Luda Cat Knox (2006–2022)
After two-plus days of our buff tabby Luda not being himself at all, wobbling on noncooperating hind legs, searching again and again for places to hide, and panting in obvious distress, it was time to relieve his suffering.
We took him to our local vet here in Athens, Georgia, and they did a great job. We had quiet time with Luda. He sat on my wife Pam, a natural pose during his nearly 13 years with us (below), and he let me cradle his head and provide a chinrest, while I slowly stroked his head exactly the way he’d taught me to do it over the years.
Everyone’s pet is unique and the best-ever, I know, but it was Luda’s unexpected adoption of me that has kept me weeping much of today.
I should say that Luda (not Luna) was the name he was given at the shelter, and it was as unique as the cat himself. But it was a bit of a misnomer; our Luda, at least by age 3 when he joined us, was an all-business cat, little to no “lude” (Latin for “play/sport”) in him. At his peak weight, I called him “16 pounds of demands.” This was no little laser-pointer-chasing kitty. He demanded, and commanded, respect.
Pam is the acknowledged cat person in the family; all cats know this, and of course Luda did. He would meow mournfully outside her shower for most of his years with us, warning her not to drown. He did it with me maybe twice. Pam’s part cat.
Luda’s previous owners dumped him because they were afraid he’d suffocate their baby — balderdash. He was incredibly gentle and, until his health went down, he never even bit us (except for some play-bites of affection). I think that the man of the family may have been unkind to Luda in some way, because Luda was very skittish around me at first. Again, I expected the cat to be Pam’s cat, so this wasn’t entirely unexpected.
Being a part-empath of the MBTI ENFJ variety, I spent time trying to get to know the cat, to see the world through his topaz eyes despite my inferior non-cat status. And after the unnecessarily medically botched illness and death of my mom in late 2010, I spent more time with him as therapy. Later, when our son Evan moved out and then went to grad school out of state in 2019, Luda served as a buffer to empty-nest syndrome. I paid very careful attention to how he purr-furred to be petted, what he liked and didn’t like, to the point where I think he got me to do things almost exactly the way he liked. By the end, Pam thought he purr-furred me to her in some ways. As I said, Luda liked my attention to de tail.
I guess I was awarded honorary cat status, a high honor from any cat. But especially from Luda, whose own standards were so high that when he couldn’t be 100% Luda anymore, it was time to exit.
Luda loved texture. He could self-induce major motorboat purring just by being on a favorite texture of blanket. He took over a pair of Pam’s snakeskin shoes and laid on them for years. When he got excited, he would hop up on the old-timey rocking chair we got for baby Evan (who never cared to be rocked) and Luda would scratch-scratch-scratch at the fibers of the seat until they eventually frayed. We never knew what that was about, but he did it countless times (and I never filmed it, sigh). Maybe that was his way of expressing as well as deriving pleasure: through texture.
As he grew older, Luda developed a very specific moral objection to the sound of silverware being put into or taken out of the dishwasher. One of my Facebook friends has doubted this; somewhere I do have video of Luda sour-meowing over 40 times in 3 minutes to the sound of silverware. Plates were generally meh; but silverware? Luda would come all the way from a sound sleep in the back bedroom to the kitchen just to object. And object. And object. This wasn’t once or twice. This was for years. Sometimes Luda would even object to the opening of the dishwasher, even before any actual sounds were made. Again, this was a moral objection on Luda’s part to the entire concept of silverware noise.
Speaking of meowing… some cats seem to have a handful of meows. Luda was the Million-Meow Cat. It’s been like talking to a precocious child; he recognized all kinds of words, and had his own prodigious vocatulary. He had everything from short, pointed meows-of-death and meows-of-bodily-harm to longer, multi-syllabic meows that rumbled like thunder and expressed some kind of complex grievance. To his last days, he had meows I hadn’t heard before (not to mention his yowling and yodeling, which were different vocalizations).
For example, the last big laugh I got from Luda was just last week. He had taken to peeing on Pam’s bathroom rug because it was too hard for him to get into the litter box (or was it just because he chose to do it?). Pam had scolded him repeatedly for doing it. Anyway, I was in the bedroom with Pam but emerged to go back to finish up some work late at night, and Luda stuck his little head out from the bathroom. He was clearly surprised that I was in the hall, which tells you something about how intelligent he was about our normal patterns. I said, “Luda, were you in the bathroom? Were you peeing on Mom’s rug?” And Luda gave a first-ever small “meoww” as he turned his head down and aside — he might as well have said “yeah, I’m busted.” I laughed about that for days, up to the point that I started weeping over his declining health.
Speaking of intelligence, my all-time favorite example of Luda’s wits is the day or two after we acquired an elliptical exercise machine for the basement. Luda got my attention one day at the top of the stairs. I said, “OK, show me,” which he knew to mean that he was in the lead. And, he took us to the exercise machine. And stood there. He had questions, clearly. I said, “Do you want me to demonstrate it?” Apparently so. I got on it for a moment, showed him what it did, and… uninterested at that point, he walked away and never paid any more attention to it.
There are many more Luda-stories, like the time he found a way into the cat-sized crawlspace between our basement’s drop-ceiling and our first floor. He figured out how to get up there himself, somehow. We had no idea he was up there, or even missing, until… I was playing our electronic keyboard, headphones on, in the basement, when suddenly one of the ceiling tiles near me came halfway down! I looked up, thinking for some reason it was raccoons. Instead, Luda’s little fuzzface peered out from the darkness, uttering a most puzzled and questioning “meow?” It took us quite a while to figure out a way to herd a cat, trapped between drop-ceiling and real ceiling, back down to safety. The shelter had warned us he was an explorer cat, and he was, in the most delightful way.
I think he was a special cat even among cats, but of course I do. In our son Evan’s perfectly evocative nickname, Luda was the “Fuzzfriend,” with an emphasis on “friend.” In an age where it’s easy to ‘friend’ someone but apparently nearly impossible to befriend someone, Luda has been a refuge for me, high standards and all. (After you get enough turndowns, no-replies and postponements-that-asymptote-to-infinity from your offers to meet up or do lunch, you get to the point of saying: screw these humans, I’m going home to pet my cat.)
Thanks for picking us at the shelter, Luda. You were the perfect cat for us, and we love you and we will always miss you. If, in a next life, I come back as a cat and you get to be the human, I bet we’ll recognize each other instantly. I will sit in your lap and purr.
