The Tiki Chronicles, Francesca Finch Bochner

The Tiki Chronicles

Part II: Tiki goes to College

By Francesca Finch Bochner The second chapter in a series about Tiki, an older cat with myriad health problems (including FIV, a feline version of HIV). Despite his various handicaps, Tiki is still alive today, and continues to lead an extraordinary life.

Dartmouth College; home of brilliant academics, cutting edge arctic science research, an excellent hockey team, Animal House and, in March of 2010, my little tabby cat Tiki.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a rule breaker. In the rare event that I do break a rule, I am usually very bad at it. If an authority figure even looks at me twice I will rush to tell them what I did wrong. However, for Tiki’s sake I was willing to take a walk on the wild side.

Rumor has it, at Dartmouth, if you are caught with a pet in your room, the school will suspend you. While the custodial staff does not clean individual rooms, campus security can go anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, each room is a reverberation chamber, anyone walking down the hallway can easily hear a cat meow. Tiki has a particular penchant for vocalizing every emotion (hunger is a loud, demanding screech; happiness a rumbling purr; “Welcome Home” a series of short meows); I was understandably concerned that we’d be caught.

During my senior spring semester, I had a generously sized single on the fourth floor of the oldest building on campus. I set the whole room up as a perfect home for Tiki, a chair under the window to lie on, his litter box was under my desk, and his food and water next to my bed so I could see if they needed refilling. The only problem was that we were right next to the bathroom, and every morning around 7:00 the custodian would spend a fair amount of time on the other side of my wall. All well and good, but 7:00AM was just when Tiki would rise and stretch with an earth-shaking screech, his breakfast needed to be served.

The first few months in my dorm were heavenly. I would feed him in the morning and pray the custodian was hard of hearing. Then I’d be off to class, pick up lunch and come back to feed him again. In the evenings I would always use Tiki as an excuse to cut out early, figuring that snuggling with my elderly orange cat trumped playing pong into the wee hours. My friends rolled their eyes at me for being so animal crazy, but they all ended up falling in love with the little guy. At the beginning of the term I would rush home to feed him and then have to go back out to see friends. Soon, I had girlfriends who specifically asked to come see him, and one who would bring over turkey from the dining halls. I have never seen Tiki happier than when he was at college. He got to be around people every few hours, and in between napped on his chair in the sun. I did all of my homework in my room while he sat right next to me. Every Monday night I would pull an all-nighter to finish the chapters

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of my thesis that were due on Tuesday, and Tiki would curl up on my desk right next to the computer charger, his personal heater. There he would stay, snoring blissfully as I typed.

We made it all the way to mid-May before we hit our first speed bump. By this time the custodian knew Tiki was in my room (he and everyone else on the floor), but promised he would not report me. I guess the daily smile and “how are you” that I sent his way were so out of the ordinary that he cut me some slack. Unfortunately, as the vet in Florida had warned me, the tumors in Tiki’s ears caused recurrent infections that made him really uncomfortable. I had an ointment specifically to manage those infections, but in the beginning of May Tiki’s ear began to bother him and nothing I did seemed to help. I tried the ointment, but one night he kept us both awake scratching and shaking his head, he had to go back to the vet.

Getting Tiki out of the dorm, past the security guards that drive behind the buildings, as well as the custodians who were not as forgiving as our friend on the fourth floor, was going to be a production. Getting him inside had been a two -person job, sneaking his carrier into the building in the middle of the night, through the one entrance without a security camera. I couldn’t bring him out in

the middle of the night, so I decided to cover the case with a towel, park my car at the risk of getting towed, and make a run for it. The stars must have been aligned that day because I managed to get down the stairs without passing any custodians, out the door when the security guard was behind another building, and safely to the vet. The vet put him on some special eardrops with the promise that he’d be better in a few days. Afterwards, I waited with Tiki in the car until dusk, and then managed to get him back into the dorm room with the help of a few friends.

My last month of college went by in a blur, all with Tiki by my side. He sat with me in one place for two days straight as I finished my thesis (thankfully I stocked up on enough food for 48 hours). He watched as I got dressed for my last ever college formal, and on graduation day he dozed and gazed at the rain out our bedroom window.

The end of college is a bittersweet experience. It is in turns surreal, unreal, stupendous, disappointing, sentimental, and hopeful. I came back to my room after getting my diploma feeling extraordinarily sad to be leaving, but excited about moving forward. I closed up the last suitcases, carried my box of textbooks down, and managed to squish my pillow into the last inch of room in my back seat. Then I went upstairs to put Tiki in his crate. This crate had brought him from central Florida to central New Hampshire. Now it would bring him somewhere new. He looked at me and let out a screeching meow. I scooped him up and gave him a hug. “Well, at least we can’t get suspended anymore,” I said, and put him in his crate, ready to start our next adventure.

Francesca Finch Bochner is a Dartmouth alum who fell in love with the Upper

Valley and decided to stay in the area after graduation. She is currently taking a year off before graduate school to train and compete her dressage horse, Tess.

She lives in Strafford with her boyfriend (a veterinarian) and their menagerie of animals. Spring 2015