Xena's gone

There is something just so unthinkably horrible about the silence, the vacuum, the hole in the world of those left behind wondering


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Xena's gone
by Brian Appleton
15-Sep-2007
 

One day three weeks ago our favorite cat disappeared.  She was the most beautiful cat we have ever owned. She was smaller than a full size cat but she had a very leonine profile, grey with black tiger stripes, a bushy tail and yellow eyes. She could do a higher standing jump than any creature I have ever seen. She could launch from the ground to the roof of our house or a neighbor’s house in a single bound. At night I could hear the wooden gate rattling outside my bedroom window when she would jump up on it... that is the only sound she would make as she stalked through the night but it was enough to let me know that she was there. She spent a great deal of her time high above the ground walking along fence tops or roofs in the darkness and shadows like a Ninja.

She spent most nights out all night but was always at the door the next morning early at dawn waiting to be let in for breakfast and then she would spend the day sleeping on the stool next to my chair in my home office if I were there or in my chair if I were not. She also liked sleeping on top of the bookcase in the living room under a down light which kept her warm. Another part of her regular routine was her demand for attention…if she wanted to be fed, or let outside, or have her litter box changed... she would make her feelings known to us without any question… She was very insistent on being held and caressed when she was in the mood for affection. She would bump her head against your leg and demand to be picked up and hugged. She would play bite but never hurt us or scratch us even when she pretended to disembowel your hand with her hind legs when you tickled her tummy.

I have never known a better hunter. She was always leaving us tribute on our front door step or on the back patio in front of the sliding doors, in the form of mice, rats and all manner of birds. One time when my wife was sick in bed, Xena came running in the front door and down the hall towards the bedroom with a live mourning dove in her mouth with its wings flapping on either side. She intended to give this to my wife to make her feel better and was terribly insulted and hurt when I took it away from her and let it go free. This was not the hunter’s code of conduct.

In six years she had never run away not even once. At first when she did not come home we didn’t talk about it but by the third day we could no longer ignore it. We went to the local pound looking for her but she was not there. We went back every few days and we also put up posters all around the neighborhood which unbelievably, self righteous old retired people spent their idle days going around ripping down. There was even a letter to the editor in our local paper complaining about posters on public utility poles and how it was against the law. I am not sure how a community is supposed to communicate with itself but that is a different topic.

While on the phone with one of my best friends in Tehran, I suddenly remembered that when I had visited them in 1966 for the summer, that the last day of my visit, their maid Roya started crying hysterically because their favorite cat and mother of all their other kitties had run away. My friend remembered that incident also. He said that the cat’s name had been Mojgon. Anyway Mojgon used to run away all the time probably to meet her boy friends because she was not spayed. My friends kept telling me not to worry because cats run away all the time but that they always come back and that Xena would come back.

But I knew better. We were her family and Xena was very, very loyal to us and she was much too clever to get hit by a vehicle or caught by a raccoon or a coyote. Her only downfall was that she was very friendly towards people. I just had this feeling that someone from another neighborhood or even another town had enticed her into their arms and stolen her because she was so beautiful. My wife feared that some sicko had caught her and tortured her to death because she was the third cat in our neighborhood to disappear this summer.

As each day passes I feel a greater sense of loss, so accustomed was I to having her around, her silent dignity and grace was a joy and comfort to behold. As I find myself missing her and regretting that I had not even been able to say goodbye... not to mention the sorrow of not knowing her fate... I began to imagine what it would be like to have a human member of your immediate family disappear. How often I have passed bill boards in cities and on the sides of freeways which families have paid to put up, with a picture of their missing loved one asking for anyone with information to contact them. There is one of a beautiful young Iranian American girl which I have noticed in my peripheral vision for years on a street in Berkeley and which I saw a newly installed bill board of her on HWY 101 near Redwood City recently. It is years now and the family still holds out hope. I have even found myself praying for them that they find her.

And then I started thinking how in the USA, people disappearing is either due to alienation and domestic abuse leading to running away or the disappearee is a victim of random, anonymous, criminal violence because our main social ills here, I believe, are caused by lack of real community, while in other countries, the State is behind it... how many people disappeared in Argentina or under Augusto Pinochet in Chile or at the hands of Savak or Vavak? Can anyone, who has not experienced such a thing, even begin to imagine the agony a family goes through?

A missing person in an earthquake or a war or a rape and murder is hideous enough but to disappear because of your political beliefs…

There is something just so unthinkably horrible about the silence, the vacuum, the hole in the world of those left behind wondering; when one day you wake up and your loved one has just silently disappeared without any note, or physical altercation or a single sound, no phone call, no witness... nothing, just a void... there is a surreal quality as if the person never really existed and you only imagined them, you find yourself almost questioning your own sanity…there are few things I can think of that violate the human spirit as much as this, not even torture... and then you can prove nothing and if you accuse or protest against a disappearance to your government, you place yourself in peril as well and yet think of all the brave mothers all around the world living under tyranny who risk their own lives to protest this everyday...

I, for one, dream of a world where people will not be totally erased for their beliefs...


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more from Brian Appleton
 
A.Mountain

Hi again! What I said was

by A.Mountain on Sun Sep 23, 2007 01:32 PM PDT

Hi again!

What I said was true!

Remember there are tons of people who read these

articles but don't leave comments, although they probably

agree with you 100%!

Keep up the great work!

Luv you too my cyberspace friend!  ~;D


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xenas gone

by Brian H. Appleton (not verified) on Sat Sep 22, 2007 10:02 PM PDT

thanks A.Mountain,

whoever you are I think I love you...;)
readers like you make me want to keep writing.
my apology was irony and also an attempt at humility which we all need as a steady diet...

yours,

Rasool/Brian


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Can't think

by A.Mountain (not verified) on Fri Sep 21, 2007 08:25 PM PDT

Thank you for all your efforts Brian.
I know you do it out of the goodness of your
heart, for humanitarian reasons, and probably a lot more which I don't know.
These people who had written vulgar stuff, they just want to be vulgar and use disgusting language.
They don't think. They can't even do that.
You don't have to apologize for anything, it is them who should do that.
From what you write- and have written before- I feel you are a really wonderful person. There should be millions and millions more like you in the world.
Thanks,
God bless you.


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comments on my article Xena's Gone

by Brian H. Appleton (not verified) on Thu Sep 20, 2007 01:45 AM PDT

Dear readers,

for those of you who got what I was trying to say thank you for your kind words and may God Bless You All and for those who did not, God Bless You Too! I have to wonder how you can feel so threatened by my humble words that you would be inspired to say such hateful things. Have I attacked your hearts and homes in anyway? How have I threatened your well being that you should feel so free to attack someone you don't even know?

Obviously I do not place the life of one cat to be more sacred than the life of a single person...although I must mention that her affection and loyalty for my family was truer than the treatment I have received at the hands of many humans...

The whole point of my story was to make people try to go beyond the gratification of their own immediate egos long enough to imagine the agony, sorrow and sense of loss that relatives go through when a loved one disappears. For anyone who has lost a beloved pet they have experienced only a tiny fraction of that pain. For me all of God's creatures are sacred and there is a long tradition of using animals in parables in Iranian literature as well as ancient Greek like Aesop's fables and in the Christian tradition with St. Francis and St. Benedict and others...St. Francis said that "the fox has its lair, the bird has its nest but only poor mankind has no where to lay his head" and he also said:" If you want to know God follow the way of the birds and the fishes..." although that may have been Malana...and what of Hafez's Parliament of the Birds? Was he blasphemous to use the Simorgh as an allegory for God Himself? I suppose you Whahabis out there would think so...LOL

For those of you who told me to get a life and were so quick to jump down my throat, I do not know where your random hatred and hostility comes from but I am sorry it is there because it is you who have to live with it not me and although you must think I am a tender hearted fool, my skin is several yards thick, which is why I risk writing publically, so call me whatever names you like...no matter. Besides they say God protects children and fools so I feel honored to be taken for one... but for the record I want you to know that I have written many letters of protest over the past several years starting Oct 8, 2001 with the US bombardment of Afghanistan to our Senators and Congress and to this deaf President Bush and protesting the deaths of the 665,000 Iraqis and counting.... Al Jazeera Magazine has picked up and reprinted many of my letters of protest.

Do you know how many letters of protest I wrote to the US president and Congress protesting when the US Navy shot down the Iran Air jet years ago over the Persian Gulf on its 20 minute flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, which is a flight I once took myself? I demanded that the US government compensate the families of the 300+ victims...you see I truely do believe in the equality of every person in God's eyes regardless of their nationality, religion or ethnic group...and I protest the stickers that proclaim "God Bless America" which imply "and to Hell with everyone else..."

I protest the words "vital American interests' which is a euphamism for our self imposed right to other people's resources because of some sense of innate superiority...we Americans are supposed to be an egalitarian society that values democratic principles and yet everywhere I see the celebration of elitism...having said all that I have to mention that the IRA has the worst record of human rights violations and secret inprisonment and torture of any regime on earth at the present time so I close my response to your comments by encouraging all of us out of a sense of universal love and brotherhood during Ramadan to think about and pray for all the disappeared, the disapparitos and their families...and if you failed to understand that my cat's disappearance, which did sadden my heart, was used as a parable, a symbol to get us to think about these larger issues then let me offer my sincere apologies for those I offended for my lack of communication skills...

all the best,

Brian


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Dear Brian, It is so

by Mina M (not verified) on Sun Sep 16, 2007 07:50 PM PDT

Dear Brian,
It is so shameful. This site is becoming worse than those other regular sites available to the public. The profanity, used by some who are ready and willing to submit any kind of repugnant and abhorrent language is beyond words!
I am amazed at how disturbed these specific people are.
Since your love and history with Iran goes back a very long way(1960's from your previous articles), probably even a long time before some of these (cannot even give them a name)were born, I am quite certain that with your understanding, you will not judge all by a few very diseased minds.

I am deeply sorry, beyond I can express.

I wish you the very best in the world.
Mina M


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God bless you and Xena's soul

by farrad02 on Sun Sep 16, 2007 05:06 PM PDT

Brian,

I'm so ashamed and sorry for the idots who responded to your heart-felt account with disgusting profanity. I have always enjoyed your writings about Iran and the good old days.  The fact that you have maintained a soft spot in your heart for Iran and her people, in spite of what has happened in the past 30 years, says a lot about you as a human being!

God Bless Xena and you.

God save all of us from radical ideologies of any kind! To me, nothing is worth spewing this type of hateful vocabulary against anyone!  As Jahanshah's tag line says, Nothing is so sacred after all!   You guys need to get a life!

Thanks,
FR

 


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I wish people who CANNOT

by Caspian (not verified) on Sun Sep 16, 2007 03:32 PM PDT

I wish people who CANNOT comprehend what is being said here would just keep quiet!... Just a wish!
-will never happen!
We have a saying: Ankas keh sokhan nagofeth bashad eib o honarash nahofteh bashad! If I don't have it exactly right please forgive me. Losely translated (since can't translate well) it means:
If you don't speak no one will know your vices or your virtues!(in this case I'm refering to the people answering here with a bag full of vices!) Someone please do the poetic translation this verse deserves!
Brian, all the best!


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HE HAS A LIFE IT SEEMS YOU

by EMMA (not verified) on Sun Sep 16, 2007 01:24 PM PDT

HE HAS A LIFE IT SEEMS YOU DO NOT


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hey brian, a million Iraqis

by AM (not verified) on Sun Sep 16, 2007 01:10 PM PDT

hey brian, a million Iraqis die and all you can do is write about your car. please get a life, read news and perhaps do a little thinking! thank you.


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I see that the anguish of

by NJ (not verified) on Sun Sep 16, 2007 06:49 AM PDT

I see that the anguish of losing your cat has made you think of the bigger picture of "loss"... By loss I actually mean losing, not knowing their whereabouts, having no news of them... and then fearing the very worst.
I can only imagine the constant nightmare it must be for those who "lose" a loved one ... the wait for their return. the wondering, the dreadful imaginations one may have.
How indescribably painful!
Many years ago my mother knew a woman who had been waiting for her son's return for 25 years ...every day she had thought "that day" would be the day she would see him again.

On the other hand a lot of times pets Do return, like my dog did when I was just
a teen and we were living in Turkey.
He just re-appeared after more than one month. Never found out where he'd been!
Hope you see Xena soon.


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I hope Xena returns home

by Naseem (not verified) on Sat Sep 15, 2007 03:42 PM PDT

I hope Xena returns home safe and sound asap.
Pets bring a whole lot of joy and love to the heart.


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sorry about your cat. i

by Anonymous12 (not verified) on Sat Sep 15, 2007 11:45 AM PDT

sorry about your cat. i enjoyed reading about her... i just don't understand how you actually took it to the level of pinochet and shit like that... anyway, thanks for sharing


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