Photo by StormChase. 19 November, 2005. Public domain.
There had been other so-called pets before him, but I never really appreciated any of them. There was Muffin, the huge Irish Setter, who would knock me and my brother down and make us cry. Then we had a dog named Beefy, who jumped over our backyard fence and ran away when I was four. The only interesting thing I ever recall his doing was eating my lollipop one summer afternoon. I was standing there, innocently sucking on my piece of candy. I took it out of my mouth for one second, perhaps to say something or take a breath. Before I realized what was happening, I saw a rush of black fur, heard a loud crunch, and was left holding a soggy stick. Needless to say, I failed to see the humor of it at the time. Now that I think about it, Beefy did the same thing to one of my ice cream cones, too. Oh, well.
During the hiatus before the one, true pet, there was also a foul-tempered feline named Pixie who hissed, scratched, and made me sneeze. And I would be remiss not to mention Paws, the dachshund,
so-named because of his sharp claws. (For a six year-old, confusing the word "paws" with "claws" is relatively easy). In a short while, his cute little puppy habits of chewing shoes, messing on rugs and constantly jumping all over people became less and less endearing. We did manage to find him a more tolerant owner.
But Mazel Tov was different. He was a pet for life. "Mazel Tov" in Hebrew means "good luck" or the equivalent (N.B. No, it doesn't), and is a common expression at weddings and bar mitzvahs. In Mazel Tov's case, it couldn't have been more appropriate. When a neighbor brought him to us one August afternoon in 1972, he weighed all of eight ounces and fit easily into my palm. The neighbor was very anxious to find a good home for the six week-old, blue point Siamese kitten. His other pet, a full-grown Great Dane, was apparently terrorizing the poor little beast, driving him under beds and bureaus and not letting him get within ten feet of his food dish. Something had to be done. After setting the tiny gray bundle on the floor of the den and watching him tremble as he crawled tentatively along the ledge of our fireplace, we were happy to do it. Mazel Tov. Mazel for short.
Mazel had to put up with several different names before we settled on the one that he was to carry the rest of his life. I thought that he looked like a Charlie, and for the next month or so that's what I called him. The passing of twenty-one years has dulled my memory, and I can't recall all of his other aliases. But finally I agreed to call him what everyone else in the family decided that he should be called, and he was forever after Mazel.
I had made a bed for our new kitten his first night at the house. Nothing elaborate, simply a large box stuffed with a comfortable old blanket and a hole cut in the front for ingress and egress. The accommodations weren't exactly spacious, but how much room did a six-week old kitten need? Pleased with my ingenuity, I walked upstairs to my room one night, with the cat tucked under my arm, and before climbing into bed myself, neatly deposited him in his new chambers. I clicked off the lights, crawled under the covers and shut my eyes. It was a matter of minutes before I heard the patter of little feet on the hardwood floor of my bedroom, and seconds after that I felt something suddenly pounce on my legs. Startled, I opened my eyes and sat up. Being a seven year-old, I naturally assumed it was the ghost in the attic, the monster in the closet or the thing under the bed. But it was only Mazel.
"You," I said, my heart pounding only slightly. "I made you a bed. Don't you like it?" Without waiting for the cat to reply, I scooped him up once again and returned him to his quarters. "Now stay there," I gently admonished. But of course this was not to be. This little scenario was repeated two or three times before I finally gave up, and with a sigh of contented resignation, rolled over and drifted off to sleep.
Mazel was an instant hit. My parents adored him, my brother and sister and I played with him constantly, even neighbors came to visit the new addition to the Heller family. For the first couple of weeks he had to be coaxed out from behind the couch and under my parents' dresser, but he soon got used to being a celebrity. He took to us as well as we had to him. He followed us to the bus stop in the morning and greeted us enthusiastically when we came back, purring, meowing and brushing up against our legs. For the first year that we had Mazel, he seemed to purr nonstop. And he would eat any scrap from the table that we were willing to feed him. Whoever thought that cats were finicky eaters never met this one. As he grew a little older, he considered himself too dignified to beg, but generally wouldn't refuse any morsel.
Although I became a little annoyed at him once in a while for scratching the couch, biting someone or forgetting to use his litter box, only once was I really angry at Mazel. My father had taken me to Martin's Aquarium nearby and bought me three fish. Three medium-sized orange fish. I didn't really form any particular attachment to them, they were just fish, more of a showpiece than anything else. But they were my fish, and I was very distraught one day when all three of them mysteriously disappeared. My father and I began looking. We checked around the immediate area of the tank. We scanned the floor. We even entertained the brief suspicion that after jumping out of the tank they had somehow wiggled their way out of my bedroom and downstairs into the living room or the kitchen. But we never considered the obvious.
We were about to abandon our search when I noticed Mazel sitting on a table in my room, chewing on something. I thought this odd, since his meals were always served to him on a place mat on the kitchen floor. Upon closer inspection, I was horrified to see a bright orange tail protruding from the cat's mouth.
"Mazel! No!" I shouted, dashing toward the cat. Seizing him by the mouth, I pried his jaws open in a vain attempt to rescue my fish. Of course, it was useless. And then I did something equally stupid. Picking him up with one hand, I swatted him on the back several times, hoping to make him cough up his little snack. "Spit it out!" I yelled. "Spit it out!" Mazel was about a year old at this point. He never would have done something so bold when he was a kitten. I later realized that I had been too hard on him. He was only doing what cats do. But there was nothing Mazel could have done that would have made any of us stay angry at him for long.
Being a male Siamese, it didn't take Mazel long to realize that he was in fact master of the house. He had been adorable as a kitten, and was still a great pet, but he grew into one tough cat. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that one of his ancestors had been used to guard a palace somewhere in Asia a few hundred years ago.
Even now I can picture Mazel poised stoically by the doorstep of some ancient home, staring unflinchingly ahead like a feline caryatid column.
Mazel made quite a name for himself among the other pets in the neighborhood. He got into a lot of fights, and took his lumps on occasion, but once he learned to rumble he was king of the block. Nobody messed with Mazel. We even heard complaints sometimes from people claiming he had beaten up their pets. He was only defending himself, we insisted, which might have been true.
To his family, however, he was very affectionate, and in our eyes he could practically do no wrong. But he wasn't overly fond of strangers, and he made this quite obvious on several occasions. Unsuspecting visitors who exclaimed, "Oh, what a lovely animal," and immediately proceeded to pet him and pick him up were usually in for a nasty surprise. Every now and then, however, he took to an outsider. One such occasion was when Jack and Carla Rollins came to visit.
Jack and Carla were friends of my parents. Jack and my father were both in the used car business, and he and his wife would get together with my parents to have a drink, socialize, see a show or play cards. That night they were playing cards.
Mazel would occasionally sit on a person's lap, that person usually being me or one of my family. Tonight, however, he chose Carla's lap. After presumably scoping her out for some time and finding her to be adequate, Mazel leisurely strolled over to where Carla was sitting at the dining room table and hopped into her lap. Carla was a bit surprised, as were we all, but she liked cats and didn't object to Mazel's being there. Settling snugly into the folds of Carla's dress, Mazel curled into a ball and decided to take a little, pardon the expression, catnap.
Finally the time came for Jack and Carla to say goodnight. Thanking my parents, they started to leave. Before doing so, it was necessary for Carla to remove the slumbering Mazel from her lap. Gingerly sliding her fingers underneath the cat, she tried to lift him. But Mazel wasn't ready to move yet.
"Ow!" Carla shrieked. "He bit me!"
After mildly rebuking the cat, my mother carefully removed him from Carla's lap and set him down on the floor. Mazel tolerated this from Mom, but how dare Carla, a complete stranger, tell him when it was time to go. Carla took it all good-naturedly, though. Shortly afterwards, they were all laughing about it.
But Aunt Rose was a different story. Although my father and just about everyone else found her little encounter with Mazel hysterical, she always swore that if Dad had been a minute later coming to her rescue, the cat would have been the death of her.
Aunt Rose was my father's aunt, Grandpa Heller's sister. I remember her as a sweet little woman with white hair and thick, purple-rimmed glasses. She was very fond of my father and everyone in my family. Well, not everyone.
On one occasion Aunt Rose happened to be visiting us, and was spending the night in my room while I sacked out in a sleeping bag on the floor of my brother Larry's room. Knowing what an ailurophobe she was, my father had assured her that Mazel would not bother her. As long as she didn't attempt to pet him or anything like that, the cat wouldn't even pay any attention to her. There was no chance whatsoever that Aunt Rose would try to pet Mazel, but to make her feel better Dad promised to keep him downstairs in the den. He would have his food, his cat litter; she would have peace of mind. Everyone would be happy.
To this day I don't know exactly how it happened, but my father woke up in the middle of the night after hearing a strange sound from my bedroom, where Aunt Rose was sleeping. Climbing the steps, he knocked softly at the door.
"Aunt Rose?" he called. "Hello? Are you okay?"
The door opened just a crack. "Come in! Come in!" Aunt Rose whispered pleadingly. "Quickly!"
As best he could, Dad slid through the narrow opening. What he saw when he was in the room he would never forget.
Aunt Rose was backed up against the door, her eyes wide with terror. Standing a few feet away, surveying her curiously, was Mazel Tov. He did not appear menacing, hostile or poised for an imminent attack. He was simply looking at Aunt Rose like she was crazy. For years afterward, Aunt Rose got her fair share of ribbing about it, but adamantly insisted that she had been in grave danger.
As I mentioned, Mazel was fond of his family members, though as he got a little older, he abandoned his ritual of following us to the bus stop and greeting us when we came home. Every now and then, however, he became a little impatient at being picked up or petted overly, or being reprimanded for something, and found it necessary to give one of us a little bite or a scratch.
Every so often he would stand in the hallway, waiting patiently for my mother to walk past. When she did, he would playfully bat at her legs, more often than not leaving a run in one of her stockings.
"Cat!" she would simply say.
Becoming annoyed at my brother Larry once for pestering him while he was trying to sleep, Mazel gave him a painful little nip on the nose.
"Ow!" Larry yelled, half from shock. He glared accusingly at the cat. "You-you . . . animal!" he snapped, for want of a better name.
Usually, pet owners discipline their dogs or cats, not the other way around. I don't think that this concept ever sat well with Mazel, and one time he found it necessary to discipline me. I was sitting comfortably on the living room sofa, watching television, when I heard a loud scratching sound. Looking down at the arm rest, I was not surprised to see Mazel, up to his old tricks again.
It's funny how people try to reason with their pets in explaining some misconduct on the part of the animal. I suppose that I was no different.
"Mazel!" I scolded. "How many times do I have to tell you? Use your scratching post!" Deciding to add a bit of reinforcement to reasoning, I gave Mazel a smart cuff on the nose with the back of my fingers. Bad move.
The cat stopped what he was doing abruptly. A startled expression registered on his features. The expression then turned to one of anger. Could it have been possible that for a second his furry face turned from gray to red?
Mazel spat out a hiss, a hiss that turned into a snarl. Almost reflexively his claw shot out, barely missing me. The cat took a step forward. I took a step backward. Then with a sudden lunge he sprang toward me, and I found myself recoiling in genuine fear. By the time I stopped, my back was literally to the wall. Mazel glanced up at me momentarily, then satisfied that he'd put me in my place, turned and sauntered away. I stood there agape for several seconds afterward.
Despite Mazel's frequent brawls with neighborhood animals, for several years he shared his house with another cat, and quite harmoniously at that. She too was a Siamese, a beautiful little sealpoint we named Molly. Because Molly was female, Mazel did not consider her a threat to his sovereignty. Frequently we would find the two of them curled up together on my parents' bed or sharing a plate of food or sitting side by side in front of the television. Since Mazel was a year older and had been spayed first, he had to watch Molly go through heat one summer. Having never dealt with such a situation before, he was utterly at a loss at what to do. So whenever Molly started howling and pacing and lifting her hind quarters into the air, he simply bit her on the neck. He was only trying to help. When Molly was old enough, she too was fixed. My mother often said that she regretted the fact that we had denied them the kittens that would have certainly been adorable, but two cats were plenty. My allergies, long in remission, might be awakened at the presence of a few more small, furry creatures. It broke our hearts when six years later we moved to a new house and Molly, having been let outside by one of my sister's friends, disappeared.
Looking back on it all, I wish that we had kept Mazel indoors. As much as he liked frolicking through the grass on balmy spring days and nibbling the flowers in my mother's garden, he had occasional misfortunes, some of them pretty bad. He would limp in the house on three paws, badly bleeding from a fight, or come inside drenched and shivering after being caught in an unexpected thunderstorm. He received some very unpleasant insect bites, and we were forced to give him a flea collar. Once he was even stuffed inside our milk box by some sadistic person. His worst experience ever befell him in the summer of 1977.
Mazel returned one evening from one of his outdoor expeditions and as he came into the house my mother noticed that he was dragging his tail. Could it be that he was simply tired? Then she noticed. His tail was bent, almost at a 120-degree angle. He was dragging it because he couldn't lift it.
Very concerned, we took Mazel to the vet next day, who confirmed that his tail was broken. How it happened was open to conjecture; the most plausible explanation was that it had been run over by a car. Though none of us wanted to talk about it, at the back of our minds lurked the dark suspicion that this might have been the act of some vicious animal hater.
The worst, unfortunately, was yet to come. In addition to being broken, Mazel's tail was also infected. As a couple of weeks went by and it became apparent that the antibiotics the vet had prescribed weren't working, we were confronted with the ugly truth. Either the tail had to be amputated or the infection would spread and Mazel would die.
The decision was an unpleasant one to make, but we settled on saving Mazel's life at the expense of his tail. I remember when he returned after his operation. My mother lifted him out of the pet carrier and set him down carefully on the kitchen floor. I was unprepared for what I saw.
Practically his whole bottom half had been shorn of fur, the pale white skin standing out starkly. As he wobbled across the linoleum tiles like a seasick penguin, the naked stump that had been his tail twitched nervously. He hadn't looked that frail and shaky since he first came to us that summer afternoon five years ago. I felt nauseous and full of pity at the same time.
Mazel was still a tough cat, though, and he soon recovered. Within a month, his fur had all but grown back, and he was his usual chipper self. If he was perhaps more subdued, none of us really noticed. There was a little bit less of Mazel to love, but we didn't love him any less.
The next two years of Mazel's life were spent in relative comfort and for the most part, indoors. As cruel fate would have it, though, they were to be his last two years.
As I mentioned, Mazel didn't take to strangers too well, which I suppose is perfectly normal for a lot of pets. There were "regulars" to whom he became accustomed -relatives, friends of the family, frequent visitors. Some he even liked, albeit not many. The vet, of course, was not one of them.
I'm not suggesting that Mazel carried a grudge about losing his tail; he had hated the vet long before that. Just the mere sight of a cardboard pet caddy seems to raise the hackles on dogs and cats, and Mazel was no exception. He acted like he had seen the cart that was to take him to the gallows. We just couldn't make him understand that this strange man who clipped his nails, crammed pills down his throat, stuck him with needles and shoved thermometers in embarrassing places was really his friend. That Mazel indirectly met his end from a visit to the vet was either bitterly ironic or strangely appropriate.
During a routine examination, the vet informed my mother that Mazel had contracted pyorrhea, a gum disease not uncommon in dogs and cats. In advanced stages, it sometimes necessitated the extraction of some of the animal's teeth. In Mazel's case, he assured, the situation could be easily resolved by simply scaling his teeth. We felt bad about having to subject the cat to yet another hated veterinary procedure, but assuming that it was in his best interests, reluctantly agreed.
Most animals have no problem with a routine teeth cleaning, or so we were told. Mazel was an exception. Shortly afterward, we noticed that he was having difficulty breathing, almost as if he had caught a bad cold. His condition seemed to get worse and worse. Soon he was not only not breathing, but not eating as well. Another trip to his favorite place confirmed that he had a sinus infection. He was not eating because he could not smell his food.
Mazel's condition continued to deteriorate. Administering the daily dose of medicine that the vet had prescribed seemed a painful and pointless task. In addition, we were supplied with a tube of thick orange gel, a vitamin supplement which we were to smear on his nose and paws three or four times a day. When the cat licked himself off, he would supposedly get the nutrients he wasn't getting from the food he wasn't eating. The orange gel proved not to be the panacea it was supposed to be.
My mother was particularly angered at the vet's remarks.
"Your cat is not cooperating, Mrs. Heller," he told her. "If he wants to get better, he's going to have to eat."
I don't know why we bothered taking Mazel to the vet one last time. Maybe we thought that there was one more chance he could be cured. Maybe we just didn't want to come home one day and find him lifeless.
Mom took the telephone call from the vet a few days later. When she hung up and burst into tears, I understood.
My sister Tracy and her friend Sandy Davidson were playing some sort of board game on the living room floor. I remember telling Sandy that she should leave. There had been a death in the family, and out of deference for Mazel she should leave us alone for a while. I suspect that my sister agreed, but since Sandy was her friend she was reluctant about simply throwing her out. But Sandy ignored my request. She and Tracy were in the middle of a game and she was going to finish it. For a long time I was angry at her for that.
I didn't cry immediately. It was not until weeks afterward, lying alone in my bed and faced with the problems of burgeoning adolescence, that I fully realized the impact. He was gone forever. I remembered his curling up on my bed that August night years ago, and many nights more. I recalled the concerned, almost compassionate looks he gave me during times that I was angry, frustrated or depressed. I thought of all the consolation he had given me, as I sat in my room alone, stroking his fur, and pouring out my heart to him about how unfair life was. Mazel Tov was always a good listener. I remembered and I cried.
Memories can haunt you, especially happy ones, because they are reminders of what once was and will never be again. With bad memories at least there is some consolation in that.
We held a brief memorial service for Mazel. I officiated, giving an extemporaneous eulogy for our fallen pet as I sprinkled his ashes into a small hole I had dug. The five of us who gathered there came not to mourn his passing, but to celebrate his life. We were glad for the seven years he spent with us, short as that may have been.
There were other cats after that, several of them. There was Chester the alley cat, who turned on us after we took him in. We were forced to remand him to the custody of the SPCA. There was Mitzi, a mentally deranged animal who howled and squirmed every time anyone touched her. She and a beautiful little Persian named Shadow had to be put to sleep after they were diagnosed with feline leukemia. The most fortunate of the many post-Mazel pets, or perhaps the fittest, as Darwin would argue, was a bushy, beige Himalayan named Allegro. He was a fat, sluggish, dimwitted beast, but basically a lovable one. Twelve years have passed, and he still hasn't.
Today I don't have any pets. I have a nice twenty-gallon aquarium set up at home. Fluorescent yellow gravel, elaborate stone formations, life-like plastic plants, pink and white conch shell against a deep blue backdrop. I even have a porous rock that floats when submerged in water. I don't have any fish yet. There isn't even any water in the tank. But I'm think about it.
I can't see myself ever getting another cat, though. After going away to college I lost what allergic tolerance I had acquired. Even so, there didn't seem to be any point after Mazel. He was the zenith. A caption I wrote underneath a picture in one of my photo albums sums it up perfectly: Mazel Tov. 1972-1979. The best cat who ever lived.
I think I will buy some fish for my aquarium. Three medium-sized orange ones.
Copyright 1991 by Allan M. Heller
