Losing Flynn
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
Mel met me at the door Friday evening with “I can’t find Flynn.”
Immediately, my mind raced to that morning. As last last to leave, I usually take a head count and frequently double-check the count before I finally close the door behind me. I couldn’t remember taking a head count. I fed him. I saw him eat. After that, I didn’t remember seeing him again. Mel thought he might have escaped when she opened the back door to take some vegetable set-outs she had just purchased to the back yard. But she didn’t remember seeing him at all when she got home.
In any case, Flynn was nowhere to be seen. Even the two triggers that brings him running 99% of the time weren’t working — the ice dispenser (for a game of ice hockey) and the sound of kibble hitting a food dish.
What do you do in these situations? Exactly what we did. Panic.
We tore up the house looking in all the spots he might be and all the spots he probably wouldn’t be, but that were big enough to hold a big cat. We ran the ice dispenser so much that the floor was slick with ice. We poured out so much kibble the other two cats couldn’t eat anything more for fear of explosion. We looked in the garage at least a couple of dozen times. Each.
Flynn was not to be found inside, so we moved our search outside.
First the back yard. We searched under, over, and inside anything that might hold a cat. Mel got the ladder and peered into neighboring back yards. We called and called. And called. I continued looking in the back and Mel moved out to the front. Nothing. So we put the top down on the Miata in order to have an unobstructed view and drove around the neighborhood until it was too dark to see. We knocked on the doors of the neighbors directly behind us to see if Flynn had leaped the fence, but no, they hadn’t seen anything.
Everyone we talked with was empathetic and very nice, promising to keep an eye out. The guys across the street thought they found him, but it was just the little girl cat down the street that looks a lot like him. Only she’s much smaller. And she’s a girl. Several others mentioned seeing the look-a-like, too, but by that time, we knew that those were false sightings.
We trudged back home and started making fliers with his picture on it. I printed a few and Mel went out to hang them on the doors of all the immediate neighbors. Then we went to FedEx/Kinko’s to print and laminate a dozen color fliers and print 50 more black and white fliers. On the way home, we taped laminated versions to all neighborhood traffic sign poles in the immediate two blocks. Then we went home to collapse, get up early, and start handing out more fliers.
All the time we were looking for Flynn, all I could think of was how scared he must be. He is an indoor cat and he does not know how to take care of himself outside. He’s afraid of things that swoop down from above and would probably be under or in something. I can imagine that if something scared him really bad, he would take off running and not stop until he was absolutely exhausted. Or dead.
Flynn is my cat. Or rather, I am his human. He is the first cat that has ever bonded with me. All the others have either bonded with Mel or are equal-opportunity lovers. When Flynn was a baby, I would feed him and then hold his tiny body for hours while he slept, in an attempt to give him some of the loving contact he would have had with his mother, had she survived. I’m a poor cat-mother substitute, but it was enough to associate me with cuddling.
As a grown cat, he’s a fairly independent beast, but every now and then he jumps up on my desk, puts his head in the crook of my arm, and naps while I surf the net. (He’s too big now for me to hold in one arm, so the rest of his expansive body splays out onto the desktop and frequently my keyboard.)
So losing Flynn — losing MY cat — was a devastating feeling. This feeling is much worse than losing a pet to death. In death, there is closure. But there is no closure when a pet gets lost. Only hope that one day, somehow, the missing animal will show up at your doorstep. That’s what I kept hoping for, anyway.
By 11:30 p.m., we had done all we could do. We were exhausted and desperate for some rest. So we decided to shut the search down until morning, because we couldn’t do anything else anyway. We opened the door for one more sweep around the yard before bed and Mel exclaimed, “Flynn!” And in ran Flynn. Scared and hungry, but otherwise unhurt. Our boy came back to us.
“Maybe it’s true that there are no atheists in foxholes,” Mel said as we watched Flynn gorge himself on tuna. Maybe so. I know I was praying to someone.
God or no god, you can damn well be sure we’ll count heads before go anywhere. We’ve got one of Flynn’s “Lost Cat” posters on the inside of the front door to remind us, just in case we forget.