A train wreck called Merlin

Inside me there is a crazy cat lady yearning to adopt. I have a free-floating failure of impulse control when it comes to homeless animals, no doubt a carryover from the succession of stray animals my father brought home when I was a child. They'd be with us just long enough for us to get attached, and then my mother would find yet another sunny farm where they'd have butterflies to chase and lots of room to run free. Ad infinitum.

So I am driven by this animal animus, which is why we have six cats--five of them rescues. It's crazy considering we have to drag them across the border a couple of times a year, but there it is. And it's a lifetime commitment, as far as I'm concerned. Childhood was not lost on me.

Which brings me to an irrational impulse to look up "Scottish Fold" on Phoenix Craig's List a few years ago. Across the Valley, a family was desperate to place their three elderly cats because they were losing their home to foreclosure and moving in with relatives in another city. One of the cats--Merlin--was a Scottish Fold, whose life story was eerily similar to the first Scottish Fold I ever rescued: Merlin had been abandoned in a Tucson rental ten years earlier, and his description sounded a lot like the Fold I had loved and lost.

My daughters went with me to meet Merlin and his family. I couldn't speak when I first saw him because he brought back the grief of losing my first Fold, Laddie. So I listened instead to the story of this family who'd done everything right but still fallen victim to the economic crash. They had a toddler and an infant, and he had lost his job as a financial adviser. Her job couldn't sustain them. They had to move, and the cats just couldn't go with them.

Merlin was the soul of composure in the midst of this drama as he stretched out on the cool white tile of the kitchen and watched us in that way cats have of pretending not to notice or care. I felt it was only fair to mention that if Merlin came to live with us, he'd have to travel back and forth to Canada every year. Clearly, he was old and a little fragile.

"Where in Canada?" the young husband asked me.

"Nelson, BC," I said.

"I was born in Nelson," he replied.

"No, you weren't!" The coincidence overwhelmed me (my husband was born in Nelson--a town of 7,000), and I was getting that dangerous feeling that Fate commanded me to adopt Merlin. But yes, he was, and his grandmother lives in Vernon.

"OUR granny lives in Vernon!" my daughters chimed in.

Small world. So Merlin came to live with us, and from the moment he stepped out of the carrier, it was as if he had always lived with us. Our other cats glanced at him casually, rolled over, and went back to sleep: nothing to see here. He just fit in. I knew Merlin wouldn't be with us long. When he was found in Tucson, a vet estimated his age at 4, and that was 10 years earlier. I was merely doing a good deed for a struggling young family: they could rest easy knowing that Merlin would be comfortable in his last days.

I honestly believed that we could manage not to get attached to him because he wouldn't be with us long. I was even more sure of that when I took him to the vet and was subjected to a litany of Merlin's health problems caused by irresponsible breeding: he has arthritis that puts a major hitch in his git-along, a heart murmur, dozens of royal-blue tumors that fill his ears, dangerously small nasal passages, a sebaceous condition of his coat, and he appears to be wearing someone else's tail. When I described him to a cat rescue friend, he nodded and said, "Yep, a train wreck."

But here's the thing: Merlin is the sweetest soul who ever walked on four paws. He never complains about anything, and he's always content wherever he is and whatever is going on around him. He's a grandfather figure who patiently endures affectionate head-butts from the other cats. Nothing ruffles his lethal white fur. He is a living reminder that it is possible to take what comes your way and remain placid. He is a feline Buddha.

But lately he'll just begin crying for no apparent reason. It's not a cry of pain--it sounds more like confusion. All we have to do to quiet him is say his name. That seems to call him back from wherever he has wandered off to. We know he's in the process of leaving us. And we also know it was inevitable that we would fall in love with him--train wreck or not--and dread the day when we can't call him back from that lost place.