It took me years to do it. Twice, I left and came back. Once, I planned to leave it for an even smaller town.

I was clearly insane.

When I moved to the Bay Area, though, I knew that I’d escaped. I’d visit, yes, but I’d never move back home.

Wyoming, as I’ve said more than once, is a lovely place to be from.

There are things that I miss, though. Lilacs. Oh, how I miss the lilacs in the Spring. (And never mind that Spring may not come until June – the lilacs are worth the wait.) The old brick buildings downtown. People who stop to help if your car breaks down. (Seriously – eight years of driving an old Bug in LA, and only a few times has anyone stopped. Once in Santa Monica, when I was trying to push my car up the California Incline; once just a few blocks from my house; and twice in Topanga. The time I ran out of gas on the 101? The Highway Patrolman who pushed my car into the breakdown lane didn’t even bother to ask if I had a cell phone before he disappeared.)

And when I’m stressed, I want to go home.

This morning, Sara, who camped across the street from us our first year at Burning Man, tweeted that she and Frinetik had “Just passed happy jack road and is stopping to look at the floating head of lincoln.”

“Hey,” I told her, “You just went through my hometown!”

And then I went to look at the Prexy’s Pasture webcam, on the University of Wyoming campus.

That statue in the middle is by the same sculptor who carved Lincoln's head.

And surprised myself by bursting into tears.

Today, I just want to go home.

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This is my very last picture of Schokie. There were two more, and I think one was better than this – you could see our eyes, at least – but somehow this was the only one that stuck. The other two just vanished.

My ex-husband and I found Schokie at the Animal Shelter – more often called the Pound – in Laramie, not long after we moved in together. We’d gone to look for our roommate’s cat, who’d gone walkabout while she was out of town. We didn’t find him, but while we standing in front of the row of cages, this tiny, obnoxious brown kitten climbed the wire door, snagged her claws in Mark’s pantleg, and screamed at us until we took her home.

She was always pushy. She’d wedge herself between us and shriek when Mark tried to kiss me. The first time she ever met a pizza, she landed in the middle of it, sank her claws into the molten cheese, and hissed when we tried to remove her from it. The first night after I brought Thryym home, she chased him around the apartment and tried to bite his balls off. But all that aside, she was affectionate, she was smart, and she always knew exactly who she was and what she wanted.

That changed a few years ago. “You’re getting senile,” I’ll tell her, when I found her staring at a wall, or watched her sit down suddenly in the middle of a room, lift a leg to scratch herself, and then freeze, with no idea what she’d intended to do next.

Last year, she went blind. High blood pressure, due to high thyroid and kidney failure, had detached her retinas. They give cats human drugs for those things; there are no veterinary drugs for them yet. A week later, she could see again, and the vet was amazed. (She even mentioned it today: “I was so proud of her,” she said, “for coming back from everything like she did.”) She had a urinary tract infection, which we got cleared up, and then she had another, and another. She weighed less than half as much as she did in her prime, and she got crankier, and scrawnier, and more and more vacant. Getting enough food into her was a struggle, and she rapidly rejected every new flavor.

This past weekend, while NovySan and I were at Maker Faire, she hardly ate at all. Or rather, she hardly ate her own food. She was, instead, determined to eat her despised neighbor’s food – Spooky, our housemate’s cat, gets Friskies, and Friskies, for whatever reason, are ever so much better than the Evo that she loved when I first got it for her. She lost weight, and when we came home, she’d hardly get off the bathroom counter. Her abdomen was distended, and under the fur and the dust (she loved to sleep in the bougainvillea litter outside) I could feel a hardening lump where I imagined her liver ought to be.

I wondered whether to take her to the vet. “How much more can we do to you?” I asked her. But she was miserable, I could see it. So, today, I took her in.

It was, as I thought, her liver that I could feel. That, and a mass in her abdomen that wasn’t there three weeks ago. She’d had lab tests that recently, with no sign of liver failure – just the anemia we’d been battling for months. It might have been lymphoma – that moves very quickly.

“We could do a lot of tests,” the vet said, “and do chemo.”

“She’s 18 years old,” I said, “and I don’t want to do that to her.”

I took her to a room with a soft couch and low lighting, and the vet clipped a sign to the door that said, “Euthanasia in progress. Please be considerate.” I spread a towel across my lap and held her. There was a purple bandage around her left right front paw, to hold the catheter in her vein. She went limp before the last of the solution entered her body. A moment later, I felt her heart beat against my fingertips for the very last time.

I don’t have any pictures of Schokie as a kitten, but on my way out with my empty cat carrier, I saw this little creature, who looked so much like her that when I went back to the photos I’d taken this afternoon, I wondered for a moment how a picture of that obnoxious little furball Mark and I brought home from the Pound had made it onto my phone.

She wasn’t my first cat, and she’s not the first I’ve lost. But she’s the first one I had for so long, and it’s the first time I’ve lost an animal without another one waiting at home. I’ve cleaned out her catbox already, and thrown out her medication, but NovySan just told me we should keep her bowls, and I will. They’ll be there whenever we need them.

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Sometimes, though, LA sneaks up on me. Tonight, I looked out my back door and gasped.

Yeah, that’ll do.

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I worked at a book/video/hobby store in my home town (which was sadly driven under when a mega-chain came to town – though that might not have happened had the woman who owned it not been quite such a dragon) that had an excellent selection of porn mags (this is where I first saw both “Barely Legal” and “Perfect Ten”), an oddly dated selection of porn flicks (I think the owner stopped buying them around 1985), and, at one time, a very broad selection of porn novels (they were gone by the time I worked there, but one of my friend’s mothers had a trunkful of them).

Anyway, it was a small town, and occasionally, something would happen that would make the owners twitchy about the porn selection. (Actually, the old lady never mentioned the porn. The old man was in charge of the porn. They were both Mormon. I’m not sure if that’s relevant here.) Years before I worked there, for instance, someone smashed the front window and stole all the porn mags as a protest against pornography. (Seriously!) The police recovered them, but of course they had to hold them as “evidence,” and they never made their way back to the store. During the subsequent media flap (as much as you can flap a single newspaper that rarely ran more than 30 pages, including the Classifieds), everything but “Penthouse” and “Playboy” came off the shelf.

The old man told me this story while he was clearing the shelves again. This time, a major local kerfuffle had erupted over a local bar’s decision to bring some (*gasp*) strippers up from Denver. (Yes, we had to import strippers.) Some stick-ass who’d walked past the bar during the show claimed he’d seen them grinding their naked naughty bits and insisted that something had to be done. (Never mind that the windows of this particular bar were covered in blackout paper even when there weren’t any strippers inside. Either he was lying about seeing them, or he was lying about seeing them from outside.) The city council heeded the call of their outraged constituency, and drafted an anti-obscenity statute which was justly ridiculed for outlawing not only those filthy out-of-state strippers, but also artistic nudes, theatrical nudity (I’m sure the university’s theatre department was thumbing its nose at them when they mounted “Equus” a few years later) and teenaged boys’ boners. (It quite specifically stated that no man could appear in public, clothed or unclothed, in a “discernibly turgid” state. Of course someone immediately printed up t-shirts that said “Discernibly Turgid.” The bear at the Fireside wore one for years.)

The measure was eventually defeated, but meanwhile, the old man took most of the more “interesting” magazines off the shelves and moved the entire stock of porn flicks to the back room. A few customers asked where they’d gone, and we’d explain they were just hiding out until the city council decided whether nudity was to be allowed in the Gem City of the Plains. Most of our customers, though, were far too shy to even mention their absence. Not Our Very Best Porn Customer, though. Our Very Best Porn Customer came in almost every day to get his fix. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were two-for-one (and oh, how I did love tormenting those blushing college boys who could barely bring themselves to rent a porno from a girl, by telling them they could get another for the same price), and so every Tuesday and Wednesday, without fail, he’d rent two and sometimes four porn tapes. Now, as I’ve said, the owner hadn’t bought anything new in quite some time – and you mustn’t think he’d bought a lot when he was still buying. I don’t think we had more than 100 pornos in the whole store. One of my coworkers figured it up once and realized that Our Very Best Porn Customer had seen every porn tape we had at least four times, and he’d seen his favorites much more often. During the great porn drought, he still came in almost every day, asking if the porn was back, and consoling himself with R-rated movies that might at least give him a bit of boob.

After a few months of this, the old man finally made his decision. All of the magazines went back on the shelf, but the porn tapes – the porn tapes had to go. Our Very Best Porn Customer was first in line. He nearly staggered under the weight of his purchases. Star 85. The Italian Stallion. (So well-loved that its original cover was long gone – it lived in a plain plastic box with a xeroxed picture of Sly Stallone stuck to the front.) All of his favorites, many of his stand-bys, and a few he said he’d never even watched. (So much for my colleague’s math skills.)

And that is my two-for-one porn story. What’s yours?

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