This weekend we are gratefully observing our third Jennyversary, that is, it has been three entire years since we went to SCAR on windy Sunday afternoon “just to check things out” and came back with a cat. So today we talk about Jenny Linsky.
Jenny is named for the star of the Cat Club books by Esther Averill; in them, Jenny Linsky was a small black cat who lived with a retired sea captain in the West Village, where he knitted her a red scarf and she ice-skated her way into the Cat Club, a group of neighborhood cats who all had glorious names and fantastical talents. If you have not read any Cat Club books, I am sorry for you, you should remedy this situation forthwith. They were beautifully reissued the by New York Review Children’s Collection in 2003 and I’m sure you can find them at a library if you’re not ready to commit to buying a classic children’s book.
At any rate. Kas and I both read Cat Club books as children and had spoken, when we spoke of acquiring a cat, of how should that cat be a black lady cat she must of course be called Jenny Linsky. We had been speaking of acquiring a cat with some frequency in the fall of 2016, as my job had begun unraveling my mind and my psychiatrist wrote me a prescription for an emotional support animal, specifically a cat. So I started searching on Petfinder, and we decided not to get ahead of ourselves, buy any supplies or anything silly like that, since we were going to take our time to find the best cat for us, and what if we bought a bunch of stuff the cat didn’t like? How foolish would we feel then?
No more foolish than we did that Sunday in 2016, when we went to SCAR and walked the mile-plus home with a panicked little black cat inside a cardboard carrier. We switched off lugging her and the litter, litter pan, dry food, wet food, door-hanger scratch pad, small red collar, and bottle of Nature’s Miracle we’d bought when we adopted Jenny, who’d been sitting in her own litter pan in a cage in a very crowded room, still with a freshly shaved tum from her spay. Year-old “Autumn” had been found on the street, very pregnant and very sick. She gave birth and got better, but her kittens didn’t survive. They had just made her available for adoption when we came by, and SCAR has a no-holds policy, so if we wanted this sulky little black cat, we’d have to apply that very minute, text our references to answer their phones, and start amassing supplies.
She’s Jenny Linsky, we said. Hi, Jenny. We’re going to take you home.
Jenny took a while to warm up to us. She took to the apartment right away, and the wet food, snubbing the dry and starting us on an endless journey of “what is the appropriate food to give to our precious cat, and what is the appropriate amount of that food?” We learned she needed to be fed in two servings about half an hour apart, lest her small stomach reject its new contents. We learned she loved to chase mice — preferably those whose tails had been detached — and she loved to be in high places. We learned that “cuddling,” for Jenny, meant sitting across the sofa from you.
But Jenny in 2019 is not Jenny in 2016. She’s sitting on my lap, aggressively purring, as I type this. It took what felt like a long time for her to warm up to me, for her to seem to actually want to be around me when I wasn’t feeding or playing with her. I started watching a lot of My Cat From Hell and counted myself lucky my biggest problem was that my cat didn’t seem very interested in me. I tried not to take it personally.
After I quit my terrible job at the end of the summer of 2017, after we’d moved and Kas had created the skyway of carpeted shelves for Jenny the height enthusiast to leap and lounge on, I had a couple months where I wasn’t employed, wasn’t looking for a job, and was a full-time stay-at-home person. I think that’s when things really clicked for Jenny and me, when I stopped being “the other one” and started being her person. I’m not saying she likes one of us more than the other now, but she certainly preferred Kas when he was the stay-at-home guy installing window hammocks for her. When we swapped, him going to an office five days a week and me going nowhere, it gave Jenny and me a chance to get to know each other. It also helped that I wasn’t crying from stress every day or working into the night on ten thousand spreadsheets. I had time, and I had emotional energy, to give to my little black cat. And she gave hers to me.
Jenny’s not the easiest cat; she fears strangers, resists change, gives nothing but hisses and baps to any and all foster kittens, attempted to proactively murder Clementine for two long months during the hard winter of 2018. She occasionally pees in the shower out of insecurity and won’t share her wheel with anyone, ever. She never asks, always demands, and when we have fosters she requires constant reassurance of our love. But she has it. She’ll always have it. Jenny is not a miracle cat; she is my miracle cat. She taught me how to love and respect cats. To what I’m sure is her great chagrin, it’s because of her we got a second cat, and it’s because of her we started fostering. We got so lucky with Jenny, we are so happy with our little black cat with her little white star, the way she greets us at the door and yodels as she runs and tries to snuggle under every blanket, that we wanted to pass some of that happiness along. My love for Jenny is so big I have to share it. So on this, the third anniversary of the day my heart started to open in ways I didn’t know it could, here are a thousand or so words on her greatness. We love you, Jenny Linsky. Thank you for being in our lives.
Pictured here with her erstwhile nemesis.