Milestone

Rufous, the Alano Club cat, is skinny, nervous, and always complaining. She attends every meeting at the facility, sits in people's laps with her tail constantly twitching, cries to be fed or have a door opened, and is enjoyed by some and tolerated by others only because Don wants her there.

Don N. died last Friday, alone at home with his own cat as he was changing his shoes. That was how he wanted to go.

People had a lot to say about him at the memorial service today, but there's really no way to describe him because he was a bundle of contradictions.

He wasn't in on the beginnings of the Palm Springs Alano Club fifty years ago, but is solely responsible for the present state of the club in its current incarnation. Thirty years ago he scraped together the donations to buy the property, erected the building, fought the bureaucrats at city hall until they approved the facility and provided a parking lot, fought the neighbors, and until a couple of years ago made every repair, planted every tree and bush, and welcomed every degraded and burnt-out street bum with no place else to go.

He patiently heard the most tedious details of everyone else's problems and never talked about his own. He'd listen attentively, offer a few words of advice, and then tell the filthiest joke he could think of.

A few years ago, with cancer eating away his face, he had half his left-side jaw removed, and the excised flesh was replaced with tissue from one of his gluteus maximi. He never complained, but afterward when he told people to kiss his ass would point to his left cheek.

Don was a saint, but like most of the illumined, was nobody's fool. When I first met him I thought he was just a nice old guy who didn't know his ass from his elbow. Later I learned that if he thought someone was a threat to the existence or prosperity of the club, he'd fight with his teeth and fingernails if necessary.

Once some of the members took him to a rich people's speaker meeting at some ritzy spot in Palm Springs. He showed up in his gray coveralls (he'd been planting a tree), and the swells were horrified. They thought the unwashed Alanoites had brought some old wet drunk into their midst.

"What's he doing here?" they asked indignantly. Privilege responds to sainthood.

I only knew him a little over a year. He no longer worked around the club -- Providence had seen fit to supply a replacement in the person of Mark R. But he was still around frequently, and one day as I was finishing up my bookkeeping work, thinking I was alone in the building, I walked out to the patio and found him sitting alone, beaming and petting Rufous. He looked like a little kid.

"She's a beautiful cat, isn't she?" he said. "She's got gorgeous markings."

I muttered something about Rufous being pretty much an ordinary old alley cat.

"She's been around here a long time," Don said, undeterred. "She's really like a part of this place. You know, this cat is about ten years old at least."

I left him sitting alone with the cat. The sun was shining and the parking lot was empty. Goldfish drifted idly in the pool under the lemon trees, and the roses swayed gently in the light breeze. He was very quiet and serene.