Paean

How do you follow Death? You don't. Opening act, no problem, it's everyone's lifelong audition. But Death is the ultimate main-liner, no one follows Death. When someone you love dies, it's over. Curtain comes down, stage goes dark, silence. No one expects the show to go on. Not for awhile.

Except when it's a cat.

When my mother died, nobody asked me, "When are you going to get another one?"

At my father's funeral, nobody said, "I just don't get fathers. I'm a mother person, myself."

Even when my dog died, I had goombahs from Waste Management commiserating. Dogs are the great equalizers.

Not so cats. A cat is a dog of a different color.

My husband says cats are like peers. Well, maybe. If you're living in a monastery under a vow of silence in a level eight trance 24/7. Which describes my life about as accurately as a Magic Eight Ball.

Come to think of it, cats are like Magic Eight Balls. Each time they blink, the message changes:

Takeout Chinese sounds good...

Crank up the sauna, my ancestors were desert-dwellers...

Are you even remotely aware of the idiocy of that remark?

Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating...

These messages are sporadic at best, as studies have shown cats can go three days without blinking. During which time they appear to be deep in thought, raising the ultimate question, "Do cats actually think, or do they just appear to be thinking?"

The jury is out on this one. The jury -- which is made up of dogs -- will be out for some time, as a matter of fact, while they exhaust themselves debating the same points, ad nauseum, over and over, endlessly, forever and ever, just one more time, amen.

* * *

My first cat entered my life on my seventh birthday.

Being the middle of three girls, I'd determined early on that I was a candidate for drugs. Cats seemed a close enough substitute until the real deal came along. So on a sunny and miraculously snowless day in April, my father knelt beside me, opened his Mackinaw jacket, and a tiny black furball with white paws and a white forehead star stared out at me in abject horror.

I was addicted from the get-go.

You must understand I grew up on the Iron Range, where, as they say, men are men and so are half the women. Everybody had a dog, nobody had a cat, and if you had a cat, you kept a very low profile, much like a cat.

On the Iron Range in the Fifties (Sixties Seventies Eighties, etc.) human society -- in particular, the male component of human society -- hadn't evolved much beyond the Stone Age (not to be confused with that other era of the same name known as the Seventies), and it was Open Season on anything female. Dogs were considered male, cats female, end of story.

Archie was the first. Then came Ditto, Crazy Horse, Sammy. Nine lives passed in the blink of a dog's eye up on The Range. Then came Mimi, though by this time I'd managed to escape Duh Rainche without being stuffed and mounted on a wall and was well-ensconced in my life down in The City, where I managed to finish college, discover drugs, grow my body hair, get married and divorced, and start collecting, in order of importance: guitars, calluses from playing guitars, complicated little brass hash pipes from India, empty Mateus bottles, footwear from the Forties, and lovers.

Eventually my husband appeared, and the rest is his story.

In the meantime...Bonnie overlapped Mimi, Rita overlapped Bonnie, Miranda overlapped them all, while three dogs, one daughter and a currently-20-year-old plecostomus struggled to get a word in edgewise.

Not that cats are particularly verbal. Rather they're masters of mesmerism, having perfected the art of the staredown, and are capable of reducing lesser creatures to stunned and drooling stupefaction in the time it takes to order out Chinese.

* * *

Thy dog and thy cat, they comfort me.

With a dog, it's all there in front of you, WYSIWYG. With a cat, it's a blind experiment. Make that double-blind.

With a cat, you're just a hapless pawn caught in some unfathomable universe, unfathomably ignorant of reality, but unfathomably grateful to be there.

With a cat, you go blindly forth, lying down in green pastures, daydreaming beside the still waters, pussyfooting up the paths of righteousness, for the cat's sake.

Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, with a cat, you're just tripping. It's all just one big hallucination, like that corner of the living room ceiling the cat's been fixated on for 10-1/2 years.

Your head may be filled with Canola oil, your cup of pinot may runneth over, but when a cat prepares a table before you of headless mice in the presence of the dog -- goodness!

Then mercy shall follow you all the way to the litter box, and you shall dwell in the house of furballs and purring, forever and ever, or at least nine times, whichever comes first, amen.




"Dude! It's those goombahs from Waste Management!"

"Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating..."