The Dog with the Old Soul. Jennifer Sander Basye

life hit me. If I couldn’t push a man in a canal, at least I could rescue a kitty on the side of the road. I pulled over as far as possible onto the left shoulder and hit my hazards. There he was, hunkered down in the greenery far above me. I rolled down my window. I watched the kitten. The kitten watched me. I got out of the car.

      I looked up the steep embankment at him. Ice plant. Damn. It was cold. I am a 911 dispatch operator. For me, hazards lurk everywhere, even in the safest of homes. A slippery shower, a frayed electrical cord. So many of the calls we take are the result of foolhardy behavior. This would fall easily into that category.

      I have nothing to put a cat in. I don’t even have a blanket. I have no idea what I am doing, I thought as I looked around. And I’m mostly a dog girl. I’ll go out of my way to rescue dogs. But a cat? I shivered and tried to focus on a workable plan.

      I decided to try and approach him. If he ran up toward the top of the embankment, I’d have to back off. I didn’t want to be responsible for a cat on a busy freeway. I started up the steep embankment and the kitten didn’t move. He blinked at me. He sat in the ice plant near the freeway on-ramp and slowly blinked his big teary eyes, open, shut, open. The light shone down from the streetlamp and his eyes glowed. Open. Shut.

      I clutched at the fence along the embankment with one hand and made my way up the slippery ice plant. It was a good slope. My clumsiness well known, I tried to keep out of my head the images of me tumbling back down to the asphalt below.

      I could hear the morning news in my head: “An unidentified woman tried to climb ice plant in an attempt to access the freeway for unknown reasons. She was unkempt and messy, and all evidence suggests she suffers from broken heart syndrome. The authorities have hesitated to confirm or deny this, and it is unknown at this time if this syndrome is related to last night’s incident. She is in critical but stable condition today at the medical center, after falling twenty feet. Doctors say she fell sometime late last night and was not discovered until morning.”

      I was one foot away. I could touch him if I reached out. Should I take off my hoodie to grab him and wrap him up?

      Nooo, I thought as I zipped the hoodie up further. It’s too cold.

      I pulled the hoodie’s wrist cuffs down over my hands, minimal protection against claws at best, and stretched out toward him. I aimed for the back of his neck.

      Cat scratch fever, cat scratch fever…cat scratch fever! My dad’s voice reverberated in my head. Whether it was a warning or the lyrics to a song, I couldn’t quite remember.

      I reached out once…twice…three times. Each time the kitty turned his head around to look at my hand but didn’t move.

      Oh. I’m going to pick him up and he will be a bloody mess, badly injured, I thought, feeling sick to my stomach in addition to feeling cold. I could see only his tiny head. And those big blinking eyes.

      Really, this was too absurd. Remember, I see potential danger everywhere. Yet there I was on a dark, cold night, perched on a slope of ice plant near a freeway overpass in the middle of a part of town you really shouldn’t slow down in, let alone pull over and stop in. I was alone, trying to rescue a damn kitten.

      I needed to get this over with. “Now or never. Just do it, Kate!” And with that rallying cry I grabbed him and pulled him to my chest. His claws held on to me and I felt his body vibrate with his purrs. I looked down the embankment. Now I had to make my way back down. This time with no hands to hold on to the fence, as both were clasping this mess of a cat. Tense, I carefully picked my way with each step down the slippery ice plant on the steep embankment, arriving at the bottom without incident.

      In what felt like a one-take action sequence, I threw the car door open, tossed the kitten in, grabbed my keys, started the car, rolled up the window—before the rescued cat escaped! I turned to look at him. He was perched expectantly on my center console, waiting and watching my hurried antics. He was bones. Skin and bones…and purrs.

      Next morning at the vet’s office, they insisted on a name. I stood in front of the receptionist, shaking my head.

      “I’m not going to name him. I don’t want to name him.”

      The receptionist raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, her fingers hovering over the keys of her computer.

      “Please don’t make me name him. I can’t keep him. I have a very small house.”

      She waited. This same scene must have happened a lot here. I wondered if it always turned out the same way. “Okay, we’ll just type in k-i-t-t-y.”

      “No, don’t write ‘Kitty’ on the chart. I don’t want to call him Kitty.” Something told me his name was Simon.

      Simon spent the next two weeks sequestered in my bathroom, my only bathroom. I gingerly opened the door whenever I needed access, pushing my foot in ahead of me to keep Simon from rushing the door, nudging him out of the way if he made an attempt to escape. I needed to keep him away from my other pets, the vet said, until the lab results came in and they gave him a clean bill of health.

      So until that approval came through, I had a four-pound, voraciously hungry, frustratingly messy roommate. A loud roommate who lived exclusively in my bathroom. His tortured cries reverberated off the tile when he heard me stir in any part of the house. In an effort to calm him, I’d visit for long periods of time, just sitting on the edge of the tub. Talking seemed to quiet him down, so I talked. The look in his eyes made me feel that he could answer back.

      “My mom died, Simon,” I whispered.

      “When?” he would purr, rubbing his cheek against mine.

      “Two years ago, but it still hurts.”

      “I know,” he would squeak, “but then somebody comes along and helps.” He reached out a paw to tap my nose.

      Simon talks to everything and everyone. He has a sweet meep, high pitched and soft, when looking up at me; a brrrrr chirp when he asks my older, “can hardly be bothered” cat relentlessly for playtime; and he gives a merrwrrrow to the dog whenever their eyes lock. All very different sounds, very specific and very Simon.

      Simon believes he has an imaginary friend. When he plays with crumpled-up paper, he growls and chirps and looks around and plays…with somebody. Not me. Not my other cat. Not my dog. He is alone. It is the craziest thing to watch. The tiny noises he makes scare the bejesus out of my big, scary dog.

      Since I found him on the way home from a writing class, perhaps he is a writer, too. He has a special fondness for laptop keyboards. The first time it was the letter x. I found him batting something small and black—the key off the keyboard—around the floor, like a hockey player practicing with a puck. The next time it was the t. He leaps up and pounces on the unattended keyboard. No letter is safe as he picks whichever one he pleases to pry off and play with. The third time it was b and e, double the fun. They recognize me now at the computer repair shop.

      The little ice-plant kitty was the most loving creature I had ever met. I thought I’d left my capacity for love squashed flat on the cobblestones in Italy, but Simon taught me my heart was still there, strong and healthy, after all.

      Sometimes I look at Simon and think back to that night on the side of the freeway. I think I saved Simon, but maybe he saved me.

      Where the Need Is Greatest

      Tish Davidson

      I have been a volunteer puppy raiser with Guide Dogs for the Blind for ten years. Donna Hahn has been raising guide dogs for at least twice that long. She has shared tips on socializing puppies, has helped me with difficult dogs and has encouraged me when my dogs failed to make the grade as guides. We have traded puppy-sitting chores and dog stories. Donna has loved every guide dog puppy she has ever raised. But one dog was special. This is Donna’s story.

      Donna