Alice doesn’t live here anymore (a cat story)

Some forty years ago I had a sweet and lovely white cat. I ran off to Paris and left her with a neighbor who loved her too. I never forgot either of them. Now they are back.

She walked into my life. Her name was Alice. In some ways, she’s never left. This is her story. And mine.

In the mid 1980s, between my two marriages, I lived in the Los Angeles district of Echo Park, not far from Dodger Stadium. I had a great little apartment in a Spanish style six unit mini-complex with red tile roofs and a pleasant, well maintained walkway up the middle of it.

I had always been a cat lover, but since the divorce I had not gotten around to getting one. One day, a white cat appeared at my door, obviously hungry or at least pretending to be. She was a bit scruffy and dirty, to be honest. I assumed she was homeless and put out some milk for her on the front step.

Well, as these things happen, Alice started coming around more and more often, so I got some cat food and invited her in for short, supervised visits. I then realized that she had fleas, so I bought a flea collar and placed it around her neck.

The next day, Alice came back, this time with a little tightly folded note wrapped around the flea collar.

It read: “Hello. My name is Alice. I have a nice home. Who are you?”

So I wrote a little note of my own and placed it around the flea collar. I said:

“I am so sorry, I was not trying to steal your cat. I thought she did not have a home so I started feeding her. Perhaps I should not have.”

Next day:

“Oh, I admit I may have been neglecting Alice lately. I have been traveling a lot. I don’t mind sharing her, really.”

Well, anyone who knows cats knows that they have minds of their own. There may be a few Lassie Come Home stories out there involving felines, but not that many I don’t think. So I did the obvious thing: I let Alice decide.

Reader, the cat chose me.

A couple of years later, I began to travel a fair bit, having inherited some money from my mother when she died in 1985. I had never been able to afford to go to Europe before, so now I did. London, Paris, Burgundy, Milan, Tuscany, Umbria, etc. Fortunately, I had a very nice neighbor named Christine who really loved Alice and was happy to take care of her while I was gallivanting around Europe. And when I fell in love with an Englishwoman who had lived in France most of her adult life, and ran off to live with her in Paris, Christine took the cat.

I lost track of Christine not long after, and of course I lost track of Alice.

So what just happened a few weeks ago? This is the kind of story ending only social media could make happen. Christine had seen some of my political posts on Facebook, got in touch after nearly 40 years, told me that Alice had lived a long and healthy life, that she had died peacefully in 1999, that Christine had moved up to Northern California, and lots of other news. It was astonishing, and of course wonderful, to learn the fate of my sweet kitty Alice and my nice neighbor Christine.

That’s all I have to say about this. What more could there be to say?

Oh wait! There is more. During the 30 years my wife and I lived in a small Paris apartment, there was no room for cats (or, to be more exact, for a cat box.) That was hard for two cat lovers. But when we moved back to the U.S., we bought a nice cozy house in the Hudson Valley. Now we share it with two cats, Camille and Thomas, and life is back to the way it should always be.

Note: “Words for the Wise” is coming back, slowly at first. Thanks for your patience.