| David's Romana |
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| Romana Stories Jailbreak I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1982 at which time I had a girlfriend who got kicked out of there for a semester. I used to go visit her at her parents' house where they had two cats. I was violently allergic to cats but took care to avoid touching anything with cat hair on it and then touching my face. Slowly over the semester I developed a tolerance, and I came to really like her cats (Sookie the Siamese and the other whose name I forget), their gracefulness, their sense of dignity, their beauty and their silliness. After a while I decided that I too wanted a cat. I moved to Denver the following year and then after six months rented a condo from one of the professors in my first masters program who had two cats himself, so I decided to get a cat of my own. At the professor's suggestion I responded to an add in the Rocky Mountain News for free kittens. The woman who answered asked me if I knew I had to feed kittens some ridiculously-large number of times per day, and I suggested that perhaps I wanted a slightly older cat. She had converted her garage into a little cat shelter, and invited me over to take a look. I didn't see any cat there who spoke to me. She told me that male cats were more affectionate, but the professor had told me that male cats spray, even sometimes after neutered, and suggested a female cat, so that's what I wanted. She told me that she tried to go down to the Denver Pound and rescue cats about to be killed, bringing them to her garage until she could find someone to adopt them. She said that there was a female calico cat scheduled to be killed that day, and asked me if I wanted to go with her to the Pound and see the cat. I had no idea what a calico cat looked like, but I agreed. The Pound was a painful place, full of dogs barking unhappily and cats mewing in misery. One male cat kept trying to reach me through the bars of his little cage. Next to him was a beautiful cat, with black, orange and white fur, sitting dully in the middle of her cage, not responding to anything. Despite her lack of response, I knew right away that I wanted her, and I agreed to adopt her right then and there. That's the best decision I ever made in my life. Her First Lickies In order to spring Romana from the Denver Pound I had to pay to send her to the Capitol Hill Spay/Neuter Clinic (and I thought I had trouble creating titles) and have her "fixed" (broken). When I arrived at the clinic Romana was all doped up from the surgery, and the people at the clinic had told me to put her in a quiet, dark place until she awakened. When I got her home to the condo into which I had just moved I put her on the old single bed in the bedroom with the lights off. I watched TV that evening and I was so excited about having her that on each commercial break I crept into the bedroom to check on her. As the evening wore on I noticed that she'd moved a little and, fearful that she might roll off the bed in her stupor, I dimmed the lights in the living room and brought her out to watch TV with me--an activity in which we would engage many a time over the following years. (She never developed any more interest in the television programs themselves over succeeding years, incidentally, than she displayed that first night in her stupor.) As the anesthesia slowly wore off, Romana tried repeatedly to stand, only to fall asleep midway and slowly descend again to the floor. I have to admit that she looked so ludicrous that I laughed at her. Fortunately the anesthesia prevented my laughter from wounding her pride. By the time I was ready for bed she had come out of the anesthesia and when I asked her if she wanted to go to bed she eagerly followed me to the bed and jumped up on it. As soon as I lay down she jumped up on my head and started licking my hair, inventing what I quickly came to call "lickies." I was always worried that she might swallow too much of my hair, so I tended to discourage her from licking my hair, but she loved to lick my upper lip, and her lickies remained one of her primary means of expressing affection for more than 18 years. Occasionally in the early years I returned the licky, but neither one of us really cared for it. As my brother Jeff remarked probably a good 17 years ago, my tongue isn't designed like a comb. Invasion While we lived in that condo together Denver experienced an invasion of the Seven-Year Locust. The condo building had a terrace on each floor, and sliding glass doors accessed the terrace from the living room and bedroom. I rarely opened the bedroom doors, but I often opened the living room door and Romana would promptly run out to the terrace for a breath of fresh air and the opportunity to bully my landlord's cats next door. Romana was always a small cat, never weighing more than 11 pounds at her peak, but having perhaps been a street cat before landing in the Denver Pound, was always tough and scrappy. If my landlord Ed had his sliding glass doors open, Romana would waltz right into his place and chase away both of his cats, one of which, General Lee (a female despite the name) weighed twice as much as Romana, and the other of which, Heather, who was definitely a compulsive overeater, weighed four times as much as Romana. The fatter cat would run immediately, whereas General Lee would stand her ground until Romana hissed, and then General Lee would be off and running too. It used to annoy Ed a bit that his cats would run from mine, and I always admired Romana for that. I wish I were a tenth as tough as she was. Romana wasn't the only invader in those days. Another cat from the far end of the terrace used to come sometimes and taunt Romana when I had the doors closed. One day I was talking on the phone and I heard a terrible crash and then Romana screaming. Thinking she had been terribly hurt somehow I dropped the phone and ran into the bedroom, only to find her throwing herself repeatedly against the glass trying to get at the cat with the smug expression on its face. Fearful that Romana would hurt herself, I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, whereupon she spun around in my grip and bit me. I yelled, "hey, it's me!" whereupon she collapsing into a limp rag as if to say, "oops, sorry about that." I went out and chased the other cat away. I'll say this though, that cat NEVER came around when OUR door was open. Then one day the locusts descended. They were all over the place, harmless to people, human and feline alike, but rather annoying. At their worst they forced me to keep the screen door pulled shut and Romana inside. One day eventually I let her back out on the terrace while I did something inside. She came running back in making a funny noise that I hadn't heard before. A short, high-pitched repetitive noise, basically a chirp. It turned out that she had a locust in her mouth. She dropped it at my feet, and proceeded to play with it, batting it first one way and then the other, and then getting it in her mouth again, only to drop it back at my feet. Clearly she had brought it for me, and clearly she was proud of her hunting prowess. Meanie that I am, I didn't want a squirming locust in my apartment (now I recall that Denver has a Locust street, although honestly until now I'd never made the connection). I said in no uncertain terms, "You take that back outside with you!" and pointed at the door. She meowed in complaint, but miraculously, she took it back outside. Did I mention that she was a smart kitty? You might have thought that she was just some pretty fur, but that cat was SMART. Faster Than A Speeding Bullet Human beings revere cats for their grace and speed ("catlike reflexes") as well as for their sensuality. Some time after the invasion of locusts, while we were living in the same condo, we had an invasion of moths. It seemed impossible to keep all the moths out, even with the screen doors closed. In those days I kept a bright lamp on top of the headboard of the waterbed, with which I'd replaced the single bed of my childhood (which resides here with me in the computer room n�e dining room). When I'd first gotten the waterbed, I moved the single bed to the far end of what was a huge bedroom in the condo (created by joining two bedrooms some time in the past). The first couple of nights Romana went not to the old sleeping spot which contained the waterbed, but to the single bed on the far side. I had to carry her to the waterbed. Who knew that the waterbed would eventually become one of her favorite places in our home? Because it became one of her favorites I now keep her remains--an urn with her ashes, her four paw-prints, some cast-off claw-coverings, and a swatch of her beautiful fur--on the shelf at the bottom of the waterbed's headboard, where I used to keep one of her waterbowls. By the time of the moth invasion, anyway, Romana had become accustomed to the waterbed and often got up on the headboard, a practice she continued until sometime in the past year. In fact in our Iowa home she used to jump from the headboard to the very top of the bookcases atop large chests of drawers, scaring the heck out of me. One evening during the moth invasion, in any case, I entered the bedroom to find Romana sitting under the lamp on the waterbed headboard, swatting listlessly at a moth flapping slowly around the lamp. I watched for a while astounded, as Romana repeatedly missed a moth that even a Cats With Disabilities Act feline should have been able to swat. I was so disappointed that my heroic super cat turned out to be so slow, so I said to her, "You're such a slow kitty!" or some such silliness. Annoyed, she turned her back entirely on the moth, leaving the moth more or less between her and the wall against which the waterbed's headboard sat. She switched her tail in annoyance. As I teased her about being a slow kitty, she feigned indifference to the moth, and then without looking, in one smooth, graceful, lightning-fast movement spun around and splattered that moth flat against the mall. "Oh," I said to her, "you were just playing. Sorry." She sure showed me! Good Riddance For our last home in Denver Romana and I lived in a small two-bedroom house. We had a garden in the back and she used to come out with me when I worked in the garden. Sometimes she would get down in the grass and stalk the birds which always remained well beyond her reach in some branches a good ten feet above teh ground. She liked to eat some of grass and then throw it back up. She also liked to lie in the garden itself when I watered and attack the little stream of water as it rolled down the slight incline in the dirt--but then would always get annoyed when the stream made her paw wet! During the first of our three years in that house I noticed a wild cat in the alley periodically when I took out the garbage. She was black and glossy, although she looked a little thin. She would do this strange sort of snap-hiss whenever she saw me. She'd snap her paw down and hiss at me. It scared the heck out of me but I'd talk to her anyway. I used to talk to her in the alley and later I saw her at the kitchen door. I got out food and put it in a bowl on the little stoop, and when I retreated inside she approached the bowl--after a good snap-hiss--and started to eat. I fed her for a while that way before she disappeared. Before she disappeared I realized that she'd had a litter of cats in the crawl space under my house and I started calling her Momma-cat. After I started feeding her when I'd see her in the alley she's still snap-hiss at me and do a big circle around me--and then head for the kitchen door. (Fortunately I accessed the alley through my other door; my kitchen door simply led into my landlord's yard next door.) When she disappeared--I learned later that a woman who ran a pet shop had taken her to get spayed and vaccinated and was keeping her at the shop--I started feeding the kittens so they wouldn't starve. I caught the dominant male and took him inside, where I kept him for a day or three to tame him before I took him to the Humane Society. At first he did the same snap-hiss that Mamma-cat did. When I first caught him by the scruff of the neck he spun around in my gripe and bit me right through my glove! I put him in Romana's cat-carrying case and brought him inside--and then put him at the far end of the living room so that each of us--as freaked out as we both felt--could have a little space. I fed him and brushed him and fairly quickly he got used to me and I could take him out of the case and handle him. The woman at the Humane Society wouldn't tell me whether they had room for him or would kill him, and after I left I sat in my car and cried. I came back the next day and he was there; he had cleaned up nicely and two families had already requested him. I wasn't going to risk another kitten that way, so when I captured the others I resolved to find them homes rather than take them to the Humane (Contingent-Felicide) Society. I lay out all night in late November on that driveway next to the crawl space catching them one by one. When I had all but the runt in the bathroom, the runt ran around down in the space crying loudly and her brother and sisters responded through the vents in my bathroom. I finally caught the runt and then kept the whole family in my bathroom for days. I never saw Romana so dejected, except for the last 12 hours of her life. I knew I had to get the kittens out of there. Once the remaining male, whom I'd named Gerard after a character from Roger Zelazny's Amber series, got out of the bathroom right as Romana arrived outside the bathroom door. I thought, based on Romana's response to other cats, that poor Gerard was a goner for sure. Much to my surprise, she didn't do anything at all. Maybe it was because he was so much smaller, or maybe it was because he was male, but for whatever reason, she left him alone. I must say that I felt terrible over how she felt, and though I really did bond with Gerard, who once took an inadvertent bath in my bathwater while I was in the tub, I was actually rather happy to be able to give him and his sisters to the pet shop lady to find homes for them. They were so little and cute that even Romana, with her great beauty, seemed big and a tad ungainly by comparison. Romana and I were both grateful after I got them out of the house and we could return to our tight little one-on-one relationship! A Day at the Races I feel guilty that I didn't take Romana out on a leash for walks very often after we moved to Iowa. In our place in Denver she could come with me to the garden, and once she went out the front and went exploring about two houses down until she heard me calling and came slinking guiltily back. I was so relieved to see her that I said in an affectionate tone, "Did you go exploring?" but she was so sure I would be mad at her for going that she slunk past me and then bolted for our "front" door. In Iowa where we lived for 11 years, anyway, we never had either a balcony or a garden, so occasionally at first I'd take her out on a leash. One problem, as I've always said, is I you couldn't walk her; she walked me. I had to follow her around, and she wanted to sniff every leaf on the nearest bush, and get her leash all tangled. One time, however, I got her up to the sidewalk. Now I'm a runner, or I have been for years until recently when my knees have been troubling me, so I thought I'd see if she could run. I started running on the sidewalk and said, "Come on Romana, let's run!" Much to my delight she broke into a sprint so fast that I couldn't keep up with her. Unfortunately she ran so fast that she reached the end of her leash and it pulled her up short. She slowed down to let me catch up and we both ran a little further. Then, as it was a warm day, she'd had enough and promptly plopped down on her side on the sidewalk, panting. I'd never seen a cat pant before--and we never raced again either. What's In a Name? People often get Romana's name wrong; they think it's the name of a cheese. "Romana" as I understand it, actually represents a female form of the Latin name for Rome, and during the days of the Roman Empire Romans referred to the Empire as "Pax Romana," meaning "The Peace of Rome" under the notion that Rome imposed peace wherever it conquered. I didn't name Romana after the Roman Empire. I named her instead after a character out of the BBC TV science fiction series "Doctor Who." The series ran for more than 25 years and became a staple of PBS programing in the United States. I really got into the series in the early 1980s just after I graduated college. The character Romana was, like the Doctor, as the main character called himself, a Time Lord (or Time Lady as they used to call her). The Doctor had many, many companions over 25 years (as well as at least six different faces). I named that beautiful little calico cat I sprang from the Denver Pound "Romana" because Romana was the only companion who ever was the Doctor's equal. |
| Nicknames One day I started rubbing Romana's tummy slowly. As I rubbed up I said "woooooo!" and when I rubbed down I said, "booooooooo!" Soon Wooboo became a nickname, and from Wooboo I got Woobee, Woob, Woobs, Bee and Beewoob. Bee became Sweetabee which at times became Sweetabeast, which became Beaster and Beasterabee. I most often I called her Woobee and Woob or Woobs. When she was ailing the day she died I said, "Woobee, do you want to die?" and when she entered the seizure that killed her I cried out, "Woobee are you dying?" When we watched Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, she became Superbee and I used to fly her around the room during the opening music, to which I made silly Superbee words. I still hear the words when I watch reruns of Lois and Clark. It's nice and yet painful at the same time, and sometimes I have to mute the TV so that I can't hear the music. I had plenty of other names for her too. Occasionally I called her my little Roman kitty, or "Roman-A." I had a silly little song about it too. "Roman with an A; I like A! You're the little B, the Sweetabee!" with endless variations thereupon. Romana had one particulary plaintive meow that I swear sounded just like the sound-effect that during the 1960s B-grade Hollywood movie-makers used for Godzilla's roar (minus the reverb and echo), so when Romana complained that way I'd call her my little Godzilla-kitty. Sometimes I'd even make her walk on her hind legs, breath fire and stomp on Tokoyo. (Okay, so I really only made her walk on her hind legs, but you have to admit it made a good story there for a minute, didn't it?) When she wasn't being a little Godzilla-kitty, Romana used to like to climb up on my shoulders and sit there purring. Sometimes she would lick my hair, especially early on, while other times she would present her chin for scratching or try to give me lickies on the upper lip. In the early years she climbed up there mostly when I was sitting in the bathroom, but in later years she started wanting to get up on my shoulders all the time. In the last few years I really got enamored of the Japanese animated TV series Pok�mon, in which a little pocket-monster named Pikachu loves to ride around on the shoulders of his human, Ash Ketchum. When Romana would climb up on my shoulders, I'd call her a little Pika-bee, and sometimes when I wanted her to get up there, or thought she wanted to get up but wasn't sure, I'd ask her in a certain almost-singing tone, with my voice rising from the the lowest register up through falsetto, if she wanted to be a Pikabee. With text I can't give you a good sense of how it sounded, but as I hear it you'd pronounced it "PEA-uh-Ka-BEE." You really have to hear it. The more I enjoyed having her be a little Pikabee, the more she liked being one. It got to the point where whenever I'd come home from being gone for hours (like during the summer and fall of 2001 when I was studying math intensively to get into the Ph.D. program in economics and would spend 8 hours a day down at school studying) she'd follow me around trying to jump up on my shoulders as soon as possible, while I'd run around trying to put her off until I could remove my dress shirt and put on a T-shirt. Sometimes she would stay up there for an extended period, until my neck and shoulder muscles got sore and I had to put her on my lap. Other times she'd get up there when I had to do something that required more mobility on my part, and I'd try to lean over the couch to get her to walk off my shoulders onto the back of the couch, and she wouldn't. Sometimes she just really, really wanted to be up on my shoulders. I still watch Pok�mon and in some ways it's nice because seeing Pikachu sometimes feels like seeing Romana in action again. Sometimes it's hard to watch Pok�mon now though because Ash still has his Pikachu while I've lost my sweet little Pikabee. Mighty Little Bitey Romana used to do what I called little play bites, although I think she used the play bites to exert some control. We used to wrestle a little, especially when she was younger. I'd put her on her back on the floor and let her wrap her paws around my arm and then kind of rock her back and forth. She kind of enjoyed it but it also irritated her too after a while so she'd eventually grab my hand in her teeth and hold on tight. She never broke the skin, but she did manage to exert just enough pressure so that if I didn't stop rocking her the bite would really hurt. Sometimes when I'd rock her I'd say, "Bite me Woob, bite me!" and she would! Sometimes I'd say "you're doing a mighty little bitey!" after she'd clamped down. Other times I'd ask her, "Are you going to let go?" because sometimes she'd keep her teeth clamped on my hand for quite a while (maybe a whole minute which seems like a long time when you have a cat's mouth attached to your hand!) Sometimes I'd call her my Mighty Aphro-Bitey (after "Mighty Aphrodite"). Sometimes late at night, or perhaps early in the morning, she get a desire to bite me around my Achilles' tendon. I'm not really sure why, but I do know that it always seemed to come in the wee hours. Maybe she just tended to get overly-tired at that time, or maybe she just wanted me to go to bed so she could curl up in the crook of my arm. She definitely bit my ankles to get my attention. I learned to tell when she wanted to bite my Achilles' tendon because she'd get a funny look on her face and turn her head sideways so she could run in and get a good chomp. Of course she never broke the skin, but I'm sensitive there so I didn't really like it. Sometimes when I saw her get that look I'd wag my finger at her and say, "Don't you bite me Woobie! Don't you bite me!" Of course that usually just triggered her to bite me right then and there. Sometimes I would say, "Bite me Woob! Bite me!" and then oddly enough she didn't always do it. Romana was just like me: she never wanted to do anything she was supposed to do. Romana was always wary around guests, especially female guests. She'd come up and sniff your hand if you put it down toward her, and if you seemed okay to her she'd lift up her chin to let you scratch under it. If you made the mistake of trying to pet her, she'd try to grab your hand with her paws, and if you had the typical human response to seeing cat paws coming your way and jerked your hand away, she'd scratch you. I saw her do it to a woman on more than one occasion. If you didn't pull away she would simply grab your hand by wrapping her paws around it, leaving her claws retracted, and then she would give you a little play bite. If you didn't pull away from her clamped teeth (and she never broke the skin with them) she'd eventually release your hand and give you two or three quick lickies, which was her way of saying that you were okay. So the mighty little bitey was just her way of saying, "I'm in control here!" Sadly her mighty little bitey didn't give her enough control to let her escape Iowa and move to Virginia with me; she had her seizure and died in our apartment in Iowa less than three weeks before I moved here. Katty Claws Over our more than 18 years together I invented all sorts of Romana and kitty lyrics. I used to sing to her in Old Norse, "Thu ert minn, lillil mestr bestr k�ttr," ("you are my little most best cat") to a rather tuneless tune I created myself. I put the lyrics to "Katty Claws," by contrast, to a quite well-known tune: Oh you'd better give scratch, you'd better give brush! You'd better not feed your cat in a rush! Katty claws are coming, to town! (Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow!) She knows when you'll be Woobie! She knows when you'll be Tube! She knows when you'll be Bab or Boob so be Woobee Woobee Woobee Woob Woob Woob! You'd better give scratch, you'd better give brush! You'd better not feed your cat in a rush! Katty claws are coming, to town! For the most part I didn't write entire sets of Romana or kitty lyrics to replace original lyrics, but rather inserted a word or two related to Romana into existing lyrics. The Queen song "Body Language," for instance, became "Katty Language," and the song "Happy Talkin'" from the musical "South Pacific" became "Katty Talkin.'" |
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