheating on him. The other vet had a relationship with the animal rescue service.) 

I didn’t realize the vet I was seeing required appointments, so I got there only to find out that they couldn’t see me for a few hours. I probably could have called first, but considering my aversion to the phone, I obviously didn’t. Not wanting to stress the cat out with too much travel, I left her with the vet’s office until I could come back for the appointment. Also, I had been keeping one of those plastic collars on the cat to help her hair grow back, but I decided to take it off for our vet visit. 

When I came back and they handed me the cat, I saw that she had rubbed off the hair where she would have had eyebrows if cats had eyebrows. (That plastic collar wasn’t cruel after all for anyone who might have judged me.) 

“What happened here?” I said. 

“That’s pretty bad,” the veterinary assistant said. “Your cat might be a self-mutilator.”

“The cat might be a what?”

“A self-mutilator. It’s a type of anxiety disorder. It’s very rare, but it does happen.”

Thinking of the Xanax in my purse at the time, I knew you couldn’t give a cat an anxiety disorder, but I still felt kind of guilty. “An anxiety disorder?” I said. 

“Have you noticed anything strange about her?”

I suppose I had been too distracted by her near-hairless state and love of rubbing up against my face to notice anything else. 

“How much does the cat sleep?” she said.

At that moment, I realized that I never saw the cat sleep. I had been taking care of an anxiety-ridden, insomniac cat for four weeks and never noticed? Now my guilt was more akin to shame.

“Not much,” I said.

“Yep, it’s probably the anxiety,” she said. “We’ll just put her on some meds, and it should help out.”

After an examination by the vet, who confirmed the anxiety diagnosis, I took the cat’s prescription and was on my way. My next stop was to meet the cat’s new foster family in the parking lot of a local movie theater.

So, there I was, standing in the parking lot of a strip mall (most likely wearing yoga pants covered in dog hair and a torn t-shirt) with a self-mutilating cat and a bottle of kitty Prozac when the cat’s new foster parents got out of the car. I handed the cat over and told them all about our adventure at the vet. 

“Thank you so much for helping me out. I really appreciate it,” I said. “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

“I think we’ve got it,” the woman said, “but what’s her name?” 

“This is going to seem really inappropriate,” I said. It had been a big week in pop culture news. “But I’ve been calling her Amy Winehouse.”

"Ah."

(She was in rehab at my house. I thought it was fitting. Then Amy Winehouse died tragically, and even though the foster family was very kind about it, I still felt like an incredibly insensitive person. )

That day, I sent off a self-mutilating, anti-depressant-taking, nearly-hairless cat named Amy Winehouse to a new foster family three days after Amy Winehouse died. 

It is a day that will forever be marked by shame. 

*Amy Winehouse really is the name that stuck. I just never took to Buscemi. The above exchange  actually happened.