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Oscar, 1983-1999

Sixteen years, five addresses, one cat.

     /\___/\
    (  o o  )    OSCAR
    (  =^=  )    Oct. 1983 -
     )  ~  (     July 13, 1999
    (       )
   ( |     | )__
  (__|_____|_)__)

  orange tabby, 14 lbs
  "The Management"

The cat at the top of the page is from the GeoCities clip art library. It is not Oscar. It is the closest thing I could find, and Oscar would have been insulted by it, which seems about right. I have roughly four hundred real pictures of him, all on film, in two shoeboxes in the hall closet. When I get a scanner some of them will go up here. Don't hold your breath. I've been saying that about my own home page since 1997.

My name is Russell Okada. I'm 36 and I write software manuals for a living in Minneapolis. I didn't think I was going to make a page like this. I didn't think I was going to do a lot of the things I've done this summer, like cry in the cat food aisle at Cub Foods. So here we are.

The short version

In October of 1983 I was a sophomore living in a dorm at the University of Minnesota, and I found a very small, very loud orange kitten in the stairwell behind the laundry room. Nobody claimed him. Pets were not allowed. I kept him in my room for three weeks, fed him from a can of tuna I bought at the Dinkytown drugstore, and named him after Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple because he immediately knocked over everything my roommate owned.

He lived with me for the next sixteen years. He died on Tuesday, July 13, 1999, of kidney failure, on the kitchen floor of the first place I ever actually owned, with his head on my hand.

That's the short version. The rest of this page is the long one.

The addresses

Years	Where	Oscar's review
1983	Dorm room, Minneapolis	Three weeks. Hid in a duffel bag during room checks. Lived on tuna and contraband. Four stars.
1983-86	Duplex with three roommates, Dinkytown	Everyone fed him. He got to twenty pounds and had to go on a diet. Radiator in the front room was his. Five stars.
1986-89	Basement apartment, Madison, Wisconsin	Grad school. One window, at ground level, where he watched feet go by for three years. Two stars. Would not recommend.
1989-93	Third-floor walk-up, Chicago	Pigeons on the fire escape. The best entertainment of his life. He never caught one, and I think that was the point.
1993-99	A small house, south Minneapolis	A yard. A screened porch. A sunny spot on the stairs that moved across the landing as the day went on, and he moved with it. Five stars, final address.

Oscar was against:

closed doors, on principle, regardless of which side he was on
the vacuum, the blender, and the smoke alarm, in that order
any cat food that was on sale
my girlfriend from 1991 (he was right)
Mondays, specifically 6:15 a.m., when the alarm went off and breakfast was late by his reckoning
the Twins losing, or at least he left the room when I yelled at the TV

Oscar was for:

tuna, forever, from that first can in 1983 to the last spoonful this July
sitting on whatever I was reading, especially if it was due tomorrow
the warm top of my 386 tower, and later the monitor, and later the laser printer
dripping faucets
the porch, in the summer, all day
me. I don't know why. I'm not that interesting. But he always came to the door.

The last year

In June of 1998 he stopped eating his dry food and started drinking out of the toilet, and the vet ran blood work and said the words "chronic renal failure." His kidneys were wearing out. It's very common in old cats. It doesn't get better, but you can slow it down.

So for thirteen months, every night at ten, I hung a bag of fluids from a coat hook in the kitchen and gave him his fluids under the skin, the way the vet showed me. He put up with it for the price of one spoonful of tuna. I got pretty good at it. He got pretty good at looking offended about it. It gave us another year, and it was a good year. He spent most of it on the porch.

In July he stopped wanting the tuna. That's how I knew.

A note from a guy who didn't expect this

I've buried two grandparents. I thought I knew how this worked. I didn't know that the worst part would be the routines: opening the back door for nobody, buying the wrong groceries, coming home at 6:00 and nobody on the stairs. My brother said, "He was a cat, Russ," and he meant it kindly, and he's wrong. He was sixteen years. He was every apartment I ever had. He was the one thing that came along every single time.

If you're reading this because your own old cat just died: it's okay that it's this bad. Nobody tells you, so I'm telling you.

He's buried in the backyard under the lilac, where the sun hits in the afternoon. There's a flat stone with his name on it that I bought at a garden center in Richfield. The lady at the register asked who it was for. I said "the management." She didn't ask anything else.

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If you want to tell me about your cat, I'd honestly like to hear it: [email protected]

Last updated 8/29/99. Written in Notepad, like a grown-up.