To love a cat. “Good luck with that,” a friend, a quintessential animal lover, said.
Her loves have included frisky donkeys, wayward horses, surly geese and fat-faced pigs. So her warning about cat devotion didn’t make sense at first.
Now it does.
When we first brought our rescue cat home, we issued three orders — no getting on tables, no sleeping on our bed and no going outside.
“You’re an indoor cat,” we explained, to his twitchy-whiskered inattention. Two years later, he owns the dining table and sleeps at the end of our bed, unless he detects wakeful movement. And as for being an inside cat, well that didn’t work out so well either. He took up a hiding place beneath the dust ruffles of the foyer table and then, as we, forever unsuspecting, made our move, he’d make his. He was deft, faster than the speed of light and dead-on accurate.
At first, when he reached the porch and vaulted onto a railing, he’d just stare out at the birds and bees. He was an easy grab, but not for long. He soon scooted out of reach, disappeared under shrubs and we lost our advantage. So we attached a bell to his collar and removed the bird feeder. In other words, we let him go free. “He’ll come back,” everyone assured us.
And mostly he does. He greets our car as it pulls into the driveway. He meets us on the path, and races ahead to be the first inside as we plod up with grocery bags or trailing grandkids, trying not to trip when he comes to a silent halt. Only a few times, as darkness looms, is the cat not home — it helps that my husband adopted the strategy of feeding him once a day and in the evening. Still, we (mainly me) worry about nighttime predators. Living near a forest and stream, we have been awakened by shrill sounds alerting us to unseen dramas. I’m very relieved that our cat is snoring away at the end of the bed.
Which was why, one recent evening, with fall’s early descent into darkness, I stood barefoot, waving a flashlight and filled with dread and cold feet, calling the cat. Where were my slippers and where was my cat? I wanted to stop searching. I wanted to return to my warm kitchen. Mostly, I did not want to be worrying over a cat. But the fear had taken root, side by side with love for one persnickety, obstinate, heart-grabbing creature. “It’s only a cat,” I told myself. But it didn’t console.
But here’s the confounding, even contradictory thing: how the love of a cat say, or the love of anything, can get so mixed up with fear and loss. Which brings me to an unpleasant topic — the election outcome.
I’m afraid that the arduous progress we’ve made as a nation toward inclusion and civil rights will be lost. That hard-fought economic safety nets will be shredded. That the fragile steps enacted in the past years to protect our planet in the face of climate change will be undone. Already, according to the FBI, we’re witnessing a 16 percent increase in hate crimes, reported acts of bigotry and intimidation directed at Moslems, Blacks and Jews even in our own valley. I am deeply worried that the appointments of those with white supremacy views and who are climate deniers will have a dire influence on the nation’s policies.
Yet, oddly enough, while looking for my cat, I was struck with a glimmer of hope. I was reminded that what I most fear losing, is what I most love. And that love brings with it a gift of gratitude, a fitting gift for the holidays. According to the researcher, Robert Emmons, gratitude impacts our well-being. The more we experience gratitude, the less anxiety we feel, and the more optimistic we may become. We may even sleep better. Perhaps grateful for what we cherish as a country, we will be bold enough to stand strong together to protect those who are most vulnerable and those who are now in the crosshairs of powerful and malevolent forces.
As a nation we’ve overcome hard times before, we’ve risen to challenge those who would deny others their civil rights and personal dignity. My errant cat was just under the porch. And maybe courage, too, is a lot closer than I know and we’ll find that courage to continue to protect the sacred ideals of equality and justice. As the singer-song writer Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” Love slips through that crack. Gratitude slips through that crack. To show us a way forward in the dark.
Ruth Charney lives in Greenfield.