I Do Not Like Mondays

Man, I do not like Mondays. So to refocus, here’s something I do like, from the more recent chapters of our lives.

This is my friend known as T. Gray, who died June 21, 2021. He joined us on or around Aug. 18, 2012, so it was two months short of nine years that he was with us.

I’ve had many pets in my lifetime — lots of dogs, cats, several rodents, even a horse or two — and many very memorable ones in that bunch. T. Gray may be the most special of any of them. He was very complex yet very silly, and just a deeply intelligent being, I would call him. He’s as true a friend as any I’ve ever known.

Going back to August 2012, my wife and I had just moved from Arlington, Virginia to a two-bedroom apartment in Stamford, Connecticut. We decided we’d get a cat, having specifically convinced our landlords to let us have one, and went to a local shelter’s adoption event at a PetSmart store.

A cat we’d viewed online and had essentially settled on turned out totally different than we’d expected and wasn’t a good fit at all. My wife and I checked out the other cats to see if any stood out. Nothing really seemed to catch our attention.

Then I passed by this one cage and took a look, and the cat inside reached out and kind of grabbed my arm. He just held his paw there and didn’t move, and I looked at the cat — it was this strange moment. It felt unmistakably like the cat was saying, “Please take me with you.”

I didn’t want to. This cat wasn’t anything like I’d had in mind. He was mostly white, and I’d never had a white cat — usually the opposite — and he was pretty chubby. But I felt like something significant had just happened, and I told my wife this cat was the one. I felt unsettled about it, like I was half regretting it, but stuck to the decision.

Interestingly, as we went to adopt this fellow, the woman who’d been fostering him and his two brothers, also white cats, showed us a video of soon-to-be-our cat opening a multi-part door lock to get into an attic. The lady considered this cat sort of a mastermind, the really smart leader of the group. The three brothers had been found in Stamford living under an old fire engine and totally caked up with mud and muck.

Those first days when we got him home were awful. This new cat of ours apparently really missed his brothers, and although the shelter folks had reckoned he’d do well as a single cat, he spent those first days hiding under furniture and yowling all night for his companions. We didn’t even have our bed set up yet and were trying to sleep on an air mattress, which we could do not at all with the cat making all that noise. I had pretty much had it with the cat.

But we stayed the course and got to naming him after a few days. At the shelter they’d called him Grady, which wasn’t terrible but didn’t feel right. I came up with this crazy name Terranor, though my wife usually says she thought of it, and working on it together we settled on Terranor Gray. The “Terranor” part was meant to signify our move north, like “terra” and “nor” roughly meaning “north land,” and Gray was more for the gray markings on his head.

We abbreviated it T. Gray, which we liked because of the play on “tigre,” Spanish for “tiger,” and also because the gray on his head was sort of like an upside-down, gray “T.” So T. Gray it was.

The name evolved into different variants over time. We’d call him simply “T.” or “T. Monkey,” “T. Monkerton” and most often, Tiguerri, like some kind of Italian rendition, with those r’s being soft and almost like a “d” sound. I think we’d also say “T. Garrison” or “T. Gray Bear” sometimes, but usually it was Tiguerri.

When our clothes got all covered with white hairs, which was frequent, we’d say we’d been “Teagrified.”

From August 2012, he did open up to us pretty quickly after those initial days, but the strangest thing kept happening. In the months and years that followed, T. would peel off layer after layer of the walls he’d put up, you could say, getting closer and closer to us and sharing more of himself. He interacted with my wife and me very differently, typically laying on and sprawling over her all the time, but he never really did that with me. Me, he would face-nuzzle.

I’ve been very close with many pets, but I’d never seen anything like this. Just when we thought we knew all there was to know about Tiguerri, he’d take it to another level. That went on for years. Often, he was like a big kitten, and as large as he was, he could really move and run in like this lightning gallop all through the house. But he was always very gentle with us.

T. also lost weight over time, slimming down, though he never dipped below about 16 pounds just because he had the largest frame of any cat we’d ever had. He loved gazing out windows — especially at birds and squirrels, if any could be spotted — and lazing around sometimes.

On that note, this one time, my wife and I were in the living room and T. Gray was lounging on an ottoman. My wife made a remark about him being lazy, that he should go catch bugs or something, and he perked up and gave us this indignant look. Just then, no kidding, a fly buzzed in and landed a few feet from the T. Master. And he pulled this incredible move where he sprang forward, caught up the fly in his paw and scooped it into his mouth, chomping and swallowing the thing and returning to where he was, all in the span of maybe two seconds. Then he stared straight at us like, “Now what you got?”

That was T. Gray. He seemed to understand some English. He could instantly read your mood and his surroundings; he was constantly aware. T. also had the most expressive communications I’ve ever seen of any non-human, using different, often multi-syllabic “meow” noises with various intonations and emphasis/ urgency. Along with his tail movements and body language, you could really tell how he felt.

Those gray markings on his head, by the way, faded away entirely to white after a few years went by. For any Lord of the Rings film series fans out there, we used to have this joke where we’d say like, “Yes, that’s what they used to call me: Terranor the Gray. I am Terranor the White.”

…ahem. So that was T. Gray. He would come running to greet me every morning whenever I woke up and every night, whenever it was that I went to sleep. He was playful and wanted to be a part of everything the humans were doing. I came to be very glad I decided to take him home that day in August 2012.

He did have a few physical flaws built in that were his undoing. T. had a heart murmur, a few different veterinarians thought, but that was always difficult to pin down because he hated going to the vet and would get enormous anxiety when we’d take him, elevating his heart rate. A bigger issue was that toward the end, we found out he had very serious kidney disease.

When that was discovered, it was already at a stage where nothing could really be done to help. He was fine for two or three months afterward, almost like nothing was wrong, then suddenly declined very quickly. Testing at one point showed his kidney function was nearly down to nothing at all, and he was very, very sick. I mentioned that T. got to a fit approximately 16 pounds, and at the end he plummeted to about 11 pounds, a shadow of his former self.

He had to have been in such pain and discomfort, but he didn’t show it. He was still gentle as ever and purred when you pet him, although at one point he could barely make the noise. He suffered silently until at last he could move almost not at all.

Our daughter was born toward his later years and probably won’t remember him, but she was more than two years old when he died. T. was always very tolerant and gentle with her, and he seemed to know right away that she was some extension of my wife and me.

That was our cat T. Gray, who I more accurately call our friend, and we miss him. After he died, we found ourselves still looking for that mystery lump in the comforter that used to be him under there, or we’d see a white box/ object or something in the corner of our eyes and think it was him, which happened all the time while we had him.

He was a remarkable creature, and a kind all his own.

Content © Aaron G. Marsh