Long before CoCoa, Booger, Diogenes, Pandemonium, Artemis, Tigger the visitor, Catalina and Meteor, there was a lady cat named Samantha. At least, she was in Judith’s house, and may have been a lady. Her story is hard to believe, especially coming from one who is subject to vivid flights of imagination. Nonetheless, it is true.

The little antique house in the Sugarhouse district of Salt Lake City was my birthday present to me in the summer of 1988. Every waking moment of the next four months that I wasn’t at work, I fixed up the house. It was not ordinary, just-moving-in work. My first task, for instance, was to sterilize a bedroom and install a mini-refrigerator and microwave therein – a bacteria-free living space from which to expand the sterilization process outward. The motorcycle bunch, previous tenants, must have done bike repair and major surgery in the kitchen and housed lions and tigers and bears in the living room, before they boarded up the blackened fireplace, burned down the garage and disappeared in the middle of the night.

I was grateful for the scut work. Dissolving the grease globs that hung from the kitchen ceiling, renewing the golden oak floors, toothbrushing the little ceramic tiles in the bathroom and kitchen and revitalizing the woodwork fashioned of Utah’s curl leaf mountain-mahogany kept my out-of-office hours occupied. There wasn’t time for introspection; not a moment to take a breath and admit how incomprehensively lonely I was since the divorce.

The house sparkled Thanksgiving week as the chimney sweep doffed his top hat and wished me happy holidays. I had left the fireplace for last, for I was truly afraid of what would be forthcoming with the boards removed. There were no bodies, though, only piles of debris. Degreaser, Spic ‘n’ Span, stiff brush and toothbrush had then revealed an unrivaled marvel of a pastel-tiled Sugarhouse fireplace. It was the piece de resistance.

The sweep skipped out the gleaming front door. I sat in my Victorian rocker and wept. The house was magnificent, and what would I do now?

“Maybe I’ll get a cat,” was a passing thought as I got in the car and went over to one of the sober clubs I frequented. “But, what if I don’t like living with a cat? Can you take them back?”

Black and white, screaming from the club bulletin board, was my answer. “Keep my house cat while I do a month in the Reserves? She’s a darling.” Here was a cat I could try on for size! I called the phone number, and Samantha came to my solitary home.

Calico, not young and assuredly not darling, she weighed at least fifteen pounds and despised me at once. “She’ll be strange for a couple of days – they always are,” said her mistress as she threw the cat paraphernalia into the living room and escaped.

When I looked around, Samantha, too, had disappeared. Forever. She ate and pooped, presumably while I was at work or sleeping, but days passed and I only heard her. Skitter, skitter, clump, clump. She had squeezed into an eight-inch gap in an oak floor register in the den and taken up residence in the enormous cold air ducts of the ancient gas furnace. The second week, I brought a cat trap from work and put her food in it one night, but in the morning the trap was sprung and both Samantha and the food were gone. I decided her owner would have to lure Samantha out when she returned from the army, and the cat and I began our non-physical cohabitation, I in my miserable solitude and Samantha in her air duct.

Christmas Eve I shut off the TV – “It’s a Wonderful Life” was not my self-pitying cup of tea – and picked up a book. A Utah snowstorm was raging so I couldn’t drive to the club, and depression threatened to overwhelm me. I tried so hard to concentrate on the novel, I didn’t hear her scratch her way up the duct and into the den.

Without hesitation, Samantha wrapped a skinny, bedraggled body around my ankles and purred like a fifty-horse motor boat. “Don’t be sad,” she crooned. “I’m here.” No Child in a whole stable full of animals had been adored any more than I was at that moment. One more time, the Something that first charted my path and now guides my life had sent me a message of hope and love; this time with a transient messenger called Samantha.