Oppenheimer

Best of the box

I remember when I first decided to get a cat. I was living in Chico at the time and I checked on Craigslist and found someone was giving away kittens for free. The house was in the avenues (northern part of town). There was a big box, and inside the box were something like maybe six to eight kittens.

There was a little orange kitten in the box, and he was probably the most active and kept jumping out of the box. Most of the other kittens were just content to be left in the box, but this orange cat wanted out. I knew right away that that was the cat for me, so I grabbed him and took him home. He litter box trained easily and I got him his shots and neutered him etc. He was already, I think, about six or eight weeks old at the time, so not quite a tiny, tiny kitten.
He didn't need milk or anything like that anymore. But he also wasn't fully socialized as I came to learn later. He was already pretty ferocious in tooth and claw. I named him Oppenheimer, I am not really sure why.

The punk

I remember my car ride moving from Chico back down to Danville. I was planning on living with my parents at the time. After I had packed all my stuff up, I went back and grabbed Oppenheimer out of the house and put him in the car with me. At first, I had him in his cat box, I think, but then I let him out to roam around inside the car. It was the Toyota 4Runner and it was pretty full of stuff, I mean just boxes and boxes of stuff. Oppenheimer got into the car and was starting to roam around and climb all over. He was basically treating the car as a sort of three-dimensional maze and was playing around in it while I drove.

10 or 15 minutes out of Chico still on the backcountry roads when he, because I guess of being in the loud car, was kind of freaking out. So he ran and jumped up onto my shoulders and perched on my shoulders and just kept meowing, wouldn't stop. He stayed up on my shoulders for a long time and then I think eventually he decided he was going to go somewhere else and settle down. So the rest of the car ride he was quiet and hung out. But there was a few minutes there where he was just perched up on my shoulders meowing and I thought that was really cute.

When I got him to Danville, he lived there for some time. My cats from when I was a kid were still living there at the time. They must have been 18 years old at that point, which is pretty awesome. But Oppenheimer was a real punk to these cats and he would frequently, run at them and jump over them, generally harass them. He also could barely be kept inside. He'd also mess with my parents' dogs. Oppenheimer could always hold his own and that's one of the things I really liked about him.

One thing that should definitely be chronicled about Oppie's life is how he lost half of one of his canines. It happened when he was still living with my parents because I couldn't have pets in my rental. My sister was also living there at the time, and Oppenheimer as she says, really wanted to go into the bathroom with her, which he would do with people. He would oftentimes follow you into the bathroom and hang out with you or whatever. And then once you were in the bathroom doing whatever it was you were doing, he would demand that you let him out immediately and then attack you, sort of gently, also sort of not. This was just his very cat-like nature on full display.

So one time he decided to do this routine with my sister and she was taking a shower and he gets let in and then she takes the shower and he's meowing at her the whole time. He's in there like let me out and she's accustomed to this routine so she's just ignoring him. So then as she gets out of the shower, Oppenheimer jumps at her like he's going for her leg or whatever and to try to bite and scratch her. Oppenheimer at this point already has a reputation for being kind of vicious when it comes to his claws and teeth.

My sister in a literal knee-jerk reaction sort of punches the cat's face with her foot and I think this is perhaps how Oppenheimer's canine broke. I later discovered the broken canine and was continuously recommended by vets to get it addressed, either removed or something, but I never really saw it bothering him so it didn't really seem to me like something that needed doing. I was always concerned that the surgery and recovery would be ultimately more painful and risky.

I think legend has it that to this day my sister still has a little piece of cat tooth embedded somewhere in her foot where she sort of broke it off. So yeah, that was pretty wild.

A Christmas boondoggle

One of my most dramatic memories of Oppenheimer happened pretty early in our companionship. He was three years old and I had just bought this house that I live in now today. It was Christmas and I was really excited having just moved into my own house. We had been wrapping presents and so we had some twine string or something out and I had been playing with the cat with a piece of string. Earlier that week I had just finished my first year at my job and received a bonus check, my first ever.

On the last day of work before Christmas I came home and Oppenheimer wasn't greeting me or anything like this. I thought that was kind of weird. I didn't think too much of it. By the evening, I hadn't really seen the cat, so I started looking for him. Eventually, I found him underneath a bed. He was cowering underneath the bed. I discovered he had been throwing up. He was really sick and wasn't drinking water. All really bad signs.

I took him to a vet and they did x-rays. Before I went to the vet I noticed that the piece of string that I had been playing with was missing but didn't think much of it. Sure enough, when the vet checked him out, they found something blocking his intestines. When I told them that he had been playing with some string, they knew immediately what had happened. Basically, the cat had eaten the string and now it was messing with his guts. The string gets stuck in their intestines and the intestines will bunch up and sometimes the string could cause damage. Who knew it could be so dangerous for cats to play with string?

I decided to check him into a hospital. It had been a day or two that he had gone without food or water, so he was very weak. After checking him in, in the middle of the night, I get a call from the hospital. They had availability for the cat to be seen by very good endoscopist. They explained the endoscopist would basically put a camera, with a little grabber, down my cat's throat, down into his stomach, into his intestines and try to get the string out. "We have the best endoscopist in the Bay Area, in the hospital tonight. They can do the surgery for you. What do you say?"

Two thousand bucks and a few hours later, I get a call in the middle of the night. I think it was 3:30, 4 a.m. and it's the hospital telling me the endoscopist wasn't able to get the string out of the cat. I went and collected Oppenheimer later that day from the hospital to decide what I was going to do with him. He looked a lot better. They had him hooked up to an IV for about a day so he had gotten some fluids and rest.

I took him home about an hour or two after we got home, he went downstairs to the litter box and crapped out a whole bunch of string. As it turned out, he just needed to take it easy and have an IV. And once that was done, he was feeling much better, he immediately ate and drank and it was like a Christmas miracle. The cat was totally fine. Yeah, we were very relieved. And even though my bonus was completely consumed I was just glad that the cat was happy and healthy again.

Communing with the local wildlife

One day, sometime after I moved into my house and Oppenheimer had been here for a while, I went outside and was looking down my back deck and saw Oppenheimer down there. He was walking up to a group of deer and a large buck in particular. Oppie walked right up to the buck and the buck sort of put his head down to sniff at this cat thing that was approaching him. He was still pretty, pretty calm. They slowly extended their noses to sniff at each other a little bit and then just sort of sniffed for a few seconds. Then all of a sudden the buck jumped back and did a jump kick thing and Oppenheimer just stood there, perplexed. I thought that was pretty amazing, my cat communing with the deer.

Later, maybe that day or maybe a couple days later, Oppenheimer came home and seemed to be kind of limping or something like this. Maybe I was petting him and I pet underneath his arm and it felt wet. So I checked my fingers and sure enough, they were covered in blood. And I checked him and looked deeper and there was this big gash under his arm. He'd been licking it and it didn't look bad. It didn't look swollen or anything, just kind of like a big clean gash. I was pretty grossed out. Again he didn't seem like he was in a lot of pain, it seemed pretty normal. So I just kind of let him live with it for a while and he didn't seem too bothered by it and it seemed to heal on its own, so that was fine.

Oppenheimer had a number of run-ins with raccoons. One instance, it was the evening, time for me to get Oppenheimer inside. I had been seeing raccoons on the street and I thought it's important that he gets inside before it's too dark so that he doesn't get attacked by raccoons. I had heard of raccoons attacking cats and kind of wiping them out and all this and so I really didn't want him to get hurt.

So I was calling him in the usual way, by shaking his dry food at the door. As I was calling him in I heard some sounds coming from a tree in my yard. The sun is still up, it's just kind of setting, and I look up and I see a pair of raccoons up in the tree, about halfway down the trunk. They're sort of stopped there and I freeze because I look up the path and I see Oppenheimer sort of just trotting down the path nonchalantly, tail held high and sort of crooked at the top as cats do when they're just hanging out. Oppenheimer doesn't see the raccoons but then one of them moves and Oppenheimer immediately reacts and looks up at the tree and sees them. We all freeze for a few moments. Then one of the raccoons decides, okay, time to go and starts to bolt down the tree and Oppenheimer immediately moves to intercept. He flies across the yard, gets to the raccoon and I thought that was it. I thought the cat was done for. I run to try and stop this from happening but they're already rolling down the hill. Down and down they go and I can't even see them anymore and I think to myself, well, that's it, my cat's gone. There's no way that he's coming back from a fight with a raccoon. They're going to eat him. I run to get a stick, or something to fight with and by the time I get ready and move again he's already back at the door ready for dinner. I greet him and I said something like, "Oppenheimer, what's up with these raccoons? What happened with the raccoons?" And he just looks at me like, "I don't know what you're talking about, dude. They're gone." And that was it for those raccoons.

Another night I was watching TV with the windows open. It was a very warm night and it was probably it was after nine or ten or something like this. I think it was the middle of summer or the end of, you know, the end of summer, the hottest months of the year and watching TV with my wife and all of a sudden we noticed that there's this sort of weird sound coming from outside on the deck. It sounds like something eating or crunching celery or like something chewing on something. And so I turn on my outside floodlights and illuminate my entire yard. No fewer than 15 raccoons spread throughout the yard, an entire gaze of them. And I am standing there looking outside my windows at all of these raccoons. They're sitting in my patio furniture. They're munching on my succulents. And I think to myself, oh, no, where is the cat? Oppenheimer was always out in the evenings. He loved to be out in the yard in the evenings doing whatever. So I go outside and I look and sure enough, there's the cat halfway down the path again and there's raccoons up in the tree and there's raccoons up along my retaining wall at the top of the street. Oppenheimer doesn't see all the raccoons. He only sees the two in front of him. And what he doesn't see that I see is that there's another raccoon that's walking along the wall above him and moving into a position where it can attack him while he can't see it. And so I act immediately and I start to run out into the yard and with something in my hand to hit the raccoons away with. I charge the raccoons and Oppenheimer sort of freaks out and tucks his little tail and does the S-tuck and puffs up his hair and all this. I chase the raccoons away and whatnot and grab the cat and bring him inside. That was an exciting evening encounter with the raccoons. Thankfully Oppenheimer came away with no scratches. He was totally fine in the end.

Oppenheimer was a pretty chill cat. He liked to be outside.

That was his favorite place to be. And he'd be outside all day long. I'd let him out in the morning on my way out to work and he'd stay outside all the way until the evening when I'd come home. I never really knew what he would get up to. I think he'd roam around the neighborhood quite a lot. He had full command of the lots next to mine. He'd oftentimes sleep underneath people's driveways or under their decks. He would sleep up underneath my shed. I'd sometimes find him up there curled up underneath the deck boards.

I came to learn later that my cat had adopted families around the neighborhood. My other neighbors would oftentimes see him and pet him. I was quite surprised that they never really were attacked by him or felt the wrath of his claws. I guess they were either very conscientious of his body language or he showed them a different side of his personality. Either way, I always thought it was really nice how Oppenheimer would come out of hiding wherever he was and greet me as I was getting out of my car. Oppenheimer was almost always there at my car as soon as I got out of it or when I got off my motorcycle rubbing my legs and saying hello, maybe even giving me a little nibble. He always loved to say hello and to greet me. He'd oftentimes greet strangers too. He was very social that way. He would run up to strangers and rub on their legs and ask for pets and whatnot. He was never too shy to say hello to people.

I always really appreciated the fact that when I would watch Oppenheimer as he would greet me up at the street level, he seemed to always be very aware and very smart about cars. That's one of the things that I'm not sure I'll ever see in another cat. The degree of confidence and awareness of cars that Oppenheimer seemed to have. It was really cool because it always made me feel confident that he would be safe no matter what and there wouldn't be issues with him getting hit by a car. I really like that about Oppie. I really, really liked how he would always greet me and say hello. Maybe it was almost always just because he wanted to get back inside to his food. But I think he also liked to see me.

He was also a very chill and cuddly cat. When I hung out on the couch sitting and watching TV, he'd come up right and sleep next to me. He was also very particular. If I would disturb him after he had sort of settled in for a nap or whatever, he would let me know with claws and teeth. As I mentioned before, he would sometimes bite a little too hard. I learned this is maybe because he wasn't fully socialized as a kitten. Maybe his cat mom just didn't really teach him how to properly, gently bite. That was something I didn't really appreciate about Oppenheimer, the cat. I thought that he could have been a little bit softer with his claws and his teeth. He's a little bit feral that way. And it wasn't uncommon for my guests to feel his weaponry as well. That was always a little bit embarrassing when they'd be petting the cat and he'd be kind of acting like everything was great. And then all of a sudden he would snap and lock their hands in some sort of death trap.

Despite that, one other thing that was cool about Oppie, sort of annoying but also something that I appreciate and I'm definitely going to miss, is how he would go out in the evenings and prowl or sit outside or whatever cats do when they go outside. Oppenheimer loved to go outside in the evenings and during the day. I would let him out in the evenings and oftentimes he'd go outside and go potty or something like this. And then he would scratch at the door five minutes later. So if I look at my front door, there's a spot where the cat would constantly scratch at the door. The color of the door is worn away and there's a lip where he had dug his claws in a thousand times. It was always amusing when guests were over because the cat would start scratching at the door and it would usually scare people. I'd always get a little chuckle out of that and say, "oh, that's just the cat. I'll let him in in a minute." Oppenheimer, like many cats, loved to go in and out and in and out and in and out. He'd do that constantly. So I'd have to buffer it a little bit and not be so responsive. Otherwise I'd be getting up and opening the door to let him in and out continuously. I will definitely miss letting him in and out.

Soft kitty

One thing that Oppenheimer could not get enough of was sleeping in my laundry. Oppie would love to find my bedroom door open and fresh laundry not put away. He would snuggle right down into that. He loved it. I had to learn over a number of instances that if I left the bedroom door open that the cat was going to go in and sleep in my clothes. It seemed like he really enjoyed stuff that I had worn or the bed that I slept in or whatever it was. If I had left a door open he would always be found snoozing in there.

I could always deal with the fact that the cat slept in there and the cat hair and whatnot. That was always fine. The main problem was that Oppenheimer had fleas like crazy because I had fleas in my neighborhood and up here on the hills and whatnot. He picked those fleas up and, we always had to give him flea medicine, but it didn't really stop him from getting them from time to time. So the worst part about finding him in my clothes was always the fact that now I had a bunch of fleas to deal with in my clothes, which is kind of nasty, so I always had to end up washing them again.

One time Oppenheimer came in and I was petting him and I was sort of stroking his chest and I felt a little sort of bump of some kind and I was like, oh God, what's that? And sure enough, it was a big old tick, huge, but already had already been sunk into the cat for a while. So we had to wrap the cat up in a burrito towel thing and that was a whole mess and he was pretty pissed off about that. We had to pin him down, get some tweezers and pick the tick right out of him, which was pretty gnarly.

I'll miss you Oppie

Already the past few days have felt like he was missing. It's been several months since he stopped going outside, prowling, greeting, dodging cars, but still, not seeing him even in his favorite hiding place, or going back and forth between there and his food has left the home feeling somewhat lacking. While he was sick, my wife caught a child on their way to school checking under our gate at the street. She asked if they were looking for the cat and they were and she told them he wasn't feeling well and they were disappointed. Apparently he would sit on the steps beneath the gate and watch passersby. I believe he had an amazing life here, able to roam freely, have adventures, and soak up more sun than most cats ever get to. He was street smart, wilderness smart, and human smart. He brooked no disrespect, and was also a warm and obviously social cat. He reminded me of one of my first cats from childhood, Mr Man (Tom). I am happy that Oppie had such a full life, and that his suffering in the end was not prolonged, and that he was my cat, and I was his human, for a while.