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Indiespensable
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Fup. Store Cat.

Chapter 188

In Loving Memory
Fup. Store Cat.
1988 — 2007
fup 18 fup 19
Click here for details on our specially designed Fup. Store Cat. T-shirts!
Fup. Store Cat.
Fup watercolor courtesy of reader Linda McDougall. Click here for a larger view.
Bear
bear 		Zooey
zooey

see Fup's photo album

Early morning, upon leaving the store, Bear split off on his own.

Everywhere he tripped over memories. First, Fup during that long heat wave, perched every evening in the tree overlooking 8th Avenue, by the building since torn down and replaced. Bear followed a quick loop south past the old Church of Elvis — also gone. Had anything survived? He'd forgotten about William Wegman's water bowl, the canine Benson bubbler, where Fup liked to linger, sometimes just pretending to drink, making dogs on their leashes wait.

Outside the Orange Room, Bear says to himself, to Fup, "Sometimes, I imagine you're on the streetcar when it's coming toward the stop. The doors open and you walk out. All nonchalant."

It's been a while since I've done that, Bear realizes.

His first week in Portland, Fup walked him here, to the corner of Couch and Northwest 11th. Before Powell's added the big entrance on this side. Huddling against the building's brick shell, in the roar of giant trucks hauling hundreds of barrels of beer. They held their breath from the stink of exhaust. They spied for rats.

Now condos rise on all three corners adjacent. It's not better, nor worse, but so different that he has to make himself remember how it was before. Through a crosswalk, under a fence, and then up a familiar metal staircase, three flights take him to the landing where Fup once broke out in song; she tried to convince him it was some kind of old-school bat lure.

If he squints through the iron gate, those might be cats 40 feet below, not people.

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The Trip to Kahani

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Read the press release.

Follow the links to more Fup adventures
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Fup's Picks

That Cat That Changed My Life: 50 Cats Talk About How They Became Who They Are That Cat That Changed My Life: 50 Cats Talk About How They Became Who They Are
by Bruce Eric Kaplan

"All these cats lead exciting and varied lives wholly independent of the human race," notes the editor in his Introduction. Well, duh. Scant attention has been paid to the role of community in modern cat culture, so what a relief that here, finally, fifty articulate felines set the record straight. Funny, sad, occasionally shocking, but never less than true, these brave monologues reaffirm our interdependency in ways that choreographed public displays such as Paws Across America never can.

Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs
by Amy Hempel

In "Dog Kibble," Tasha Baxter's verse exhibits a brutal economy of words: "Life is never meaningless," her villanelle announces, "there is always food." Here and throughout this collection these authors demand your attention, as if to bark, "You can send me to my room for yelling at the neighbors but you cannot silence what woofs in my heart!" Among the selections nominated for Best American Writing by Pets 2000 are Bob Barker Barry's sordid and hilarious hallucinogenic escapades with Lynda; a tragic, posthumous prose poem by Marrow Irving; and Sadie Louise Lamott's "Spoon River Sadie Louise," a wildly metered exploration of the cross-cultural dynamics within a household occupied by dogs, cats, birds, and small children. The sheer intellect of these collected pieces will renew your faith in dogs.

Is Your Cat Too Fat?Is Your Cat Too Fat?
by Bronwen Meredith

Too fat for what? And what business is it of this Meredith person's anyway? Bronwen sounds like the kind of lady I wouldn't like at all.

 
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