Wherein I become that crazy cat lady...

Me, two nights ago:

Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.

My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.

I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.

So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."

But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.

Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.

(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)

Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.

Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.

The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.

The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.