Pandora

Adopted 24 November 1992 in Jenks, OK – died 22 February 2004 in Tulsa

Madeleine had long been a ward of Friends of Felines. I met her during one of my early visits to the Jenks cat trailer, where upon entering I was surrounded by a score of curious cats. From the outter fringes of the clower, a slight Turkish Van-like cat wedged her way toward me more determined than the others to be noticed.

Leslie, the chief rescuer and FoF president (Blog bio 28 MAR 16) remarked that Madeleine was funny, unique, adorable ... and unadoptable. “Why” I asked stepping foolishly into one of Leslie’s traps. “Well, the poor cat seizures when confined in a carrier and that spookes people,” Leslie retorted in the quivering tone she elevated to an art form.

I resisted. In ensuing months, usually over a glass of wine, Leslie would bring up the subject of Madeleine “languishing in the trailer.” It was Esmeralda’s unexpected death (Blog bio 10 JUN 12) that made me vulnerable to a “replacement.” And so, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1992, a dark and stormy evening, Leslie and I met at the SEG parking lot as in some illicit swap. Under torrential rain, Leslie exited her van muttering “God dammit, I wonder what it must be like to be Normal!” and transferred a sedated Pandora into my Volvo. I drove home as fast as weather conditions permitted before the tranquilizer wore off, laughing all the way at Leslie’s existential query.

Sure enough, although the carrier door was wide open as soon as we were safely indoors, the instant she awoke she seizured, erupting out of the box and literally flying to the basement where she landed with a thump yowling pitifully. It follows that she went into deep hiding.

Her curiosity compelled her and she soon fell into the daily routine, which ceased to be routine by her mere joining. She was omnipresent; nothing happened without her close supervision. At times her stare was so sustained that it felt like she was sending a telepathic message I couldn’t quite get. Like the mythical Pandora she was a game changer; thus the name.

Eating canned food out of her own saucer? Nah! She preferred to swat food out of the other cats’ portions and eat what landed on the white kitchen counter. Because the other cats objected vehemently, breakfast was messy and contentious. She wouldn’t drink out of the water bowls either; she sat by a fosset staring at it or at me, until I made it drip ... just right while she waited, critical of unsatisfactory adjustments.

Pandora sometimes slept on my pillow; of that I am reminded every time I look in the mirror. She bolted who-knows-why over my face one night and scratched the tip of my nose. Sometimes one is too tired to care and I went back to sleep, only to wake up on a blood-soaked pillow. A scar to remember her by.

Old Pandora still playful

Only two nicknames stuck: Pandorcilla and Explodobutt. The latter suggested itself when an undetected anal gland abcess erupted like Krakatoa while she was lounging in the middle of ... my bed, of course. The putrefaction ejected far and wide out of a little round hole in her skin, near the anus, remains chief among the foulest smells I have experienced. She had not appeared to be in any discomfort before, nor after. Explodobutt was too busy to wallow.

The seizures didn’t come back except once, briefly, for no apparent reason because Pandora was never confined again thanks to the long-suffering Dr. Thomas McCoy who agreed to make house calls for her needs.

There lives today a cat so similar to Pandora in both appearance and personality, that it earned her a second name Basmah-Pastora (Blog bio 16 SEP 13) in her memory. Similar, but not quite; different names acknowlege their singularity. Animals are not “automata” as some notable imbecile ... oh, wait, it was Descartes ... said.

Flamboyant and intense, that was my Pandora until her much lamented death.