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The Legend of Tony

He prayeth best who loveth best, all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

~~I can’t make you believe this story. All I can do is tell it directly and honestly, exactly as it happened. These are things I witnessed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. If I’m crazy, then so is my wife, who saw and heard them too.~~

“TONY FOUND YOUR RING!”
It was a bright day in late September, 2011. There were only a few white puffy clouds in a clear blue sky, and the leaves on the maple trees there in Courthouse Square in Downtown Warren, Ohio, were still a bright light green, with just a faint kiss of orange beginning to show at their tips.
I was on my lunch break and I’d been taking my time walking back to my office, so I could admire these first poetic foretells of autumn’s arrival.
I stood astonished, reading the text message over and over. It wasn’t quite sinking in so I called my wife, Kerry, for an explanation.
It seemed she’d been in the kitchen, making some lunch, and heard our 4-month-old kitten, Tony — the newest addition to our furry little tribe — playing with something near the refrigerator. He began to meow, not loudly but persistently, just enough to get her attention.
When she walked over to see what had caught his big golden eyes, he looked up at her again, meowed politely, and looked back down at the floor.
There in front of his paws was my missing wedding ring.
Kerry and I were married on August 5, 2011. A month later, on Labor Day, we went to the Canfield Fair, where we found Tony at a display operated by a local animal charity. We adopted him then and there.
Later that September, I had to have a minor outpatient surgical procedure that required general anesthesia. I woke up groggy, and it seemed that upon my arrival home I didn’t notice my ring — which fits a bit loosely — slip off my finger.
We searched for a week before giving in and ordering another. It’s a $360 ring, and we weren’t exactly raking in cash back then, so it hurt to buy a new one.
I was raised in a fairly traditional Italian-American Catholic family, so naturally I’d offered the standard prayer to St. Anthony, patron saint of miracles and lost items.
I was astonished that my kitten had found my ring. However, as I stood there in the Square among the maple trees I’d been admiring just moments earlier, somehow it didn’t click for me that I’d prayed to someone named “Tony” to find my wedding ring, and indeed someone named Tony had found my wedding ring.
This only occurred to me much later, after so many other remarkable events, and I look back on it now as a bit of foreshadowing. My ring wasn’t the only precious lost item Tony would find for us.

He would soon do justice to his namesake. He would work miracles.

A Lion of a Kitten
Tony stole our hearts immediately. He was just a little black and white urchin with a big pink nose, sitting at the back of his little compartment inside the RV that was renovated to serve as a mobile adoption center for Angels for Animals. As soon as we asked them to take him out, the show began.
I think he knew we were an easy mark, and I always like to say he sold the deal like a car salesman one mid-sized sedan away from a Caribbean cruise. He purred and nuzzled my face and chewed at my goatee and the brim of my fedora hat. He nibbled and pawed at Kerry’s long, coppery red hair.
He came home that night and made our dilapidated little country house a happier home. We already had five cats there, but something about Tony told us our home needed to be his.
He curled up that night on my bed, in the crook of my neck, and purred himself into a sound sleep. He knew he was home. He became Kerry’s constant companion, making her carry him from room to room when she woke up and got ready for work, and again when she arrived home. He loved to stand at the edge of my bed in the mornings while I got ready for work, and reach up my chest and chew on the buttons of my shirt. When I’d get back from my shift as a reporter at the Tribune Chronicle, he’d be waiting in the living room, on the other side of the wall of paned glass and French doors that separated it from the indoor patio. When Kerry and I decided to move to a small house in Youngstown, we took him with us on one of our weekend trips to prepare the place for moving in.
Everything Tony did was with a “brrrruuuuup!” and a chirp and a happy high-pitched mew. He perfected the move we call “the scaredy cat” — he’d arch his back, stick his tail straight up, and hop sideways.
During his first week with us, he pulled this maneuver, transitioned perfectly into a “zombie walk,” and managed to scare the living hell out of Angus — Kerry’s oldest cat. He was the biggest, meanest, most cantankerous, volatile, and terrifyingly intelligent monster of a cat I’ve ever known…and on that day in early September 2011, he was effectively treed by a polite, happy, fearless kitten a mere fraction of his size.
Tony even loved the dog, Ruby, and he became her best friend in a house full of cats who barely tolerated her. They’d play in the hallway and he’d jump all over her, then roll on his belly and she’d nuzzle and gently nip at him until he squealed.

The Bitter End…
For all his heart and strength of character, though, Tony was no match for FIP. There’s no need to recount the painful and horrifying details. Tony died by euthanasia, after dry FIP had its way with him, on the morning of December 19, 2011 — two days after we moved into the new house. I’ll only say that if I’d known what he’d go through that weekend, we would have given him peace the Friday before.
In the moments before the kind veterinarian pushed the plunger on the syringe that ended his suffering, Kerry said a quiet farewell.  I told him “Thanks for choosing us. Now go be a lion.” I held his paw in my hand and wailed like a wounded dog as he left this world.
We buried him near a grove of trees next to the house we’d just left, where Kerry’s mom, Marjorie, still lived. I marked his grave with a red paving stone and some pine boughs. When Marjorie moved out months later, I took the paving stone from Tony’s grave. It now says “Tony’s House” in black and white calligraphic writing. It adorns the front porch of our home.
The pain of Tony’s death was sharp and weighty; it felt like a nail had been driven into my heart and someone had tied a cord to it attached to a barbell. Christmas was a dud, and that winter was long, cold, miserable and painful for Kerry and I both. We did what we could to cope in our own ways. We read books on spirituality and pseudo-neuroscience, and we gave all the love and affection we could to Ruby and our remaining four cats — Chloë, Nitschke, Flynn, and Angus. But there was little joy in the house, and comfort was elusive at best.
Every day, on my smoke breaks at work, I’d stand outside by the Trib’s loading dock and look to sky, begging for the impossible; hoping God would reconsider and I’d see Tony just walking across the parking lot to come chew on my shirt buttons, as if nothing had happened. Of course, he never did. I was a college-educated man in my early 30s, but I had to talk to myself like a five-year-old to make myself understand he was gone.

Here Comes the Sun
With the end of May came finer weather. One fine Sunday, I decided to grill out on our little back porch. I got chicken for Kerry and some wild Alaskan salmon for me.
As I stood with a smoke on my lips, a beer in one hand and a grilling spatula in the other, I heard a bird chirping loudly and persistently, and seemingly very nearby.
After a good 10 minutes of this — and me offering an occasional “oh, put a cork in it!” — I took a few steps out into our small backyard to see if I could determine where the loudmouth fowl was perched.
Our neighbors, Bob and Sharon, whose pool deck and storage shed directly abutted our back yard, had been working on their patio, and some debris was laying at the back of our yard. I didn’t mind because they were good neighbors and it was only temporary.
There, at the front of the small debris field, stood the tiny noise polluter — and it wasn’t a bird.
An extraordinarily small black kitten stood atop a cinder block, mewing as loudly as its little lungs would permit.
With the help of Bob’s humane trap, this kitten was soon the newest member of our family. We noticed quickly that she wasn’t just black; she was black and white.
We sequestered her in our small spare room, which served as an office. For at least a week, she wouldn’t even come out from her hiding spot under the low shelf of our computer desk. It took Kerry nearly a month of sitting in the hot, stuffy 8-by-8 room, playing computer games for hours at a time, before the kitten would come out while we were in the room with her. It was nearly six weeks before we could touch her.
For about the first three weeks, we thought she was a boy, before Kerry was finally able to get a closer look.

Soon enough, though, she came around. She started to play with us from a distance. I bought a toy that I thought might draw her out of her shell a bit more — a stick with a feather at one end and a thin rope at the other. At the end of the rope was a small toy mouse that squeaked whenever it was tapped or jerked.
We talked endlessly about names. When we thought she was a boy, I’d gotten Kerry to agree to “Silvio.” It was a nod to Silvio Dante of the Sopranos — Tony’s #2.
When we discovered Silvio was a girl, it was back to the drawing board; “Silvia” just didn’t seem to fit. We narrowed down the options to a few we really liked, wrote them on paper, and put them in front of her. The one she chose had been written almost at the last second, after we remembered we’d mentioned it days earlier and kind of liked it. She became Lucy.

The First Miracle
One evening, as we sat in the office with her, after she got bored playing with the squeaky mouse/feather toy, she decided she was comfortable enough to let me pick her up, and she stayed sitting in my lap.
Kerry and I had so often floated the idea that Lucy was somehow linked to Tony; maybe he’d sent her. Maybe his furry little soul had guided a lost, hungry, frightened kitten to our back yard and said “There! Make noise and those people will feed you and give you a home. They need you as much as you need them.”
But these were all flights of fancy, we knew: dead cats don’t send their successors to their old human caregivers. Still, our tendency to want to believe in some otherworldly causality led us to speculate from time to time, as we did this evening.
“Can’t help wondering if he had something to do with it,” Kerry said.
“I know. Me too. Tony, did you send Lucy to us?”

The mouse squeaked.
It sat there on the floor, a foot or two away from me, nobody touching it.
“That was odd.” She said, her eyes wider and slightly disbelieving.
“I’ll say.”
“Tony, did you squeak that mouse?”
It squeaked again.
“No f—ing way…”
“I can’t believe that just happened,” I answered.
Kerry tested it. She asked a question…nothing.
Another question…nothing.
I asked a question or two…nothing.
This went on for a couple of minutes, but there was no further reply from the mouse.
We bantered about it for a couple more minutes, still inclined to think we’d seen something out of the ordinary, but trying to laugh it off and let our rational minds bring our excited imaginations back to Earth.
“OK, I’ve gotta know, once and for all…” I said in an audacious tone. “Tony, if you’re here, squeak the mouse for Daddy agai—“

“SQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAK— SQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAK— SQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAKSQUEAK!”

Just like that: the mouse squeaked three times in rapid succession, in a precise and identical cadence.
I laid my hand on Lucy, who had felt me shake, and was looking up at me as my chest and throat tightened and tears welled in my eyes.
Kerry sat there on the floor in stunned silence, her eyes red and watery too.
“We miss you, buddy. You’re always welcome here. This is always your house,” I said.

The Storm Clouds Return
Lucy spent the rest of the summer getting used to the house and making friends with the other cats. She liked Nitschke a lot. They’d chase each other around the basement, and tussle until it ended with her on the floor and him sitting on her. She’d get up and they’d repeat the routine. We got her spayed and vaccinated, and learned what foods she liked (Friskies Flaked Tuna), and she became part of the normal order. She liked pouncing on my feet when I moved them under the blanket, and she LOVED to bother us for our dinner. She even swatted food off Kerry’s fork once. For this, and for her similar coloring and otherwise sweet disposition, we nicknamed her “Honey Badger.”

On August 25, a Saturday night, I went to take Ruby out to pee. Lucy followed us outside without my knowing it. I turned around to see her in the flower bed and she must have sensed my panic, because she ran off. She ultimately disappeared under Bob and Sharon’s pool deck, where we’d first lured he out with some cat kibble months earlier. We searched and called, but to no avail.
That night, I dragged my mattress out onto the back porch, and Kerry and I laid outside all night, trying to sleep, a can of Friskies tuna open nearby. For at least a week, I slept on the couch. I couldn’t sleep in my bed again until Lucy was back to pounce on my feet.
We posted fliers all over the next day, and repeatedly all over our west side neighborhood for the next week or so. I even took days off work to canvass the area, hauling a cat-carrier packed with fliers, a stapler, cans of tuna and the foam plates that our cats know means dinner.
On August 29, around 7:30, the phone rang. A woman said she and her child had seen Lucy at the gas station on the corner of Belle Vista and Mahoning Avenues.
When I got there, the store clerks said they’d seen her too — she’d been in the store! I walked around the property, a can of food open in my hand and giving the dinner call for God and country to hear: “LUCY! DINNER! WHoooo’s HUUUNNGRYYY? WHoooo WANTS TO EAT?”
A meow.

It came from the direction of the greenhouse of the florist next door to the gas station.
As I hurried over, a small grey kitten scurried out from beneath the limestone foundation of the greenhouse, meowing as loudly as he could. He reminded me so much of Lucy’s desperate pleas for food that happy day in May.
I fed him, petted him, continued looking for Lucy as he watched me, and ultimately decided I couldn’t just leave him there.
The kitten who became Bobby Corwen spent one night in our garage with food, a litter box, and a bed made of the hoodie I’d been wearing. The next morning, I tried to get him to a local shelter, but they were filled to capacity. I brought him back to the garage. While I was at work, I got a text from my wife: “He’s in the house. His name’s Bobby.” Or something to that effect.
He was such a compassionate kitten who seemed to know he was needed, seemed to feel  he had a duty to save us humans from our sadness. He took the job very seriously and carried it out to near perfection, and with great style.
He also gave our home the worst case of fleas I have ever seen. It took us 6 months to get rid of them. He was and remains well worth it.

As the days turned into more than a week, our resolve began to wane. Each day that Lucy remained missing, our morale took a hit. We grew desperate. I said my daily prayers (more like full novenas at that point) to St. Anthony — whichever of them would answer.
I even visited for the first time my grandparents’ graves at Calvary Cemetery, right across the street from the gas station where I found Bobby. I asked for their help and even sweetened the deal a bit. I turned back as I was walking away, and spoke at my grandmother’s grave. She’d always wanted me to quit smoking.
“Bring her home, and I’ll quit. Cold turkey. No ifs, ands or buts.”

The following Wednesday was September 5 — a year since we’d found Tony at the fair. I felt it. I knew it. That was the day. That day held magic. It had to. What other day could there be for a miraculous reunion with our girl?
But when night came, Kerry and I both laid our heads on our pillows, exhausted again from our fruitless search efforts and our grief. Lucy hadn’t come home, and I felt like the last of my hope had left me.

Little Darling…
Thursday, September 6, passed mostly as a normal day. I went to work, still vainly hoping for a message from Kerry that Lucy had returned, but not expecting it. I went home, we ate dinner on the couch and watched the Democratic National Convention. I half-heartedly played with Flynn and Bobby with Lucy’s squeaky mouse for a while, then set it down on the couch next to me. Bobby hopped up and stretched out next to my leg.
As we watched, waiting for Vice President Joe Biden to take the stage on TV, I noticed the mouse squeaking. I didn’t think too much of it because I was shifting now and again, and Bobby was occasionally changing his sleeping position; it made sense that the toy’s sensor might be triggered.
Still, it was squeaking quite regularly.
When Kerry stood up to go to the kitchen for a drink, I suggested she poke her head out the back door.
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ll look.”
She came back a minute later, speaking in a hushed but urgent voice, as she hurried past me towards the front door.
“Dan I heard something out there.”
The big door was open and the screen was up on the storm door. I stood up and joined her on the front porch. The mouse squeaked as I moved from the couch, but it didn’t stop when I walked outside.
We stood on the porch, warm, still late-summer night air air thick with tension and silence…then we heard it — a faint and plaintive “meow.” Near my car, which was parked in front of the garage, we saw something move. Inside the house, Bobby stared transfixed at the mouse toy, now squeaking loudly and relentlessly, like a car alarm.
It continued squeaking as we ran back through the living room and into the kitchen, where the emergency cat food can and the flashlight sat on the table.
Kerry grabbed both and charged out the back door.
“You stay here,” she said. “If it’s her, we don’t want to overwhelm her.”
Kerry charged toward the narrow strip of lawn between our garage and Bob and Sharon’s pool deck; the direction in which the shadowy little figure in our driveway had fled.
My nerves dialed up to 11, I momentarily forgot my promise at the cemetery, and I lit up a smoke as I stood on the back porch, waiting  for Kerry to say something…anything; waiting for her to send my spirit soaring or inviting it to join hers in dejected acceptance of another loss.
After a few long minutes of staring in through the screen door at nothing, my shaking hand mechanically feeding the cigarette to my mouth at intervals, I heard my wife’s voice.
How she kept it so calm and even I’ll never know. She is truly grace under fire.

“I’ve got her. Open the door very quietly. I’m barely keeping hold of her.”

I opened the door. Kerry let Lucy go inside the entryway, and the wayward trouble maker charged across the kitchen floor.
My wife walked in behind her.
I closed the door and looked to the stars above me. With tears in my eyes, I choked out a raspy “Thank you.”
Without another puff, I dropped the half-smoked cigarette and stomped it out on the concrete. I was true to my word; it was the last one that has ever touched my lips.

We danced and shouted and cried with an overwhelming elation that should have been more than enough to explode our hearts. The dog joined in, and all the other cats were in a state of high bother at all the excitement. Kerry placed the remains of the can of Friskies flaked tuna that she’d used to lure Lucy out from the deck onto our kitchen table. Our undernourished wanderer stuffed her face into it, eating ravenously as our celebration continued.
After we’d called family to share the good news, and posted it on Facebook. We sat on the couch with our “Badger.”
It seemed that she was as glad for the end of the ordeal as we were. She paced urgently back and forth across our laps, purring and cooing steadily at a high pitch and volume. She knew she was home with her people who loved her.

I don’t know who’s responsible for Lucy’s return. I pleaded to Tony, to St. Anthony, to my grandparents and aunt at their graves in Calvary. I said every Catholic prayer I could think of.
All I know for sure is that on Sept. 6, 2012, a second miracle occurred in the little white house on Hartford Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio. I know that on no fewer than two occasions, a simple cat toy behaved in ways that no rational person would ever expect or believe that it could or would behave. I know that from the moment of Lucy’s return, that particular mouse toy never gave another single squeak out of place, if it squeaked at all. I know that Lucy is home, and happy and healthy, six years old now. I know Bobby is a happy, but very serious, adult cat (also six), and still very sensitive and compassionate.

I know that when I prayed again to Tony in late 2015 for our newest cat, Frankie, to beat feline leukemia, and to get the job I have now, I got a phone call scheduling my second interview at Kent State on the same day we took Frankie to the vet, where he received a clean bill of health.

I know our home is full and our hearts are as whole as they can be. I’m inclined to think it’s because I have two patron saints of miracles and lost items…both named Tony.