“You are my best friend,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from shattering as my writing partner looked at me, a moment before his heart stopped.
It was about 12:30 a.m. on November 18, 2023 … a half-hour into my 72nd birthday, one that will never be remembered for candles and cake but rather always carry heartache and hints of hurt … until my own journey into the blackness into which my best friend would embark.
“You’ve always been a good boy,” I said, stroking Champ’s head. “Beautiful boy. You’ve been my best friend for a long time now.”
Even though
blindness had accompanied his downward spiral in recent months, accelerating as
autumn chill had settled in outside the French door where he would let slanting
sun warm his frail body, the light disappeared from his eyes quickly as his
heart stopped on what will forever be my most somber birthday.
My wife -- who never minded that I referred to my office
assistant as “my best friend” every night before he settled down on my chest …
or simply when he vaulted into my lap here in my office, as I began my daily
quest for words to string together -- stroked his back and told him “We love
you, Champ. You’re a good boy.’’ If she was trying to hold it together for my
sake, she failed. “You’re such a good boy, Champ.”
Champ had always sought out Suzanne when he needed
comforting, whether in a thunderstorm, when neighborhood scalawags celebrated
July 4 or the New Year with bottle rockets or when workmen cursed and slung
hammers against nails during various renovation projects. Champ had lived through many of those in our
home, a 1956-model brick rancher in Nashville’s Crieve Hall neighborhood. Other than his annual physical or the
occasional visit to the heart specialist to monitor an eventually mortal
defect, he’d never been anywhere else.
In the hours before his death, he laid, gasping, on Suzanne’s
outstretched legs and lap. He would try to purr. But then he’d cry, a soft, cat
whimper. It was time, we knew. All three of us. We wanted that journey to begin
and end at home. But that bad heart, his long-ago forecast fatal flaw,
struggled to keep him going, faintly, in fits and stops, as fluids filled his
lungs. He was struggling, even as he spread his love.
Champ had been with us almost 12 years, after I picked him
out of a Nashville Humane Society cage.
Everyone else in the cat room that winter’s day was playing
with and adopting kittens. It was the
full-grown fellow, at least 2 years old, that I pulled from his cage. He was happy about that. Me, too. I had
called the Humane Society to see if any of their population already had been
declawed. I didn’t want to do that to a cat, but if the deed had been done, I
wanted him in my house rather than with someone else, who might let him wander,
defenseless, as so many cats do. Too many coyotes and vermin around the woods
behind my home.
“We’ve got one older cat here who’s been declawed,” I was
told. “His name’s Mike.”
I asked for them to put a “hold” sign on his cage while we
trekked the 20 minutes from what was to become Champ’s lifelong domain.
On that long-ago December 29, my daughter Emily, and my son,
Joe, sat with Suzanne in the glass room where you “try out” cats. They’d all
been looking at kittens, while they waited for me. Their eyes sparkled when I
entered the room with the tabby in my arms’ crotches.
“This is the one I was telling you about. His name’s Mike,
but that’s no name for a cat,” I said, handing the handsome eight-pounder to
Suzanne.
The beautiful cat began campaigning for adoption, wandering
around the little room, spreading purrs and rubbing against legs. He didn’t
know the decision had been made as soon as I made that phone call, less than a
half-hour before I lifted him from the cage and he purred, contentedly.
It was the birthday of my late mother, a cat-and-dog lover
named Dorothy Champ Ghianni. Suzanne suggested we call him “Champ.”
It fit. I didn’t know at the time that he would become my
office assistant as I wrote my yarns, mostly melancholy ones. My name’s Timothy
Champ Ghianni. Jocko, or maybe it was Nardholm or Carpy… maybe even Uncle Moose
… dubbed me “Champo” in college. Those from Hanson House who survive continue
to call me Champo. It’s been a life full
of nicknames. There remain a few who call me “Flapjacks,” a name I earned
during caffeine and nicotine-fueled newspaper deadlines, back in my favorite
professional days. That’s another story. There’s a book about those days if you
are interested.
When we got the former Mike to our house almost 12 years
ago, Champ immediately strutted, calmly through his home, the place where he’d
reign. He found the litterbox in the utility room and his food and water dishes
at the kitchen’s edge.
He was sweet and happy, immediately. Suzanne took him to the vet in the next day
or so, and the doc was concerned. He sent Suzanne and Champ to the specialist
who detected the major flaw in the cat’s heart. “He’ll only live six more
years, at the most. If he’s lucky.”
We were the lucky ones, as he spread love and devotion in
our house for 12 more years.
Quickly, Champ learned how to chase the melancholy from my
soul – admittedly it sometimes ends up in my dispatches as I continue a life of
chasing away the black dogs of depression – just by his presence.
My newspaper life ended in 2007. That’s another story, and it can also be
found in that book I referenced earlier. It’s a story about personal ethics versus
corporate tyranny. And it doesn’t have a happy ending. The scars exist still,
and Champ, when he joined us, helped me cope with that still, long-lingering pain.
That’s all beside the point of this little tale, other than
to note that on December 29, 2011, when Champ first moved into what became his
house, the beautiful cat learned that a great place to spend the days was in my
lap as I sat before my computer. Soothing any sourness in my soul as I composed
news and feature pieces, class lessons, blogs and authored five books.
His calming attitude worked well, as I typed my way through
a jumbled career that included freelance work (sometimes for free if I thought
it might help my friends in music or the arts…. My heart and personal loyalty
long has outpaced any push for riches, which is fortunate.)
I also wrote for a
major news service for a decade, a job I lost in the heart of COVID and when
Reuters began trimming its part-time freelance staffers. An every-other-week, slice-of-life-and-news,
people-focused column I had written for a decade for Nashville Ledger similarly
died of COVID cutbacks. Champ also sat on my lap as I worked hard to prepare
writing and stylebook lessons and quizzes for my journalism labs at a local
university. When all those long-running jobs
died at about the same time, ending consistent income, Champ sat in my lap and
purred. Sudden loss of even minimal income wasn’t important to him. Or to me,
thanks to Champ.
Life cannot be bad when you’ve got a cat who loves you
unconditionally in your lap and a great family around you.
Champ was with me from about 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily,
seven-days-a-week while I wrote my latest book, Pilgrims, Pickers and
Honky-Tonk Heroes. He was there when I called friends like Duane
Eddy, Kris Kristofferson or my dear pal Bobby Bare to talk about what I was
writing.
He was with me when my best human Nashville friend, Peter
Cooper, who was editing the book for me and who wrote the foreword, spoke to me
about what I’d written during that year of typing and remembering. “Change
nothing,” he’d say as he concluded each chapter, suggesting only minor grammatical
or punctuation changes. “It’s beautiful. It’s written only as you could write
it, Timmay.” (That was another nickname I earned, one used only by Peter. I
also had been dubbed “The Dirt Man” or simply “Dirt” by my friend, my long-ago
Tennessean entertainment staff gossip columnist Brad Schmitt, who continues at
the paper, where he provides good-news and tasty filet/buttered biscuits tales….
Back in high school a bloodthirsty football coach dubbed me “Brahma Bull,” but
that tale is long, painful and is in another of my books. My head still hurts,
though.)
In 2019, when my Dad succumbed to his World War II-age and
corresponding maladies, I would spend quiet time, mourning, with Champ on my
lap. Dad used to watch Champ when we went on our seldom vacations, and I think
Champ likely knew his “Grandpa” was gone.
Champ climbed in my lap each day last December when I’d get
back from the hospital where Peter Cooper lay dying after damaging his brain in
a hard fall a year ago Friday, December 1. He died five days later, and I miss
him and our almost-daily phone conversations.
My office assistant’s soft purring helped me survive those
blackest days. I cried, while Champ
nudged his face against my own, calming if not fully chasing away the tears of
heartbreak over a beloved friend’s too-young exit. Champ’s purr and his gentle
head nudges were his way of saying “I love you. Everything’s OK.”
I wish Champ’d been
able to calm me the other night, early on my 72nd birthday, as I
wiped the tears and petted his still body.
“He’s still beautiful,” Suzanne said, as she battled her own
heartache. Her lap of solace for Champ would forever be empty now.
A major reason for our own love story, dating back into the
1980s, was Suzanne’s love of animals matched my own. To many, pets are for
entertainment, accompanists to neighborhood struts. And that’s fine. As long as
they are loved.
To others of us, they really are family members. There is
incredible weight in this attitude, as we know they will only be with us an
abbreviated amount of time.
Of course, Suzanne really is my best-best friend, she is a
former lifelong journalist who loves animals. Fact is, our only real difference
is that she turns to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; while I find my solace in John,
Paul, George and Ringo.
My mother -- or maybe it was James Thurber, James Herriot or
cat-lovers Ernest Hemingway or John Lennon -- said long ago that the greatest
gift pets give us is they prepare us for death. If we can say goodbye and not
totally break when a pet dies, then perhaps we’ll be able to handle the deaths
of parents, grandparents, best friends, work colleagues and Beatles.
True enough. But then, what prepares us for the death of our
pets? One who is a best friend? I know the writing rules call for pets to be
“its” and “thats” and only humans dubbed “whos,” but that’s heartless and
complete bull shit.
Every year, near but never on my birthday, I write a column
or a blog. I write it for me, soothing or cleansing my brain... It’s sort of a
State of the Union, or a State of Old Timothy Address, a rundown of my
thoughts. Generally melancholy, as I am, I run through what I’m thinking, what
I’ve accomplished and how I’ve failed in the previous year … and then reflect
back on the now 72 years since I was born in Saint Joseph Hospital, a dandy Catholic
joint, in Pontiac, Michigan.
I often don’t publish it. It’s just for me, a way of busting
through the cobwebs of death, disappointment and defeat that have been spun
during the previous year/years. Oh, I do celebrate the triumphs, too, like the
success of getting a major book publisher to take on my recent book about the Pilgrims,
Pickers and Honky-Tonk Heroes I had befriended.
I never published last year’s for example. It began with a
litany of bad things that had accompanied my year and the good things, like my grandson
(I now have a granddaughter, as well), my children’s successes and my spiritual
bond with Peter. Before I could post it, Peter fell, hit his head and died. I
rewrote that year-in-the-rearview meanderings to reflect that loss – but I
never published that 2022 State of Timothy Address. Too damn sad. I did write
and post a separate piece about Peter, as I thought it might help the many
others who mourned him. And writing
always has been my own salvation.
Last I looked, the 2022 State of Timothy Address was about
15,000 words, as long as a novella. Perhaps if I ever do a collected works,
weird scenes inside the goldmine that is Champo/Flapjacks/Timmay/the Dirt Man
and Brahma Bull, I’ll include it. I’ll give you a hint: Nobody wins.
I read through that unpublished 71st birthday declaration
again as I was thinking about Champ’s death on my 72nd birthday.
There are several mentions in that one of that wonderful cat and how he helped
me cope.
For example, near the end, I say:
Now, I am fortunate. I have a nice, little house in a
prime Nashville neighborhood. I have been married 30-plus years to my best
friend. And I have two kids and a grandson.
And a cat, who helps me write this stuff.
Again, that was just over a year ago, on my 71st
birthday.
That cat isn’t around to help me on this one. He died and
there was no cake. Just tears.
One thing Champ had to endure over the years was my love of
music. For years now, I’ve been pedaling my recumbent stationary bike daily for
miles to nowhere in my basement. That bike sits right next to my office door.
Sometime, usually in the mid-afternoon, I put on my favorite
music – The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, The Traveling Wilburys, Bare,
Kristofferson, Dylan, Cooper, Brace, Jutz, Byrd and death-era Cash.
At least 60 percent of the time, it’s The Beatles, as a
group or separately.
And I begin the daily toil designed to keep my own heart
healthy. I pump ‘til I sweat, climb off to arrive where I began.
Champ, who always claimed my office chair as his own as soon
as I ducked out from beneath him, would just sit in the chair – he frequently
spent his nights there in recent weeks, I guess because it was comfortable,
smelled like me and he could find it in the darkness that had become his
worldview.
He’d watch through the office door as I pedaled. Or at least
look toward the sound.
Last week, in the days toward his decline, Champ heard an
awful lot of Beatles. For some reason, I’ve been exploring the outtakes from
John Lennon’s Imagine album package of a few years back, seeking answers
or just smiles. Champ always seemed to like John’s voice. I’m sure he was particularly fond of John’s
description of life’s peasants in “Working Class Hero.”
If I was playing The Stones,
for example, he might get down and wander upstairs and jump in Suzanne’s lap to
avoid the Crossfire Hurricane. Jumpin’
Jack Flash may be a gas, gas, gas; but it’s difficult on feline ears.
Lennon, whose voice soothes me as well as provides heartache
because of the fact he died more than 40 years ago when he could still be
making music, seemed to be a favorite of Champ’s.
Course I don’t know that. I just know Champ sat quietly in
my office chair as John sang by himself or with his Scouse cronies on my old stereo.
I’m not sure what was the last song my beloved office
assistant heard. It could have been “Imagine,” “Crippled Inside” or a long
piano solo from those Imagine outtakes, that to me are better than the
finished album.
Thinking back to that day, as I write this, though, I’ll
wager it likely was a “new” song – The Beatles’ hit record “Now and Then” – that
I’ve been playing several times a day that Champ last heard.
It’s John Lennon’s voice from the grave, an old cassette
demo that was brought back to life by Paul McCartney, Ringo and Giles Martin. A dead George Harrison plays guitar and
harmonizes.
Some say, and I am among them, that the cassette left behind
by John was a sort of love letter to his life’s best friend, his truest
companion on the road through life, Paul. The two boys from middle-class
Liverpool changed the world, with the help of a couple other Scousers. Some are
dead and some are living.
Truly, the last music my beloved Champ likely heard included
John’s purified voice singing: “Now and then, I miss you.”
It’s very true that Champ helped me write stuff all of these
years. Often, I wrote through too many
disappointments, deaths and betrayals. Champ calmed me with his purr or head
nudge, triggering emotional rescue. Then, and I’m thankful, my words would
smile.
Accomplishments, like having a book published that was
praised by Kris, Peter, Bare and more, also were put into perspective by his
steady support and encouragement. Keith Richards got a copy of the book in
trade for loaning me a couple of photos published inside, and I hope, even
though it’s not only rock ‘n’ roll, that he liked it.
Sitting here in Champ’s office chair, thinking of the huge
hole in my heart and the shock-induced nausea and diarrhea as his death exacted
a physical toll on Champ’s favorite writer and best friend, he’s still here
with me in spirit.
My lap is empty, and it’s colder down in the basement
without Champ.
I keep looking at the chair when I come down to the office.
Champ: Now and then, I want you to be there for me.
Only in memories and warmth in my soul.
