“My daddy is bigger than your daddy,” a taunting voice called form behind me. I whirled around, face twisted in anger. No one was bigger than my daddy, what the hell was this kid thinking? When I saw who had flung the insult, I inwardly groaned. Of course it was him, the bully that lived to make everyone else miserable. He wore ripped jeans and black sneakers and had shaggy brown hair and narrow eyes. For a first grader, he pulled off mean biker arrogance pretty well.
“No he is not! Nobody is bigger than my daddy!”
“My daddy is,” he grinned, arms folded across his scrawny chest. I mean, we were six, no boy was sporting man muscles at this stage.
“Is not! Nest to my daddy yours is a shrimp.” I stuck my tongue out for emphasis. Again, we were six. All of my insults needed some work.
“Is not!”
“Is too!” Back and forth. Back and forth. We really needed to step up our repartee. The only thing that managed to end our endless cycling of familiar phrases was the bell to end recess. Never had I been so thankful for the bell that ended recess.
At that age, all of six and full of a stubborn case of “I know everything about the world,” no one could sway my opinion on anything. Six going on sixteen, I often heard. But the one person in the world that I looked up to, the person that could do nothing wrong and that I would always listen to (or at least pretend to listen to), was my dad. He was invincible, nothing seemed to be hard for him to do. Fix a car? Check. Teach me to ride a bike? Check. Take me to all the activities a little kid could manage to get herself involved in? Check. Calm my tears and bandage scrapes? Check.
In my young mind, there was nothing he couldn’t do, and no one he couldn’t best in combat. Not that I really knew anything of combat at the time, but it sounded good in my head.
My family was notorious for our cats, and not for any reason that you might think. We lived in the mountains, and all of them were indoor/outdoor cats. They had free reign, mostly choosing to stay outside during the day and come back in at night. By the time I was in third grade we were on cat number four. Every time we got a new one, it was because someone we knew what a cat that had kittens, or had found an abandoned cat and it needed a home. I would beg and plead and promise everything that my parents and both knew would never actually happen in an attempt to get them to take in the cat. I loved cats. But more often than not, after the rescued cat had lived with us for a while, and I managed to fall in love with yet another ball of fur with sharp claws, the poor cat would disappear. There was always a day where I would go out to call it inside for the night, and it wouldn’t appear scampering up the road to the door, or out from behind the tree.
Living in the mountains, there was always the threat of wild animals. Bobcats, coyotes, mountain lions… they all roamed the hills and for the most part, I only saw them from a distance. When a cat wouldn’t come home, the immediate assumption was that it had managed to become prey for one of these larger predators. I learned very quickly about the circle of life after the first cat never came home. We all loved the cats that we had, and took care of them, but part of living in the mountains was letting your pets roam free. And while we may not have had a tone of cars to worry about running them over, we did have those big animals.
None of us were ever cavalier about the loss of our four-legged family members, but it was a risk of living where we did and having animals. I know now that keeping them fully indoors would have been better, but that wasn’t how things were done at that time and in that area. Cats and dogs were working pets, and while part of the family, not actually family. My own opinions have changed on this over the years, but that was what I knew at the time.
Cloud came to us is a very unexpected manner. He was found as a tiny kitten, under some stairs and abandoned. We weren’t sure where mama cat was, but Cloud was taken in by some of the other people who worked with my parents. He was too young to have weaned off mama cat entirely, so the people that found him bottle fed the tiny kitten for weeks, and did their best to keep him alive. My dad joked that if the cat survived, we would take him in. And guess what, Cloud survived and we ended up with another cat. Survived despite one of his rescuers deciding that placing him in a low temp oven was the best way to warm him up. For the entire life of that cat, we attributed a lot of his quirks to the fact that he was quite literally baked when he was young.
This undersized gray tornado managed to stick around as a fixture in our family for quite some time, ingratiating himself into our lives without too much effort. I loved him instantly, my mom tolerated him, and very quickly he became my dad’s best friend. A gray shadow that silently stalked behind him everywhere. Cloud liked all of us (mom, dad, and me), but dad was his favorite by far. Which was kind funny because of all of us, dad was the one that really didn’t think he would make it past the oven-baking stage of his rescue process.
Honestly, that damn cat made an impression on everyone. He was your typical, playful kitten. Cloud loved it when my dad would “wrestle” with him on the carpet, basically caging the tiny fluff ball under his large hand and shaking the cat back and forth while tiny claws gripped at his fingers and sharp teeth tried to repel the attack. It was always amusing to see my almost 6’ dad sitting cross-legged on the carpet in his oil splattered jeans, dusty buttoned work shirts, and heavy boots, thoroughly enthralled with the antics of the cat and very much ignoring everyone else in the vicinity. Their favorite game was when Cloud would chase one of those cat string toys around the room, and my dad would pull it toward the wall and yank it up at the last minute, with the cat barreling headfirst into the wall. With a quick shake of the head, he would trot back to my dad and the string, as if to say “let’s go again.”
When all of the antics and play came to an end for the day, Cloud would curl up in my dad’s lap as he sat in his recliner and watched TV with the volume turend up to dance club decibels of sound. Absently petting the cat, who’s plae tongue would peek out of his teeth after a giant yawn, my dad would smile. It was as if this four-legged feline was like a son my dad never had. Dog may be considered “man’s best friend,” but Cloud was dad’s best friend. 100%. The cat had a purr like a lawnmower, and seemed to enjoy my dad talking to him as if he were an actual person. If that cat paid even the slightest attention to my mom or I, we considered it a win. We were not his favorite people, dad was the only human alive that could claim that title.
One of my favorite memories of this odd friendship was of seeing Cloud perched on my dad’s shoulder, tail curled around his neck, and sitting up as if he was a parrot. He would sit there for as long as my dad would let him, survey the surroundings, whiskers twitching at the slightest sound. Whenever we returned from a vacation, Cloud was always first to greet my dad at the door, twisting his lithe gray body around his ankles and ignoring the rest of us until he got the attention of the one family member he loved the most.
About 4 years into having Cloud as a member of the family, one day he didn’t come home.
“Cloud, come here kitty. Cloooooud,” my dad called out, his voice echoing in the little valley that our host sat in, bouncing off the metal awning of the porch and toward the mountains that surrounded us.
“Cloud, come home” I piped in, my shrill voice a definite contrast to my dad’s steady tone.
“Cloud.” My dad leaned over the wooden railing of the porch, checking to see if Cloud was hidden by the oncoming shadows of twilight. I stepped out with my dad and clutched at his leg. I may have been 8 years old, but I could feel a creeping sense of unease that something was not right. I needed physical support, even if I couldn’t voice it out loud.
“Come home kitty.” I looked up at my dad. “Dad, where’s Cloud? He usually comes home by now.”
“I don’t know” he replied, a faint catch in his voice the only hint that he might be lying and know what happened to our cat. We called out for a few more minutes, but eventually turned to head inside, quietly leaving the door open behind us just in case. I plopped onto the couch, the old springs squeaking at the sudden force. My dad fell into his chair, the old afghan draped over the back falling down around his shoulders as he sighed deeply and stared at the TV, then slid his denim blue gaze to the side, where my mom had a collection of decorative hearts hanging on the wall. Neither of us spoke. Mom was working nights, and wasn’t home yet, so it was just us two sitting in awkward silence.
Dad and I repeated this routine for about three days. Every night he would stand out on the porch and call out Cloud’s name. I would mostly hang around the doorframe, adding my own voice to the call at random intervals. But by the end of day three, when there was still no sign of our gray companion, we all knew that he had likely had a run-in with some form of local wildlife, and did not make it out alive. When my dad came into the house for the last time, he pulled the door shut behind him, but before it closed he turned around and went back out to the porch. Curious, I followed, my bunny slippers scarping softly against the weathered wood of the porch as I shuffled out in my pajamas. I looked up at him as he stood there, eyes still searching one last time in the shadows surrounding the house for any sign of Cloud. I wondered what he had heard that made him come back out, made him reluctant to go back inside the house. Turning, I left him out there alone, going back to curl up on the couch with my mom and try not to think about the fact that Cloud probably wasn’t coming home.
On the couch, I glanced out the window. I could see dad shake his head as if he were trying to clear his mind, running a hand over his moustache and chin. A few minutes later he turned back to the doorway and stepped inside the house, letting the door close with a soft snick behind him.
That moment, the moment dad closed the door, knowing that our cat would never return, changed how I saw him. Not in a negative way, but in a way that changed my idea of what it meant for someone to be strong, invincible, and bigger than life. My dad, the man that never cried, always held my hand, and slayed my dragons (mostly metaphorical but sometimes real), had emotions. While he may not have cried in the sense that tears were falling down his face, I could tell in those last moments of silence that he wasn’t unbreakable. And that it was OK for people to not have to be so strong all the time.
“My daddy is bigger than your daddy.” If only I had the wisdom at six that I have now about what it means for a person, for a dad, to be big and strong. I may have changed my response to that damn bully. I would have sung back “No, my daddy is bigger than your daddy, and he has feelings too.”
Maybe that’s not so much of a snappy comeback. But it is true. And it is a valuable lesson to learn.
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