Ted the Cat on Love and Death (reprise)

Ted, reluctantly sharing the couch

(Those of you who are pining for Ted the Cat should know he’s doing just fine.  Simply put, Mr. Big left the computer turned off while away.  The bigster will be back next week.  Meanwhile, here’s the post in which Ted made his first appearance, back in January 2010.)

Around our house we have two cats, Ted and Juliet. Juliet’s hardly worth a mention. She’s been hitting us up for food and shelter for 9 years but still leaves the room when I walk in. But Ted—he’s a good boy. When our daughter Elizabeth and I first picked him up from the auto repair shop bathroom where he was born, he was 3 weeks old. Fifteen years later you’ve got to help him up from the floor to the bed, but he grows only sweeter with time. Ted’s Day Planner looks like this: eat, nap, eat, nap, eat, nap, eat, nap. 

He is less mindful than he once was of the litter box. I know this is just a matter of age and infirmity, since Ted would never do mischief with malice aforethought. Ted’s never had a forethought in his life. But since Christmas or so, we’ve taken to laying newspaper down around his box, in a radius of a couple of feet, just out of prudence.

As it happens, Ted perceives newspaper as litter, so what we’ve created is simply a much larger litter box.

Which leads me to Erich Segal and Love Story. Last week, I was opening up the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post so as to arrange a nice absorbent pile of double-wide pages on the floor for Ted, and came across this headline and accompanying photo:

‘Love Story’ author Erich Segal dies at 72

Love Story! Was it really 40 years ago—boy, talk about different times!—that every first date involved having to go see it? The plot, in essence: blue-blood Harvard boy Ryan O’Neil and working-class Italian girl Ali McGraw fall in love; she dies bravely of protracted natural causes. A real weeper, and woe to the poor guy on the date who rolled his eyes. O’Neal, a fat old man today, was a strawberry-blonde heart-throb back then.  McGraw, now 71, was the kind of actress who is seen, in the mind’s eye, sleekly, eternally, emerging from a swimming pool . . . though it’s possible that was in another film.

Segal wrote Love Story as a screenplay, then as a novel, which the critics laughed at but which had an initial run, in paperback, of 4,325,000 copies. As the Post reports, “Mr. Segal, who taught Greek and Roman literature at Yale University, might have been an unlikely author of a heart-tugging tale of doomed romance, but his story captured the spirit of the time, and its signature line became a catch phrase: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

If Segal was right, and love really does mean never having to say you’re sorry, nevertheless a lot of folks seemed to want him to. The quality lit guys in New York and elsewhere took it rather personally that he had earned millions, plus big-time celebrityhood, off this harmless little tear-jerker, while they had to sweat to earn their money and fame via art. Or art, let’s say, as the quality lit guys define it.

According to the Post:

While jogging in New York’s Central Park, Mr. Segal once recalled, he saw novelist Philip Roth and said, “I admire your work.”

“And I admire your running,” Roth replied.

This tells you plenty, doesn’t it? Something about both men. But particularly about Roth, who’s spent his career raging at death but never has come to terms with the fact that all humans, big-time literati and hacks alike, owe God a death.

So I read Erich Segal’s obit and then I laid the pages on the floor around my cat’s litter box. Ted—fond, grizzled old codger—arrived soon after, as he always does when I do that, and made a little mess on the paper. I sighed in resignation and then I said, “You’ll never have to say you’re sorry to me, Ted boy.”

The stuffed animal pictured with Ted is not Juliet, who has been deliberately excluded for lack of gratitude toward her owners.