Orange Cat (Photo credit: alana sise)

The story of how Saffron ran away is long and tragic, but here’s the short version: Once upon a time he lived in a spacious townhouse in the suburbs with a back patio, a high fence where he could sit and survey his kingdom, and a huge hill behind the townhouse which was perfect for hunting voles and mice. Then his owner (me) decided to move. She took him first to an 800-square foot apartment surrounded by an elementary school and a daycare center with noisy screaming kids. Then she bought a rundown little duplex in a hip, upcoming area of Oakland that also faced a huge, urban high school with kids dressed in hoodies who carried boom boxes and drove low riders. Some of the people in the new neighborhood were a little crazy and they had crazy cats to match. Whenever Saffron went out on the new front porch, usually only for a few minutes each morning, he was assailed by unfriendly animals and the occasional large Norway rat. He began yowling in the middle of the night and had to take tranquilizers to calm his nerves. His owner (me) wished she could take tranquilizers too, but they were habit forming so she took the occasional sleeping pill and a lot of Chinese herbs, and became a devoted practitioner of mindfulness meditation.

Then, one day, Saffron simply disappeared.

I recapped this sad tale in my mind as I drove home, Saffron peering through the metal grate of the carrier in the passenger seat beside me. When he ran away in the spring of 2006, I phoned the pet retrieval service weekly for the first month. They assured me he could not be dead because the chip had not been turned in. I assumed, or perhaps wished and then fantasized, that some nice person had taken him in and was providing a life of peace and quiet, yummy food, and large expanses of grass and trees. Truthfully, I was relieved. Sad, but relieved. Two cats, one of them a stress case, in a 600-square foot duplex was way too much – and the cats were the least of my problems. Neighboring humans were also acting out.

Oliver and I soldiered on. Eventually, I sold the little duplex and moved to a more spacious apartment in a small building in a much nicer area of Oakland. The new place had a deck with a sweeping view of the Oakland hills and provided the peace and quiet Oliver and I needed. It was to this home – which he had never seen – that I was now transporting Saffron.

As I wound through traffic, I talked to Saffie.

“Oliver’s not with us any more,” I told him. “He’s gone to Kitty Heaven.”

This was a bit saccharine, but the truth was too harsh. Oliver’s kidneys had failed a year earlier. So after 19 years of faithful companionship, I had him put down. At my request, he was cremated, and his ashes were now resting in the dirt of my vertical garden fertilizing the chard and beet greens.

Saffron’s only reply to my sad news was a testy meow.

“We’ll be home soon,” I said reassuringly, realizing he had absolutely no concept of “home.” Home for him had been a patch of dirt under a deck. Perhaps he had stayed with someone for a time – I hoped that was the case – but his immediate past was the hardscrabble existence of a feral cat. Albeit, in a much nicer neighborhood than the one we had both ditched.

As we drove, I continued to murmur little reassurances, but my mind was on my new cat, Odie. He was affectionate and utterly adorable, a roly-poly orange tabby with a white ruff and white paws, but he was feisty and playful, still a kitten really. How would these two orange guy cats get along?

I pulled into the garage and sang gaily to Saffron, “We’re home, buddy.” But my heart was divided. How on earth was I going to manage two cats?