How dangerous was my venture into Englewood Illinois to purchase my new Siamese kitten? Possibly more than I was aware of at the time.
Englewood is a southside Chicago neighbourhood, just west of the University of Chicago. It is bordered by South Racine, Garfield, West 76th and Interstate 90 and is predominantly African-American. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, it is a "Gang Nation", home to three of Chicago's oldest and largest gangs: the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords and the Latin Kings. Their primary occupation is the distribution of crack cocaine, racking up daily sales of $10 - $15 thousand dollars. At least, this was in September of 2006 when 23 gang members in a barricaded crackhouse were charged in a huge bust. In a video of the drug raid, suspects were seen tossing bags of the drug out the windows.
On May 13 of this year during a sweep of the neighbourhood, five members of the Gangster Disciples were arrested.
Within three blocks of the address where I bought the kitten, there were 46 crimes on each of October 16th and 17th and 48 on October the 15th. These included, among many, aggravated assault, burglaries, weapons violations, car theft, narcotics charges and vandalism.
The map from the website of SpotCrime is solid with symbols of fists, fleeing men and burglars.
Into this mire, I, a blonde, white woman "of a certain" age drove in my Mercedes SUV. The google map to the house certainly informed me of the location, but not of its inherent risks. I knew the Southside had a problem with crime, but I figured anyone breeding Siamese kittens would be safe.
The website, Paws4Affection was impressive, boasting home-raised, socialized, well-loved felines and when I talked to the owner on the phone, she was effusive and well-spoken and seened sincere. She was a member of the American Humane Society.
But as I turned off the throughway and drove deeper and deeper into the neighbourhood, I saw street after street of derelict, boarded-up houses, dead cars, vacant, garbage-strewn, weedy lots and graffiti-smeared businesses. What shops there were were all behind bars and the blue lights that signal police cameras blinked at all the intersections where young African American males stood in tight groups. It was a scene of deprivation and uncertainty and idle, resentful discontent. I felt bleak, hopeless and unsettled just viewing it.
I wondered if I'd be wise to turn around. I felt like a target though no-one paid any particular attention to me even as I slowed down to look for street names and house numbers. And I was determined to get the kitten.
Finally I came to a ramshackle two-storey duplex with peeling green paint and rotting verandahs. I got out of the car with real trepidation and walked through a rusty, broken gate, (though still hooked up), across a junky yard and saw in the front window a sign that said, "No guns. We want to live." A big gas barbecue was tucked under the stairs. I walked up those rickety steps and knocked on the door and knocked harder a second time when no-one responded.
A personable girl/woman looked startled to see me but when I said I had come for the kitten she invited me into a sparsely furnished, living room cluttered with children's toys and said to sit down on the brown velvet sectional. I decided to remain standing. She explained it was her mother who had the kitten but that she lived upstairs. She telephoned her to come and get me. And then she disappeared.
What next appeared, or I should say, who next appeared was a sleepy, towering, sculpted and gorgeous Black brother, bare-headed, bare-chested, bare-footed, pants slung almost to his groin. He stopped dead when he saw me. For a shocked second, we both eyed each other. But scarcely missing a beat, he said, "Howyoall." And he too disappeared.
Almost instantly the front door opened and in bolted a hefty black and white pitbull, (aren't they all?), wiggling and wagging her tail. "That's Angel," the woman who followed said in a booming voice. "She alright."
The woman was all energy. I don't remember what she was wearing. Her hair was pulled into a high, tight pony tail that went down her back and thin braids hung around her attractive, made-up face. She was full-figured and maybe fortyish and forthright, loud, enthusing over the fact that I'd found her place in the middle of a raging windstorm. It practically blew us over as we climbed a second set of shaky steps up to her apartment.
It was even more spare than her daughter's but it was pin-neat and clean. In the centre was a large black leather lazy-boy facing a monstrous flat TV screen. A toddler teetered around not doing much of anything. He didn't respond to my greeting. "That's Cortez. My great-grandson," she offered. Then, "Come! Come! Come and see your baby. And be prepared!"
When she opened the door to the back room off the kitchen a hoard of Siamese cats and kittens came rushing forward. The room reeked and a litterbox overflowing with feces sat by the entrance. The felines, maybe a dozen of them were all ages and sizes and off in a corner was a carton of six tiny kittens, still too young to leave the protected space. The woman went around picking up the bigger kittens one by one, lifting up their tails. I wanted a male and there was only one. Finally, after examining several, she found him and picked him up and put him in my arms.
He was as sweet as I hoped he'd be and he was healthy, no runny eyes or nose, no wheezing, a good weight but he was really trembling and I wondered how socialized he was. It crossed my mind not to take him. I didn't want a scaredy-cat, one who skittered everytime someone entered a room.
Instead, the women held him while I retrieved the $200. from my purse. "I been doin' this for twenty years and I never had a complaint about none of my kittens. You just gonna love this baby and this baby just gonna love you," she said. I wasn't sure.
As I was leaving, thinking of our Great Dane, Maggie, I asked how the kittens got along with Angel. "They all been raised with her," she answered. And that was that. I was there barely ten minutes.
I walked down the flimsy staircases in the brutal wind, got in my car, drove away from the falling-down green house on the street of falling-down houses, drove away from all the other distressed, dark and dirty streets, the lost and menacing young men. The kitten curled up and purred in my lap and I wondered, pondered deeply about the experience. Had it meant anything at all? I'm haunted by those streets but somehow in the woman's space, (I never did get her name) with all those beautiful, loved and well-cared for cats, there was some kind of redemption.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Coyote eats cat.
The dogs were barking frantically at the window overlooking the marsh. (Maggie, the Great Dane, Gracie & Hutch, the toy poodles). My husband peered over his newspaper and looked out. "It's a deer," he said. I got up and went over and thought I made out a coyote hunched over a dark mass. It was 7 am and still dim. "No, it's a coyote," I replied, "And I think he's standing over something big and black. Is Niger out?"
Niger is our 16 pound black cat. "Yes," answered my husband.
Just then, the coyote, disturbed by the dogs' continued barking, picked up the "thing" and trotted casually off into the reeds. I can still picture the carcass dangling limply from his jaws, seemingly weightless. But it's the blackness that's so vivid. It's as if it were spotlit.
The next little while is a blur. I was in shock, half in denial that it wasn't our beloved Niger. My husband and I did an inventory of what else it could be. Cheeks, the cat next door? He has a lot of white which would have been visible. A 'possum? They're beige. A skunk? Not likely. Besides, like Cheeks, the white would have shown. A squirrel? Squirrels are small and grey. A raccoon? Likely, there'd have been a lot of noise and they aren't really black.
We knew. Niger was gone.
I kept watching for him to come around all morning, hoping against hope. He was an in-out, in-out sort of cat. I even imagined his somehow escaping the coyote and crawling home wounded and my taking him to the vet and getting him all sewn up. But he never showed up. Today it is a week since the horrific incident. There's been no sign of him.
Niger was an extraordinary cat. I've had more than a dozen cats in my life, some really great ones, like Mumbo, the insatiable Tabby, Cinder, the Yukon survivor, Yo-Yi, the charming Siamese. But Niger was definitely the most outstanding. He was an aristocratic hybrid: part Seal Point Siamese, part red Abyssinian. He was elegant and almost massive, with a noble head topped by oversize ears. When he was a kitten, he was all ears. He appeared black, but in sunlight, you could see he was actually a luxurious deep red-brown. On his chest was a slash of white, like the shirt front of a tuxedo.
What set him apart, though, was his interdependence with us. Aloof, independent, remote, solitary: none of those describe how he related to humans. No, he was gregarious, affable, sociable, companionable often to the point of being insinuating. With everyone. Family members, visitors. He conned neighbours. No amount of affection was enough. He'd butt and butt with his beautiful head against your chin if he was on your lap. He'd lick your cheek or nose or ear. He'd weave in and out of your your legs, tripping you, when he was on the ground, which he'd have preferred not to be. One of my daughters used to carry around all twenty pounds of him, (he'd lost some weight recently), on her shoulders, hunched like an old woman.
One of the things I loved best about him was seeing him come bounding towards me when I called him, no matter how far away he'd been or how long I'd been calling. He ran smoothly, surely, with great strides, like a panther and if a cat can be said to show joy, he was always joyous when he arrived.
We'd had him for eleven years and he'd adapted to a lot of different places and circumstances. He came from Montreal at eight weeks and went immediately to Connecticut where he met our first Great Dane, Lily and our three other cats, Yo-Yi, Mitsu and Huey Lewis. He bonded immediately with Lily, who could have chomped him with one bite but instead they played and slept together. He has lived in a big old house in a small town on Lake Ontario in Canada. He's lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park. He's lived in a townhouse on busy La Salle in Old Town in Chicago. Once he spent a month by the sea in New Brunswick, having travelled for three days to get there, never leaving the car. Many times he rode back and forth in that car, free, on the eleven hour drive from Chicago to our house in Canada.
And always he's been a prowler, a hunter, a lucky survivor, ever loyal to wherever he was living. Did I worry about him when he was out? Though I'm normally a hand-wringer, I somehow always trusted Niger would be OK. That'd he'd come home. And he always did, every night adding satisfying weight against my body in bed.
I didn't really know about the coyotes when we moved to this house on the Blackwell Forest Preserve. Or rather, I knew they were there, but my sense of them was that they're scared of humans and therefore keep their distance. But then I heard their menacing howls nearby. And I saw them. Because they fearlessly began to appear on our property too close to the house. I knew they were wily predators and I began to hear stories about stolen cats and small dogs. Naively...no, not naively, cavalierly, foolishly I believed Niger was somehow immune. That intelligent and aware as he was and given his feline skills, like climbing a tree, he'd escape the coyotes' jaws. And for almost three years he did.
And then last week, he didn't. I think he must have been hunting the mice in the grasses along the marsh and that a coyote was lying in wait, silently, with the patience of the ages. The coyote pounced before Niger even knew what hit him. I'd always imagined, (when I did imagine it), a savage scream. But we heard nothing. That's why I think the kill was instant: a grab on the neck, a hard shake and it was over.
My grief could, (and maybe should) be brushed with guilt but it isn't. Perhaps it will be later as I more and more contemplate the event. Now I'm still quite numb. I've barely cried. When I was driving to Chicago in the storm yesterday morning to pick up a new Siamese kitten, Andrea Boccelli on the CD player finally brought tears.
The thing is, Niger had always been an outdoor cat, an adventurer, from the time he was quite small. Once, at about 12 weeks, he caught a snake. He was a creature of nature, primal and substantial, like his ancestors. That's what made his needy extroversion so remarkable. Keeping him indoors would have been imprisoning him. Anyway, I don't think he'd have stood for it. He was highly vocal and could sustain a plaintive wail like a rock star.
The only disaster he ever encountered, (and it was horrifying) happened when he was sleeping on top of the open garage door and my husband, not knowing, closed the door. Niger slid down to the opening and was caught between the door and the frame, his legs hanging down the outside. Then he was screaming. We were terrified to either open or close the door further, fearing to crush him more. I think we decided to open the door a little and that freed him. He had a few injured nerves in his spine and his back legs were wonky for awhile, but he recovered completely. He was ever fearful of garage doors opening and closing.
But he wasn't fearful of anything else. In fact, he was fearsome, especially towards other cats, a fierce defender of his territory. Much as I wanted to, I could never have another cat. I tried and Niger attacked.
His latest best friend was our second Great Dane, Maggie. For her, he would roll over and purr and prod her muzzle while she nibbled up and down his body, as if he were a cob of corn.
Some pets invade us in the finest sense with their intelligence, their animation, their sensibility, their ability to connect in ways that offer not only pleasure but solace. They have a gift, an infinite capacity both to give and receive love. They offer the most notable characteristics of their species, but they also seem to take on the best of what we value as humans. Niger was one of those.
Our new Siamese kitten, called Hu Jin, which is Chinese for gold tiger, will have his own special qualities I know. And though I am so glad to have him, from the deepest part of my being, I hate the reason that I do.
Niger is our 16 pound black cat. "Yes," answered my husband.
Just then, the coyote, disturbed by the dogs' continued barking, picked up the "thing" and trotted casually off into the reeds. I can still picture the carcass dangling limply from his jaws, seemingly weightless. But it's the blackness that's so vivid. It's as if it were spotlit.
The next little while is a blur. I was in shock, half in denial that it wasn't our beloved Niger. My husband and I did an inventory of what else it could be. Cheeks, the cat next door? He has a lot of white which would have been visible. A 'possum? They're beige. A skunk? Not likely. Besides, like Cheeks, the white would have shown. A squirrel? Squirrels are small and grey. A raccoon? Likely, there'd have been a lot of noise and they aren't really black.
We knew. Niger was gone.
I kept watching for him to come around all morning, hoping against hope. He was an in-out, in-out sort of cat. I even imagined his somehow escaping the coyote and crawling home wounded and my taking him to the vet and getting him all sewn up. But he never showed up. Today it is a week since the horrific incident. There's been no sign of him.
Niger was an extraordinary cat. I've had more than a dozen cats in my life, some really great ones, like Mumbo, the insatiable Tabby, Cinder, the Yukon survivor, Yo-Yi, the charming Siamese. But Niger was definitely the most outstanding. He was an aristocratic hybrid: part Seal Point Siamese, part red Abyssinian. He was elegant and almost massive, with a noble head topped by oversize ears. When he was a kitten, he was all ears. He appeared black, but in sunlight, you could see he was actually a luxurious deep red-brown. On his chest was a slash of white, like the shirt front of a tuxedo.
What set him apart, though, was his interdependence with us. Aloof, independent, remote, solitary: none of those describe how he related to humans. No, he was gregarious, affable, sociable, companionable often to the point of being insinuating. With everyone. Family members, visitors. He conned neighbours. No amount of affection was enough. He'd butt and butt with his beautiful head against your chin if he was on your lap. He'd lick your cheek or nose or ear. He'd weave in and out of your your legs, tripping you, when he was on the ground, which he'd have preferred not to be. One of my daughters used to carry around all twenty pounds of him, (he'd lost some weight recently), on her shoulders, hunched like an old woman.
One of the things I loved best about him was seeing him come bounding towards me when I called him, no matter how far away he'd been or how long I'd been calling. He ran smoothly, surely, with great strides, like a panther and if a cat can be said to show joy, he was always joyous when he arrived.
We'd had him for eleven years and he'd adapted to a lot of different places and circumstances. He came from Montreal at eight weeks and went immediately to Connecticut where he met our first Great Dane, Lily and our three other cats, Yo-Yi, Mitsu and Huey Lewis. He bonded immediately with Lily, who could have chomped him with one bite but instead they played and slept together. He has lived in a big old house in a small town on Lake Ontario in Canada. He's lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park. He's lived in a townhouse on busy La Salle in Old Town in Chicago. Once he spent a month by the sea in New Brunswick, having travelled for three days to get there, never leaving the car. Many times he rode back and forth in that car, free, on the eleven hour drive from Chicago to our house in Canada.
And always he's been a prowler, a hunter, a lucky survivor, ever loyal to wherever he was living. Did I worry about him when he was out? Though I'm normally a hand-wringer, I somehow always trusted Niger would be OK. That'd he'd come home. And he always did, every night adding satisfying weight against my body in bed.
I didn't really know about the coyotes when we moved to this house on the Blackwell Forest Preserve. Or rather, I knew they were there, but my sense of them was that they're scared of humans and therefore keep their distance. But then I heard their menacing howls nearby. And I saw them. Because they fearlessly began to appear on our property too close to the house. I knew they were wily predators and I began to hear stories about stolen cats and small dogs. Naively...no, not naively, cavalierly, foolishly I believed Niger was somehow immune. That intelligent and aware as he was and given his feline skills, like climbing a tree, he'd escape the coyotes' jaws. And for almost three years he did.
And then last week, he didn't. I think he must have been hunting the mice in the grasses along the marsh and that a coyote was lying in wait, silently, with the patience of the ages. The coyote pounced before Niger even knew what hit him. I'd always imagined, (when I did imagine it), a savage scream. But we heard nothing. That's why I think the kill was instant: a grab on the neck, a hard shake and it was over.
My grief could, (and maybe should) be brushed with guilt but it isn't. Perhaps it will be later as I more and more contemplate the event. Now I'm still quite numb. I've barely cried. When I was driving to Chicago in the storm yesterday morning to pick up a new Siamese kitten, Andrea Boccelli on the CD player finally brought tears.
The thing is, Niger had always been an outdoor cat, an adventurer, from the time he was quite small. Once, at about 12 weeks, he caught a snake. He was a creature of nature, primal and substantial, like his ancestors. That's what made his needy extroversion so remarkable. Keeping him indoors would have been imprisoning him. Anyway, I don't think he'd have stood for it. He was highly vocal and could sustain a plaintive wail like a rock star.
The only disaster he ever encountered, (and it was horrifying) happened when he was sleeping on top of the open garage door and my husband, not knowing, closed the door. Niger slid down to the opening and was caught between the door and the frame, his legs hanging down the outside. Then he was screaming. We were terrified to either open or close the door further, fearing to crush him more. I think we decided to open the door a little and that freed him. He had a few injured nerves in his spine and his back legs were wonky for awhile, but he recovered completely. He was ever fearful of garage doors opening and closing.
But he wasn't fearful of anything else. In fact, he was fearsome, especially towards other cats, a fierce defender of his territory. Much as I wanted to, I could never have another cat. I tried and Niger attacked.
His latest best friend was our second Great Dane, Maggie. For her, he would roll over and purr and prod her muzzle while she nibbled up and down his body, as if he were a cob of corn.
Some pets invade us in the finest sense with their intelligence, their animation, their sensibility, their ability to connect in ways that offer not only pleasure but solace. They have a gift, an infinite capacity both to give and receive love. They offer the most notable characteristics of their species, but they also seem to take on the best of what we value as humans. Niger was one of those.
Our new Siamese kitten, called Hu Jin, which is Chinese for gold tiger, will have his own special qualities I know. And though I am so glad to have him, from the deepest part of my being, I hate the reason that I do.
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