A Safe Cat

I’m working on a new story so in the meantime, here’s a newspaper column from 2005. About living with a cat. 

I have been listening to this witless noise for years; it’s the shuffle-swish sound a milk ring makes as our cat Rosie bats it around the back of our basement.  

Living with a cat is training for odd activities, like the reading of poetry, where the more you pay attention, the more fun you have. If you don't feel like paying attention, why bother?

We have, as I’ve casually mentioned before, four cats. I rarely bother explaining or defending anymore. When the urgent stirrings of love hits teenagers, sometimes you get babies. Others of us break out in cats.  

 Rosie is our hockey player, writ small. Very small. She weighs about eight pounds and most of that is, I swear, in the black patches that mottle her white fur. There's a big patch that fits her back like a slipping saddle. A different black patch fits down over her entire head like Snoopy's Sopwith Camel aviator helmet. When she closes her eyes half her face disappears.  

The first years she lived with us she was a dishrag addict who spent much of her time and energy hunting for damp rags and then transferring them to secret places. There was the year we took our Christmas tree down, lifted the protective plastic sheet on which we'd set it, and found enough dishrags to, well, make us laugh really, really hard.  

Somewhere along the line Rosie changed her focus and isn't that a mystery? When was the day you stopped loving your first love? Do you know how or when or why? It was like that. We knew Rosie had a thing for dishrags. Then some uncharted moment happened in her life and dishrags were left behind like perfect memories of a gentler, younger time when women wore hats and men were princes.  

We moved to the Age of Milk Rings. Now when one of us twists the milk ring loose, causing that tiny snapping noise, well, watch out. Suddenly, barreling down the hall, or pitter-pounding up the basement stairs, or leaping from furniture in the living room, comes Rosie -- a tiny Paul Revere risking all in her wild, soft-pawed gallop to the kitchen. 

She skids to a stop under our feet, lifts her front paws up the front of the cabinets, and loudly meows that whoever has the ring should hand it right over. We always oblige, often by setting it gently on her nose. This makes her cross-eyed a moment, which only makes her more dear. She then drops her paws back to the floor, the ring falls to the tile, and kitty hockey begins.

Passion does not live in a vacuum. Rosie loves milk rings so much that our other three cats have, over time, evolved into fellow hockey players. Various cats bat the ring as long as it takes to lose it under the stove or refrigerator. Sometimes they get it as far as the family room. (We pulled out the sofa last week. You don't want to know...)

The next day the other cats are back to their naps as Rosie plays solo hockey with random rings she carries downstairs to slap hither and yon. Often she will bring a ring to me, drop it on my keyboard, then chat at me with great animation. I respond to her remarks and then drop the milk ring on the floor next to me. Sometimes this makes sense to her and she chases it some more. Other days it's too hard to figure out where the ring went so she takes a nap instead.

Quite a few pictures that mean something to me are thumb-tacked to the wall next to where I write. One is a photograph from a war zone where a middle-aged woman is standing in front of a bombed-out building that, I think, was the apartment building in which she used to live. It's winter.  She's wearing a thick scarf over her head and a heavy coat.  

Tucked inside the coat, cradled in her arms, is a small gray cat.  

Behind the two of them is a bleak and sorrowful scene of despair and destruction yet the cat's eyes are closed as if it is purring. It has a paw curled around the woman's lapel as if it’s trying to hug her. The cat looks warm, comfortable, and utterly at peace. The woman who has lost everything is sharing all she has left; her arms and her coat, to make one small cat feel safe. 

The less I understand the meanness, greediness, and self-righteous violence in our world, the more I am moved by the stunning gift it is to love and keep safe a small creature.

And this is our current cat Susan