• The older residents call it Laugh­town.  Younger ones call it the Big Yeet.  Lafayette, California, is a land of contrasts.  None of the preceding is actually true, but what is true is that while I was initially looking to move back to Albany or somewhere in northern or western Berkeley, I decided that a new life chapter called for a bigger break from the past, so I’m now rockin’ the suburbs in the hills about ten miles east of my old place.  To people who knew me way back when, this will not seem like much of a break at all: not only did I grow up in a hilly suburb, but when I moved to the Seattle area, I did not settle in the city itself but in a hilly suburb about fifteen miles east.  The rental agency thought it’d found a good match, and as I drove up the long curving road to the apartment complex it’d sent me to, in what was then Issaquah but would soon secede to become Sammamish, it just felt right⁠—like a Northwestern version of what I’d grown up with.  But I left Sammamish over a quarter of a century ago.  My next stop was New York City.  Then the planned industrial city of Holyoke, Massachusetts.  When I returned to California, I continued to live “in town”: while Sammamish had a popu­lation density of around 1900 people per square mile when I lived there, San Leandro has 6800, Albany 11,000, and El Cerrito 7100.

  Lafayette has 1700.  And as with Sammamish, what got me thinking that maybe this wasn’t just a flyer, that maybe I actually would move ten miles away, was that the drive from the freeway offramp to the apartment complex was lovely⁠—especially in contrast to the graffiti-strewn dystopian gant­let I had passed through in order to get to an otherwise very nice apartment I was checking out in Alameda.  But while Lafayette is generally grouped together with the neighbor­ing towns of Orinda and Moraga, those are almost wholly bedroom communities, while Lafayette has a little down­town area.  E.g., Tradey Joe has set up shop just a short walk from my new place.  My favorite croissants west of Montreal are less than a mile away.  And if I do end up regretting leav­ing my old stomping grounds, well, eastern Berkeley is less than fifteen minutes away when the traffic is light, Berkeley Bowl West is twenty-two, and I can come back in a year.

• It will likely be a lot hotter here than I’ve been used to⁠—the Bay Area is a land of microclimates, and it has been common for it to be 90°F in Lafayette while it’s 65°F in Albany and El Cerrito.  But perhaps that is changing, because it regularly topped 90°F even in El Cerrito this month.  Prior to March 20.  When it was still technically winter.

• One aspect of physics that mystifies me⁠—the others being “basically all of them”⁠—is this: the room at the El Cerrito place where I held my online tutoring sessions had a door that led to the back yard.  If that back door was closed, and I tapped the other door, the one that led to the rest of the house, the door I had tapped would swing gently shut.  But if that back door was open even by one millimeter, and I tapped the other door, that other door would slam shut with a loud bang.  But that was usually my only clue that the back door had been open.  I certainly didn’t notice any difference in air pressure.  So how could such an indiscernible drop have such a dramatic effect?

• (More understandably, it turns out that the refrigerator door just flies right open really quick when it doesn’t have stuff in it.)

• I was also shocked at how the echoes in that room multi­plied a thousandfold once the soft furniture was removed.  That empty room with its hardwood floors made my tutor­ing sessions sound like a recording studio with the reverb cranked to the maximum.

• I drove a lot more than usual this month, ferrying stuff from El Cerrito to Lafayette.  On one of these drives I saw a car with the license plate DOG BOY, and I wanted to take a picture of it for Ellie because that phrase is an inside joke for us.  But I didn’t have my camera with me.  I did have my emergency phone, which looks like something out of 1995 but which does have a camera built into it, so I tried taking a picture of the DOG BOY car.  But apparently crisp photo­graphy is not one of this phone’s selling points, because here’s how the photo came out:

  

• A few days later I saw a car whose license plate read IDSIRE U.  It took me a full minute to parse that as “I desire you”⁠—until it clicked, I could only read it as “I’d sire you”.  Like, was the driver a vampire offering to turn me into a fellow creature of the night?  Or was he saying that if I was floating around in pre-existence, he’d happily impregnate someone so that I could be born?

• A third license plate I spotted said 0 CARBS.  Again, I eventually figured out that the driver was boasting about consuming zero carbohydrates, but at first I could only read it as the beginning of an archaic ode.  O carbs!  How I adore thee!  From nought of dough to Spaghetti‑O, O carbs, O carbs, I love thee so.

• On top of the refrigerator I found a bottle of avocado oil spray and a bottle of coconut oil spray, but in the box I was holding I only had space for one.  I was about to do research on which one was considered more healthful, until I noticed that the coconut oil spray had expired in 2022.  Whoops.  Well, decision made!

• Under the bathroom sink I found a bottle of lime-scented shampoo that I have been using very sparingly since I bought it, because the company discontinued it, so once this bottle is gone, I’ll never get to enjoy that particular aroma­therapy hit again.  Apparently I’ve been doing a good job showing restraint, because the bottle is still about one-third full, and the back of it says that its manufacturing date was September 20, 2008.  (Shampoo doesn’t expire, right?)

• I drove Ellie to a bunch of the local discount stores (Ross, Marshalls, Home Goods, etc.) so that she could pick up items for her new place.  Her favorite design motif is bows⁠—bows on her bedsheets, bows on her shelves, bows clustered up in elevens and twelves⁠—and apparently 2026 is her year be­cause these stores are putting bows on every frickin’ thing.  Bows on bathmats and shower curtains, on chair backs and lamps, on dishes and glassware.  Your bow motif needs will be met this year is I guess what I am saying.

• At one of these discount stores⁠—a T. J. Maxx in this case⁠—I was standing in line behind a mom with three daughters: one looked to be about six, the second about five, and the third was a baby.  The lineup areas at these stores tend to be stuffed with impulse purchases, and the two older girls seized upon a stuffed butterfly that they wanted their mother to buy, purportedly for the baby.  “She already has a million toys,” the mother said.  The girls waved the butterfly around and the baby vaguely reached out toward it.  “She wants it, Mom⁠—she wants it,” the girls pointed out.  The mother still wouldn’t buy it, though.  As the five-year-old put it back on the wall, the six-year-old turned to her baby sister.  “It’s okay,” she said consolingly.  “You’re gonna live your life.”

In 2021, when international borders started to open up after the pandemic, someone I had worked with closely for several years took the opportunity to move to New Zealand.  The One Neat Trick that allowed him to relocate to the Southern Hemisphere was that he’d married a woman with Australian citizenship.  She had a cat who, as I understand it, she had selected from a box of free kittens outside a grocery store; in 2021 that cat, Ollie, was fourteen, and she was concerned that he wouldn’t do well if sub­jected to the six months of quarantine required by the govern­ment of New Zealand.  So, with Ellie’s encouragement, I agreed to take him in⁠—this was right as she had moved to Portland, and she thought I could use some companionship between visits.  But initially, it wasn’t really working out.  Ollie had spent much of his time outdoors, but we’d all agreed that in his retirement years he should be indoor-only, and my apartment was small.  I was also up in Portland for several days at a time, during which Ollie’s only companionship came from daily visits by my landlord’s daughter.  When I was home, Ollie would either just stare at me or engage in ritualistic behaviors: coming up to me and bowing his head repeatedly, or walking in tight circles, or both (bow, circle, bow, circle, world without end).  When Ellie visited, he seemed to get along with her a bit better, so pretty soon we decided that the best option was to move Ollie to Portland.

Now, Ellie already had a cat, Derry.  Derry was an extraordinarily beautiful cat; Ollie was a void with one white whisker and a wart on his chin.  Derry was exceptionally intelligent; Ollie wasn’t dumb, but he was just a guy.  Derry was graceful; Ollie went click clack as he plodded around because he couldn’t retract his claws, which were consequently as dull as a dog’s.  Derry was adventur­ous; Ollie would warble “no, no” on a five-minute trip to the vet.  But Derry was also pretty feral, even four years removed from the hedge where Ellie had first found her.  She would pounce on Ellie’s ankles, swipe at me with her claws out (and honed to razor sharpness), and was not affectionate in the slightest.  “I want a cat who actually likes me,” Ellie lamented.  So that was supposed to be Ollie’s role in his new household, and he did a good job of it.  He was Ellie’s lovebug when she was happy and jumped in to absorb her tears when she was sad.  But he also pretty much taught Derry how to be a housecat.  They played together, chasing each other around, and he gave as good as he got, so she’d pick up on what behavior would lead to retaliation, and learn firsthand what cat bites and scratches feel like.  And it was just play, because otherwise they coexisted pretty well.  They were never friends, exactly, and didn’t cuddle together the way Ditko and Crango did back in my Massachusetts days, but they’d sit together six inches apart, often mimicking each other precise­ly in classic copycat fashion.  Once all four of us were living to­gether, I was astonished at how much Derry had changed, and continued to change.  She was still playful, but now she swatted at me with her claws in.  The ambushes were a thing of the past.  In the last year or so, she even took to sleeping on Ellie and then on me from time to time⁠—i.e., it took seven or eight years, but Derry actually became a pretty nice cat!

And Ollie… as he turned seventeen, then eighteen, then headed toward nineteen, he did start to decline.  He went almost entirely deaf, and needed to be escorted to the feeder a lot of the time be­cause he couldn’t hear it go off.  Only if he spotted Derry sprint­ing toward it would he realize that a meal had been served.  More troublingly, he developed a thyroid issue, and while we tried to control it with the more expensive version of the recommended medication, that only did the job for so long.  He lost over half his body weight and basically became a furry skeleton.  And he was so hungry all the time⁠—when he wasn’t sleeping, he was yowling for food, and when he saw Ellie or me in the kitchen making some food, he’d be utterly frantic.  I’m a vegetarian; at one point Ollie hopped up onto the counter, stuck his face into the pot on the stove, and started chowing down on big florets of sauteed broccoli.  But then I didn’t have to worry about that anymore, because he lacked the strength to jump onto the counters and tables⁠—he’d try, and scramble to get some purchase with his claws, but then go thump back on the ground.  I’d always thought that you called in a vet to have a cat put to sleep when the cat was incapacitated: couldn’t eat, couldn’t use the litterbox.  Or in cases like Ditko, who had inoperable stomach cancer and was clearly in a lot of pain, licking at his disfiguring sarcoma.  But Ellie had worked at an animal shelter, and knew a lot more about this than I did.  The consensus in that world was better too early than too late.  Ollie had good days and bad, but was it right to make him suffer through nine bad days, yowling in misery at his unrelenting hunger, unable to keep down the food we did feed him, in the hopes that the tenth would be a good one?

We made the appointment, and his last couple of days were really good ones.  We took him back outside, letting him amble around the back yard, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to make a break for it or hop the fence, and he really perked up feeling the sunshine and prowling around among the plants.  The next day we gave him all his favorite treats, and for once he didn’t just vomit them right back up.  Instead, he sprawled around conten­tedly, first upstairs in the bed with Ellie, and then down on the daybed in the little living room.  I lay down next to him and he cuddled up to me and purred and put his paw on my hand and did the kitty-bread kneading thing with his dull claws, for close to an hour.  So much of me wanted to call it off⁠—look, he’s still getting enjoyment out of life!  But later Ellie showed me some videos of his first few years with us, and he had never been a “lie around weakly” cat: I’d grown so accustomed to the diminished version that it was startling to see this husky guy giving fero­cious bunny kicks to his favorite feathery rattle toy.  Before the vet arrived, Ollie fell into a deep, deep sleep for several hours, frail and flattened out on the daybed, and Ellie and I hoped that he would take the opportunity to slip away peacefully…

…but that’s not how life works.  Instead, he perked up just a few minutes before the vet arrived.  When the vet did come in, he remarked upon how active Ollie was, feeding my fears that we were too early⁠—but he also remarked upon how thin Ollie was, which reassured me that it would be wrong to let him keep dwindling to the point that he would be cruelly emaciated.  And then… many people have kindly empathized with me, talking about how they’d been through this before themselves… but I never had.  The cats my family had as a kid were all outdoor cats, and after a year or two they’d just disappear into the canyon and never come back.  Jennifer had sole custody of Ditko and Crango long before these sorts of decisions came up.  So this was my first time.  The vet had explained that it was a two-step process: first, a shot of morphine, after which the vet would back away into a corner so that we could give Ollie our love as he drifted off to sleep, and then an overdose of sodium pentathol, an anesthetic, to stop his heart.  Ellie added that the drifting off to sleep should feel blissful to him⁠—there’s a reason people take heroin, after all.  But Ollie was so thin.  He yelped when he got the first shot⁠—I don’t know whether I will ever stop feeling haunted by that sound⁠—and then… yes, the vet backed off, and as Ollie looked confused, I tearfully told him “it’s okay, it’s okay” and Ellie told him “I love you, I love you”, but there was no peaceful drifting off, no time for lullabies… in seconds, he was just gone, eyes open.  The vet seemed surprised at how quickly the morphine had taken effect⁠—Ollie was so thin.  The vet gave Ollie the second shot, and offered his condolences as Ellie and I cried our eyes out, and took his payment and left, and it all just ended so fast.

It all just ended so fast.

OLIVER PALMER

“just a kitty dream he’s livin’ in”

2007		2026
Bronx, NY		El Cerrito, CA

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