Ozzie [nate]

When I came home for the first time after nine months away at college I didn’t expect to learn that the thing I loved the most at my house had died nearly seven months ago due to neglect from my parents. Ozzie, named after the baseball player, died locked in my old bedroom in the corner of the basement. My parents were having a dinner party, and didn’t want “my old cat” running around their friends, so he was locked in my room. A week later he was found dead, forgotten about. He was sixteen years old, which is quite old for a cat, and his body was later “disposed of” by my parents. They waited until late Friday night, my first night in town, to tell me what happened. I don’t think they planned to tell me at all, but my persistent questioning forced them. Thankfully, an old friend from high school, who I bumped into at a gas station on the way home from the airport, had invited me to a party that night. I used this as a reason to leave my parents house. Before I left, I went in my old room. The posters had all been taken down and my parents had painted it a different color. In my desk I found an old picture of Ozzie. I folded it up and put it in my back pocket.

When I arrived at the house, I was engulfed by a mass of faces I hadn’t seen in almost a year. I could hardly remember anyone’s names as they all fought to be the first to say hello to me and shake my hand. It was strange they were so happy to see me; I had hardly known them in High School. I thought it was weird that this many people were back from college the same weekend as me, but I would later learn that none of them had gone to college, and this was a regular weekend event. When we stepped inside the house I was instantly handed a beer. The room was full of a thick smoke that smelled like a strong mix of both cigarettes and marijuana and someone was lying on a couch watching some old Nickelodeon cartoons on the television. Cigarette smoke is hard to get rid of, I thought, it’s going to smell like this for a long time. “Whose place is this?” I asked.

“Oh it’s Jake’s. You remember Jake? He works full time now with his dad out at the cleaners, he’s loaded.”

“It’s nice.”

“I know, right?”

We stepped out of the front hallway and into the kitchen where a group of people were all focused on the center of the table, playing some sort of drinking game. I remembered how my dad used to hate that Ozzie would sit on the kitchen table, and I always enjoyed watching how angry he would get. He would run in screaming and Ozzie would look at him like he was nobody, like it didn’t matter what he said. I reached back and touched the picture in my back pocket.

“So what are you doin’ with yourself now, man?” a face with a name I couldn’t remember asked.

“I’m studying engineering over in New York.”

“Shit man, New York? How’d you afford that?”

“Scholarships.”

“Nice man, yeah I’m not in school right now, but it’s great. Pretty much do what I want, when I want,” he said, over the muffled sound of the cartoons still playing in the other room.

I was not upset when a rather drunk guy stumbled into the room, screaming, interrupting our conversation.

“Let’s have a moment of silence for our good friend Tommy.”

Everyone in the room looked down at their drinks. A few seconds crawled awkwardly by as I tried to figure out who Tommy was. The drunk guy interrupted the silence with a loud “Yeeaahhhhh!” before he chugged his beer and shouted “Tommmmmy!” He flipped the lights on and off a few times for no apparent reason.

“Who’s Tommy?” I asked the guy next to me.

“Oh shit, you didn’t hear about Tommy? Tommy Catalano? He died about 3 weeks ago. Car accident.”

I did know Tommy Catalano. We had P.E and History together. I wondered when the funeral was and if many people had gone, if it was a beautiful service or subdued. For some reason, I felt like I should have been there. I remembered when my aunt died and my parents didn’t want me to go to the service, they said I was too young. When they would leave, as they often did, they would leave me with one of the neighbors who would fall asleep on the couch. Ozzie was my only real company at that time. We would play and when I fell asleep, Ozzie would sleep at the end of my bed.

When I went home from the party I had to crawl in through an unlocked window around back because my parents had forgotten to leave the door unlocked for me. I unfolded the picture of Ozzie and placed it at the end of my bed before I went to sleep.

The next day I decided that I would give Ozzie a proper funeral. My parents had placed his body in a box, taped it up, and thrown it away. I found an old shoebox filled with dusty old baseball cards, dumped them out, and placed the picture of Ozzie inside. Across the top of the box I wrote “With Love” and I started towards the backyard. On my way out my father asked what I was doing.

“I am going to give Ozzie a funeral, you and Mom may come if you would like.”

As I stepped outside I heard my father say to my mother under his breath, “If I wanted a good cat I would have gone to a Chinese restaurant.”

Outside a cool breeze blew by and the smell of rain was in the air. The clouds, too, were dark with the threat of rain. I hoped I would be able to get back before the rain, but didn’t really care anyway. In the shed behind the house I found a small shovel, and unsure of where I wanted to go, I just started walking. I walked past the dull metal slide I used to play on as a child that was now rusted with age and into the stretch of forest that expands from my parents’ back yard for miles. About fifty feet or so into the trees I thought I heard rain, and upon looking up, saw something in the branches I had completely forgotten about. Roughly halfway up the tallest tree three boards were nailed into two branches close to the trunk, creating a small platform. A friend and I had put them up years ago and would spend hours up there, watching clouds or for animals, away from everything.

I decided that this was the perfect place to bury Ozzie. I dug a small hole near the base of the tree and placed the shoebox inside. I knew I wanted to say something, but unsure of exactly what to say, I thanked Ozzie for always being there, said goodbye, and filled in the hole. I felt the breeze across my face and looked up at the platform in the tree. I wanted to climb the tree and sit on the platform and stare at the sky one more time, but I didn’t think it would hold my weight anymore, so I started off towards my parents’ house. I looked back one more time at the freshly packed earth over Ozzie and hoped I had done him justice with the funeral. I thought of Tommy Catalano and his funeral, and wondered if I had missed any others that I didn’t even know about. I thought of school and getting back and my plans and my scholarships. Then, I turned back towards my parents’ house, and I heard the rain begin to come down harder.