Zoey

When I find the little cable to connect the digital camera to my computer, I’ll put up the one “good” picture I have managed to take of our new cat Zoey. Zoey goes through about twenty “good” photographable instants per minute, but she does not stop at any of them, so it has taken me the whole three months we have had her to capture this one.

At the moment she is sitting on the side of my neck like a happy muffler, her tail lazily stroking my forearm. She is there because a) she generally finds me congenial, b) this morning I let her come outside with me while I dug a few bucketfuls of dirt for Mom to use for potting on the back porch, so I am specially in her good books for today (we’d have been out longer, but a heavy rainstorm is supposed to be coming and I wasn’t sure she was ready for that), and c) she has correctly caught on that the laptop is her major household competitor.

Zoey brought her name from the animal shelter – it’s the sort of name that has us periodically calling her Ziffles, the name of course of our dear departed cat who lies under Gwen’s memorial tree, but Zoey came to us five months old, which seemed a little old for us to be confusing things. We used our time-tested strategy of asking who was the most energetic kitten in the shelter. Zoey is a ropy female American Shorthair with that black and white “tuxedo” coloration that makes you wonder if there is a gigantic lab complex somewhere out in Nebraska turning out clones in 10,000-kitten lots. (Gwen always wanted a tuxedo kitty. When Mom and I settled on Zoey I thought, here you go, girl, if you’re watching.) “Ropy” is the adjective I keep coming back to. She is too long to be called “burly”, but all the adjectives I can think of are more tomboyish than Ziffles would have brought to mind even when kitten-wild. “Monkeyish” is another word, something about the way she carries her hindquarters when she walks. The tail is all cat, though – the tail of infinite inflection and almost separate mind.

Zoey has just figured out how to wrestle with the flat surface of my bald head. I would not have thought that was possible. She is just now starting to approximate the size she will be as an adult – her new weight is startling in its reality – but she is still all kitten. It is amazing to watch her, even as she makes me feel like a bipedal glacier; she is in the period of “making everything harder,” in Mom’s words which are just right. Lean over the back of the chair? Let’s try it upside down! Now let’s go behind the chair and climb up the back! Now let’s try to do that upside down! Now let’s do it with one foreleg only!

It is good to have someone around to whom everything is new.

A cat relationship is good. It’s not a dog relationship. A cat isn’t going to think I’m God. She will not think of defending me, and – this has already been tested when relatives came to the door – she isn’t going to look to me for defense; she goes directly to her own hiding arrangements, thank you very much. But the lack of close need makes a bond of coziness. If and when the cat hangs out with me or gets up close, it’s simply because it and I seem like a good idea to her. This is magnified by her oddly independent sleeping habits; she sleeps alone often, and when she does decide to follow one or the other of us to bed, she usually prefers to settle down nearby, in line of sight, rather than actually with us the way Ziffles would have. When she does come to us, it’s a decision. She’s working out slightly different relationships with me and with Mom. She’s watching us.

(None of this contradicts an amused part of my mind which sees this just as practical, strategic adaptation, a successful knack and niche that cats have lucked into. I would not be offended by a biological documentary on parasites that commented that parasites specific to humans range in size from submicroscopic to… cut to a twenty-five-pound tabby snoozing on a lap.)

(But I have known some remarkable cats, and given them attention enough for them to know me, and strange things happen along the borderlands of need and comfort in animals dancing along the edge of consciousness in any sense – just as in us. Two cats in particular I can be damn sure did love me, and I think I’d be safe in saying three, though the third was good-humored enough that it would have hardly mattered. Maybe Zoey will be another.)

Now she’s gone to sleep.

***

I’ve been away, haven’t I? Amy said my digital footprint had disappeared. True, true, and oh how strange.

Writing has been on my mind. Writing is curious things to me. Having written has been sometimes the only way I can be sure that I’ve been thinking, or the only way I can be sure that there’s anyone in this head whose thoughts might be worth reading. And: For me, deciding to write – whatever that is , however that is, whenever it has come – has always been like, or actually been, something you could call deciding to exist.

Amazing how hard or how distant that kind of decision can be.

I suppose the last year has been the sort of year where I’ve been saying, or trying to say, or seeming to myself to say, to the world or whoever, “I’m fine,” but have really been flat on my back. The knockout year. I suppose it really has been. Though I wouldn’t have dared admit to any such thing… as the days and weeks and months wasted by. I don’t think I put any claims of “I’m fine” in OD – no, I see I didn’t – because there is something about writing that would unravel a claim like that into shreds before it could get out. The state has been strange to describe – not horribly depressed, but checkmated. Unready to do anything but let it all roll by. Equably. Sometime recently I remember thinking that despair is when you can’t even gather yourself to think about what you should be doing, or about what you should be hoping for, or about what you’re despairing about, or even that you are – you can’t organize your mind to take it up. But the word despair is dramatic. The state is quiet. As quiet as a death, your own, that you don’t exactly want – I’m not built that way, I guess – but that you can’t muster a reason to think of as regrettable whenever it happens. Meanwhile I’ve been living moment to moment, not mustering – anything. It has been the sort of picture that would be despicable if fully chosen, if alternatives were really possible. Maybe it’s despicable anyway. I can’t judge.

But meanwhile there are ghosts and ripples… the things I could write about. Which are not about me. The things that mean that the world is real, outside of me. Entries, thoughts strung out, appear half-formed. I’ve never tuned out. (That would have been too active, certainly.)

I don’t know. Anything. Is the difference, the threshold, the key, only a question of if I happened to start writing again? The exterior fact of it having happened? If entries started appearing here? The typing? The doing?

I don’t know. It isn’t me that calls for the entries I’d be writing. The topics kind of do. They do in my own mind…

…If I’m supposed to have a supercharge of OD vanity that’s supposed to carry me over the lip of anything, I don’t have it. I can’t find it.

And I’ve just said in the last couple of days that I’m going to put together a resume, long overdue, for purposes of trying to get a steady editing job with somebody instead of freelance-hunting… andI have been completely unable to say anything about myself for a year.