The title of this diary is borrowed from a beautiful Japanese folktale retold by Elizabeth Coatsworth in her award-winning.book about a cat who miraculously appears on a scroll despite the wishes of the monks who commissioned it, and who dies from happiness at the sight of her image being blessed by Buddha It is also the story of the little Japanese bobtail calico we named Mike (mee-kay, the Japnanese word for a calico cat), who left us this morning at 11 o’clock to cross the Rainbow Bridge. She looked exactly like the cat in the illustrations. I can’t help feeling Buddha blessed her—and us, the day she came to us.My neighbor Patty, surely one the thirty-six Righteous Ones whose loving presence keeps God from destroying the world (according to Jewish myths I’ve read), found her lying by the side of the road on the base we lived in, Kamiseya, Japan. She was so weak she couldn’t stand. She crawled to Patty, wanting just once more to feel soft hands stroking her fur, a loving touch and a soft voice before she died. We don’t know her history before that, but we suspect that some military family on base had abandoned her when they transferred from Japan, an occurrence which happens all to often.If you hate Pootie Diaries, please skip this one. My heart hurts too much to deal with rancorous comments or disparaging ones.
Despite Patty’s husband’s objections—she was sick it was doubtful she would live and he didn’t want to see his wife’s heart broken—Patty rushed her to the vet and then brought her home. She weighed only three and a half pounds, a tiny scrap of fur over a skeletal body. The vet’s notation in her medical record was “Not expected to live”. She had a severe respiratory infection and had to be fed with an eyedropper for the first few days. Against all the odds, she lived. She had a very big heart and a great deal of love. Even when she was still too weak to stand or leave the bed my friend made for her in a small plastic tub, she was intensely grateful for being cared for, and would try to thank Patty with silent niaows (“niaow” is the Japanese version of “meow”)
That’s how my husband first saw her when Patty told him about her nameless rescue. I think it was love at first sight on both their parts, but I was the one who decided we should adopt her, because I was afraid that another careless family would take her for a couple of years, then leave her behind when they came back to the states. Even 15 years ago, it cost nearly two hundred dollars to fly a cat home, and many families don’t want to spend their money. Besides, I had had a premonition before we left the States in 1994 that we would bring home a Japanese bobtail when we came back.