Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Cat's spell wouldn't permit owners to let go
It pains me to tell you the story of Toby the lost cat, but I will persevere, for Toby's sake.
Until the morning of Aug. 24, Toby was the treasured pet of Ken and Theresa Mullen, an orange-and-white tabby that had walked through their back door as a stray five years earlier and made himself at home.
The Mullens, who own a small condo near Loyola University, already had two cats, but they made room for Toby, seduced by his affectionate and playful ways.
With no children, the Mullens were very attached to their cats-- Ken to Toby, especially.
Toby would shadow Ken around the house and follow him on walks through the neighborhood as if he were a dog. Toby would give Ken cat hugs, climb into his lap and sleep on his shoulder. When Ken would practice the guitar, Toby would sit and watch for hours. When Ken would mow the lawn, Toby would observe from a safe vantage point beneath the bushes.
On warm summer mornings, Toby would lie in the cool of the back porch and watch the birds in the yard. That's where Toby was last seen that Saturday in August when he disappeared.
"We really don't know what happened," Theresa told me this week, her voice stoked with emotion from the painful memory.
It wasn't like Toby to leave the yard, but he wasn't there.
"Gone, completely vanished," Ken said, struggling with the memory himself. "I felt like I lost my son."
They found Toby's collar two doors down, but no clue as to how he had lost it. They theorized maybe he had climbed into the back of one of the moving vans seen in the neighborhood that day, but it was just a theory.
Pets are lost every day to the heartbreak of their owners, but what distinguished the Mullens was their search for Toby: as determined a search as if he were their child, because to them, he was.
"Where's Toby?" asked the four-color posters that blanketed the Rogers Park neighborhood and other parts of the North Side. The poster showed a photo of the cat and offered a $250 reward for his safe return.
They attached the posters to light poles with duct tape, stuck them in store windows, handed them out to veterinarians and animal shelters. When somebody would take down the posters, they'd put put up more.
Theresa estimates they hung 800 posters altogether.
They also ran ads in the newspapers, and Theresa made weekly visits to the city pound and the Humane Society.
Ken, a high school teacher, would walk the streets and alleys of Rogers Park for hours at night with a flashlight while jingling his keys, his customary method for calling the cat.
The awareness campaign was so successful that when they'd run into somebody on the street and start to ask them if they'd seen their missing cat, the passersby would say, "Oh, you mean Toby."
But nobody had seen Toby.
Oh, there were plenty of leads, as many as five calls a day for the first month, often from people certain they had found Toby.
"It was really heart-warming," Theresa said of all the callers trying to be helpful.
"So many times people would swear it was him," Theresa said. But when the Mullens would investigate, it wasn't him.
The calls would come and the Mullens would rush out to look at the cat in question.
Twice they were called out in the middle of the night in driving rainstorms. Once Ken blew through a stop sign and was pulled over by police. One of the female officers saw the posters in Theresa's lap and said, "So you're Toby's owners." She sent them on their way with an admonition to "just be careful."
Somebody brought them a dead cat in a shoebox. Another demanded the reward based on a videotape that didn't show Toby. The Mullens paid a pet psychic $40 for a warm and fuzzy vision that got them nowhere.
Time after time, they were disappointed.
A few of the calls were from crackpots threatening to hang their cat, but more often they received messages of encouragement from people with stories of lost pets and happy endings.
Along the way, the Mullens reunited two other lost cats with their owners, found homes for four additional strays and adopted another cat themselves. But they couldn't stop thinking of Toby.
Ken became depressed. His work suffered, and his principal let him know. His friends told him to let go and move on.
Ken cut back on his nighttime search missions. The calls dwindled to zero. Ken grew more depressed. When the first snowfall of the season hit, Ken cried and cried.
On the day before Thanksgiving, the Red Door Animal Shelter left a message for the Mullens to tell them that a woman had just brought in a stray cat that they thought might be Toby. Ken didn't listen to the messages when he got home. When the shelter called again, Ken thanked them but laid down to take a nap, not ready to face another disappointment.
He shook it off long enough to make a trip to the shelter on Lunt near Western, a couple of miles from the Mullens' home in the 1300 block of West Albion.
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