I often say that dogs are a lesson in unconditional love, and cats are a lesson in very conditional love.
Having pets in your household can mean a lot of things, and it does not necessarily mean having pets in your family. It can mean having beings who make you feel good about who you are because they love you so much.
Then there are Siamese cats.
My first and second cats were Siamese, and I loved them. They were just cats. One of them was very talkative, and had a particular way of telling me that he wanted a glass of water. (There was lots of water available, but he liked me pouring him a glass of water. That seemed reasonable to me. When I went off to college, my mother was not happy about his expectations.)
When we moved into this house we’d lost a couple of cats because of asshole neighbors in Cedar Park who let their dogs run free—those dogs killed cats and small dogs. Those dogs killed two of our cats. If St. Peter really is a gatekeeper to heaven, and really does ask that we explain why we deserve to go to heaven, I will point out that I did not take a baseball bat to the owner of those dogs.
We moved to a house on a busy street, and one of our cats was one-eyed, so we wanted to keep them inside. Jim built a catio (we didn’t know that was a thing)—a way for the cats to go outside and yet be in an enclosed space. (If memory serves, he initially used a structure he built so that I could try to grow kale and keep it from squirrels.)
After we moved here, our munchkin and I wanted a third cat. Around this time of the year in 2006 (or 2007?), we went to various cat rescue places to get a cat. Turns out that this is not a time of year when there are a lot of kittens up for adoption, but there was a Siamese of indeterminate age. (Definitely not more than a year, but how far under that was unclear.) She was affectionate, and just absolutely beautiful. I was puzzled as to why anyone would give her up. Our munchkin had been reading the Eregon series, and so she was named after a blue-eyed dragon.
And she was a Siamese, the kind I’d never had. She hated being picked up. She liked being around people, while in her own space. She would, at her will, come over to someone and get petted, perhaps even climbing onto a lap. Then, she was incredibly affectionate, as long there was no move made to hold her. When she wanted affection, she asked for it. Otherwise, she was not to be touched. As the catio got more elaborate (it now has three stages), she was clear about what part of it was hers.
When we moved to this house, we decided our cats would be purely indoor. We live on a busy street, a short distance from a creek that is a coyote highway—it’s just too dangerous. Every once in a while—because our house is built on clay that’s on limestone—the house shifts in such a way that doors don’t really close. That happened after we got back after seeing a play one evening, so it was late (for us). We realized she’d gotten outside. We caught glimpses of her behind the ac unit, and then in some bushes, and spent over 45 minutes crawling in bushes, trying to chivvy her to an open door. At some point, while crawling around, one of us looked up and saw her sitting in a window watching us, mildly interested. She was on the inside of the window. She’d long since taken advantage of one of the open doors.
Her space was the porch. A friend gave us a beautiful Morris chair, and we put it on the porch. She claimed it. When we went onto the porch (which we do a lot), she’d come and get scritches, and then go back to her chair, once she’d gotten what she wanted. She went blind about two years ago, and she stopped joining us for morning cuddles, but otherwise behaved no differently. She still went into her catio, made her way to the litterbox, checked in with us (as though she was granting us the pleasure of petting her) when we were on the porch, chivvied dogs off of any space she wanted, and was just the cat she wanted to be.
Shortly after we got her, I felt bad, and thought maybe we were the wrong family for her. I imagined that maybe her ideal home was a little old lady who had her as their only cat, and that we were failing her because there were other animals. I eventually came to think we were the perfect family for her. No one fucked with her. She got affection when she wanted it, hung out on the catio watching birds and squirrels when she wanted, claimed the most comfortable chair in the house.
I came to admire her clear sense of boundaries, her ability to ask for what she wanted, her clear sense of dignity, and her treating blindness as a minor issue. She really was a blue-eyed dragon.