Freddy

I owned a cat called Freddy while I was growing up. He was 17 or 18 when he died and I was away at university. I started dreaming about him regularly so i thought maybe I needed to make a book for him, about him, remembering all the good times we'd spent together. So I made my 'Freddy' book. Originally the book was made using digital prints on good paper and hand bound with lovely japanese binding. I finished the edition of 10 in 2004 and sold the books, but I wanted to make a more accessible edition of this book. So recently I decided to remake it as a photocopied zine. 

I have these books at market with me and every time someone looks though them I feel happy that Freddy is being remembered! I still dream about him every now and then. Jeremy says he feels he's known this cat all his life too for all the talking of him that I partake in, even though Freddy died in 2000 and I only met Jeremy in 2005. It makes me feel warm and safe when I wake in the morning if I've dreamt of Freddy. He's almost become more than just my old dead cat, he's 'dream cat' and he often talks to me in these dreams in a very comforting way, almost like a parent reassuring a child.

Anyway, I've listed Freddy book on etsy and I'm going to leave some off in Sticky Institute, the zine shop in the Flinders Street subway, sometime this week.

Here is a poem that I fell in love with. It is one of the poems in the Australian poetry book I had the pleasure of illustrating last year. It reminded me of Freddy.

The Old Colonist by Andrew Taylor  

1

Our old tomcat, with is weak heart,

anything over eighty, though once

menace of the whole district, preferes 

to piss in the sink, in the frying pan, 

on the vegetables. 

Anything but go outside in the rain 

and cold. Anything 

than go at all. We house him 

now in the laundry, on an old cushion 

on the antique copper. He pisses 

on the soap, finally on the cushion. 

The laundry was a hazard of stale shit. Yet 

when we scrubbed it with disinfectant, 

hosed out the stink, encouraged clean air in, 

he was neither grateful nor malcontent, 

but with ravelled, unwashed dignity, 

intelligent eyes, and ears alert, 

from great age and it's obscurity 

pissed on the ironing with deliberate intent.  

2 

six days later  

Too old at last even to wash himself 

his only thought was to be comfortable. 

Mostly on the table under the vine 

he lay on his side, watching all his years 

slip quietly from him, kittens prowl 

backyard and lane that had been once his pride. 

His tail was a scattered skipping rope, 

his haunches rejects of an Op-shop coat: 

you almost thought the moths would pass him by 

he was so tattered. Hardly weighed a pound. 

He had stopped eating, would sniff milk. take 

barely a bite to eat then turn away, 

content that we had offered him the choice, 

would purr when we coaxed him, but still turn away. 

And yet he had his spirit to the end. 

We used his table for our lunch, and found 

him comfortable among the cutlery 

minutes before the guests arrived - not once 

but three times. Lunchtime yesterday. Our last 

sight of him was a scornful rickety leap 

over the fence, tail raised in a vague 

vanishing salute. This afternoon 

we found him, dead, ants beginning to swarm, 

stretched in the sun, warrior to the last, 

sprawled like an insult on the mayor's front path.