Misty Mewsette Chantoo is a "Beyond Cat", a cat of outstanding intellect and superior gifts in all things cat-like. She has been, in her 14 years on earth, huntress, temptress, goddess and Queen, playing each role to the hilt. She believes she is Bast, the cat goddess of ancient Egypt. She's probably right. She is certain that the world revolves around her. It does.

Mewsette was a vamp from the age of 8 months, and is still expert at it in her teens as she passes 70 in human "years". Her basic makeup has never changed. She is hedonistic, narcissistic, amoral, existential and Libertarian. There are not great numbers of Libertarian cats, as far as I can tell, most cats being Republicans like my other two, who don't like for anything to happen that hasn't happened before. Mewsette is one of the world's last free souls.

Back in the middle ages (or the late 60's), Don McLean wrote and recorded a song called Narcissisma, which is self-explanatory. He wrote it for Mewsette, who was yet to be born. She has never, for one moment, doubted her supreme superiority to all other living creatures. A bundle of feline perversity, she remains beguiling, imperious, and mystical in her old age, even though her mystery has been crumbling slowly for years, try as she might to maintain it. After all this time together, she simply is no longer unfathomable. We know each other too well. Her function in life is now to sit and be admired, but she seldom sat for most of her life.

She was the most wild, least domesticated, of all my cats.

This tall, slender, longhaired package of raw nerves spent 12 years prowling restlessly, wailing and shrieking, sobbing hysterically at serious slights and complaining loudly over lesser ones, yowling and battering the door to go out, bellowing her head off until she was hoarse. There is nothing more pitiful than a hoarse cat. She held me personally responsible for any kinds of weather she didn't like and darkness when she wasn't in the mood for it.

She spent them stalking across the kitchen floor stamping her feet in fits of pique, muttering to herself for hours over any imagined injustice and talking a blue streak the rest of the time, vomiting daily from sheer nervous exhaustion, and pouting under the table when she was miffed, which was all the time. She could gaze at me so reproachfully under lowered eyelids that I'd hate myself. Mewsette was in a snit for 12 years.

She spent the last day of her snit in a carrier among the boxes in our house on the mountain, thrashing about in an attempt to commit suicide and hurl herself into hell to escape the purgatory she believed I was about to thrust her into. She had howled non-stop for 7 hours, to the point of hyperventilating and, I feared, going into cardiac arrest, while the movers carried all our belongings out of the old house. When I put her carrier into the car to make the trip, she screamed like a banshee and didn't stop for 2 more hours. She rubbed all the fur off her nose on the carrier that day. It was a day I'll never forget.

But I had accidently done something right for the first time in her life and moved us to the city, into a roomier house that turned out to be perfect, even for her. And Mewsette, being 65 in human "years" then, retired.

Gone was the wild little hoyden of the first 8 years of her life, that fearless huntress of fields and woods, climber and roof-walker of tall buildings, foster mother of the chicken coop. Gone was the tragic little captive of the next 4 years of her life, her soul crying to be wild, glumly contemplating the great outdoors from the restriction of a small screened porch that served only as a cinema seat to the Call of the Wild, still a deafening roar in her ears. Gone was the agitated, anti-social little insulter of company, the howling little banshee who cried and screamed into the dark night; gone were the pathetic Little Match Girl routines and the full-blown presentations of Camille.

In their place was a quiet, sedate little elderly lady cat, who could very soon watch the city traffic from her window without flinching, who ate her food without arguing, who stopped vomiting and ceased howling, and slept quietly and serenely jammed into my side at night instead of pacing the floors calling down the wrath of the Cat Gods upon me.

The battle was over.

I could hardly believe it. Once I released her and her feline housemates from their carriers in the new house, she never howled again. She became the paragon of virtue and fountain of matchless love I had seen in her as a kitten. She did still have jealous little spats with Phelicity from time to time, but she's feline and that's what comes of having two goddess-queens in the same house. Her feelings are still hurt easily, because she's so emotional, but we have a very good table for her to go and pout under. Centrally located. She still needs comforting, and that's what I'm here for. She still talks and chatters all day and occasionally all night; she's a born insomniac.

It wasn't long before she selected a window that would henceforth be her own inviolate window, and shortly thereafter she chose the den as "her room". Nobody argues with her. However, the wonderfully large enclosed back porch I had chosen the house for, for the cats' sake and in exchange for the large, modern bathroom I'd wanted for myself in another house, was a failure with Mewsette. Phelicity loved it at first sight and spent a lot of her time out there, and BamBam was as impressed as she could be with anything at her age, 16, that required walking a distance of more than half a room to reach. The screen door out to it did squeak, and Mewsette cannot abide squeaking doors. But I think her primary disappointment was that I could prop the door open, giving the cats free access to the porch day or night, so she had no reason to throw a fit to get out there, or make me let her in and out 10 times in 5 minutes. The whole point was lost. A freely permitted privilege is no privilege at all in her book, I suppose.

Mewsette has gone through a passage, in much the same way I have. That isn't surprising, considering how her raw emotions have mirrored mine all her life. When I'm stressed, she is stressed out. When I'm a nervous wreck, she gets sick. But I am feeling more brave again and I see that she is, too. The connection is not lost on me. I hope we are going to be healthy and brave old ladies together. This is new. BamBam and I have been old ladies together for some time, and we are used to it. Now Mewsette has given up the battle, relaxed and joined us.

Hallelujah.

written out of love by Mewsette's mom.
copyright ©2000 by Sharon Goodman





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