In my previous two posts, I reminisced about things that would change my life, and the world—even if I didn’t realize it at the time—that began during this time of year, specifically during a too-early-for-the season heat wave.
My most recent post described how a morning ride with a friend became a journey to the end of fifth grade, a time just before my body and so much in my surroundings would change irrevocably.
That was May of 1969. Now my “Time Machine”—in this case, Tosca, my Mercian fixie, on which I took another early ride—will bring us to 1991.
My bikes in those days: a Colnago Arabesque and Bianchi Aelle. I’d spun the Colnago’s pedals up and down the “seven sisters” on the Jersey side before crossing the George Washington Bridge back to my place. After showering and eating, I took the subway downtown to a workshop led by poet Martha Rhodes.
One of the workshop’s participants had a cat who’d just had kittens. As much as I love anything with whiskers that meows and purrs, I could have understood had Martha been annoyed at my fellow student bringing her little ones to the class. But Martha adopted one. I took another. Or, rather, he took me: He gave me a look that combined vulnerability and confidence in a way I’ve never seen in any other living being before or since: He seemed to say, “Oh, I’m just a little kitty” and “You know you’re taking me home” at once.
We didn’t look away from each other on my way home. When I brought him to the vet, the receptionist, technician and vet himself fawned over him: He seemed to be cuter by the minute. And he would develop a bond with me and Caterina, my other cat, that deepened.
I quickly became as impressed with his intelligence as his friendliness. But at the time, I didn’t realize how much, and how soon, I would need him. That is not to say that Caterina wasn’t loving. She was already eight years old (according to the vet) when I adopted her five years earlier. My new “fur baby,” on the other hand, would become the first—and, to date, only—friend I’ve had from the beginning (He was two months old) until the end of his life.
I named him Charlie. Why? It just sounded right—like a “buddy” name. Like someone who showed up at just the right time.
My ex and I had separated; it would soon become a divorce. Although I wanted our (dis)union to end, it was difficult. For one thing, she fought it, at least in the beginning. Part of me said I should give it one more try, because she wanted it, but I knew, almost from the beginning, how untenable our relationship was. Also, as much as I wanted out of it, I never realized what else would end with it. Even in a bad relationship, there are some things that are pleasurable or meaningful only when you are together—like the cafe where the waiter knew us. I never went back.
Sometimes the very people who knew your relationship shouldn’t have happened in the first place are the ones blame you for “abandoning” your former partner. Or you find out that people with whom you thought you would remain friends were really friends of the couple, so to speak, not you.
On the other hand, the breakup gave me a chance to do things simply because I wanted to: the bike ride, taking Martha’s workshop, adopting Charlie.
I joke sometimes that he got me through my first semester of graduate school and college teaching that Fall. Who do you think helped me read and write all of those papers? Seriously, though I was happy to be doing those things, they were at times stressful because they were new to me (and because I didn’t get my first paycheck until the middle of November even though I started teaching in late August). I had to relate to people—my students, my fellow students and colleagues—in ways to which I wasn’t accustomed, in part because more than a decade had passed since I was last a student, and because the environments in which I’d worked had been very different. And, of course, I looked at relationships, all of them, differently as a result of my marriage.
Oh, and there was one other reason why I would need Charlie in ways I could not have foreseen. A week and a half after I adopted him, I learned that a college friend, Robert, had died. While I stayed in touch with him episodically after we graduated, he was always important to me because he was the first person to utter the words, “I am gay” in my presence. I had suspected as much, but it mattered, in ways I couldn’t realize at the time, that he would make such a declaration. He wasn’t trying to get a date with me; it simply came up in the course of something he, another friend and I were talking about. In that place and time, such an admission could be anything from risky to deadly. To this day, I really don’t know why he told me; I don’t believe that I was one of the more sensitive or open-minded people, even in that environment.
Since we are in 1991, you might have surmised what took his life: AIDS-related illness. By Christmas of that year, four other friends or friendly acquaintances would die the same way. Another took her life; still another was murdered. (Actually, I consider the AIDS deaths, like those from COViD, to be murders because they resulted, directly or not, from what health and government officials did or didn’t do. ) And on the day before Christmas Eve, Caterina passed away.
What would I have done without Charlie—or cycling?
(Note: The cat named “Charlie” in this post is not the same as the one I mentioned in some of my early posts, although they were eerily similar in looks and personality. Charlie II came into my life as an adult cat a few months after Charlie I died. Charlie II was rescued; his rescuer named him Charlie.)
