Tristan

Vale Tristan

Tristan died a few weeks ago.  I miss him dreadfully.

Tristan arrived at Spring Rock in January 2003, as the cutest ginger kitten I’d ever met.  A few months before his arrival I’d mentioned to my friend and neighbour, Aileen, that with all the cats I’d owned in my long history of cat ownership, I’d only ever had one ginger cat and that was when I was a child.  I told her I love ginger cats (well, I love any colour cat, but I was talking about ginger cats at the time) and would love to own another one.  A month or two later Aileen asked if I still wanted a ginger cat.  Graeme was nowhere in sight so I said yes.  Aileen’s daughter’s cat had had an illicit liaison with a feral tomcat and had produced a litter of kittens, one of whom was ginger.

As soon as he was old enough to leave his mum Aileen brought the little ginger scrap over to his new home.  Tristan settled in quickly.  I named him Tristan to fit in with the current Arthurian theme at the time.  Lancelot and Guinevere were my two, now middled aged cats in residence.  Tristan developed a deep affection for Graeme, almost on sight, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when he wanted to sit on Graeme’s knee.  Graeme wasn’t used to feline attention.  Lancelot and Guinevere spent all their spare time on my knee.  After a few false starts, Graeme and Tristan became firm friends and the tiny kitten would curl up on Graeme’s knee while he worked on his computer at night.  As Tristan grew older and larger, and took up more of Graeme’s knee he was told he’d have to find somewhere else to spend his nights as he was now in the way, so Tristan, ever the pragmatist, found a spare spot on my knee and ignored the two older cat’s bad language as he settled in.

Lancelot and Guinevere didn’t ever really accept the new arrival.  Their opinion of this little ginger scrap was decidedly negative.  They felt that the house operated well on a two-cat basis and saw no need to over populate the house with an excess redhead.  Tristan lived on the periphery of their lives and was content to do so.  Very little upset Tristan.  He’d just go with the flow with any situation that arose.  I’m not sure that this laid-back attitude to life didn’t annoy Lancelot and Guinevere more.  No matter what bad language or physical insults they threw at Tristan, he’d just move a little further away, out of striking range, and settle down for his nap, whether on my lap, in front of the heater or in the bathroom on the beds there at night.

After Lancelot and Guinevere were no longer with us, Tristan settled down to enjoy life without cross cats in his life.  He didn’t have long to enjoy the single life before Ambrosia and Nefertiti arrived.  Unlike his two predecessors, Tristan welcomed the two new kittens with open paws and not a claw in sight.  All three cats settled into a warm friendship where there were no fights about lap space, heater privileges or room on the bed.  Strangely, sunny spots on the carpet did cause harsh words from time to time, but I’d just open the curtains further and increase the sunny spot size on the carpet and peace would reign again.

At first Tristan didn’t seem to fit into the Spring Rock menagerie.  He was a totally sane cat.  This was unheard of in the annals of my menagerie.  I mentioned my concerns to Graeme, rather in the manner of expecting trouble to rear its head any time now.  I needn’t have worried; it didn’t take long for the general lunacy among the four-legged Spring Rock population to rub off on him.  After a while, Tristan developed his own little idiosyncrasies.  When he felt unloved or unappreciated, Tristan took to putting his face against the wall and not talking to any of us.  He began channelling Meerkats, sitting upright on his bottom and hind legs for extra height, despite being on the floor so not gaining any advantage with this extra height, and, he began bunny worrying.  

In his younger days, before retirement and a sedentary life inside, Tristan preferred the wide outdoors most of the time.  When hanging around the house yard and house, whichever side of the door Tristan found himself was the wrong side of the door.  The time I spent opening the back door to either let him in or out doesn’t bare thinking about.  

When outside and wanting to come in, Tristan would sit outside the lounge room window and emit little plaintive meows.  It seemed only I could hear these pleas to be let inside.  Graeme remain blissfully impervious to them.  Once inside he’d visit the food bowl and catch up with Ambrosia and Nefertiti for any new gossip (before these two friendly cats’ arrival he ignored Guinevere and Lancelot because all he would have received for his trouble would be a growl or swat), visit the food bowl again and soon begin to think of all the farm he hadn’t yet explored.  His strategy for letting me know his visit has come to an end was to jump on me if I was sitting down, jump down again, walk a little way away from me while looking over his shoulder at me in a significant way, then returning to jump on me again.  Tristan was no lightweight cat.  When you'd been jumped on by Tristan you were left in no doubt that you'd been jumped on.  His landings were often accompanied by an "Ooof!" from me as his paws hit my stomach (I tend to lay back slightly on the lounge with my feet up you see).  If I was standing up he wound his way around my legs, doing his best to trip me up (so he could jump on me I imagine).  He then headed door-wards while throwing me that significant look once again and returned to wind himself around me again if I still hadn’t figured his message out.

Tristan would disappear for days on end – on two separate occasions he was gone for over two weeks!  When he returned his ears would be covered in rabbit fleas.  We believed the only way he could acquire such a large number of fleas - his ears would be black with them - was to actually go down the rabbit holes in search of bunnies.  Rabbit fleas behave more like ticks than fleas.  They burrowed into Tristan’s ears and stayed put.  We haven’t had a flea on any of our pets since we moved to Spring Rock which is wonderful, and the only fleas we had to deal with stayed in the one spot on Tristan making de-fleaing a very easy process - Graeme and I simply used tweezers to de-flea Tristan on his return home.  If Tristan came home without us noticing the fleas, he would make sure to sit on my lap, give me a significant look and rub his ears on my shirt.  I soon got the message and Tristan was soon flea free again.

As he grew older, Tristan became more and more a homebody, choosing the inside option more and more until eventually he didn’t go outside at all.  When he first settled into old age Tristan would stand at the front door until I opened it so he could go outside and sit on either the front steps or just meander onto the front porch.  That was enough outside for him for a couple of years.  Then when he reached 18 he would ask for the front door to be opened, look out onto the porch and garden, ignoring the door I’d opened for him, then walk back to his comfortable bed, secure in the knowledge that should he ever wish to go on adventures the outside was still there waiting for him.  Eventually even checking the door still led to outside stopped and Tristan reached full retirement.

At 18 Tristan started having infrequent, but terrifying seizures.  His visit to the vets during the pandemic, along with Cleo and Aslan who also needed vet treatment, was not his idea of how an elderly gentleman should be treated.  Dreadful threats and bad language emanated from the cat carrier - even Cleo and Aslan looked concerned at the threats.  Once at the vets’ (we had two vets treating the three pets) Tristan quietened down and bided his time while the larger patients were seen to.  When Tristan’s turn came, I warned Jen, the vet, that he was in a bad mood and now felt that one of the privileges of old age was to be irascible and say it with tooth and claw when really ticked off.  Jen approached the cat carrier with caution, saying that most elderly gentlemen could be problems. 

Tristan decided to hold no grudges against Jen.  It wasn’t her fault he had been treated so abominably in the last hour or so, and he gave her is best purr while rubbing his face along her hand.  Jen was a devoted fan from that moment.  She complimented me on his excellent condition, despite his age.  I told her I hadn’t done much to contribute towards that condition - I’d bought him a heating pad for cold winter weather and called out to Tristan each time I encountered a very elderly cat on the internet, telling him the cat’s age and letting Tristan know this was the new number we were aiming for.  After a number of tests Jen told me, the seizures were not a big problem as long as they remained spaced about a month or more apart.  Should they get closer together we would have to review Tristan’s quality of life and make hard decisions.  Thankfully, they never occurred closer than a month apart, so Tristan and I just dealt with them as they occurred.  He was always able to recover relatively quickly - I think he was over the seizure before I was.

He enjoyed a “mushed” egg each day when eggs were plentiful or a small helping of butter off the end of my knife as I made my lunch when they weren’t.  Tristan began having a mushed egg because he refused to eat the egg white, gobbling up the yolk and ignoring the rest of his egg.  I whisked it to combine the two and Tristan polished off the lot, so that became his treat.  One time I had put the egg in his bowl when the phone rang.  I answered the phone and then wandered away, forgetting about the unmushed egg.  Tristan was appalled!  He sat there waiting for me to return to my duties, and when I failed to show up, half an hour later, he came and got me, letting me know I needed to return to the kitchen.  As I followed him, his tail straight up in the air to express his disappointment in me, Tristan muttered about how hard it was to get good help these days.  He then sat next to his bowl and looked at me, then the egg, then me again.  I got the message, mushed the egg and all was forgiven.

Tristan had me well trained in the delivering of mushed eggs and in many other ways.  When resting on my lap, if Tristan decided I was non-gainfully occupied with my needlework or reading, he would reach out a paw, hook it around my wrist (no claws involved thankfully) and bring my hand over to the spot that needed patting or scratching.  Once I was gainfully employed, he'd close his eyes and enjoy the attention.  Should I stop patting or scratching him and return to my earlier occupation, Tristan would simply repeat the process that led to his comfort and hook my wrist again and pull it towards him.  There was really no point in trying to sew or read when Tristan wanted attention, so attention Tristan got.

In the end, Tristan lived to two months short of his 21^st birthday.  Tristan had lived with me longer than any of my children had, a fact I pointed out to them often.  Although he began to look like a very elderly cat towards the end, with that scruffy coat older cats usually have, he remained spry enough.  I bought a grooming glove to help with the scruffy look, but there was no denying my beautiful boy was a very old cat.  He had his daily arthritis medicine, which couldn’t have tasted too bad because Tristan would remind me if I forgot to administer it.  He’d stand by the kitchen cupboards near where I kept the medicine on the bench, look at me, and wait for me to catch his message. 

He died on his bed.  In the morning, we found him there in a bad way.  His back legs no longer worked and he’d become incontinent during the night.  He died before we could get him to the vets’ for which I was grateful.  A long car ride in the cat carrier when he was in such a bad way would have been so stressful for my gorgeous old gentleman.  I had time to say goodbye to him and thank him for almost 21 wonderful years of his company.  Sadly, I have no photos of Tristan’s last months to share.  I had a bad run in with technology around that time.  My computer was dead for over five weeks so I didn’t save my phone photos to the computer.  Then, before the computer was repaired, the SD card in my phone died, taking all my recent photos with it.  I have photos of Tristan from the day he arrived until a few months ago and I’ll always have my memories of a life shared with a wonderful red headed fellow.