can you hear the drums ferdinando?
I met Ferdinand on my third or fourth date with AK. The plan was to meet at her house and in a move that was retroactively predictable, she was running late. A thin-hipped black cat soft-pawed toward me on the fence. "You must be Ferdinand," I said, and we hung out there, outside the bungalow she shared with Alberto, and for the next fourteen years. Yesterday we said goodbye to him. For months, he'd been doing that ailing-cat move where he drank water from any vessel he could find: glasses, the pots in Dash's play kitchen, a plastic souvenir Dodgers cap. But both OC and T-Mec had long, slow declines during which they mostly lived their lives, and even when he went from his usual slender build to truly bony, I thought we'd have a while. Then all of a sudden we didn't. Big eyes, big heart Long ago, AK and I picked out careers for our cats, and Ferdinand's was DJ. He was always the coolest guy in the room. He came and went as he pleased; we ass...