It’s hard to pinpoint the moment an acquaintance becomes a friend. Sometimes a shared experience is enough. Other times, tragedy binds us together.
That’s how I realized Dillon was one of my best friends.
I have no idea what kind of cat he was. The shelter called him a “domestic short hair,” the feline equivalent of a mutt, but some of his traits hinted at a more exotic lineage.
At our apartment, he quickly grew from a whiff of black fuzz into a long, muscular prowler. From head to tail, he was a bigger by a third than most house cats.
He was ferociously intelligent. When he got sick, we hid his pills in treats designed to hide them, but Dillon figured it out. We tried pouring the powder from the pill casings into his food, but he noticed a tiny chunk and refused to eat it. He learned how to use the pet door much faster than our dog, taught himself to open cupboard doors so he could sleep in them and found some of the zaniest hiding spots in our apartment.
Dillon was loud. I always assumed he had a bit of Siamese in him for this reason. His meows were wild. He’d keep going all morning until we fed him, running back and forth between us and his bowl and vocalizing.
He loved my girlfriend. He would wait until she was brushing her teeth or fixing her hair in the morning and then jump on the bathroom counter to “hug” her. He would put his front legs up on both sides of her neck and sort of jump into her arms and purr.
He didn’t like me as much because I teased him a bit, but we had our moments. He played a game where he would jump onto my desk while I was working. I would tell him no and set him on the floor. Damned if he wasn’t back up there 30 seconds later. If I blocked a way, he’d come through another way. I usually gave in and let him be.
We had a routine where I’d put a blanket on my lap every night. He’d hop up and knead it with his big paws for a half hour or so. Almost every night, the same thing. He’d bite and claw and knead that orange IKEA blanket like crazy.
He jumped up on the bed and laid in my lap when he got sick a few weeks ago. He didn’t do that much. It was bittersweet. As I patted his head, I noticed it fit perfectly into the palm of my hand. That’s when I realized he was a friend. A good one.
Good friends are hard to come by. You might not even realize you have one. Sometimes they are enormous pains. They might tear up your furniture, break expensive glass decorations or claw up your hands. Appreciate them anyway, before it’s too late.
One night a week and a half after he got sick and three trips to the emergency room later, Dillon seemed to perk up a bit. He walked around the living room and then sort of laid down near the door to our porch and stared at me for a bit, like he did when he triumphed over my attempts to keep him off my desk. I rubbed his back and told him goodnight before I went to bed. He was gone when I woke up.
We wrapped my friend in his orange blanket when we took him in for cremation. I like to think he had it at the end.
rlaforme@mail.usf.edu
