One year

A few days ago, I got a few drops of water from where it had been trapped outside and looked at it under a small microscope. As expected, I saw a one-cell animal swimming around a little chunk of something that it found nutrition in. A brainless, simple form of life, yet it had needs and drive and, like all of us, one shot at life in the universe. Over time, its life will be exactly as meaningful and important as mine or anyone else's. Humbling.
Last night, while going for a walk, I came across a possum in my driveway. It looked at me and I at it, both discerning whether or not the other was a threat. After a dozen seconds, it scrambled into the darkness of my back yard. So ugly it's cute, it's been around for twenty million years and is the only marsupial I'll see in the wild on the East Coast of the United States, where I live.
This morning I went outside to feed my koi and saw a hawk trapped in the plastic fencing the construction crew building a new house next door put up. His leg was snared. I called neighbors, got work gloves and scissors, and headed out to help it get free, but it had done so on its own by then. While trapped, many smaller birds were yelling at it, some doing dive bomb feints toward it. If birds can feel embarrassment, the hawk, a big one, would've been feeling it. Imagine being at the top of your food chain and in that situation. Poor thing. 
A year ago today the cat I'd had for just seventy-two days died of a form of cancer similar to my own. It still hurts.

Cat life

I've had the cat for a month and a half now. We have settled into our routines. He gets me up by eight o'clock, demanding food. I get up but there's what to him is a huge delay from the time I twist myself out of bed. I shower and dress first. He eats then drinks from the toilet. I put out fresh water for him regularly but nothing satisfies him more than putting his head in a big ceramic bowl. He agitates the water with his right paw first, then uses that paw to scoop water into his mouth. He does this with surprising skill.

Then it's time for him to urinate, sometimes crap, and then sleep. His choices of sleeping areas are determined by things only he knows. He'll decide on a chair or a place on a carpet and be loyal to it for days, then abandon it for another place. Right now, he likes to sleep where I've folded up an area rug and topped it with a bathmat in front of the toilet to make it easier for him to reach inside. He won't budge from here, and I step around him with care to use the toilet. This is stupid of me, a permanent crutch user in danger of falling in good circumstances. I must toughen up. 
When rested, he'll eat more of the food remaining in his bowl. I'll stir it up and stack it in the center, which freshens it for him. After that he'll sleep somewhere else. At times he'll join me in the living room where I use the computer and read on a large sofa. He'll sleep on a cushion there. In the afternoons and evenings, I'll join him and read. He'll lie near my remaining foot, just out of easy petting reach. His age, twelve, joint stiffness, and year in the shelter left him content with the house as he experienced it his first day here. It took him two weeks to discover that the house has a second floor, which I only go up into two or three times a week, if that. 
He likes to eat dinner around five, a good hour and a half before I do. 

I got a cat today

My latest scans did not indicate that I'll be dead in a year, so I went ahead and said yes to getting the cat I'd seen at an animal shelter last week.
His name is Raymond. Despite my recent good news, my odds are still long enough that I knew it'd be foolish to get a kitten or even a young cat. Thanks to improved care, cats often live to be twenty or more these days. (The oldest cat ever was named Creme Puff and lived to be 38.) 
I got the oldest cat they had. Raymond is twelve. His last owner was a woman who developed dementia and was no longer able to take care of him. He'd been in the shelter for about six months. The shelter was a good place but Raymond doesn't get along well with other cats (generational differences?) and the shelter would only give him to someone with no pets. That's me!

Not having had a cat since I was a kid, I'd forgotten how much is involved. Cat food is around $1.50 a can now, and that's all he can eat. Cat litter is heavy and expensive and if you get the clumping kind you learn that an ounce of urine makes a clump the size of the cat's head. 
The center is a responsible one. They give you vet records, the cat is chipped, and there's a contract you have to sign when you pick up the cat. There was no cost to me, but I was reminded that a donation would be useful, as that's what they depend on. 
The cat was said to be hard of hearing and a woman who spent time with him daily said Raymond didn't seem deaf to her. 
She was wrong; he is quite deaf. I clapped and whistled loudly when he was facing away from me. You know how cats' ears sort of flatten and aim backward when something's going on behind them but they're not about to let some idiot make them turn around? Raymond's ears didn't even twitch. The woman wasn't lying; Raymond seems visually astute enough to get around his hearing problem.
He also seems vocally challenged. At six, when he was hungry, he walked up to me and spoke, but I could barely hear him. His purr is a loud one. It's probably the only sound he can hear. 

Too close

Two deer in the Loser's back yard.

Last night, during a short highway drive, the Complete and Total Loser came just feet from hitting a deer as it ran across the road from the Loser's left to right. The Loser had a hard time believing he didn't hit it, it was so close, and drove for several minutes afterward with a stupid, slack-jawed look on his unattractive face. 
Today, the Loser saw a dead cat on another road, the victim of a car. It made him think about how and why it tugged at his heartstrings—it was probably someone's pet—yet it had no more or less personality than a deer. The Loser can see personality differences in the deer that enter his back yard. Some are bolder than others, some of the young ones are more playful than their peers.

A dog

For three weeks this February, the Complete and Total Loser will take care of his sister-in-law's dog, a corgi, while she and her daughter visit New Zealand to celebrate her recent graduation from college. 
The Loser has never had a pet, though he's taken care of a few. Sixteen years ago, he took care of an acquaintance's cat while he was housesitting for his traveling parents in the suburbs.
The cat had a fully developed personality. When you said its name, it answered you. It talked like a person would, except in its own language, of course. It was like the elderly Chinese people the Loser met in remote villages when living in China in the mid '80s, people who would chatter away to the Loser because they had no concept of people not speaking their language. 

This isn't the dog the Loser will take care of but it looks just like her.

One August evening, the Loser let the cat, which lived in the city, outdoors to explore and hunt. It wasn't the first time, but it would be the last. There were weeks of posting signs, calling shelters, making grim drives on local roads looking for a small body. It never showed up, and the Loser was certain it had been killed, though he doesn't usually give feelings and hunches real weight.
He lied to owner, telling her it had escaped and that he was profusely sorry. She accepted this, though she was sad. 
The cat was ten years old at the time, meaning it would have been dead for at least half a decade by now, but when the Loser thinks about it he feels as sharp a pang of sorrow and guilt as he did at the time. 
Since then, he has made it his policy not to have pets or people in his life.
The dog might be fun for a few weeks, but there's no way in hell it's setting an unleashed foot outside. No goddam way. Not even once.

The Loser, early this morning

Three a.m. The Complete and Total Loser senses her in bed next to him. She's come from the bed she was sleeping on previously in the room across the hall. He pats her on the shoulder and goes back to sleep. The Loser wakes a half hour later and she's still there. He can hear her breathing, small puffs of air whooshing through nostrils and nasal cavities. He reaches over and touches her hair. He puts his hand on her stomach. She pushes it away. He puts it back. She lets it remain. The two return to sleep.

Four o'clock. She rouses. The Loser feels her movement under his hand and also wakes. She gets off the bed and exits the room, again, wordlessly.

The Loser hears her footsteps as she goes down the stairs. She is, he guesses, headed to see if there's food in her bowl, or to use the litter box.