Captain White Socks (1984 – 1996) entered our lives as a small, mostly-tiger kitten that Amity heard about from her camp-bus driver. Such was Cappy’s charm that it smote us all at once, even as we gasped at the giant fleas crawling out of his ears and over his tiny tummy.
Quick veterinarian action intervened.
Years passed, during which Cappy grew large and bold, treating our family with a courtly affection but expecting to be the alpha (neutered) male in his interactions with any outsiders. He was lordly (not to say a bit aggressive) and he may well have been chasing a car when he met his end. I had imagined that he (like our other cat Sylvester) always stayed in our back yard but kept away from the street.
It wasn’t so. There was a slight drizzle falling from the sky when I was summoned by the doorbell, and a very contrite driver, to look at Cappy’s now limp but still beautiful corpse, spangled with fog drops.
To my dismay taxidermists turned me down flat when I asked about getting Cappy “preserved” so that he could lie curled up on some mantel or windowsill. My children were baffled. We had been to Chincoteague and seen the body of Misty “mounted” (they don’t call it “stuffed”) for eternal memory. We had stayed in New Zealand with people whose parlors displayed even (now somewhat motheaten) dogs they had loved in their childhood.
But even though we were by then in Princeton, NJ, so that I was able to pester taxidermists all the way from NYC to Philadelphia, nobody wanted to “mount” our old Cappy so that we could keep him. “We don’t do pets,” more than one surly old-timer told me. Meanwhile, in our freezer, Cappy lay curled up in a giant plastic bag surrounded by frozen peas and fudge-ripple ice cream.
Frank, of course, had a truly unique suggestion: “Don’t say it’s a pet. Tell them I shot it.” Somehow, I hadn’t the chutzpah to try his method.
In the end, finally, I bought some beautiful cloth that was black and golden, like Cappy, to wrap him up in. We buried him in the back yard. Einstein’s back yard, which was our back yard way back then.
But if there’s a resurrection, Einstein can’t have him because we want Cappy back!