Old Cat Blues

My friend lives down the street from me, just a few blocks away, but sometimes I think we live in different worlds.

The man across the street from my friend is living with a woman who, a couple of weeks ago, became irate with her 15-year-old deaf cat, kicked her, chucked her outside, and left her to defend herself against the forces of an outside environment. The old cat's crime? She peed on clean clothes tossed into a basket. At least, this is the story my friend tells who, in the past, has been known to exaggerate, confuse the facts, and/or sometimes make up her own version of the event, not in a malicious way but in a dreamy, forgetful and creative manner.

The old cat (who is nameless at this point) has decided that she wants to live with my friend, but my friend isn't amenable to another feline addition to her family. She says she's not feeding the cat because she doesn't have the money to feed another cat. (She feeds her outside cats dry food in one bowl - what's one more mouth to feed, really?) The owner doesn't appear to be feeding the cat either. My friend said today that another neighbor is feeding the old girl, but that cat is soooo thin and she cries constantly when she sees a human, rubbing up against legs and following whoever is nearest. So, today I walked back to my house (after my long walk with my friend) in the hot noon sun and brought back a can of cat food for the old cat. She dove into that bowl like she hadn't eaten in too many days. She inhaled that food. I gave my friend what was left and asked her to feed the rest of it to the cat in the next couple of days. She took the can in a snit like I had just asked her to do something extremely difficult and time-consuming that would interfere with her busy, busy, busy life. (She's retired and mostly hangs around her house.) I wanted to slap her. An old deaf cat who was kicked out her own home came to my friend for help and my friend is ignoring the situation.  She didn't pay for the can of cat food - I gave it to her, I who have no income whatsoever - and I will continue to bring food to that old cat because I'll be damned if I'm going to let her starve in the shadow of a woman who seems at times not to have a compassionate soul, even if she claims to be a Buddhist.