felis ambitiosus
June 11, 2010 – September 8, 2025
On December 6, 2010, my then-wife adopted a young cat from the Animal Welfare League of Frederick County (Maryland), already named Lola at the shelter, a.k.a. “KITTY #8 LOCKLAIR,” according to the initial vaccination document that we were given. Her cat Lola moved in the same day as the cat who I adopted, Pixel. Pixel was an orange tabby, and Lola a grey tabby with white chest and paws, and a looooong striped tail that curled up over her back when she was happy. She was extremely quiet (sometimes with a completely silent meow!) and reserved. She liked to hide a lot during those early days. Lola kept her shelter name because, well, I guess my wife liked it. There was a lot of singing of songs from Damn Yankees and The Kinks.
The pair of cats grew up together, and got along pretty well. Pixel used to chase Lola around the house a lot. Lola occasionally decided to chase him back, and immedately regretted the decision. But then sometimes they would cuddle together in the same cat bed, or hang out together, looking out the low french door windows into the backyard, or climb up into the Xmas tree together. I think they had a pretty good life.
They both drove with us across the country to Seattle in mid-2013, when we moved there for my new job. A couple of years after the move, Pixel suddenly died of heart failure. I was heartbroken, and so was Lola. For weeks after, she would wander around the house, meowing for Pixel, wondering where he was. Lola became the sole cat in the house, and started to hang out with me more, since her owner often closed herself off in a room, away from me and Lola.
In 2020, that situation came to a head when Covid hit, and already-strained relationships were further strained by quarantine and layoffs. When my wife and I separated, Lola moved with me to a spare bedroom in my friend Quin's new house in Oregon. Quin had a dog, Dante, who while without question is a very good boy, was also a very nervous boy with a high prey drive, and the upshot was that Lola could not come out.
I made a custom hardwood pet gate that mounted on the outside of my bedroom doorway (matching the door trim in the house), so we could get fresh air and opportunistic conversation through the doorway without letting Lola out. (Lola and Dante formed an uneasy detente, occasionally peering at each other through the gate.) Thankfully, Lola wasn't a jumper at all, perfectly content to lounge on my bed most of the day, and the gate was very effective. Lola would come out and stretch her legs on the occasion that the others were away for the weekend. In retrospect, it wasn't the best situation, and I probably overstayed my welcome, but I'm forever grateful to Quin for giving us a place to stay and to get my life together before moving on under my own power several months later.
While at Quin's house, I secured an IT remote-work job that meant I could move to whereever I wanted, and where I had always wanted to be was Los Angeles. I was a video editor and surely there would be work for me there! Lola and I took another long road trip down the coast, and moved into an apartment on Fountain Ave in Hollywood, where very tall windows reached down to just about a foot above the floor, and Lola could rest her front paws on the windowsill as she peered down at the street below — much the same as she used to do back in Maryland.
Soon after moving in, my new girfriend, Jill, started to come over, and slowly formed a friendship with Lola. I did the same at her house, with her cat, Brooks. About a year later, we moved into a house together, and so Lola and Brooks became roommates. Brooks very much wanted to be friends with Lola, but Lola now having had years on her own, wasn't super keen on the idea, and would chase Brooks around! The idea of this tiny grey cat bossing around a big himbo of a black Maine Coon mix — how ridiculous! Brooks would sometimes walk the circumference of a whole room to avoid a conflict with Lola.
Lola and Brooks eventually learned to live with each other. Sometimes there were even two cats on the bed! Occastionally they touched! I'm not sure that they were the best of friends, but I think they loved each other in their own way. She definitely came to love Jill, and was closer to her than any anyone else besides me. Jill liked to have dance parties with Lola. We even all danced together to a couple of songs in her last hour.
In the last years of her life, here in LA, she discovered new things about herself. She loved banana bread. In fact, now that she knew there was something other than cat food in the world, she begged for my food, and tried to steal my dinner more than once. I kept the human food to a minimum, but she knew that cats can have a little salami — or bread, or shrimp, or maybe some chicken I was cutting up for salads — as a treat. Literally the afternoon of her last day, I accidentally dropped a "philly cheesesteak" flavored Pringle, and she snapped it up greedily. What a life!
A cat who had spent her whole life not being intereted in climbing or jumping up on things, suddenly loved to jump up on things. Jump up in my office bookcase. Jump up on the dining table to lay where a sliver of sumbeam was. Jump up on the counter, and try to lick the pan after dinner. ("Lola, no!") Jump up on the edge of the kitchen sink, so she could stare up at the skylight, looking for a bug… or maybe ghosts.
After the cross-country drive from Maryland to Seattle, when we kept the cats on leashes to give them a little exercise at rest stops, she garnered an interest in the out-of-doors. She would occasionally patrol on the walkway just outside of my upstairs Hollywood apartment, taking a quick look to see what the neighbors were up to, before coming back inside. She would also patrol the patio behind our house, walking around the corner to see what was going on with the air conditioning compressor. (Don't worry — she was a real indoor cat, and her outdoor adventures were always supervised.) She sure loved to sniff those outdoor smells.
Brooks taught her how to meow louder than she ever had before. But mostly she meowed when her office chair was occupied, and she wanted up. “Mark, why are you working in that chair? That's where I curl up and spend the afternoons! Well, at least let me sit in your lap then.” She would sit with us on the arm of the couch when we would watch TV in the evenings, but almost always with her butt facing the TV. The butt of disdain. But she wanted to hang out anyway. Often she would fall alseep in bed, laying on top of me, her human heating pad.
She loved crinkly packing paper. She loved to "fight" the neighborhood stray cats by swatting the glass patio doors with her paws. She earned the nickname Princess Pissypaws (of the Pee-pee Protectorate) by her continued predilection for standing in front of the cat box and peeing at it, even if you were staring right at her, in an act of feline defiance. She had an oddly wide stance, and stubby little legs. She loved licking all of the gravy off of both her food and Brooks’, before deigning to actually eat any of it. She was a very photogenic cat, and our lovely cat-sitter Jess took some of the best photos I have of her. (The photo at the top of this post is one of Jess’s.)
She hated being in "the cat zoo," meowing loudly to be let out when I would put her in the glass-doored shower to await her turn with our very patient cat groomer, Alex. She hated going to the vet, and she and Brooks would loudly sing the song of their people as we took them in their carriers out to the car, the cat chorus sometimes alarming the neighbors.
She would sometimes trap herself in a closet or behind another door, but she didn't understand how doors work, and would sometimes manage to stick a single paw out, waving up and down, to alert us to her predicament, when a side-to-side motion would have freed her. Sometimes Brooks let her out (he's a very skilled opener), or at least meow to us that she was in trouble. She did eventually learn to open some doors by pushing them with her face, but never with her paw.
One time she stole a donut off the counter, in the middle of the night, and licked all of the icing off. One time Brooks was in the hostpital for a week, and when he finally came home, she seemed surprised, and a bit annoyed, to have him back. Sometimes when I would travel for work, she would ignore Jill for a couple of days, but then once she assumed that I was never coming back, suddenly be extra nice to her.
But above all, she was a very good cat.
Unfortunately, she developed intestinal cancer, and after months, with all of the efforts we could possibly attempt to mitigate it, she finally died a few weeks ago, on September 8th. I found it incredibly hard to let her go, and perhaps held on too long. I'd never had to make the decision to euthanize a pet before — both of the previous cats in my life had died suddenly, with no warning, so I hadn't had to wrestle with the long, lingering question of whether the time was right. It's one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make in my life. Jill and our vet, Dr. Freedberg supported me all along the way, but even knowing it was for the best, it still felt to me like a betrayal. I wanted to do more, to save her somehow, but ending her suffering was the best that I could do. I know my feelings are unreasonable, and Jill and I really did so much to try to save her. But still. I'm sorry, Lola. I wish I could have done better.
I am grateful for the chance to have had such a wonderful companion in my life, even though I wasn’t the person who originally adopted her. I miss Lola dearly. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe she's somewhere better, or that there is some fabled rainbow bridge to cross, as comforting as that sounds. She is truly gone. But her memory still inhabits this house. I hope that she knew how much I loved her, and that I made her life as good as it could be, while she was here.