An Ode to Gata Linda

This is a tribute to Gata Linda Diaz, (yes, she was so part of our family that she took our last name.) Out of the blue a few decades ago (I won't say the year to not age my older sister and myself,) this beautiful little gray fluffy cat with emerald green eyes suddenly appeared one afternoon at the door of our house in mid-Miami Beach (between Pine Tree Drive and Alton Road.) The cat chose well (although my sister and I theorized that the Latina lady who took care of our elderly French neighbor Marie somehow encountered the kitten and placed her on our property but we were never able to prove that but the cat seemed to know her. LOL.) The little cat, which looked like a mix of a Persian and a stray, always lingered by our house until one day, my sister (Cary) and I scooped her up in our arms and we went, house to house, for over four blocks, asking fellow homeowners and residents, "Is this your cat?" No one recognized her. My conservative but loving Cuban Papi wouldn't let her inside the house but he was okay with her outside our house, where we fed and interacted with her.

The cat became a regular presence outside our house. I was a student at F.I.U. at the time. We gradually fell in love with her as she slowly slipped into our hearts. But then, one day after I came home following a day of journalism classes and interning at The Miami Herald in the Hialeah/Miami Lakes office, I discovered a tiny underdeveloped kitten outside our front door on the welcome mat. Gata Linda unfortunately miscarried. It broke my heart as well as that of my dad, my sister and my mom. From then on, we let Gata Linda stay inside the garage which was huge and spacious. Then we decided to fix her (spade her) and let her inside the house in a cage/crate (temporarily) while she recovered where she was super high from the drugs and kept meowing loudly. Eventually, she calmed down and we let her roam freely around the house (three bedrooms, three bathrooms) and she was super happy at home with the super cool A/C. She made our house her home.

Her favorite spot: Sitting in the dining room window and looking out at the traffic on West 51st Street. (On a side note, she would sit near my dad at our dinner table for weekly Sunday lunches because he would throw scraps of chicken her way which she loved.) Then she figured out other ways to get attention. If anyone of us (or my bestfriend Cindy at the time and me) were watching a movie in the family room, Gata Linda would stand in front of the TV set, her silhouette disrupting whatever movie or program we were watching. And then she (the cat) would splay herself across the tiles of the main hallway so we would have to pay attention to her when we walked by. My little second cousins from Kendall absolutely loved hugging her and took photos with her. Gata Linda was also very intuitive or just psychic. She seemed to know the day and time when the mobile groomer would arrive because she would suddenly...disappear and hide under my parent's bed. Gata Linda must have picked up on the words "appointment" or "cita" and "groomer" in phone conversations in the house because...she knew and vanished! And when the friendly groomer showed up, we had to extract her from under the bed and she would start peeing everywhere like a garden sprinkler all over the kitchen which made my mom laugh really hard. And for some reason, Gata Linda seemed to have a fixation with my bedroom. Whenever I went clubbing in South Beach on Thursday or Friday nights and I happened to leave my bedroom door open (BIG MISTAKE), the cat used my bed as her personal kitty litter. Not fun especially when I had to drive to Hollywood, Fort Lauderdale or Pembroke Pines as a fulltime cub reporter for the Broward City Desk at The Miami Herald to report breaking news the following morning. (She was obsessed with my room for some reason and shopping bags.)

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved that cat. I would pick her up from the vet and grooming appointments where I discovered, to my surprise, that she was listed as "Gata Linda Diaz." Que? But after I moved to Boston, my bedroom was off limits. Whenever I visited, she would meow outside my door and I would cautiously let her in, as long as I could observe her. In the last two years of her life, I remember calling my parents each night (super Cuban thing) and my mom had a tendency of using the speaker phone in the kitchen and her conversations reverberated throughout the house, so when Gata Linda heard my voice, she would rush to my bedroom door and meow and meow outside my door. Such a sweet thing. She remembered me (and my bed.) I look back at my birthday photos and she was there, for 11 in all, in my arms.