Zachary

This is the story of Zachary. He found me, as most cats do, in Seattle in October of 1992. Scott and I had just moved into an apartment on Pine, a really busy street, near downtown. We didn't have our phone hooked up to the door yet and we were having a friend over for dinner. I went down to the lobby to wait for our friend to arrive. While I was waiting, a man came to the door with a beautiful, fluffy gray cat with clear, wise, green eyes.
He told me he had found the cat outside wandering around, trying to get out of the rain. I said the cat might be my neighbors' cat and took him into my arms. He was very sweet and very happy to be in my arms. He had no tags and no collar.
I took the cat to the neighbors' house and they laughed. Their girl kitty looked nothing like the gray kitty I was holding. I immediately took him home and told Scott we might have a new kitty joining us. We made a poster and plastered the neighborhood with them. We never received one call. He adopted us easily. We were good suckers for it.
My kitty Jazmine was still in California when we found Zachary. When she arrived in Seattle she was NOT happy to meet Zachary. She was really angry about the whole thing. Eventually she got used to him and even grew to love him fairly quickly.
Zachary was a one man show. He loved feather toys and anything he could wrestle to the ground and kill. He could jump two to three feet in the air. We both played with him for hours at a time. While we were living in the apartment on Pine Street, we lived on the top floor of a converted warehouse. It was pretty fancy and the top units each had an outdoor patio big enough for a chair or two and some plants. All of them were connected, with low barriers. Zachary taught Jazmine to go from patio to patio. I believe he even made a habit of visiting people in their apartments. Not much changed over the years!
We did some kitty research and found a photo of a Norwegian Forrest Cat. It was an exact replica of Zachary. Norwegian Forrest Cats are known for their love of people, being really smart, needing companionship and playmates, having large paws and continuing to grow up to 4 years old. That was Zachary, although I don't think he ever got over 15lbs. (I have a friend with a 30lb Maine Coon cat! Prince Willie)
Scott and I moved to a duplex in the Fremont District of Seattle after living in Seattle for a little under a year. Zachary loved our new digs. He was allowed to be outside for the first time since his escape (or his exile?) from his first family. There is nothing he loved more than to roam the neighborhood. He made friends everywhere he went. There were a number of occasions that he would wander off and stay away for two or three days. I would always find him walking down the street as if he was just on his way home.
When Scott and I broke up, I got custody of Jazmine and Zachary. There was no question in my mind about who should have custody of Zachary, but apparently, Scott loved him as much as I did and seemed to be really sad about having to leave him with me. It was this way in which Zachary really made an impression on people.
About a year or so later Zachary became an only child. Jazmine was hit by a car during the day when I was at work. It was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. Her spine had been broken and she was paralyzed from her shoulders down. The only thing I could do was have her put out of her misery. God that was awful. She was my own very first kitty. It seemed that Zach missed her, but how can you really tell?
I eventually had a roommate. May had a 19 year old cat, Prince. He and Zachary got along great. I always hoped Zachary would live that long or longer.
There were only two cats Zachary was ever afraid of. One was "Gimpy" aka Bazil. He lived with the girl next door. He had a bad front paw (and he was mean) so we called him Gimpy. Apparently the trauma to his paw really affected his personality. There are very few cats I would call "mean" but he was definitely one of them. He would pace back and forth outside my place, looking in the windows to catch a glimpse of Zachary. If any windows were open Gimpy would happily come in and chase Zachary around our house! It got ugly a few times. I am sure they both lost fur and skin more than once. Gimpy's mom tried to keep him in as much as possible, but sometimes wasn't successful.
Zachary and I left Seattle for Berkeley in 1997. We moved in with my parents and their cats, Trouble and Pandora. He took to Trouble fairly easily. Pandora didn't really have anything to do with him. She is another story altogether.
After about a year and a half Zachary and I moved out of the parents' house and into an apartment in Oakland with my cousin Dylan.
Shortly after, Dylan picked out a kitty for himself at the SPCA in San Francisco.
This was only one of the many kittens Zachary had to accept into his life. He did it with absolute grace. He got along very well with other cats most of the time.
He continued to run away occasionally. He made friends everywhere he went. And he loved a party. Most cats will run and hide when there are lots of people around. Zachary, however, was quite the party animal. He would spend time mingling and sitting on laps whenever there was one to sit on.
Zachary enjoyed all the finer things in life, many of them things I enjoy myself... he was a man after my own heart. He liked to sleep in till all hours of the day, he regularly ate tortilla chips, bread, and he LOVED butter, preferably right off the stick in the dish on the counter.
It was during this time that we had to start shaving him. While in Seattle I had him groomed once at the vet. I think they gave him some drugs to accomplish it. When we were at my parents' house I took him to a groomer who said they could groom any cat. They were confident it wouldn't be a problem. When we picked him up he was mostly shaved, but not completely and the women said they would never have him back because he was so vicious. He really hated being shaved.
At our apartment on Benvenue my mom, Dylan and I all got together to shave him. We were using a people shaver and it wasn't working very well at all. All of his fur was getting caught in it and clogging it up. At that point my mom grabs her bag and pulls out a pair of MONSTER clippers! These things were seriously on steroids. About two or three times the size of normal clippers. They certainly did the job. Very quickly too. After clipping him we called him the "Lamb Lion."
The second really mean kitty Zachary encountered showed up when Dylan, Dawn, Wendell and I lived in the big house on Benvenue. The cat was another white cat. He would come into the house in the middle of the night and terrorized Zachary and Tom. Neither Zach nor Tom were easily intimidated, but there is something about being woken up in your own house by some terrorizing freak of a cat. I think we called him "Paycho kitty." When we went to tell it's owner she couldn't believe that her sweet, loving cat was literally going after our cats. I think she finally put him on some prozac and she kept him in the house at night. he stopped coming around.

Zachary and I moved back in with my parents at the end of 2001. We were back home. Although I bought a house in Oakland and moved out of my parents house in July 2002, Zachary stayed with his grandparents. My house was in a pretty bad neighborhood. My mom wasn't happy about me moving there, I guess she felt she had to draw the line with her grandkitty. She was worried he might get eaten by a pit bull or something.
During his years with my parents, Zachary was very well taken care of. He had the run of the house and kept all the other animals (Pandora, Trouble, Pancake, Inky, and Finnegan) in line and where he wanted them. For example, Inky was not allowed on the bed with Zachary until recently.
When he was out in the neighborhood he also reined supreme. My step-dad, Mark received a telephone call and the person asked if he belonged to Zachary. Once ownership had been established the guy said that Zachary was sitting on the dining room table as if he owned the place. Mark said, "Yep, that's Zachary. Can I come get him?" And the neighbor said it was fine and he actually liked Zach and he could stay as long as he wanted.
Zach also taunted the neighbor's dog by sitting up on the fence just out of reach of the dog, until the dog was frothing at the mouth. That particular dog almost got Zach in the front yard when he was off guard.
At one point a year or so ago, Zachary was staying out all night. Unlike my cats, Zachary had to be home for dinner and in for the rest of the night. But he had found a home down the street where the owner was feeding feral cats. Zach, being opportunistic would wait around for the food and scarf it down. There was no reason for him to come home!
One day Zach was outside with Mark. Zachary had recently been shaved and looked like his little lamblion self. Someone walked by and asked if he was some special breed.
In the last year, Zachary had been getting really skinny. Last May he had a tumor on his back left leg. The tumor had not metastasized, but his leg needed to be amputated. He became a tri-pod kitty and actually adjusted to having only 3 legs rather quickly. What he didn't get used to was being home-bound. Due to his compromised ability to run, he was no longer allowed to leave the house. He did get away a few times, and was thrilled to run around the neighborhood while my Mom was in a complete panic.
The last days of Zachary's life he spent curled up in a ball under various tables and in a box of bedding in the basement. He didn't eat much and when he did he wasn't able to keep it down. An ultrasound showed a cancerous tumor in his intestine. There was no way to remove it and it was only a matter of time before it would kill him. Rather than waiting for certain death, my Mom, Mark and I decided to have him put to sleep in the most humane way we could. We were able to locate a vet who does house calls only for euthanasia of animals.

I arrived at my parents before the vet came to the house so I would have some time to spend with Zachary. I retrieved him from his bed in the basement. I decided I would take him outside to enjoy some fresh air since it had been more than a year since he was allowed to go outside. We sat on the back deck taking in the sun and breeze. At first he tried to get away from me, but eventually was convinced I wasn't going to let him go. After about 5 minutes, I went to the front yard and sat on the stoop of my parents' house. He got calm more quickly this time, settling in to being held and petted. Zachary had big, soft paws. I stroked them and thought about having one on a key chain like we used to have lucky rabbit's feet. Remember those? Zachary would have left a beautiful lucky cat foot!
The euthanasia process was relatively quick and mostly painless. My Mom, Mark and I all sat on the love seat in the living room. Zachary was on my Mom's lap; Mark and I on either side. Zachary was looking at me to the last minute. His eyes ever green, clear, all seeing, seemingly all knowing. Just like they were when he found me.
He was loved by all who met him. The king of cats. He will live on in our hearts.