Nick the Cat

Nick the Cat Christian Reflections on the Stranger

Roberta C. Bondi Abingdon Press Nashville

Copyright Information To Bill Mallard

Preface

The following is the story of Nick, the most amazingly eccentric, lovable, and smelly cat I have ever known. As he simply appeared in the driveway behind our house one day several years ago, it does not include an account of his kittenhood. Nor does it include an account of his death, since a long time later he just quietly disappeared under a bush in the neighbors’ front yard and didn’t come out again. It does, however, contain a description of many adventures he had while he was living with our family, and it also contains some theological reflections that were prompted by Nick and those adventures. On the whole, we modern Christians haven’t been very good at talking about our relationship with animals. There are many reasons for our failure. In part, it seems to me that our failure is a result of our erroneous interpretation of a religious tradition that appears to deny our kinship with the animals at the same time that it affirms our superiority to and difference from them. “God is a spirit,” we say, quoting one part of scripture, “and not a material, sensual being.” Then we go on to remind ourselves that as human beings it is we alone who are said by the Bible to be made in the image of this God who is spiritual. But have we got this right? If God is a spirit, are animals who live so obviously in the material world the opposite of God and less than we, and therefore unworthy of our love and attention? We have it wrong. First, it is true that we are spiritual beings. It is also, however, an undeniable fact that we are animals ourselves, and this is no accident. This is the way God made us. This material world, which we know and relate to through our senses every bit as much as through our minds, is where we live. It is the air we breathe, the water we swim in. When we Christians forget or repudiate this fact, we put ourselves and those around us in real danger. Not only are we tempted to become “holy floaters,” as one of my friends says; we also frequently find ourselves committing atrocities on others as a result of not even noticing what is happening to ourselves and to them. Second, for Christians to act as though we are meant to be only “spiritual” is to deny the reality of what Christians have always believed about the Incarnation, namely, that when God came to reveal Godself most fully to us, God did it not through intellectual arguments, or prayer, or dreams. God came among us as a human being of flesh and blood, an animal with senses and appetites, birth, joy, suffering, and death just like the rest of us.

Third, whatever else we want to say about the meaning of being made in the image of God, our tradition is also very clear that it isn’t only human beings who reflect who God is. All of creation, every bit of it, expresses God and points us back to God. In fact, according to the great fourth-century theologian Athanasius, because of sin human beings lost the ability to see God everywhere. One of the most important results of the Incarnation is this: having seen God in Jesus Christ, we are once more able to value the whole of the creation as an expression of God. Though Athanasius himself doesn’t speak of animals in this regard, it seems to me that if animals are part of creation, then Christians ought not to have to apologize for caring about animals. It was painful to me to hear my friend Katherine, when she told me about the death of her beloved cat--who lived with her for fifteen years through a number of traumas including the death of her parents and two divorces--say, embarrassed, “I’m sorry I’m crying. I understand it’s not as though a human being has died. I know he was only a cat.” It is even more painful to remember what happened to my friend Bill a few years ago. He had taken his son Johnny to church; halfway through the service the minister asked the congregation for their requests for intercessory prayers for those in need. Frightened, but having an opportunity to speak his deepest concerns where he felt it might do some good, ten-year-old Johnny gave a great sigh and bravely raised his voice among the adults. “Everybody please pray for my dog, Ranger,” he said. “Ranger has the red mange.” There was a moment of foot-shuffling silence in the church, then the minister replied. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” he said. “We are only praying now about serious things.” For Johnny, for Katherine, and for large numbers of the rest of us, animals are a significant part of our ordinary lives, including our spiritual lives. They offer us comfort, companionship, pleasure, order, and love. Like God, and unlike most human beings, they frequently love us unconditionally. Like God, when they love us, they love inexplicably across species and not because we are like them. As Christians, we can learn a lot from them, if we pay attention. They can help us live more fully in the actual, present, concrete world God gave us than we might otherwise be able to do. They can teach us humility, humor, kindness, and faithfulness. Attention to their needs can help us learn to pay attention to the needs of our fellow human beings. In short, as Nick was able to do for me, they can offer us badly needed help as we seek to grow in love of God and neighbor. In some ways this was not an easy book to write. I would like, therefore, to thank several people who supported me through it: Caroline Walker Bynum, Melissa Walker, Karen Scheib, Carl Hall, Marian Dolan, Tere Canzoneri, and Dale Smith. I am happy to thank Benjamin Chesnut, our son, for loving Nick and retrieving him after the incident with the new roof, and Anna Grace Trodglen, our daughter, for much advice about animals.

I particularly want to thank Pam Couture, who is not only a friend, but a practical theologian, an excellent Wesley scholar, and a great colleague. In chapter 5, she also figures in the story. Of course, I must thank our good neighbors, Syd and Chip Howell and their daughters Maxie and Molly. I need to apologize to Chip, however, for leaving out the story of Nick’s celebration of Chip’s fortieth birthday; at Chip’s party Nick was fed a dozen raw oysters straight from the shell. He and Chip enjoyed it greatly. I am more than grateful to Bill Mallard, to whom this book is dedicated, for the twenty-one years we taught our beginning church history course together, for his friendship through everything, and for telling me bluntly when I needed to go find myself another cat. Then, there is Richard, my husband and my companion. Thank you, thank you for being all the good things you are.

1--The Coming of Nick

It was one of those stifling hot, soaking wet, sunny afternoons, ten years ago this summer. Nobody could breathe; nobody wanted to move around. Our old house lacks central air-conditioning; on a day like that, the window units don’t stand a chance against the combined sun and humidity. Surrounded by limp piles of paper, sleeping cats shedding onto my desktop, and dripping glasses emptied of their iced water, dazed of eye and glazed with sweat, for hours I had been trying to work at my computer under a fan that made my study a wind tunnel without cooling it. Richard, who claims his Sicilian roots make him impervious to the heat, had been out in the yard for several hours mowing the lawn and hacking back the dark green ivy which is always threatening to pull apart both the driveway and our small, red brick house. At four o’clock, I had been unable to sit there fruitlessly any longer. Trying to imagine what the two of us could bear to eat later on for dinner, I dragged myself out of my chair and carried my empty glasses to the kitchen. Sicilian roots not withstanding, Richard was there before me. A worse mess than I was, his dark curls were matted down, and his face, arms, and legs covered with little bits of grass clippings, loose dirt, and even twigs. His T-shirt was soaked front and back, and there was a particularly disgusting patch down toward its hem where he had wiped some mud off his hands. He gave off the aroma of a hot, dirty male. He also had a small bowl in one hand and an old cup in the other, both of which he was about to carry outside. “What are you doing?” I asked this filthy man, who was my husband of twelve years or so. Richard hadn’t heard me come in, concentrating as he was on trying to open the kitchen door with his right elbow at the same time he was attempting not to spill the contents of either dish that he was carrying. “Please?” he replied, jumping a little. That is what people reared in Cincinnati say when they don’t understand what you’ve said. He looked half crazed. As I rushed to help him, I prayed the heat hadn’t gotten him as it was getting to so many others.

“Tell me what you are trying to do,” I asked him once more. I watched him furtively from the corner of my eye to make sure he was all right. Richard shook his head without answering. He was glowing with heat as he tried to blow a particularly itchy piece of dry grass off the tip of his nose where it had stuck. For the moment I gave it up. I would find out soon enough. “Whatever you’re doing, just let me help you with it,” I said as I brushed the grass off his nose. I elbowed him aside and opened the inside door for him, then the one in the laundry room that goes into the backyard. He was panting slightly, his eyes glazed with the yard work he had been doing and probably with dehydration. “Thanks,” he said. With me behind him, he maneuvered himself out without spilling the water in the bowl or the dry pellets in the cup. “Sick cat. Out back,” he grunted out an answer. “Sick cat?” I replied. “Who? Where? With what?” What cat was he talking about? Julius and Romana, the two cats who lived with us, didn’t go outside. Right now both of them were on the other side of the house, trying their best to cool off, sprawled out like cat-skin rugs on the red tile floor of our screened-in front porch. As far as I knew, both raggedy Julius, who was small and black with white paws and a white patch on his chest, and beautiful round-eyed Romana, who was shiny and black with a plushy thick coat, were perfectly healthy. Earlier that afternoon the two gray-striped neighborhood tabbies also had appeared to be in the peak of health: I’d seen them quivering with anticipation as they crouched stealthily next to each other on the bench by the hydrangea bushes behind our house. They were watching intently as the ground feeding birds hopped among the ivy to look for the seeds that had fallen from the feeders above them. I walked out the back door, therefore, to see for myself what Richard was doing, as well as to keep an eye on him in case there was something wrong. I followed him up our driveway, watching at a distance as he set the dishes he was carrying on the cement under the chin of what was clearly a sick, crouching animal of some sort. The good-sized creature was hunkered down miserably on the concrete turnaround next to the side of the garage. Richard was murmuring something to it that sounded, from where I stood, like encouragement. What kind of animal was he trying to feed? It might have been a possum; we have a lot of the big, homely creatures passing through the wilderness behind our house, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a large rabbit, either--the ears were wrong--nor did it appear to be a raccoon. Surely, Richard wouldn’t be feeding a rat! Whatever it was, it was ugly. Except for some felt-like mats of what looked like grayish-brown carpet padding on its cheeks and jowls, it had lost every single

hair of its coat. Its bare skin was dead white, covered head to tail with new dark red cuts, bites, and terrible scratches. Its ears were notched and torn, one of them in so many places that it looked as though it were tipped in fringe; the other ear appeared actually to have been pierced in several places. The animal was filthy, it smelled awful, and it was hard to look at. When it raised its head to stare at us with its huge yellow, big pupiled eyes, however, there could be no doubt that it was, indeed, a cat. It was not too injured or too hungry to look intently--and it seemed to me, hopefully--into our eyes and purr. This was no ordinary purring, either. Rather, it vibrated for us like a gas lawnmower on a summer day. It was the loudest purr that I had ever heard. The wounded animal struggled to stretch out its head to Richard to be petted. It was too sick to butt its forehead into Richard’s hand. I moved forward unthinkingly to pet it, then caught myself and drew back. I would gladly feed and bring water to this sick creature, but I couldn’t afford to touch it. Not only was it clearly diseased and most certainly dying; I knew myself well enough to recognize that petting the animal would give me an emotional connection to it I couldn’t afford. Our household had two cats already. There was no more room, money, or energy for something so pathetic, so full of needs, and so close to death as this one. Oblivious to my reluctance, Richard only moved the dishes closer to its mouth as he talked to it, urging it to eat and drink. At last, continuing to purr, it lowered its head to the water. Its long pink tongue lapped noisily. “What do you imagine happened to it?” I asked Richard as I watched it drink. “What is it doing here?” The cat having begun to respond to his attention, Richard was able to answer at last. “I think it’s just old and got into a fight it couldn’t win,” he said, looking thoughtful. “For some reason, it’s picked out our yard to die in. It won’t hurt us to bring out water and food for it since it’s lying here, anyway.” I shook my head doubtfully. “Okay,” I said, “it’s yours.” I wanted no part of it. The dying cat would have to be Richard’s project. Two hours later I found myself sneaking out to the garage to check on what the cat was up to. It was lying in exactly the same place and in the same position as it had been earlier. This time, however, I noticed some scratches I hadn’t seen before, as well as many scars from disasters or successes in the past. Briefly, I wondered what had happened, besides old age, to the unattractive animal before me to put it in the condition it was in. Though I could see that it was starving, I

couldn’t imagine how being hit by a car would account for its injuries or its hairlessness. “Were you attacked by another, larger, younger cat?” I asked it as I crouched down next to it. “Was it a pack of wild dogs? That’s what happened to Rose, the cat next door, a lot of years ago.” I remembered the awful winter night when we were awakened out of a deep sleep, the hair standing up on the backs of our necks, by the snarling, growling, yipping, and high-pitched yowling coming from the front yard of the house next door. Richard had rushed out to investigate. A pack of dogs had something in their midst which they had cornered and were torturing. Richard waved his arms and shouted. The dogs ran off at once, and there was poor Rose lying on the ground, head down, eyes glazed, and her tongue hanging out, her fur bloody, torn, and wet all over from their slobbering mouths. The present cat in the driveway didn’t tell me what had happened to it. As it had before, it turned its yellow eyes upon me, and stared intently into my face. Again, it tried to rub its head against my leg. It was purring loudly. Uneasily, guiltily, once more I stood up and I backed away. When I glanced into its bowls of supplies, I was startled to find them both empty. “You ate all your food and drank all the water,” I exclaimed in spite of myself. “How did a dying animal like you manage to do that?” Of course, the cat didn’t reply. He only turned his head to follow me with his eyes, purring louder as I walked back to the kitchen in search of more water and something tasty a sick cat could eat and might perhaps enjoy. And that is the way Nick first arrived on our property. For a very long time he was not a cat I wanted. With all the other hard things going on in my life, such as my needy aunt’s unexpected move to Atlanta, my friend Sue Ann’s divorce, our anxious daughter’s transfer to a dorm at Emory, and my own overbooked, underrested schedule, I had no extra concern or energy to commit to a creature in such need, even for a short time. Still, even if everything had been as calm as water I would not have wanted the most perfect cat in the world because we already had two other cats living in the house: though I can’t seem to live without them, cats make me sneeze, my eyes swell shut, my head clog up, and my nose run. But of course, this cat was far from perfect. Having no possible form or comeliness that would make anyone in her right mind desire him, in those first weeks, he was a truly undesirable animal. He was hideous. Besides being mangled and hairless, he was so filthy, in fact, that when we knew him better, we decided that he must have lost his mother at some crucial time in kittenhood,

because he never did seem to learn how to wash himself or even keep his whiskers clean. He was so thin that it looked as though his body was bizarrely narrower than his head. You could count all his ribs if you could stand to be close enough to him to do it, and he seemed to have infectious-looking fleas crawling on the surface of his skin. Why we didn’t take him straight to the animal clinic where our other cats go, I couldn’t say. I imagine it was because Richard and I both were afraid that the vet would feel obligated to “put him to sleep” as a hopeless case, whereas the two of us had already decided without consultation that even if we didn’t want to keep him, this wounded and battered animal who had chosen our house to die by should have the right to end his life with the people and in the way that he wished. Now, I know, I know. This was an anthropomorphizing, non-rational, even sentimental reason not to take the cat to the vet, surely having more to do with our feelings about our own deaths and the death of the people we loved, which we projected onto him, than with what might be going on in the mind of the actual flesh and blood cat lying in the driveway. The cat probably wasn’t even aware that he was dying, not at least with anything like human awareness. Even if he were, why should the cat care where or how he died? Still, projecting, anthropomorphizing, this reason not to take him to the vet was very real to me, at least at the time. Of course there are problems with thinking like this. I am not a fool, mind you; I know we human beings regularly get into trouble when we imagine that any others, especially animals, think as we think and feel as we feel. One of the great gifts of the women’s movement to the academic world in the last few years has been a more general awareness of the difficulties to be found in the assumption that the world ought to look the same to all rational, reasonable people, women as well as men, people of non-European ancestry as well as European. The fact that it doesn’t is not simply an abstract insight, either. It is about as practical as insights come. I’m sure everyone remembers being told by a friend when we were suffering an injury or a loss or an emotional wound of some sort, that our friend understood just what we were feeling. Being aware that, for a number of reasons, this couldn’t possibly be true, we ended up feeling more alienated and alone than we had before. An ordinary and innocent enough mistake, at least on the surface, it is based, nevertheless, in an unconscious self-centeredness that makes it impossible for the imagination to envision a world peopled with human beings and animals who really are unlike us in some fundamental ways. Assuming that everyone else would act out of the same motives that move us if we were in their situation, we cannot imagine what it feels like to belong to another economic class, to another race, another religion, another gender, another age category, another nationality,

even to another part of our own country. Thus, if we aren’t careful to respect the otherness of those with whom we share our world, we can find ourselves reducing the rest of the world to no more than an extension of ourselves. This is truly a serious wrong that we do. At the same time, I believe there is more to it than that. As a Christian I simply can’t accept the notion that our world is the sad, broken, and violent place it is as a result of too much misguided empathy, too much identifying with others’ pain, suffering, vulnerabilities, or weaknesses. I will never be convinced that our problems, personal and social, fundamentally come from the assumption that others hurt as we hurt. How can I believe this when at the heart of the gospel is the claim that our very life depends upon the self-emptying empathy and love of the Uncreated, even Alien, Ultimate Other for a finite and broken world? But back to the cat in question. Needless to say, when Benjamin, our big, softhearted fifteen-year-old teenager, came home from drama rehearsal for supper that night, he did not find the problem of the small, mysterious visitor resolved. Rather, we explained to him calmly that there was an injured, hairless cat in our driveway and that we were feeding it and looking after it, but that it was so sick it might very well be dead by dawn. Without even going out to see for himself, Benjamin began to cry. I don’t recall the rest of our conversation at dinner, but I do remember that Benjamin went out alone to examine him after the meal, then he went into his room to mull over what he’d seen. He called me later that evening from his bedroom. “Mama, can you come here a minute?” “I’ll be right there,” I replied. Benjamin was under his quilt, rolled up on his bed in a ball. “Are you sure the cat’s going to die?” he asked as I sat down beside him on his bed. His blue eyes seemed to plead with me in the same way the cat’s eyes had earlier. “Can’t we do something for him?” “I hope he doesn’t die, but he’s in awfully bad shape,” I replied. Absentmindedly I ran my hand through Benjamin’s shiny, thick hair. I couldn’t think what we would do with the cat if he didn’t die. I did know, however, that our original move to Atlanta following his father’s and my divorce had been very hard on my son. As a result, Benjamin didn’t suffer losses or even absences of any kind easily. Benjamin loved all cats; that before this evening he had not even laid eyes on this one was irrelevant.

Worn out from a day that had been too full, I patted him distractedly for a few moments and thought about the hot night and the cat on the cement outside. “He might be a female,” Benjamin said hopefully, after a long silence. “He could be,” I said. Perhaps its chances of survival would be better if it were female. That seems to be the case for human beings. Benjamin sighed a time or two as once more I smoothed back his light brown hair, then I turned out the light. The next morning, which was hot and sunny, Richard, Benjamin, and I went out together with great trepidation to discover how the animal who had committed himself to our keeping had come through the night. Amazingly, he was not only alive. He had once more eaten all the food we’d left him and lapped up all his water. Euphoric, Benjamin ran back into the kitchen to replenish the cat’s supplies. Again, the animal purred his lawn mower purr while he seemed to wait, staring me in the face. His eyes were yellow, his pupils big and black. I noticed that his front paws were huge and bony, barely sticking out from under his chest where he was crouching. The matted colorless fur left on his cheeks stuck out like a lion’s mane. I backed away once more without wanting to touch him; he probably wasn’t rabid, I told myself, but I could easily imagine what other dreadful diseases this smelly animal carried. Still, there was no question in my mind that he was aware that food and water were not appearing magically before him; he knew that we-Richard, Roberta, and Benjamin--were feeding him, even wishing him well. His purr was his response, an apparent expression of profound gratitude. Now, with this statement, I am fully aware that I seem to be back on the shaky ground we were just on a moment ago. Gratitude! If we have already agreed that no one can truly put herself or himself into a position where she or he can claim to experience the world as another person does, how could I imagine that a cat could possibly experience not only something like a human emotion, but an actual virtue like gratitude? A cat, after all, is a nonhuman creature of an entirely different species whose mind almost certainly bears little resemblance to our own. A virtue, of all things! You needn’t point this out. I know it perfectly well: if I am not careful I will embarrass us both.

But, the trouble is, considering what I saw and experienced with this cat who ended up living with us all those years, I can’t avoid making this judgment. But, for that matter, if I am very, very careful why should I avoid making it? Does it make better sense, is it more moral, more “godly,” more “sensible” or rational somehow, to treat animals who are sentient beings as though they had no more meaningful awareness than rocks or trees just because we know that they do not think as we do? Perhaps when we automatically assume that we ought not imaginatively to try to put ourselves into the place of a sick cat, say, or a possum who has tried to come into the house for the winter, we become guilty of several things at once--intellectual arrogance, failure of sympathy with the rest of creation, even a profound disrespect for the God we claim watches every sparrow’s fall. We human beings are animals ourselves, after all, and we say that this is the way God made us. At the same time I realize perfectly well that Christians have often argued through the centuries that what marks off human beings from animals and gives us our special dignity is our unique creation in God’s image. In love with large parts of the tradition as I am, I simply can’t support it at this point when it would seem to suggest that the ability to experience gratitude must belong only to humans because the virtues belong only to the human image of God. I certainly don’t want to be the one of us assigned the task of saying to our Creator, “If you love us as your people and you expect us to love you in return, then you cannot possibly give these characteristics that we have been told belong uniquely to your image within us to other, nonhuman animals--not only gratitude but also generosity, loyalty, persistence, humility, resourcefulness, obedience, sensitivity to others’ needs, fierceness in protecting the young, faithfulness, courage, sympathy, playfulness, kindness, and even an ability to enter into a covenant with you, too.” As you can hear for yourself, my sensibilities are strong on this subject. Besides, what seems to me to be the gall involved in telling God what is appropriate divine generosity and what is not, the whole topic reminds me too much at times of the things I still occasionally hear men, and even women, say, with supposed backup from Paul, about women and their necessary subordination to men that automatically makes them unsuitable for ministry. Meanwhile, God goes right on making God’s own judgments, calling all kinds of “unsuitable” folks to ministry and generally spreading grace everywhere in the world God feels like it. I’ll admit, it baffles me. I can’t figure out what’s wrong with us Christians. Why should we think that our faith in God can only be authentic, and God true to us in return, if we are utterly, uniquely, singularly made in God’s image, not just on our own planet, but in the very universe?

But lest I rant further and drive you away altogether, let me return to the cat in the driveway, whose story, after all, this really is. After that first amazing morning when Richard, Benjamin, and I went out behind the house to find the injured animal alive, we continued to open cans of food and bring out fresh water to him two or three times a day. The cat continued to respond. For two weeks or more, he appeared to lie in the same hard but shady spot on the cement to the right side of the entrance to the garage. Though occasionally we saw him briefly lower his head to his water bowl, we never caught him eating. It wasn’t that he hadn’t any interest in food. Rather, it appeared that, starving or not, if the choice were between food and company, he would always take the company. Whenever we approached he continued to fix us in his vision, holding us close to him with the force of his huge eyes while his whole body vibrated with his purring. Nevertheless, since the food and water kept disappearing and he didn’t die, we had to assume that it was he who was consuming, very gingerly with his mangled mouth, what we set out for him. Other than that, there wasn’t much apparent change in his behavior or his condition through those first weeks. He was an odd cat, to say the least. From the beginning he never seemed to lick himself as other cats did. He never stood up while he was in our sight, or went to the nearby dirt at the edge of the driveway to relieve himself. Though he was far from passive, when we approached, he would hunch down even further into his crouching position, front and back paws usually tucked under him as compactly as possible. Then one late August morning things began to take a different turn. It was Richard who noticed the changes first. “Roberta, come out!” he called to me through the open dining room window. Always convinced that the birds will starve to death in the middle of summer unless he takes care of them, he had gone out half dressed to fill his feeders in the ivy off the driveway before he himself ate breakfast. “Come on; I need to see what you think about this cat!” Richard sounded excited and a little uncertain. “Do I have to come now? I’m sure he can wait a few minutes.” I replied. Early morning is never my most active time of day. I hadn’t slept well in the heat. Now I was dressed in my ratty summer bathrobe, sprawled over the rose colored sofa in the dining room, and looking at the funnies. I was also drinking my third cup of coffee as I tried to get myself into good enough shape to swallow something like cereal and milk that actually had lumps in it. Even the back door seemed to me to be too far to walk to. Richard knew my habits well; it had been he who had made the coffee I was incapable of brewing at that hour without getting grounds all over the kitchen or dropping the pot and shattering it in the middle of the cream-colored linoleum.

“Oh come on,” he cajoled. “You can make it out this far! You’ll be glad you did.” “I’ll bet,” I muttered. Richard is hard to say no to. Grumpily, I got up and went out the back doors through the kitchen and laundry room and up the driveway. Richard was looking down at the cat, who was peering up at him in return, again purring loudly enough to be heard a fair distance away. “What’s wrong?” I asked, impatiently. “He looks just the same to me.” “Look again,” said Richard. All of a sudden, as I came closer, I could see what Richard saw. Though he was lying on the concrete pointed in the same direction he’d been in for weeks, and he was crouched in the same position, he was not in the same spot. His empty bowls were no longer under his chin. At some point since we had seen him last, the grotesque cat had moved himself away from the garage and closer to our house. I looked at the cat in wonder as I squatted down beside him. “How did you get here?” I asked him softly. I turned my head to measure the distance with my eyes. He had come several long, hard feet. “How did you do it?” Decrepit as he was, it was hard to imagine. Did he crawl? Was he able all along to get up and walk if he chose? He surely hadn’t dropped from the trees the first day he appeared in our yard. Certainly, the cat was not about to tell me. He only continued to look trustingly and intently into my eyes as he kept on purring. Every day now, it seemed that whenever we came out in the morning he had moved closer to the house in the night. The morning finally came when I opened the backdoor and found him in his usual crouching position, but this time, he was up on the bench across from the dining room windows. That was when it really came to me that he was recovering. His raw cuts, scratches, and wounds had turned into thin, dark brown seams on his pinkish white skin. Even more astounding, as I bent over him, I could not only hear him purr, I could also see that his back and sides were covered with a very short, colorless down. Though there was too little of it even to guess at its eventual color, his fur was growing back. He was getting a little meat on his bones, too. Where before we had seen nothing but the outline of his scrawny ribs, the bony protrusions of his spine, and the knobby joints of his skinny tail, his flesh seemed to be plumping out. Though his head was still at least twice as wide as his body, and the torn bits and pieces

of his left ear flopped down in the same old threads of pinkish skin, astonishingly, the cat was apparently healing. As all this was going on before our very eyes, we could hardly help wondering about his past life and how he came to us. “Maybe he isn’t old at all,” I speculated to Richard and Benjamin one day when I was feeling a bit melancholy about my own aging. “It could be that we only thought he is old because of the way he’s looked,” I said. Richard laughed and shook his head. He knew what I was thinking. Benjamin didn’t bother to respond at all. He was sitting in the shade on the concrete beside the cat; he squinted as he examined the tidy row of nicks around the edges of his ears. “Perhaps he was chewed up by a really big tomcat,” he suggested. Benjamin had been picked on by the larger boys all through elementary school. Richard, who had been adopted from an orphanage at five months old and knew nothing about his biological family who had put him there, looked at us both and smiled. He could play the game, too. “Whatever it was that happened to him, I imagine he got hurt when he was away from home,” Richard said. “He got lost, and with nobody out looking for him, he couldn’t find his way back to where he belonged.” I don’t remember our daughter Anna’s speculations the first time she saw him, since she was living away from home. I do recall, however, that she was quite taken with the mysterious cat when she finally met him. She is certainly the only person I ever knew who talked baby talk to him then or later and it didn’t sound insulting, but then, again, Anna has always identified with the wounded of soul or body, animal or human; it is one of the reasons her house is filled with blind iguanas, birds with crippled feet, and hairless rats bred to feed the snakes at the pet shop where she used to work. As for where the cat actually came from, Elizabeth, Benjamin’s friend from across the street, had her own theory. Elizabeth was sure the cat had first lived with a couple way down at the far end of our block. No matter what they did to win him over, however, he didn’t want to live with them, and so, presumably, after he ran off again and again, they finally gave up and let him go. That is as close to finding out where the cat was from originally as we ever could come. Of course, this is generally the way with stray cats and grace, too; they appear on your driveway or your doorstep or in the grocery store or gas station in an animal, or person, your spouse, your child, or your worst enemy, you never wanted in the first place and certainly would never choose yourself. And one day you wake up to find yourself changed, wounded, perhaps, by love or something like it, understanding or maybe not understanding, what has happened to you,

but filled with an unexpected gratitude as apparently impossible as the gratitude of the cat we ended up taking into our family. But, lest you still are worrying about the possibility of a Christian, much less a sensible human being, believing that a cat might feel gratitude, let me suggest one or two more things about the subject before I tell you how we ultimately came to let the cat into our house and permanently into our lives. Do you remember the very last verse of the entire book of Psalms? It goes, “let everything that breathes praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!” It isn’t only Psalm 150, either, that talks this way about the praise of God. Many, many of the praise psalms that come at the end of the psalter sound like this. Psalm 148, for example, says Praise [God], sun and moon; praise [God] all you shining stars! . . . Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Wild animals and all cattle. . . . For us modern folk it is hard to know what to make of this praise offered by the natural world. We often act as though we assume that we autonomous, rational creatures are different from the rest of creation, and that for the most part, nature is only a kind of complicated machine made of interconnected parts. If this is true, then there can be no rational way to speak of the whole universe we live in “praising God” any more than we could say that a machine praises God. The world that science describes, we think, must be totally indifferent to human meaning which we only try to impose upon it. One alternative assumption we hear expressed in these psalms, on the other hand, and which, incidentally, is also to be found all through scripture, and all through the tradition right up until our own period of history is this: Reality, animate and inanimate, “rational” and “irrational” is put together in such a way that it is a single reality, an intermeshing, interconnected, far from mechanical whole. At the human level, this is why both the Fall could be said to have taken place and the Incarnation could work. Since we are all one, what one human being does is bound to affect us all; what God made flesh, entering our world, does in the flesh also shape us all. But, as I have said, it is not only at the human level that this unity exists. This is how Paul can say,

the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility . . . by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free...and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves. (Romans 8:19-23a) Do you hear it? Creation is groaning as one with us! This is metaphorical language. Of course it is, but I am sure that it is also more than that. In the Bible creation responds to the God who made it. As one and as individuals, all creation, not just human creation, mysteriously in tune with itself, groans. All creation also praises, and I believe it is safe to assume that it is out of gratitude for the gifts of being, its own and God’s, that these praises come. At the same time, real modern physics, not just our outmoded popular notions of physics, would say that all things that have being, even the smallest and most “mindless,” mysteriously, unfathomably seem to have a certain significant autonomy, that they respond to and are fundamentally affected by each other as well. Even if this is a hard idea to grasp at the microcosmic level, at the macrocosmic level the environmental movement by now has made nearly all of us accustomed to the idea that the world as a whole is a single ecosystem to be treated gently and carefully, for what affects a part of it will ultimately affect us all. If all this is true, could a cat experience gratitude? Could the cat on our driveway be grateful to God or to us, the ones who fed him and cared for him? Of course, I would have to say, surely not in the same way we human beings do, but yes, I believe so. All things that have being respond to God. Why should animals not know God on their own terms at least as well as we? If the movement of the smallest particles is affected by our eyes upon them, why should a cat not be able to feel gratitude? For that matter, if as Christians we want to say that we simply can’t communicate across species, if we claim that we can’t find some common point between us that allows for awareness, kindness, and sympathy, perhaps we’ll never find this point between the human nations, races, genders, and world religions, either. How can we respect the not-us if we can’t accept that we share a common life? How can we look for any communication much less common life between God the Ultimate Stranger, the Uncreated, and us with our created nature? The fact is, Richard, Benjamin, and I did come to share a common life with the cat in the driveway, and, odd as it may seem, I do believe it was based in a mutual appreciation and love which was ultimately grounded in God.

But that love didn’t happen at once. A long time passed before I decided that, in a household dominated by the young, I wanted the cat as a battered companion to my early middle age. Weeks went by before his fur grew out so far that we could know that it was a greasy, chewed up, solid blue-gray. After a while darker rings appeared around his skinny tail. A few more weeks passed before we cautiously named him “Nick” because of the numerous nicks in his ears that turned them now into a velvety gray fringe. (“Cautiously,” I say, because Richard and I were both aware of the difficulties involved in turning your back on another living being you know in a particular enough way to call by name.) Whether it was gratitude or eccentricity, clearly Nick wanted to live with us. For two months after school started, he practiced the habit of spending his days sitting in the wood chips under the dining room window, gazing up at our indoor cats, Julius and Romana, who spent their days perched on the windowsill next to each other, peering down at him. At night, he slept on the walk behind the house, leaning against the back door. It was increasingly apparent to all of us that, dirty or not, Nick was a wonderful, loving, and intelligent cat. Through all this time, he continued to butt his head into my hands and legs when I fed him or talked to him, and kept on looking soulfully into my eyes and purring when I was near him. Still, I never touched him deliberately, never petted his back or scratched behind his dirty ears or felt the soft fur that adorns the front of every cat’s neck. I knew I couldn’t afford to lay my hands on him. Though I can’t live without at least one cat, I am allergic to them and it was obvious that this was a cat I could not fail to be allergic to. I never intended him to stay. Instead, I did everything in my power to find him another home. I asked my friends and got the children to ask theirs if they didn’t want him. For my students on transparencies for the overhead projector I drew pathetic pictures of Nick sitting in front of a house in the rain, tears dripping from his face; I included a scripture text, too: “Suffer the little kitties to come unto you and forbid them not for such is the kingdom of heaven.” A particularly kind-hearted student was finally worn down. On the afternoon of my birthday, which is the nineteenth of November, Jeremy drove up with a cat carrier to pick Nick up and take him to his mother’s farm in North Carolina. As a farm cat, Nick wouldn’t be allowed in her house; his job would be to kill rats, mice, and other undesirables (something he daily demonstrated he was good at, since, after those first weeks, when he was hungry he simply went out and caught himself a little something). We stood about in the autumn sun, Jeremy and I, talking about what Nick would be doing in his future, and then Jeremy bent over to pick up Nick. Nick had been

crouching in his characteristic pose on the wooden bench behind the house, shifting his great yellow eyes from one of us to the other. Nick let himself be picked up. Perhaps with an intimation of what was coming, he was alarmed on the way to the cat carrier. He stopped purring and twisted in Jeremy’s arms to follow me with his eyes. That was when I realized for the first time how attached to him I had grown, and how much I didn’t want him to leave. I watched Nick for a moment or two and then I began to cry. “I changed my mind,” I said to Jeremy, who, after my months of attempted persuasion, looked far more surprised than Nick had when the young man picked him up. I was horribly embarrassed, but at this point how I looked wasn’t about to affect my decision. I blew my nose on an old tissue I found in my jeans pocket. “I can’t send him away; I want to keep him myself.” All this time, I had never once touched Nick deliberately, never petted him or stroked him. Now I held out my arms and Jeremy brought him to me. Immediately the big cat, for so he had turned out to be, rolled over on his back and wriggled up against me, watching my face and purring in ecstasy. I looked into his eyes and rubbed his dirty, hairless stomach with pleasure. When Richard came home I told him what I had decided. “I would like Nick for my birthday,” I said. “He needs to go to the vet.” “Are you sure?” Richard answered. “It’s going to cost a bundle.” “Yes,” I said. “I know it will, and I’m sure.” And whatever Nick could be said to be feeling, at that moment I, at least, was profoundly grateful.

2--Nick in the House

Taking Nick to the vet for the first time was surprisingly easy. Unlike every one of the other cats who have lived with us through the years, he walked into the cat carrier on his own, turned himself around two or three times, lay down so that he could see out the front grille, and began to purr. Neither was the car ride difficult. In his hard plastic case, which against my better judgment I had set next to me on the passenger side of the front seat, he rode along calmly. He continued to purr and stare at me with his big yellow eyes. He was curious and interested in everything about this new situation. He didn’t howl once, claw the sides of his carrier, hunch down piteously, or throw up. As he was again and again to prove himself to be, he was a cat without fear. Unlike most cats, he was also completely unafraid and confident at the vet’s. I parked the car in the lot by the liquor store, carried in his carrier, and put his cage on the counter. As we registered I told them the little I knew about his medical history. His purring never ceased as the dark-haired young receptionist wrote down in a file what I said and the other--who was blonde and wore a name tag saying “Wendy” poked her fingers through the mesh of his case. Delighted, she laughed when he rubbed his head against her hand as though he had known her all his life and reached toward her with his bony, ugly paws. Once the writing down of his history was finished, the two of them took him out and put him on the counter. He walked back and forth between them, obviously enjoying himself as he happily ate the fish-shaped treats they held out for him. A few moments later, when he was up on the table in the examination room, he began his fearless exploration of his environment. He sat up on his back legs, supporting himself on his front legs like a statue of an Egyptian cat goddess. He turned his head back and forth, blinking slowly as he took in the closed cupboards, the countertops lined with bottles and jars, the white sink, and the shiny trash can. When the vet came in, he walked over to her, stared into her eyes with his big yellow ones, then affectionately butted his head against her hand. The curly-haired young vet was impressed and won over already. “Well, look at you,” she said as he continued to rub against her arm. “You are a piece of work if I ever saw one.” She scratched the top of his head between his mangled and pierced ears; he sat there patiently purring as she examined them. She looked at the fringed edges, the obvious scars and the injuries to what should have been the pointed parts of

his ears, then inside them with her light. “Ugh, ear mites!” was her only comment. “We’ll take care of that!” Next, she somehow got Nick to open his mouth so that she could examine his teeth and down his throat. “Terrible teeth! A few missing, too.” She was clearly horrified. I’ll bet you have trouble eating, don’t you, cat?” she said to him. The purring steadily continued. “Not that I can tell,” I answered for him. “He eats everything I give him, no matter what it is, and then he wants more, besides.” It was true. Like other starved cats who had come to live with us, Nick could never leave food in a bowl, even if he had just eaten, or walk away without first pushing the bowl around with his nose. “Well, don’t let him overdo it,” the vet said. “I won’t,” I said. I wondered how I was going to hold him back. I remembered Pansy, a beautiful calico stray, who had been taken in by friends as a scrawny kitten and sent to live with us. Pansy had been so obsessed with eating that she had once ravenously lapped up the water in a pan in which cream of mushroom soup had been heated. With plenty of food around, Pansy had quickly ballooned into a beach ball-shaped red, black, and white cat who died young. The examination of Nick continued. The vet ran her hands over Nick’s lightly furred and scruffy back and ribs. He was definitely better. His ribs were no longer obvious as they had been when he had first come into our yard, and his cuts and bites had become white lines visible through his fur. The vet turned him over with his feet in the air, and felt around on his mostly hairless pink stomach. “His abdomen seems to be okay,” she commented. He let her examine his legs as one by one, she stretched them out, then she looked at his paws. Nick had enormous, bony feet, all knuckles and nails. They embarrassed me. To me they looked gnarled and callused like the naked feet of an old man whose shoes had never fit properly. “Nothing wrong here,” she said as she turned him back over on the table. Immediately he stood on his hind legs, arching his back, then stretching up to kiss her on the face with his nose. She was flattered, but drew back in spite of herself. “He sure does smell, doesn’t he?” she said to me. Once more she ran an appraising hand over his greasy, gritty fur. “I don’t know if this cat has ever learned how to clean himself.” Of course, she was right. I must admit that Nick’s personal dirtiness had already embarrassed me for him far more than the appearance of his feet. Having an odor somewhat like a rabbit skin coat, generally, the house cats who have lived with us have presented themselves as members of a tidy and even pleasant-

smelling species. Most cats seem to know how to use a litter box from the time they are the smallest kittens, and they don’t like to use it if it is not kept fairly clean. Most of the other cats I have known have kept their fur as shiny and free of dirt as they are able, and using their paws, they wash their face and whiskers after the smallest snack. Not Nick. Even after his fur began to grow back and he got as healthy as he would get, I never saw him wash like other cats or show squeamishness at the sight or smell of the grossest dirt on himself. Rather, he often would jump up on the bed after his own breakfast to give me a kiss on the nose. Nearly always there would be bits of wet-looking, malodorous canned cat food hanging off the ends of his long gray whiskers and sticking to his chin. I would sit up in bed and grab a paper tissue I could use as a napkin as soon as I heard him thumping through the house. As his fur grew in, it was nearly as disgusting as his whiskers were in the morning. At the best of times, it never felt anything but greasy to the touch, usually being full of dust, scabs, and even tiny burrs within two hours of its being brushed. The vet sighed deeply as Nick kept nuzzling her. “Look,” she said tactfully, “I can’t tell you how old this cat is, except for the fact that he is not young. He is at least middle-aged. Other than that, he certainly appears to be normal and basically healthy, although he needs a bit more work; we have to keep him two nights, anyway. We’ve got to neuter him and give him his shots, and he is sure to be full of all sorts of parasites which he’ll give to the other cats if you don’t get rid of them. Why don’t you let us give him a bath and clean him up before you bring him home and let him into the house?” I looked down at Nick, who was now enthusiastically rubbing up against me and purring. “How much more is a bath?” I asked, faintly. In spite of Richard’s initial warning, how expensive all this could be had never registered on me. Now at last something of what all this doctoring was going to cost us was occurring to me. The vet laughed as she confirmed my fears. “Don’t worry,” she replied, “you’ve got an expensive animal here. Your bill is going to be so high, the price of a single bath won’t make much difference!” Her prediction was proved correct two days later when I went back to pick him up. I had some serious misgivings when I learned that it would cost over three hundred dollars to get Nick out of there. Nick was, indeed, an expensive cat, and, as I would soon learn, he was about to get even more costly. Still, he had already come to belong to me, so what was I to do? Not that any of this was of interest to Nick. Riding home in his cat carrier on the back seat of the car, within a few minutes he was too busy being happy. He was loved, he smelled good, and his fur was clean and relatively glossy for the first and last time during his life with us.

I drove him home without event, and then, with a certain trepidation, I brought him into the kitchen in the carrier he had come home in. Cats are solitary, territorial animals as a rule, and they don’t like new places or other cats in them until they are well used to everything. Nick had been confined for three days in a cage at the vet’s; he had had an anesthetic, surgery, and strong medicines. Now he was coming into a house he’d never been in before that already had two wellestablished younger neutered female cats living in it. None of this suggested that he or we would have an easy adjustment to his transition. One more time, Nick surprised us. When I set the cat carrier on the kitchen floor and opened its door, he jumped out of it fearlessly and walked into the dining room. There, while Romana and Julius watched cautiously from the arch into the living room, he rolled and wiggled with pleasure, his pink belly up and his gray back down, in the middle of the carpet; then he rubbed his cheeks on the upholstery of the couch and chairs. Nick was delighted with himself and with his new home. As far as he was concerned, it appeared that he had sat under the dining room window staring at the other cats all those months for the express purpose of being allowed into the house and being given a place among us. He rolled and rubbed until he was through with it. Then, having made his mark in the one room into which he had been able to see from the outside of the house, he came over to me where I was sitting on the old rose-colored couch, jumped into my lap, put his paws on my shoulders to look into my eyes, and raised the sound of his vibrating purr by two or three notches. I wasn’t quite ready for his breath in my nostrils or his fur, clean though it might have been, against my face, but if he were to live with us, I didn’t want to reject his advances, either. I stood and picked him up with me, intending to hold him in a position most cats like, head up and paws down, across my chest and parallel to the floor. Nick was never an ordinary cat. When I took him in my arms he immediately turned himself over, with his near naked belly and paws held up in a position most cats will not tolerate for even a moment or two. Held like a baby, staring me in the eyes and throwing his head back so that I could rub his neck and chest between his front legs, Nick was ecstatic and totally without dignity. From then on, this peculiar position was his favorite way of being held. What a very odd cat Nick was! How uncatlike he seemed in so many significant ways! Yet in spite of the way he liked to be carried, at the same time he was so hard to anthropomorphize. As I mentioned before, he was never a cat any of us wanted to talk baby talk to; even the pet names we called him were never diminutives. He was not Nicky or Kitty, or even Pussy Cat. He was Nick or Nickers or sometimes You Big Gray Cat.

My mother grew up on a farm and doesn’t like any animals in the house, but she particularly doesn’t care for cats. Generally she makes a disgusted face when she encounters our other ones and rarely addresses them in any way except “Cat” (“Get off the table, Cat!” she’ll say, or “Go away, Cat, you’re driving me crazy!”). Perhaps because she admired his being such a survivor, she came to like Nick. For some reason she chose to believe, entirely erroneously I am sure, that there was something special about his ancestry, and that the blood of an aristocratic Russian Blue show cat flowed through his veins. She called him Nicholas. But whatever we called him, no matter what the vet had said about him being perfectly “normal,” Nick was never a normal cat. He didn’t look normal and he didn’t behave normally--at least not according to the notions of normal our family originally applied to what cats were and what they ought to be. Still, what does “normal” mean, anyway, for people or for animals, except as a category defined fairly arbitrarily by human beings? Jesus wasn’t normal by the standards of his day or of our own. He doesn’t seem to have married or held a job or had a fixed address. He didn’t keep his mouth shut when self-preservation demanded it. In fact, though he set a lot of folks free and made a lot of them happy, he also upset a lot of “normal” religious people. By insisting that they look for the spirit of what God called them to, rather than the letter, he made them mad every place he went. If we can trust what Jesus told Philip when Philip asked Jesus to show his disciples the Father, then we have to know that being, acting, or looking “normal” just isn’t an issue for God when it comes to valuing someone. It’s a good thing that God is like that, too, when I think of how fast the definition of “normal” has changed in our society over the last thirty years and how few of us actually are able or even want to be the way the culture expected us to be in 1960. At any rate, all this being true, it was on the very day of his move into the house that Nick began to exhibit some of the more difficult-to-live-with sides of his nature. Things started off well, as I have already said. From the beginning he made it clear that he was ecstatically happy to be indoors. He did not seem afraid or in any way aggressive. He was affectionate and sweet. He ate passionately the canned food set out for him. He did not chase the other cats or threaten them overtly. He was a contented cat, too. After his initial leap from the cat carrier and his first foray into the dining room, he was perfectly satisfied to spend the next few hours walking slowly from room to room, exploring under beds, jumping into chairs, stretching out on desks, and sniffing in the corners. It was only later in the afternoon that the first problem manifested itself when I discovered a medium-sized, unidentified puddle on the dark wooden floor in the hall between the bedrooms. Because I didn’t want it to be what I knew it was, my

first reaction was to wonder, fleetingly, what had been spilled. I hadn’t had coffee that afternoon. Richard was at work, and Ben was at school. When I bent down to examine the puddle more closely I had to admit the truth. The smell of male cat urine was overwhelming. I stood up in surprise, nonetheless. How could this be? I had shown Nick the litter when he first entered the house. He was dirty, certainly, but cats are a fastidious lot. The ones who had lived with us had seemed to know from birth how to use the litter or something like it outdoors to bury their wastes. In my past experience, even if there were some problem with the litter, a cat would never urinate on a bare floor in preference to something like laundry or a rug or even a blanket on a bed where he or she could at least make a pretend attempt at burying the mess. Nick, however, was not behaving in the manner of the cats I knew. He had peed on a perfectly bare floor. My heart quailed within me. Any cat urine smells bad enough but that of a male cat is by far the worst, having, as it does, the capacity to scent a room on a damp day for years afterward. I used old newspapers to mop Nick’s up, then a disinfectant and paper towels to scrub what was left the best I could. After that, I went to look for Nick. He was rolled up in a ball, contentedly asleep on the red Chinese rug at the foot of our bed. Again, the other two cats were watching from a safe distance. I squatted down beside him. “Nick,” I asked him rhetorically, shaking him a little. “What have you done?” I thought of the money we had spent to let him come into the house, and how entwined with him I had already grown. “Are you going to use the litter, or will you have to be an outdoor cat again?” Hearing my voice, Nick lifted his head and looked at me. He got to his feet and stretched, then rubbed up against me, purring loudly. I knew right then that I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get attached to this cat. I didn’t really think I could put him out and live without him, but I also couldn’t imagine what I would do if he wouldn’t use the litter. In failing spirits I picked him up and carried him to the litter pan once more, set him down in it, and left him, hoping, after another try or two, he would finally figure it out for himself. From that particular low point, Nick did work out how to use the litter fairly quickly, but it wasn’t the end of his problems or of ours--far from it. At this distance, I am not certain how long it was, whether it was a matter of days or weeks, that I first began to have the peculiar experience of smelling male cat urine at funny times and places. I might be washing dishes peacefully and looking out the window in the kitchen when all of a sudden I would be hit in the face and stomach with a frightful odor. I might be attacked by the unmistakable stench while taking a shower or looking for the mail on the front porch. One

morning it was at the garbage can in the kitchen; one evening it was in the laundry room. Where was it coming from? There were no more puddles, nor anything obviously visible. Certainly, I never saw Nick doing anything he wasn’t supposed to, so what was happening? As I tend to do whenever I am hurt or sick, I suspected I was making it all up or, at the very least, my anxiety over Nick was making me exaggerate. Perhaps my senses were tricking me. Or, it might be that the litter that needed changing, or the reactivation of the spot on the hardwood floor in the dining room that Kitty, a former male resident of our household, had left there twelve or thirteen years earlier. Remembering my baffled reaction to that dreadful, ever-moving odor, I can only believe now I didn’t recognize what Nick was doing because I didn’t want to know. It must have been about a week, I suppose, before the truth became inescapable. It was on a day when two new faculty members along with an old friend were scheduled to come over in the evening for cake and coffee. Late afternoon had arrived. Our old house wasn’t about to receive a goodhousekeeping award, but it was as straightened and cleaned up as it was ever going to be. The cake, made from a family recipe, was baked and iced--Italian cream cake, three layers full of coconut, pecans, and buttermilk, covered in cream cheese, vanilla, and pecan frosting--and the good coffee was ready for the coffeemaker. Because the welcoming of new faculty was a festive occasion, I had gotten out the fancy cups, saucers, and plates and the cloth napkins I had actually ironed. This brings me back to the problem with Nick. In the middle of deciding whether I wanted to use the silver coffeepot that I had inherited from my eccentric grandfather in New York, the knowledge of what the cat was doing was, so to speak, shoved down my throat. It happened like this. As I stood there in the living room, pondering by the open door of the china cupboard, the telephone rang. I was expecting a call from out of town, and I had to answer it. Caught equidistant from the phone on the wall in the kitchen by the refrigerator and the one on the table by our bed in the bedroom, I made a split-second decision. I raced through the hall to the bedroom, where I was brought up short by the sight of Nick, caught in the act at last. On the floor by the wardrobe I had left an open box with the new shoes in it I intended to wear that night. My shiny black shoes were visibly nestled where I could admire them, heel to toe, like two sleek animals, in the fancy tissue paper that comes from the store with ladies’ shoes. Nick had discovered it. As I ran into the room, he was standing over the box facing me but gazing into the distance with a look on his face that was half intense concentration and half absentminded dreaminess. His left hind leg was raised; from beneath came a fine mist of strong smelling cat urine which was settling lightly, almost invisibly, on my shoes. Nick was doing what male animals do in the wild: he was marking his territory.

The phone shrilled on as I stopped dead in my tracks with horror. I clapped my hands, made a face, and shouted “Nick!” Nick lowered his mangy hindquarters, shook his head a little as though to clear it, and stared with surprise at finding me there. He walked over to me, purring his inevitable purr. As I squatted down next to him, he put his front paws up on my right leg and looked questioningly into my face. He was glad to see me, but he didn’t have a clue to why I was upset. It would be purely accurate to say that Nick never gave a hint that he was aware that spraying in the house was antisocial behavior. There were no signs of the hesitation and furtiveness which Sophie, the beautiful, loving and clever tabby with whom we presently live, displays when she sits on my file box and sticks a paw into the bowl of glass marbles I collect. Indeed, though I am sure it is entirely too anthropomorphic to believe that Nick was pleased with himself, and pleased with me for finding him beside my shoes staking out his claim to his new home, he certainly appeared to be pleased. Nick was not a sneak. I can say with conviction that Nick always seemed to be a perfectly straightforward cat. Even hunting--at which he was very good--I never remember him hiding, crouching, or slinking in the ivy behind the house, though, considering his lack of speed, I suppose he would have had to hide, crouch, and slink if he were to catch the multitude of gray voles and red-striped chipmunks he favored for his snacks. The phone silent at last, I sighed and rubbed Nick under the chin. With his paws on my leg, his clear eyes on my face and the tips of his droopy whiskers full of cobwebs, I knew that at that moment there was nothing I could do. Though now I could no longer avoid my own knowledge of the origins of the cat urine I had smelled all over the house, there was no point in getting mad at him or yelling at him. Nick would never understand it. He was like a proud two-year-old caught by her mother in front of the black shoe-polish mural she has just completed on the bottom of the refrigerator door. Insofar as he might, at that moment, have any memory of what he had just done, what he seemed to expect from me was not scolding, but admiration and even gratitude. Looking down on this unpredictable creature who had come to share our house with us, I could only sigh again. Heavily, I removed his paws, stood up, went to the kitchen and filled a bucket with warm water, detergent and disinfectant, and walked around inspecting for other sites of his spraying. As I washed the disgusting white spots off the lower half of the dining room windows, their sills, and the baseboard, I wondered what I was to do, short of throwing this outrageous animal out of the house. Training cats to do or not do anything is almost always a near impossible task. Even if I were to catch Nick in the act and squirt him with a water bottle--something most cats hate--I didn’t trust that this middle-aged cat would understand that a thing he considered to be such a good idea would seem to me to be a terrible one. I imagined him standing and staring

at me, puzzled and hurt as he shook the water off his ratty fur, his battered ears, and his drooping whiskers. What was I to do? By now it was only a matter of two hours or so before the company came. I had to admit that the answer was “nothing” so late in the afternoon. If the spraying kept up over the next few days, I would surely have to have some sort of help. Meanwhile, I decided, I could only try to put the problem from my mind. I kept the news of Nick and his obnoxious habit to myself, therefore, when Richard came home soon after that. I would only become upset again if I told him. And why should I break the news then, anyway? With a sinking sensation in my stomach, I considered that there would almost certainly be plenty of opportunity to tell Richard later. In fact, he would probably discover it by himself. It was eight o’clock when our friend Jane arrived, dressed in the pretty clothes she had worn to school. Even though Jane herself had large indoor dogs and from the beginning had been a passionate advocate of Nick’s being allowed to stay with us, I had no intention of telling her, either, what Nick was doing. The beginning of the evening was pleasant. The new folks arrived a bit late, but dressed to the teeth from an official banquet they had had to attend as part of Barbara’s work. Allen was tall and elegant in his tuxedo; Barbara was strikingly beautiful in an expensive-looking, pink, fluffy cocktail dress that was covered with shimmering seed pearls. It was all very civilized. For a few minutes we chatted about the various polite things folks who work together, but don’t yet know each other well, chat about-the weather, common friends, food, parking problems, favorite books. Then I went in to make the coffee and cut the cake. When I returned to the living room with the tray--at the last minute I had decided to use the silver coffeepot, cream pitcher and sugar bowl--I set it down beside me on the carpet. At the very same time Nick walked into the center of the room from the direction of the bedrooms. Where he had been I couldn’t say; I had combed the house for him before everyone came. He hadn’t been anyplace visible the last time I had looked for him to put him outside. From the stretching, blinking, and yawning he was exhibiting, however, it was clear what he had been doing. He had found a hidden place to sleep. There was no point in explaining that. “This is Nick, our new cat,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. In contrast with Barbara’s and Allen’s elegance, Nick looked rattier and dirtier than ever. Though he didn’t smell like urine (surprisingly, he never did), I was certain the odor of tuna-scented canned cat food was hanging in the room like an evil cloud. Suddenly as I looked at him, imagining how he must appear to Barbara and Allen, it seemed to me that Nick wasn’t the

only problem in the room: I had never noticed before how dingy and in need of paint the walls were, and how old the sofa. Nick, however, was oblivious to human discomfort, shameless as well as fearless. Having stretched, yawned, and assessed the company to his satisfaction, he slowly drew himself into a standing position. Then he ambled over to a very surprised Allen and jumped onto his smooth, black, tuxedoed lap. “Oh, Allen,” I exclaimed, “now you’ll have cat hairs on your trousers for the rest of your life! I’ll bet you’re allergic to cats, too.” Horrified and apologizing all the way, I rushed to pick up the settling animal and put him out. Though Barbara clearly thought the whole thing funny, Richard was almost embarrassed, and Jane clearly irritated by the whole thing. As for Allen, he laughed and looked down bemusedly, then began to scratch in the favorite spot between Nick’s ears. “Don’t worry,” he said, “he’s fine where he is.” As though he understood our exchange, Nick turned around, stood up on his hind legs in Allen’s lap and positioned himself so that he had a knotted paw on each of the stranger’s collar bones and for a moment stared into his eyes. Then he stretched his neck and gave Allen a lick or two on the end of his nose. By now Jane, Richard, Barbara, and Allen were laughing, but it was too much for me. Again, I got up to take the awful cat out, but by the time I crossed the room, Nick had rolled onto his back across my new colleague’s lap and settled in. All four of the gray cat’s legs were in the air, his eyes closed and his pink belly exposed, while Allen rubbed Nick’s once-again greasy neck and chin. Though I was glad this was a social event and not a professional encounter held in our house, the whole thing made me feel faint, and definitely out of control. “Why don’t I pour the coffee?” I said in an effort to distract myself, at least. “I’m sure it’s getting cold.” Humoring me, everyone accepted food and drink, and soon, the conversation turned to something other than cats. The cake was politely exclaimed over--as it should have been; it was a very good cake, perhaps even spectacular--and a concert we all had been to was discussed. I sighed with relief; we had escaped calamity. Then I made the mistake of glancing across the room at Barbara. While we were talking Nick had changed places without me noticing. Now he was on his hind legs in the delicate, pale pink chiffon in the woman’s lap, his paws on the smooth, white seed pearls on her shoulders. He was standing in the exact position in which he had stood when he licked Allen’s nose. Now, however, he was looking intensely into Barbara’s eyes, a dopey look on his face, purring at full volume. “Oh, Barbara,” he was apparently

saying to her, as he had already said to Allen only moments before, “you know, of course, that you are the only one I’ve ever loved!” Meanwhile, Barbara was taking it very well, better, in fact, than she should have had to. She was stroking Nick’s sides and returning his gaze as she made soft noises at him. “Don’t worry; he’s fine,” she said, as once more I rushed to take him away. The other three of us continued to talk while Barbara and Nick kept on with what they were doing. Helpless, I watched as Nick now rolled over into the paws-up position on her lap. I could only imagine the dirty gray blotch that would inevitably be left on the pale fabric. “I’ll make some more coffee,” I said. Nobody heard me or at least paid me attention. I picked up the tray with relief and went into the kitchen. With my eyes closed I leaned against the counter while it brewed, then refilled the cream pitcher and cut a little more cake. By now Nick had rotated to Jane’s lap, but he hopped off when I sat down, slowly walking toward me. Once more I set the tray on the floor. I had had enough of him; I chose to ignore him. “Anybody want any more coffee or cake?” I asked nonchalantly into the sudden lull that had arisen in the conversation. Nobody answered me or so much as moved. Everyone was looking at the floor. Mentally, I shrugged my shoulders and bent over the tray to pick up the pot, and then I saw the source of their silence. There was Nick, purring like a mad animal, yellow eyes blinking slowly, hind leg lifted as it had been over the shoe box earlier. This time, however, he was misting the tray and everything on it with a cloud of cat urine--cake, cream and sugar, coffeepot, even the napkins. He was content; he had become one of us at last. He had marked everything. How the evening ended after that I don’t recall, although I know everyone went home soon after the incident at the tea tray. I also remember that everyone pretended they had not seen Nick’s final atrocity; at least no one, not even the outspoken, not easily embarrassed Richard, mentioned it. I was too rattled to think to look for the predicted dirty smudge on Barbara’s dress or cat hairs coating the trousers of Allen’s tuxedo when they stood up. Surely Jane and Richard must have had something to say about something after the other two left, but whatever it was, now it is gone from my mind. Though we had plenty of other problems with Nick over the years, as far as I am concerned, Nick’s behavior hit a kind of low point that night it never reached

again. I said before that Nick wasn’t normal and it is true, if you use “normal” as a shorthand way to say that Nick didn’t fit the stereotype of what human beings think a cat should be as a house pet. Even if you aren’t thinking in house pet stereotypes, Nick may still not have behaved normally. For example, cats really are a clean race as a rule; they just seem to be designed by their genes to keep themselves clean. Perhaps the question wouldn’t even matter if, in our larger culture, not to mention in our churches, we still didn’t either keep trying to turn “normal” as a humanly constructed social category into part of the laws of nature or make up our minds that, if we are to give others the space and circumstance to be who they are, we must declare everything to be a private matter of personal taste or insight. This is hard to think through. Sociobiologists don’t do much for me when it comes to considering what is “natural” male and female human behavior, especially when they begin to draw conclusions that seem to justify the status quo. I, at least, can’t forget the way in which women in the 1950s and early 1960s were told, not just by their churches but by psychologists and psychiatrists, that it wasn’t “natural” or “normal” in some cosmic sense to compete with men in tennis and win, to think abstractly, to want to work outside the home, to be a scholar or teach in college or seminary, to serve as a minister in church, to like science and mathematics, or even to call men on the telephone to ask them out on a date. I find a good number of the discussions taking place in churches around the country right now are equally frustrating when they only center around what is considered in Scripture to be “natural,” that is, “normative,” male and female sexual behavior. If I didn’t know any better, listening might make me think that this is the single most important criterion in Scripture for deciding who is fit for ministry or leadership in the churches and who is not. The truth is, that whatever else there is to say about this, compared to a good deal of other behavior addressed in the Bible, such as the neglect or mistreatment of the poor, the parentless, and the resident alien, no sexual issue really gets that much attention in Scripture. So what about it? Do we as Christians have norms to live by that are, indeed, more than a mere reflection of the collective opinion of our culture, Christian or otherwise? Though I don’t for a moment consider that this question is easy to think through, or that what we are about can be reduced to a set of simple laws that can be memorized, I believe that we do. But how do we get to these norms? I begin by acknowledging, understanding the importance of, and committing myself to live out of four basic theological insights of the early church I study and teach. The first is this: with Athanasius I am glad to affirm that creation is good, that what is “natural” is good, and that in some significant sense it is a major source of the revelation of God to the world. When we study mathematics we are not simply imposing our perceptions of things on a reality that may, in truth, be

very different. We have discovered the formula for determining the volume of a cube; no one invented that formula. There was no doubt in the minds of the ancient teachers that the natural laws of mathematics and physics--today we might think of gravity and the observable behavior of light, for example--are not only ordained by God; they actually reflect something significant to us about who God is. More difficult for me to agree with totally, they also believed that because human beings are created in the image of God, human behavior was also meant to be governed by laws built equally firmly into the very universe, and that these laws, too, reflect and reveal God’s intentions and desires. Second, though these teachers thought God reveals God’s self to us in such a way that we say we human beings can come to “know” God in some significant ways, they also affirmed that God is fundamentally “by nature” unknowable. The early teachers from Origen to Pseudo-Dionysius the Aereopagite believed this because they were convinced that God is beyond all conceptual categories that limit us as created, mortal, time-bound human beings. To them this meant that we are never able to speak of God except by a kind of analogy. So, when we say God is “alive” or “father” or “mother” or “good” or “merciful,” God isn’t any of those things in the same way that people can be said to be. Those same teachers also spoke of God’s unknowability in other terms, too: God is not just transcendently unknowable. God, and the nature of God, are also unknowable because they are so very complex, and we human beings as a reflection of who God is, are also unknowably complex as well, even to ourselves. As one fourth century teacher, Gregory of Nyssa, puts it, even the nature of the ant is unknowable to us! The third insight that comes out of my own study of the early church is this: while we are dealing with so much that is fundamentally unknowable by its very nature, we also have to acknowledge that human beings live in a world governed by the social patterns of sin. It is sin, and the wounding that comes from it, that above all gets in the way of our ability to see God, or the world for what it is. This means that since sin has so formed the basic patterns of our social interactions, the very structures of society, and the judgments we make that come out of those structures, we need to be very careful when we decide what is “natural” for another human being and what is not. Perhaps this is why the eccentric and wonderful early monastic teachers of the Egyptian desert did not spend much time making moral judgments about particular actions in terms of their naturalness or unnaturalness. They were, however, very interested in the question of the “normal”: they insisted emphatically that Christians need not, and in fact, must not, have the shape of their lives determined for them by the “normal” ties and demands of family, property ownership, and even bodily existence. As for the last of these four insights from the early church, these Egyptian monastic teachers I study suggest that, though learning how to do it is a long

hard process involving our own effort and God’s grace, the one thing that is truly desirable and “natural” to human beings made in the image of God is to live out and grow into Jesus’ Great Commandment, “you shall love the Lord your God with your whole being, and your neighbor as yourself.” This is what Abba Poemen meant when he said, “God has given this way of life to Israel, to abstain from everything which is contrary to nature, that is to say, anger, fits of passion, jealousy, hatred, and slandering the brothers [and sisters. . . .] (Apo. Poeman 68, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Trans. Benedicta Ward), p. 148. And it is why Abba Theodore of Eleutherpolis said, “If you are temperate do not pass judgment on the fornicator, for you would then transgress the law just as much. And he who said ‘Do not commit fornication’ also said ‘Do not judge.’” (Apo. Theodore of Eleutheropolis, 3. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p. 68). When it comes to thinking about what is merely “normal” and what is morally “natural” this is where I come out, too. The center of what is “natural” to us when we are not so thoroughly governed by sin that we can’t see what is right in front of us, is to love God and to love our neighbor. To pass judgment on another person on the basis of what we consider to be natural, is not, in fact, natural in this sense at all. As for being “normal,” to help us give up our compulsion to judge and so coerce or dismiss our neighbors to be like us, we can remember that, if we are able to trust the Bible, Christians don’t really have to have any interest at all in the humanly constructed category of the “normal” much less in trying to live up to it. But does this abandonment of the normal as a moral category, along with “the natural” understood as fixed laws of human behavior ordained by God in favor of “the natural” understood as love, finally mean that, in reality, I think we do live only in the realm of the subjective? No, not if we say “God is love,” for the existence of the God who is love does not depend upon our own subjective judgments. What it does mean, I think, is that I am not going to be able to find a list of rules that everybody must live by that allow me to avoid having to make some decisions that may later be proved wrong. At the same time, I believe that, when it comes to wanting to make judgments on other people on the basis of universal “laws of nature,” I need to be very careful to remember that both the teachers of the early church and modern scientists remind us that nature and its laws are often far more complex and unknowable than we would like them to be. This means that where I do have to make judgments about myself and other people upon which I base my actions, I had better make love the measure of those judgments and not nature. But Nick? What about him? I know that in all this discussion we have gotten away from the cat we left a few pages back at the front door, wishing the visitors to the Bondi household a restful evening and imposing on his human family the worst kind of nightmares. When I consider whether his behavior was natural or normal, I have to acknowledge that he was, indeed, an odd cat. Still, he was only expressing his genuine cat-nature when he sprayed in the house to mark his

territory. We couldn’t be mad at him or describe him to him or to ourselves as a bad cat. On the other hand, natural or not, we couldn’t live with Nick acting like this in the house, either. I took him back to the vet the next day, therefore, and explained our problem. She assured us that he was a wonderful cat and it was only the male hormone testosterone left in his system even after neutering that was causing his behavior. Oddly, her recommendation was a hefty shot of the female hormone estrogen, which might very well counter the remaining testosterone. Purring right through it, Nick received his shot that morning, then went home and slept most of the rest of the day. Since the shot was not repeatable without seriously jeopardizing Nick’s health, we held our collective breath for the next forty-eight hours while we waited to see what would happen. By the end of that time, Nick had still not sprayed and he never did again. We loved him, and it was a great relief, a grace, really, that he could live with us. I might even say it felt natural.

3--A Middle-aged Nick

All things considered, Nick adjusted pretty well to life as an indoor-outdoor cat, and we adjusted pretty well to him. Winter was a good time for Nick. He liked spending part of every day sleeping, lying with his head twisted to one side and his whiskers twitching, stretched full length on his back on top of the dark red comforter at the foot of our bed. His paws tucked up against his body and his throat and increasingly fat belly exposed to the world, he should have looked vulnerable, but somehow, he didn’t. Instead, even sleeping in such a ridiculous position, he exuded confidence in himself and in the people with whom he had cast his lot. Julius and Romana became accustomed to Nick and his comings and goings within a few days. The three cats never fought. In fact, I don’t even remember them engaging in the kind of hissing contests cats typically have to let each other know who is the top cat. Perhaps the lack of warfare was because Nick was so obviously the biggest and toughest of the lot even when he first came into the house in less than the peak of health. Maybe it simply had something to do with how some female cats share territory with males. Maybe the smaller cats were simply respectful, having been impressed by the battle scars on his dirty gray face and body and the fringes on his ears. Certainly, in the beginning the little black and white cat and the larger plush black one whose presence in the house had preceded Nick kept themselves out of his way. If, when he walked in, they were eating from their bowl in the kitchen, they moved back a few inches and let him eat first. If one of them was asleep in the sun on the table in the dining room and Nick jumped up beside her, she would immediately wake up, jump off, heavy-pawed, and go to another room. In fact, in the first few weeks whatever either of the other two were doing, whenever Nick would enter a room she had already occupied, she would walk out. Whether this was because Romana and Julius didn’t like him, or whether it was a result of a vaguer, more simple discomfort, I couldn’t say. I am sure Julius, at least, wasn’t afraid of him. Though Julius was always an emotionally needy animal--even whiny, I’m sorry to report--in some areas he (or she) was enormously brave. Julius had come to us eight or nine years before Nick from the people across the street. One of the Humane Societies in Atlanta has always had a policy of placing unadopted animals in foster homes rather than putting them to sleep as most

animal shelters do after a certain length of time. The Cooper’s house was one of those homes. As I seem to remember, Julius was not doing well with the other dogs and cats that were already living in the Cooper household. I can’t recall the problem; he was too small for it to have been a matter of him picking fights. One day the eldest Cooper daughter, Ben’s friend Elizabeth, appeared on our front porch carrying a big-eyed, big-eared, obviously part-Siamese little cat. Except for Ben, none of us had seen this creature before or even been aware of his existence. Elizabeth walked into the living room with the animal her family called “Crazy Owl” draped over her arm. The cat was in trouble at their house, she said, and he would have to find another home. Knowing that we had a soft spot for cats, she explained, she thought she would bring him over and see how he liked it with us. Richard and I were taken aback. Considering my allergy to cats, we hadn’t considered adding another cat to our household. As soon as he was set down on the floor, however, Anna and Ben, at least, were enchanted. The cat walked up to Anna, crouched down in front of her, looking her in the eye and engaging in the screeching sort of talk Siamese like to do. “Well, you’re a cute one,” she said, grinning. She stroked the little animal around the head and ears. The cat settled down and stared at her earnestly as he continued to explain to her why he should live with us. Then Ben picked him up off the floor, put him in his lap, and started talking baby talk to him. “You really are a cutie pie, aren’t you?” Ben said. The cat put his chin up and closed his eyes while Ben scratched him on the neck. “Yowl, screech, meow!” said the tiny cat. “Mama, Richard,” Anna implored over his caterwauling. “He has no place else to go. We’ve got to let him live with us!” Ben added, “What if he is put to sleep somewhere?” The cat, obviously understanding English very well, shut up and looked at us expectantly. Richard and I looked back at him, then briefly conferred. “All right,” Richard gave our reluctant answer, “but he’ll have to go back to the Coopers’ till we get home next week from our trip to Cincinnati.”

Though Richard and I believed that we had made an insane decision, Elizabeth and the children were delighted. Elizabeth picked up the little cat who, seeming to understand that he was going back, struggled to get down. Elizabeth walked toward the door with the wiggling animal. “Wait,” I said at the last minute. “Tell us why you call him ‘Crazy Owl.’” “Well,” answered Elizabeth, her back to us. The triangular-faced cat held firmly over her shoulder was all eyes and ears as he watched us closely. “He has big round eyes like an owl, and he is definitely crazy a lot of the time. I’m glad you’re taking him,” she added, knowing, I suspect, that we could change our minds in a moment. “He’s a good little animal.” The four of us watched her carry the new member of our household across the street, where he would stay until our return from our out-of-town trip. We went to bed that night, the adults uneasily anticipating the cat’s arrival the following week. None of us was prepared for the morning. We woke up early, very close to dawn, to the close-up sounds of what would soon become a familiar high-pitched, head-assaulting howling. “What on earth is that?” I asked Richard as I quickly dragged myself out of bed to look. I was prepared to find a cat in our front yard being attacked by wild dogs. “I’ll go see, too,” Richard answered, reaching for his bathrobe hung on the bedpost. Barefoot, he shook his head and blinked as we raced through the living room, flung open the front door, and rushed onto the porch. The sound level ratcheted up several decibels as we turned our eyes to the source of the noise on the brick stoop on the other side of the porch door. It was Julius, the smallest, most fragile-looking cat we had ever seen, looking up at us with great concentration as he tried to explain how, as we later learned, he had jumped out a two-story window at the Coopers’ and crossed the busy, fourlane highway to come back to what he somehow knew was now his home and his family. Julius turned out to be a very odd cat. He wasn’t crazy (we changed his name as soon as he came to us) but he certainly was a peculiar cat at the very least. Perhaps this was because of the confusion about identity from which Julius could hardly help suffering. This confusion was our fault and not his. In fact it was our confusion which we unthinkingly had thrust upon him. In spite of the way I have been referring to him, Julius was, in fact, originally a female, but we had given him a male cat’s name

(already changed from what the Coopers had been calling him) because we only discovered he was female after he lived with us for several months. We found out “he” was really a “she” when the vet called before the surgery to have him neutered. I had taken the little cat in to the vet the morning the job was to be done. Not knowing what was about to happen, Julius had been happy to go; though he was not as promiscuous as Nick, Julius liked new people and didn’t seem to be as disturbed by strange sights, smells, and other animals as many cats are. I was working at home at my desk several hours after turning Julius over to the office assistants, when my phone rang. “Mrs. Bondi?” a female voice at the other end asked. “This is Dr. Smith over at the Briarview Animal Clinic.” I picked up something peculiar in her voice, some caution or at the very least, exasperation. “Yes?” I said, alarmed. “This is Roberta Bondi. Is something wrong with Julius?” Dr. Smith didn’t bother with the niceties, or with reassuring me. “Maybe so, but probably not,” she answered. “Would you mind describing your cat?” “What do you mean, ‘describe my cat’?” I replied, a little irritated, myself. Clearly, she wasn’t prepared to tell me yet what this call was really about. Her voice became edgy as she asked again. “Look, can you just describe for me what your cat looks like?” I gave up. “Well,” I said, “he’s black with white feet and a white spot on his chest and face; he is obviously part Siamese, but he is really short-haired, very small and skinny, and he is bow-legged.” I thought some more. “Oh, yes. His ears and eyes are enormous, he talks all the time, and he has itchy skin,” I added. “Why do you ask? What is going on over there?” This time I insisted. There was a very long pause at the other end of the line, then the sound of a throat being cleared. “Mrs. Bondi,” Dr. Smith responded portentously at last, “I was concerned that I was about to do surgery on the wrong animal, but we appear to have the right one after all. I’m sorry to tell you that your cat is a female. I can’t castrate the cat, but I could spay her. I suppose you realize that it will cost a good deal more to do the surgery.” “A female?” I said stupidly. “But that’s not possible. He came from a foster home for the Humane Society. They’ve taken in a lot of animals over the years, so we believed them when they told us Julius was just a very small male.”

“People make mistakes, you know,” the vet said in reply. “Didn’t you ever look for yourselves?” “No,” I answered, feeling like a fool. “It doesn’t appear that we did.” There was another fairly long pause as both of us thought this over; then the vet asked, “Do you still want the surgery?” “Well, we can’t let him have kittens,” I said. On that embarrassing note, Julius, at least in theory, went from being male to being female to being neutered all on the same day. “At least in theory,” I say because, having lived with this cat as though it were male for as long as we had, we never afterwards made much of an attempt to get Julius’s actual gender right. After all, we had only known this animal as Julius. The cat even answered to it, as far as cats ever respond to their names. How could we learn to call him Julia? It beats me how we could have been so callous. The fact is, we believe in the importance of names in our household. l have always been convinced that a real name is an actual part of the thing or person who bears it. A name is something that seems to me, not just to describe what we think we see, but to describe what is really there. This is why a lot of women are rightfully unwilling to change their names to their husbands’ when they marry. How can they give up the name they’ve always borne as though it is as exchangeable as a piece of furniture or a suit of clothes? Even the Bible recognizes that names are about something real, and not just for people, either. Think, for example, of the story of wily old Moses trying to learn the name of God at the burning bush. Moses had escaped from Egypt. He was out in the wilderness one day, you remember, watching the flocks which were nibbling obliviously on whatever edible they could find, when all of a sudden he spied a weird sight. He saw a bush which looked as though it was on fire but it wasn’t burning up. Moses had pretty much just walked up to it to check it out when whoever or whatever was apparently lodged in it spoke to him. “Get your shoes off, Moses,” the being said to him from the midst of the mysteriously blazing pile of dry wood. “You’re on my holy territory; have a little respect for the God of your father and your father’s fathers.” How Moses got his shoes off, the text doesn’t tell us, but it does let us know that Moses had sense enough to be afraid and to cover his head. This, however, was not the end of the matter. “Look, Moses,” God said to him. “My people are down in Egypt as slaves, building the pharaoh’s pyramids. I intend to get them out of there and, after I

clear out its present inhabitants, I am going to give them another land of their own. What I want from you, now, is to go down and talk pharaoh into letting them go. After you do that, I expect you to lead my people out across the wilderness and bring them back here to me at this mountain.” Moses had been raised at court, and he didn’t like to be ordered around. “Come on,” he answered, “whoever you are! You’ve got to be kidding.” These were not his exact words, of course, only a paraphrase. “Why should I do that? You know I can’t do it; nobody could.” Moses had no intention of taking this seriously and risking his neck, but he couldn’t say that, so he used all the other arguments he could think of. “What about all those people you are about to displace in this land you want to give them?” he asked. “Anyway, why should they listen to me even if I were interested? I couldn’t possibly be your man.” He kept on, happy to let go of his pride to get himself off the hook. “You know I grew up as an Egyptian prince. Haven’t you heard how soft we all are? Who am I to be some kind of a superhero leader of a slave revolt?” “Oh, come on, yourself,” God answered impatiently from the bush, which was continuing to crackle away imperviously. The crackles began to sound to Moses like strange laughter. “Don’t be such a fool. This is about me and my intentions; of course, it isn’t about you. I’ll be right there with you; we’ll do it together.” Even taking account of his dislike of being bossed around, Moses, with his ambiguous Egyptian-Hebrew past, could hardly be blamed for his hesitation. Apart from the craziness of the whole idea, he had, indeed, grown up a prince but he had also become the murderer of a sadistic Egyptian task- master caught bullying the Israelite slaves while they worked. Those slaves Moses had defended hadn’t appreciated it, and nobody else had, either. Moses had had to leave Egypt on the run. Now he had a new home and a new family. Life in Midian wasn’t luxurious, but it was safe and, in its own way, quiet. He could see for himself that if he were to find a way to resist the coercion of this unfamiliar but exuberantly high-pressure God, he would have to come up with a fool-proof excuse. He thought he had one. Moses had already noticed that, while this bush-talking god had freely told Moses that he wasn’t a stranger to him (“I am the god of your fathers”) he hadn’t told Moses what his actual name was, and apparently he didn’t intend to. This was because in those days it was believed that knowing a person or a god’s name gave you real power over the one named. On the surface, this is an odd idea, but not such a primitive one as it might seem. Think how a child or a teenager can be completely undone by the names her classmates call her on the playground, not to mention how warring spouses destroy each other by the hateful names they use on each other. I’m enraged when a middle-aged man who doesn’t like what I’m saying calls me “honey,” because I know that he is calling me that to put me in my place. On the other

hand, I settle right down in a coffee shop when a waitress calls me by the same name. The names we use matter for good as well as for ill, sometimes making claims on us that we can’t refuse: “Mama,” one of my grown children may tell me, “I need help,” and help, I must; it goes with the name. It shouldn’t be so far from our imagination to understand, then, why Moses might think that God would be so unwilling to give up God’s name that Moses would be off the hook. It had to be clear to Moses that if God would tell Moses God’s name, Moses would be in a position to have some real power over God. Obviously, Moses had this unnamed God exactly where he wanted--or so he thought. “Well,” said Moses, therefore, his voice no doubt dripping regret, “what you are asking of me might sound workable to you, but I could hardly be expected to give those slaves your message if I can’t even tell them the name of the one who sent me, could I?” Moses hid his smirk behind his hand while God, who had always been smarter than Moses, walked right through the trap, just as over and over we see Jesus walk through all those traps in the Gospels set by the super-religious, pious defenders of the public’s morals. It no more worked for Moses to give God what appeared to be the only two possible, logical choices than it did for Jesus’ opponents. It never works. Every time Jesus finds the third, obvious, alternative-which is always the right one--and walks right through the trap and out the other side. “Healing on the Sabbath?” says Jesus. “Yes, of course. But tell me what you think. Is humanity made for the Sabbath, or the Sabbath for humanity?” God in the burning bush does the same thing with respect to God’s name. “My name?” says God, “I already told you who I am; I am the god of your ancestors. As for more name than this, if the slaves insist on your telling them who sent you, and you have to tell them something, you can just tell them this: ‘I Am the One Who Is’ sent me.” We can only hope that, whatever his reasons, Moses learned something that day from trying to name God. The names we give to people and things are important-why else wouldn’t God give God’s name?--but they are also slippery. They describe and label what really is, but they don’t do it in any straightforward way, like a mirror reflects a face. As they are humanly given, names attach themselves to what is there and identify it, telling us how to relate to it. The names we use don’t just roll off the surface of children, adults, God, or animals. Don’t think for a moment that the rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me” is true. Names can kill us. Yes, we are who we are as God made us, but who we are is also shaped and limited by the way in which we are perceived and defined. The things we are called wound us or build

us up; they form the three-dimensional picture of ourselves that we live into or up to. They shape our relationships to the people who name us, too--including to ourselves. I wish I didn’t remember as well as I do what I felt like in the 1950s and 1960s when I read in women’s magazines that “real” women could only be happy when they could “submit themselves” to the men who chose to marry them, that men were “threatened” by women who beat them at sports and were “emasculated” by women who were as intelligent as they were. No wonder we Christians must be careful how we name ourselves to God in our prayer. The shame that fills us when we name our character “lazy” or “bad” makes us too miserable around God to want to be in God’s presence. Conversely, the self-satisfaction that floods us when we name ourselves “more righteous than this tax-collector here” throws up a wall between God and us that will not let us climb over it. What do we do to our relationship with God when we take our healthy children, our intelligence, or our relative wealth as signs of God’s favor and name ourselves “blessed” because of our own hard work? What about the God who names and values people in ways contrary to our human valuing? We are blinded by such naming, so that we cannot see the God whom scripture describes as loving the poor, the resident alien, or the helpless. As for changing names, there is no getting around the fact that it is a risky business to insist on believing that, just because a person, animal, or thing bears a name that we can hardly imagine changing, our perception of unchangeableness is a reflection of reality itself. This is why, when we learned that Julius was actually female, we should have renamed Julius “Julia,” in spite of our natural inclination to stick to the familiar. Why should the little cat, and not we, have had to pay the price for what was, after all, our inability to look, literally, at what was in front of us? The gender confusion wasn’t Julius’s fault. Why should we have insisted on, not just naming her, but continuing to think of her as one thing when she was actually another? Why couldn’t we let her be who she really was? Our stubbornness over Julius’s name reminds me of some of my students’ unwillingness to try not just naming God as “mother” as well as “father”; they can’t even bring themselves to speak of “humanity” rather than “mankind.” Why won’t we try new names? Generally, not so much for nefarious reasons, but just because our gut tells us wrongly that the solidity of the very ground under our feet depends upon its comfortable familiarity. But the gospel, as I read it, is not about living together in a safe, familiar, and predictable world, and neither is the story of Moses. Indeed, just the opposite. Scripture, old and new, calls us into a new creation where nothing follows the patterns we take for granted. Entering the new creation entails learning to live with the often uncomfortable mystery of grace. Poor Julius, living with people like us. No wonder the cat seemed to be confused.

Whatever Julius’s problems, there appeared to be nothing confused about Nick, however, those first few months he came into our household. Nick was a happy animal. As the time passed he continued to settle in. He slept a lot in the house, as all domestic cats do. He spent a lot of time in laps, lying on his back with his eyes shut, his ratty gray belly exposed, and his paws in the air. He was a promiscuous lover of visitors, as benevolently blind in his indiscriminate affection of anyone who came in the door as God. He awoke from his naps with huge yawns and great head-down, front-paws-forward, hind-end-in-the-air stretches. He blinked his yellow eyes and continued to purr most of the time he was awake. Outdoors, Nick was a thorough and competent hunter who, unlike domestic cats who had never had to find their own food, actually ate what he caught. He would crouch for hours in the ivy in wait for a rustling chipmunk, mouse, or vole, and he generally came back with something. He was never much interested in the myriad of birds in our yard, but during the years he lived with us the chipmunk population in our front and back yards was almost decimated. I would often look up from my work on the front porch to see him trotting by in the grass below, a dazed striped chipmunk hanging from his mouth. For a long time I would yell at him to try to make him drop his prey but it never did much good. Nick didn’t drop what he caught. After a while Nick began to leave us offerings from his hunt, however; from early spring on, often two or three reddish brown tails a day would appear stretched out neatly, parallel to the back door outside Richard’s study. Why did Nick hunt? Why does any cat hunt? Because it is the way God made them, that’s why. Home-loving as he was, Nick was not created simply to be the companion of a middle-aged woman. Domestic animals may, indeed, appear to be domestic, but they are also animals who have their own calling, their own covenant with their creator. Cats are alien beings, very different from us; the inescapableness of this mystery is one of the great advantages of living with cats to people like us who are always forgetting who we are as we try to make over the world in our own image. I still recall Nick’s behavior the day my Auntie Ree decided that because every woman needed a fur, she would buy me a badly-shedding, rather ratty old gray fox fur jacket in a garage sale. She truly surprised me with the jacket as I was leaving at the end of visiting her one afternoon in January at her retirement home. It was a cold day, and as usually happens in Atlanta’s fairly clement clime, I had gone out without a coat. She was an old-fashioned, very stylish, worldly, and at the same time surprisingly innocent woman, and she used to love to do things for me. She was as proud of herself as she produced that coat as a little child would have been to give her mother a present for which she had saved her allowance for six months.

When she brought out that coat, however, my own feelings were not so unmixed. I loved my aunt extravagantly and, as I always was, I was deeply touched by the expression of her love for me, her grown-up niece, although the fur was entirely worn on the cuffs and coming out in big clumps on the arms and front. Of course I thanked her for her gift. At the same time, as I was trying on the coat for her, I couldn’t help wondering guiltily about the cats’ reactions to it once I brought it home. “How will I explain this thing to Julius, Romana, and Nick?” I asked myself. Hooking the hooks that went up the front, I tried to disguise my anxiety. “What will they suppose it is made out of? I’m sure they can’t distinguish one kind of fur from another. Will they imagine I have killed other cats to make it?” Of course, this was sentimental anthropomorphizing in the worst way, and I should never have fallen into that trap. If they think at all, cats surely don’t think like human beings. I nevertheless left my aunt’s late that afternoon and forgot about my cat worries as I drove home from Northeast Atlanta in the horrendous expressway traffic that clogs our city from four o’clock until seven or so every weeknight. It was my turn to cook, and I had planned something for supper a bit more complicated than usual. I pulled into the garage and rushed through the back door. I was carrying in the coat, but was unprepared until after dinner to deal with the heavy garment, which meanwhile had shed so badly in the car that it was amazing it was not entirely bald. I knew I couldn’t put it in the closet, but since I didn’t have the time or the brain at the moment to figure out what to do with it, I hung it on the outside of the closet door in our bedroom. Then I went into the kitchen, washed my hands, began cooking, and forgot about it. It was only after a half hour or so that I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the cats since I came home. Since cats like to be where food is being prepared (they enjoy the company, and cooking is always interesting to them) this was unusual enough to warrant investigation. I finished chopping whatever vegetable it was that I was cutting up into little pieces, washed my hands again in the kitchen sink, dried them on my apron, and, foreboding in my heart, went looking for them in their usual favorite spots. None was curled up on the couch in the living room; none was on the porch in the lawn furniture. Nobody was asleep on a dining room chair pushed into the table, and not one was on Ben’s bed or under the bed in the guest room. There were no cats in the bathtub, and none in the sink. Even the warm computer in my study was without a cat. I had originally entered the house with the coat through Richard’s study door and our bedroom. Because there had been no visible cats in either room when I

came in, I had put off looking there until last. Now, however, having determined that the cats were not in plain sight anywhere else, I returned to the bedroom. That, of course, is where they were. As I reached the door of our bedroom I began to pick up a peculiar noise, a bit like the whirring of a helicopter in the distance, a bit like the sound of a sewing machine in a neighbor’s house as it is heard from the street. It wasn’t a loud noise, but it was powerful. It was a vibration and a hum. Absently, I stepped through the bedroom door, still calling the cats as I looked around, wondering what the funny sound was. On the other side of the door I found its source. Julius, Romana, and Nick had positioned themselves in a row underneath the hanging jacket. All three of them were sitting on their haunches staring up at it while they purred. As I entered the room, three pointed chins were lowered in unison, three heads turned, and three intense pairs of eyes stared at me meaningfully. Other than that, not one cat budged. The purring intensified to the level of frenzy. They continued their frenetic purring and their intense stares as I began to walk over to them. What are they saying? I wondered guiltily as I thought of the dead foxes in the coat. It was obvious that the cats were speaking to me, but what was it they were trying to tell me? I stood there for a few moments pondering before I remembered the collection of chipmunk tails laid out neatly parallel to the back door they had left for us over the preceding months, but once I did, I understood: my cats appeared to believe that the disgusting, gray, shedding coat they were looking at was the carcass of an actual dead animal I had brought home to show them. The cats were pleased with me. “At last,” they were trying to tell me, “after all our hard work, instruction, and hopes for you, you’ve finally learned how to hunt for yourself. Look at this mess you’ve made! Good job! You’ve left only fur and skin; whatever it was, you’ve eaten it all! At last you’re grown up and self-sufficient. Congratulations!” “Thank you very much,” I replied politely once I understood. What else could I say? Then, musing on cats, humans, the various perspectives from which we see life, and in the light of all that, the extreme oddity of the ordinary world we live in, I returned to work in the kitchen. Speaking of perspective, whatever the combined cats might have considered their household responsibilities to be in those days, as I experienced it, Nick’s best work was as companion in my newly self-acknowledged middle age. Aging was not always an easy business for me then, and I needed help badly. Though I thought of myself as lazy, as I always do, in fact, I was working harder at teaching, writing, and traveling for speaking engagements than my body would tolerate. My aunt was in terrible health and in even more terrible financial trouble. My father, far away in Connecticut, had emphysema, which was killing him. It is true that our children were mostly grown, and that made things a little easier. At

the same time, though I was the mother of one ordinarily moody but peaceful and intelligent teenager who was still at home, our other child was an intensely creative older adolescent whose life was a series of battering and often very dangerous storms. My concern for her future as well as her present was a heavy boot continually grinding into my chest and crushing my ribs. It wasn’t just that suddenly I had begun to feel middle-aged: I felt like an old woman, worn, lumpy, gray, and strung out. I was so tired and stressed that I felt as though I was on the point of dying of a heart attack or stroke right on the street. Richard, on the other hand, being chronologically ten years my junior and of a much more relaxed disposition, appeared to me to be as young and gorgeous as he had ever been. Where my hair was turning gray, his was still black and curly; where I was saggy, he was firm; where he was energetic and lighthearted, I was more often than not weighted down with mental and physical exhaustion. The music he listened to left me dazed and confused, and when he began to speak of computer software and hardware, I didn’t have a clue what he meant. Though our age difference had never before seemed to bother Richard in the slightest, I began to wonder if now he were secretly beginning to regret being married to the baggy-eyed old woman I met every morning in the mirror. It wasn’t an easy time in my life. I had felt old before, but never like this. It was as though Richard, at least, was staying in exactly the same point of youthfulness he had been in when I, like a deranged adolescent, had first fallen in love with him. I felt as though I were heartlessly being pulled away from him by the processes of my own life. I had been plunked down in a small, untrustworthy boat and set adrift on an icy ocean. I just couldn’t get my bearings. Richard, baffled and claiming that I looked and seemed to him to be exactly as I had always been, professed not to have a clue what I meant when I tried to talk about how I felt. His very bafflement only added to my sense of being completely, inconsolably, cosmically alone. Then, into my cosmic loneliness came scarred, saggy, smelly old Nick to keep me company. While I spent hours a day writing all by myself at the computer in my study, middle-aged Nick spent those same hours on the corner of my desk, sitting up on his haunches, staring at me intently and intelligently. For whole mornings and afternoons, Nick sat there with his eyes fixed matter-of-factly on my face, his shredded ears cocked forward and his increasingly shaggy gray belly drooping over his back paws. Sometimes he sunk down on the job to sleep on watch, as is the way with cats, curled up comfortingly against the warm parts of the computer where I was at work. Reliably good-tempered and funny looking, he was always with me. When I left my study to go into the kitchen to cook or wash the dishes he followed me and sat companionably in the middle of the white linoleum where he could participate

in whatever was going on. The main thing that happened were our ongoing conversations. Chopping, washing, stirring, frying, I would talk to him about the sorts of things only intelligent people of about our age liked to discuss--the writing of books, what the hunting of chipmunks was like that year, the lost hopes and bodies of our youth, other places we had lived, people and animals we had known, fur and clothes, and the passage of the seasons of nature as they corresponded with the seasons of our lives. As anthropomorphizing as it sounds, though we were two different species, to me it was even more significant that we were in significant ways two of a kind, two middle-aged creatures who were somehow alive and comfortable with each other. We related to each other as equals in experience. Whatever it was he felt, with Nick I didn’t feel alone; with him I didn’t have to understand the words or like the loud, undifferentiated music Richard and the children enjoyed. I didn’t have to worry whether Richard would someday notice and be repulsed by the disparity between his beauty and my countenance. I liked Nick’s chewed-up look; I thought it gave him character and distinction, and he helped me want to think of the wear and tear that had happened to me in the same way. With Nick I could indulge in at least imaginary conversations on events from a past that had taken place before, metaphorically and sometimes even literally speaking, the rest of my nearest and dearest were even born. In short, I could relax with Nick without always having to apologize in my head to my family for my own imagined deficiencies of aging. For the rest of the spring, amidst my well justified anxieties for my daughter and my aunt and my not at all well justified anxieties over Richard, time spent with Nick was energizing and comforting. Once school was out for the year, the comfort continued, too, at least right through the early part of the summer. During those gorgeous warm and sunny days when he wasn’t accompanying my writing or helping in the kitchen, Nick spent a lot of his time in the house, rolled over on his back, belly up and sleeping contentedly on the couch, the floor, or a family member’s bed. Awake, he purred, he lap-sat, and he entertained guests. Mornings, he would jump on the bed and kiss me on the nose with a lick of his pink tongue as he dragged his tuna fish-flavored cat food coated whiskers across my cheeks and mouth. Once it was warm, I would do my reading in the afternoon on the screened-in porch at the front of the house. Sometimes Nick would lie beside me, stretched out full-length on the old wooden bench that Richard’s father had once used for gardening. At other times Nick lay outside in the sun on the patio by the driveway or did his own solitary work, which primarily was hunting chipmunks. At breakfast I would glance out the dining room windows and see him poised as still as a tattered gray statue, ready to pounce on an unwary striped body in the ivy under the birdfeeders. Often in the evenings, on the porch, I would look up from my

book as I read about the lives of the vegetarian holy men of the fourth-century Egyptian desert and see him trotting obliviously along across the front yard, a small body dangling from his mouth, as though the whole event were as peaceful and ordinary to him as a trip to the grocery store is to me--except, of course, that what was happening to the animal whose life was just coming to an end in Nick’s jaws was not ordinary at all. Then, all at once, before I had a chance to sort out the difference between my gloomy feelings and my contrary theological reflections on aging, to mull over the contrast between what my secular culture told me about what it meant to be old, and what my ancient Christian teachers had to say about it, everything with Nick changed. It began to happen when spring turned into summer. Ordinarily, apart from the citywide allergies to ground mold, daffodils, azaleas, dogwood, pine, and oak pollen we all suffer, our long spring in Atlanta is delightful. For two or three months, sneezing and wiping our eyes, we drive the roads under an ever varying cloud of pink and white fruit trees and dogwoods, and walk the sidewalks between clumps of dazzling daffodils, crocuses, tulips and hyacinths, and mounds of white, pink, or red azaleas. By the first of July when Nature has turned a uniform green and the blue sky of sunny days take on the grayish green haze of air pollution, pleasure begins to give way to something closer to a stunned lethargy. It seems only right, therefore, that it was the beginning of July of Nick’s first year with us that he began his descent into what I sometimes think of as his own sort of mental illness. The first warning sign of his troubles came sometime in June; the fur on his belly started falling out. As I said earlier, when Nick had first arrived at our house he had not only been gashed, scratched, and punctured; he also had been nearly completely hairless. Then, as time passed, and his wounds healed and turned to scars, we watched his scruffy gray pelt grow in on his back, chest, sides, head, and tail. Several months later, we took this out. However, his naked pink belly was covered over still only by a very thin fuzz. It was not until the middle of January, after Nick had spent many contented, lazy hours keeping me company in my study and sleeping on his back on the clean furniture of the living room that the fur began to come back. Though we looked for it anxiously, it was only in the following spring that it appeared, but once it did, it soon became positively shaggy, the hair thicker, softer, and more luminously gray, in fact, than it was on his sides. At first, though we were sorry to see his stomach going bald again, we didn’t really worry about the re-emergence of his pink skin. It was excruciatingly hot that year, and cats shed in the heat. He was shedding all over, anyway, so it didn’t seem surprising that he would lose his thickest fur.

I would like to be able to say that we noticed him changing habits, becoming restless, say, or sleeping more, or getting moody, or being more nocturnal. He may very well have exhibited one or more of these symptoms of distress, but I am ashamed to admit that if he did, being without air-conditioning and therefore too hot ourselves, we didn’t notice. What I do remember is that one day we woke up to find that the very domestic Nick had apparently turned feral in the night. Ordinarily our familiar cat would wake up slowly, stretch and yawn his huge yawn, lope to his breakfast bowl in the kitchen for a bite to eat, and finally jump up on our bed for some socializing with his human companions before taking a turn around the neighborhood. Not that day. That morning Nick had no interest in his ordinary routine. He didn’t want cat food or water, and he didn’t want our company. Instead, altogether ignoring us, he stood at the back door and stared grimly at the doorknob. Finally, after we understood that he wasn’t about to eat or socialize, we opened it and let him out. From that day forward, forever after, the everyday comfort of our familiar, takenfor-granted life together was over. Even after several months had passed and Nick seemed to revert once more to the loving, sociable cat who had first come to us, nothing was the same. By then, it had become apparent to us that we no more were able to understand and control our cat than Moses had been able to understand and control his God. The familiar God of his ancestors was inaccessible and unnamable to Moses. The cat we thought we’d known, who, by virtue of being a living being, reflected the being of God, was now inaccessible and unnamable to us.

4--Nick in the Wilderness

We had no idea what was coming that morning when Nick went out the back door without his breakfast. It wasn’t long, however, before it was obvious that something was really wrong. Watching from the back windows, we could see that he had forgotten or chosen to abandon his usual outdoor patterns as he had those in the house. He appeared to have no interest in going to his favorite places on the brick by the patio under the dining room windows. The day before, he would never have failed to hunt for an unsuspecting and vulnerable groundfeeding bird, pecking around in the ivy for seed another bird might have dropped at Richard’s feeders. Now Nick was no longer interested in the formerly everfascinating chipmunk holes liberally scattered throughout our yard, which had provided him in the past with an endless supply of fat and satisfyingly easy prey. Nor was he moved in the slightest by the plump gray squirrels who, somehow sensing their unexpected safety, bounded under his nose in the underbrush, only to rush up the nearest tree and chatter at him from a branch above his head. Nick ignored the lot of them. All he seemed to want to do was to lie down in the driveway with his feet tucked under him and his back to the garage and stare at Elizabeth’s house across the street. Off and on, that first day we watched him anxiously. We couldn’t think of what might be wrong with him or whether, for that matter, we were simply imagining problems that weren’t really there. After all, we had no air-conditioning in our nice but old house. It was too hot and sticky for words, and though Richard’s Sicilian blood made him impervious to heat, I myself was badly out of sorts. At that point, Nick didn’t appear to be ill; at least he wasn’t acting like our other cats when they got sick. Telling myself that Nick was probably just too hot and bored to eat in the house, sometime in midmorning I tried to take him a bowl of water and a dish of his favorite smelly tuna catfood. I approached him cautiously in the driveway and set my offerings in his line of vision a foot or so from his head. “Hello, Nick,” I said as I put them down. I was pretending to myself that if I could be matter-of-fact about what was happening to him, he would be, too. Then we could go back to a less scary normal. “I brought you a little something,” I said cheerfully, “in case you’re hungry.” Whatever it was that was the problem, Nick was not about to be beguiled by me. He refused to look at me or acknowledge my presence, or the food and water I offered, in any way whatsoever. Though I still am not certain how he did it without

so much as moving his head, he managed to exude an atmosphere around him of cold, nonnegotiable rage. I realize of course, that here, when I speak of Nick’s anger, you may very well suspect I am stepping with both feet into the trap of anthropomorphizing the mind of what was, after all, only a domestic cat; surely, a cat cannot possibly feel human emotions. I would agree with you, too, if, for one minute, I had ever really attributed to Nick not only feelings, but the full set of thoughts accompanying those feelings, which he might have had if he were reacting like a particular human being who was mad at us about something. This kind of anthropomorphizing I didn’t do--or at least, I tried not to do it. Still, Nick had feelings. It is an inescapable fact for anyone who has lived with a cat or a dog, that these so-called domestic animals do have a whole range of genuine emotional responses to people, to each other, and to the world around them. True, we can almost certainly assume that whatever they are feeling, it is not like human feeling, nor is it accompanied by anything much like human reflection on those feelings. I wouldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams, for example, that a dog who is kicked responds by consciously thinking about it, thereby making a conscious, thought-out response to the injury based on analogous past or imagined future mistreatment. But emotions? Yes, indeed. Cats are notorious not only for their anger and jealousy, but for their ability to maintain a grudge or suffer from hurt feelings for a very long time. Cinnamon, the smart and very friendly Siamese cat who belonged to Richard when we were married, would be so put out when we left her alone overnight that she would refuse to look at us or allow us to pet her for the first twenty-four hours after we had come home. Then there was Pansy, the beautiful soft calico who later lived with us for several years. When she was angry because I had left her in the house all day, Pansy would tap her paw against a cup or vase until it fell off a shelf onto the floor and shattered, then stand on the edge of the shelf and look at the wreckage with interested satisfaction. If that didn’t seem to her to get our attention, she would go and urinate on the chair where I usually sat in my study when I did my work at home. It isn’t just our own cats that behave this way, either. If you put your mind to it, you can come up with examples like these, yourself. Take Leto, our son Ben’s bushy Maine Coon cat. Leto was so upset when Ben brought home a younger female to keep Leto company while Ben was at work that the cuddly Leto refused to sleep any longer on Ben’s bed or to sit on his lap. Leto also lost most of his thick, long fur, including the tufts on his ears and the fluff on his tail. It was more than a year before the cat forgave Ben, relaxed enough for his fur to grow back, and resumed his former habits.

Taking all this into account, therefore, I declare without any apology whatsoever, that as far as I can judge, when Nick left the house, lay down in the driveway, and refused to eat, it was perfectly logical to assume that he was mad. Nothing we did helped. Certainly, it seemed to do his mood no good when he slept hunched down on the driveway the first two nights after all this began. We only made it worse on the third night by deciding to bring him into the house after dark, but what else could we do? His strange, inert behavior was making him too vulnerable to marauding dogs and opportunistically territorial neighborhood cats. Though he didn’t scratch or bite, he struggled and writhed to be set down when Richard picked him up and carried him inside. Nick no longer could bear to be shut up in the large space in which he had lived so happily for a year with people with whom he now wanted nothing to do. We were shocked to get up the next morning to find that he was gone. Sometime in the night he must have wriggled through the barely opened window in the dining room and hurled himself repeatedly against the metal screen until he was able to bend out the aluminum frame, push up one of the latches, and escape. Rushing out to look for him and half expecting him to be gone entirely, we found him in his now-accustomed spot on the driveway. Not that finding him did us any good, and probably not him, either. He continued to ignore us pointedly. We kept setting out food and water for him, which he left untouched. He lost weight quickly. He had been barely more than a skeleton when he had first arrived less than a year before; over the winter he had bulked up to eighteen pounds. By the end of that first week in the driveway he must have lost a third or more of his body weight, enough to change the apparent shape of his head as well as his body. Having watched him continuously the whole time, I was not aware of this until my friend Anne, who up till now had not taken what was going on seriously, drove up the driveway one day. Before she got out of the car she spotted him crouched unmoving on the pavement. “Who is this strange cat you’ve got here?” she asked me through the window. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken in another stray?” “Oh, that’s Nick,” I said as I leaned against the door to talk to her. “He just isn’t acting like himself these days.” “Nick?” she said. She got out of the car and sat down beside him to examine him more closely. She put her hand on his scruffy head. The cat ignored her. “That can’t be Nick,” she said. “This cat is obviously mad and everybody knows that Nick is always friendly. Besides, Nick has a round face like a teddy bear. This cat has a wedge-shaped head and a pointed chin like a Siamese.”

Startled, I saw that she was right. The cat crouched down before me didn’t even look like the old Nick. For an instant as I knelt for a closer examination, I wondered if our familiar Nick had somehow been kidnapped by fairies and a changeling cat left in his place. The cat, of course, wasn’t a changeling. Though his appearance was completely baffling, it was, indeed, Nick. “See here, Anne,” I said to her, bending over him. “Look at his ears. This has to be Nick. What other cat in the world has a fringe on one ear and what looks like a hole for a pierced earring in the other?” “You’re right!” she replied, “it’s got to be him.” Together, we got back up and stood there silently for a few minutes contemplating the strange unpredictability of life in the everyday world we shared. Then, without another word, we went into the house and talked about something else. Things did not improve with Nick as time passed, and one scorching summer day followed the next. Though he must at least have being lapping up a little water from somewhere--what else would have kept him from dying?--Nick continued to refuse to eat or drink what we put out for him. He continued to get skinnier and skinnier and scruffier and scruffier. He did, however, begin to get up off the driveway and roam the neighborhood for a few hours a day. What he was doing on these trips away, I could never fully determine. Once I caught a glimpse of him in the distance at the corner of the block on which we live. He appeared to be very focused on something before him as he slunk along through the bushes, his head down and his ears back. Another time, I found him sitting on a wall by the road, an enigmatic expression on his face, a block or two in the other direction. This time, he didn’t seem to recognize me. When I spoke to him, he glanced at me briefly, then jumped down onto the grass behind him and ambled away. Apparently, he was cutting his ties to us. It was a week or two later that I saw him on the wall on a Sunday afternoon. Richard and I were sitting on the front porch, drinking cold drinks and reading the weekend papers, when the phone rang. Annoyed, I threw down my part of the paper as I went back into the house to answer it. “Hello, is this Mrs. Bondi?” a strange female voice asked when I picked it up in the kitchen. “Yes it is,” I answered grumpily. It had been a hard few days, and I was accustomed to more calls than any human being ought to have to tolerate from

people trying to sell me aluminum siding for our brick house, or to press one more unwanted credit card into my rejecting hand. I assumed that this was one of those calls. It wasn’t. “Well, if you are Mrs. Bondi, then I think we have your cat,” the woman at the other end of the phone replied. “He’s come a long way and he is so sweet, I know you want to have him back.” “Wait a second,” I answered. “Do you mean that Nick is at your house and you think he is sweet? The cat you have there is sweet? Are you sure we’re talking about Nick?” “That’s what his tag says,” the chirpy voice on the other end of the phone answered. “That’s how I got your telephone number. If you want him back, let me tell you where we live.” Her house was at least two or three miles away, across more than one extremely busy intersection. Stunned, I wrote down her address, then went to the porch to give the news to Richard. My baffled husband abandoned his share of the paper and went to the basement to get the carrier in which we take the cats to the vet. He tossed it into the back of the van as we climbed into the front seat. We arrived at the house of Nick’s good Samaritans a few moments later and walked up the flagstone path to the well tended front door. A small, well-dressed elderly man with a gray fringe around the outside of his head was waiting for us. “Come in, come in,” he said, straightening his back as he pushed a metal-rimmed pair of reading glasses to the bridge of his nose. “We’re glad we could get a hold of you. Your cat is a real prince. He’s sitting in my wife’s lap, or she would have come to the door herself.” We were more than grateful for being called, but Nick in his present frame of mind, a prince? As we went over the threshold, Richard and I glanced at each other and raised our eyebrows. Perhaps there had been a mix-up with tags; this couldn’t otherwise be our cat. We followed the man through his front hall and into the living room beyond it. There, his wife, as large, soft, and shapeless as her husband was small, was sitting on a flowered sofa. She was talking baby talk as she scratched the belly of a big gray cat who was draped across her lap. It was Nick, all right. His distinctive, well-chewed ears were plainly visible as he looked into her face adoringly. “What a sweet cat you have,” the lady said to us, looking at him all the while as she talked to us. “You must have been worried sick about him.”

In spite of our constant worry for him, the cat had not so much as glanced at us for a very long time. All of a sudden as she continued to talk, the dopey expression on his face and his loud purring filled me with fury. After months of companionship, all those days on the corner of my desk, all those conversations from the kitchen floor, naps on our bed, and yes, vet bills, Nick was ready to move in with someone else as though he’d never seen us before in his life! How could he be so unfaithful! Whatever did he think he was doing? I was too proud, of course, to tell any of this to these polite and helpful strangers who were obviously prepared to take him off our hands should we choose to leave him with them. How could I say these things? I felt like a woman who has just been the last to find out what all her neighbors had known for years--that her adored husband habitually ran around on her. This goofy, purring cat made me feel like a fool. Richard, as embarrassed as I, couldn’t think of what to say to her either. Hoping that she wouldn’t notice our peculiar reaction, I finally stuttered out something ambiguous like, “Thank you so much. We’re glad you called; we simply haven’t known what to do about him.” After a bit more uncomfortable conversation, we packed Nick up and took him home. A few moments later we brought the carrier into our kitchen, all the while telling him how worried we’d been about him and how glad we were he was home, where he clearly did not wish to be. As soon as we let him out of the box, he ran to the back door and clawed the knob to be let out. He still hadn’t eaten from his usual dish, and he still refused to look at us. Though we talked soothingly to him and tried to scratch behind his ears in the old way, he only cringed away from our hands as though he had experienced nothing but hurt from them. Of course we let him go on out; there seemed to be no point to anything else. We watched from the doorway as he walked disdainfully to the spot in the driveway in which we had last seen him crouched, paws under him, staring at the Coopers’ house across the street. The next morning he was gone. Elizabeth Cooper called later in the morning to announce that he had taken up residence in exactly the same position on their front lawn under the camper top for the family truck: he was hunkered down on his four feet, whiskers back, and ears up as his yellow eyes implacably surveyed the passing world through the narrow opening of the camper top. The sun was already unbearably hot as it beat down on the metal and glass hut into which Nick had retreated. As the day went on, we knew the temperature in that enclosed space could only rise higher and higher. He was still refusing food and drink. As I look back on it, I am still surprised that, at this point, we didn’t pick Nick up bodily and take him to the vet. When Cinnamon, the beautiful Siamese who had

come with Richard when we got married, had gotten ready to die, she wedged herself between the living room mantel and the tall cabinet next to it. She sat there in exactly the same pose that Nick was taking up outside, and she, too, had been unwilling, or more likely in her case, unable to turn her head either to look at or acknowledge us and the other two anxious cats who crouched beside her, keeping watch. We should have seen that there was something dreadfully wrong with Nick which needed real attention; it was clear to anybody who knew him that he was not acting remotely like a healthy cat. This is so clear in hindsight, in fact, that it seems important to reflect on why I, at least, couldn’t see it. Why on earth did it never even occur to me that something was truly the matter? There are some obvious surface reasons; there always are. To begin, Nick wasn’t acting like a sick cat all of the time. Yes, he did spend many hours sitting on our driveway and then under the camper top over at Elizabeth’s in exactly the same immobile state as the dying Cinnamon. Unlike Cinnamon, however, who couldn’t move or respond to us, when we had tried to keep Nick in the house overnight, he had been able to summon up a huge amount of strength and energy--enough for him to break out the screen from the dining room window and make his daring escape back onto the driveway. Cats, furthermore, do get in bad, even spiteful, moods. It is fairly easy to make them mad or jealous or wound their pride or sense of entitlement. I think now of Rolly, the nice, apparently easy-going gray and white cat from next door. Two years ago Rolly could hardly wait to come in the house when I got home from school every day. He would happily jump on our bed, put his paws on my shoulders and wait for me to pick him up. He was so clingy we needed to throw him out every night as we gave him a speech on his obligations to the people with whom he nominally belonged. From the day our present cat, Sophie, moved in, however, Rolly has adamantly refused to come in the house or let me pick him up at all. He was mad and his pride wounded from that first week right before Christmas a year and a half ago, and he is still mad no matter what kind of coaxing or sweet talk I give him. Then, there was Nick’s flight to the elderly couple’s house. Nick didn’t appear to be at all sick when we went that summer afternoon to pick him up. Indeed, he acted as though he had always lived with them. Though he had spent a year with us sitting in our laps, sleeping by my computer, and conversing with me in the kitchen, he didn’t even acknowledge we were there. Nick was a cat, for sure, and whatever else we can say about cats, they did not and never will think like human beings, feel like human beings, or love like human beings, and we never forgot this for a moment. Nevertheless, Richard and I, and Benjamin, too, had grown to love Nick over the previous year and, given the way he had joined our household, it was not unreasonable on our part

to assume that he loved us in his own catlike way in return. Thus, when he went someplace else and treated me like a stranger, I felt hurt, rejected, panicky, and mentally confused as I would have if someone close to me acted this way. This gets me to what I suspect were the two deeper and more painful reasons I couldn’t acknowledge how bad things were with Nick. First, I don’t ever take rejection from anyone very well; no matter the reason for it, I always tend to assume that I have been cast off for something I’ve done or failed to do. Then, having already decided that the rejection is my own fault, I decide that I must be the one to fix what I imagine I’ve done wrong. In Nick’s case, I reacted to what felt like his rejecting anger as I would have if he had been a human being. I blamed myself for his rejection. Then, since in my heart I figured I deserved what he was dishing out to me, I also figured it was up to me to make everything all right again. Was this craziness on my part? At one level, no. As I have just illustrated, cats are great pouters, grudge-holders, and revenge takers. At another level for me to believe automatically that I was to blame for Nick’s behavior was a kind of insanity. It was, however, an insanity bred into me by my culture. Most Southern women, and plenty of men, too, have been trained to blame themselves when a house burns down in Akron, Ohio. As a class, we’re good at this. I have a friend who almost can’t bear to return a defective item to a store for fear of upsetting the sales clerk. Another friend who teaches with me will have her entire day ruined by an obnoxious student who complains that he will lose his scholarship because of a grade she gave him. She is generally able to refuse to be bullied into changing a B to an A, or a D to a C; after all, nobody loses a scholarship who hasn’t done badly in several classes. Nevertheless, she generally says when it happens that she never can help feeling as though she is the one injuring the student who has done the inferior work. I am always hearing stories like these from my friends, students, and the people I talk to on retreats I lead. Of course, it is insane when we react like this. At the same time, I don’t mean to suggest that it is innocent craziness that only hurts the crazy person. In Nick’s case, my assumption that I must be to blame for whatever was wrong with him was a real reason that prevented me from taking him to the vet. I suspect that similar assumptions by other people in many cases where human beings are involved not only render them unable to resist actual abuse. By their inability--or unwillingness--to stand up to their ill treatment, they suggest to their abusers that they agree that they deserve their abuse. This confirmation of the victimizers not only encourages them to continue in their violence; it encourages them to fall even deeper into their twisted view of reality that justifies it. I have a dreadful memory of Sue Ellen, a desperate woman I met in a church out west. Sue Ellen told me how she had grown up with a controlling, perfectionistic mother who was also subject, as her mother told her, to trouble with her heart.

Against her mother’s wishes, Sue Ellen had gotten married one August several years ago and gone to the Caribbean for a two-week honeymoon. Not wanting to endanger her mother’s heart, she reluctantly agreed that Mama could meet her and her new husband at the airport when they returned. That day it was one hundred degrees in the shade; nevertheless, Mama met Sue Ellen with a coat, and she ordered Sue Ellen to put it on at once. Her daughter had sent her mother a postcard in which she joked about gaining five pounds on the trip. Mama was so embarrassed at the thought that someone would see her “fat” daughter that she was having heart palpitations from the stress. Even though a part of her knew better, Sue Ellen told me, rather than ignoring Mama and thereby “causing” her to have a heart attack, Sue Ellen put on the coat. Whether there really is a heart problem is not the issue here; it is the issue of abuse. Having learned how effective her psychological violence could be, Sue Ellen’s mother continued her demands on Sue Ellen. By now, her “justifiable” behavior has driven off most of her friends. This awful blaming and blame-taking is a major cause of misery in many marriages, too, such as that of John and Sara. John is about to lose his job for the third time this year. Every night when he comes home, their neighbors hear him yelling at his wife, Sara, that she is emasculating him by her constant “demands” on him, particularly for money. Sara, who is already working two jobs, is exhausted at the end of the day and just doesn’t have the will or the energy to defend herself. She had been reared by her mother and father to believe that it is part of a wife’s job to absorb her husband’s moods and fix them; however, her resentment at her husband’s abusive behavior confuses her. Though a part of her knows that she is not being unreasonable in expecting him to be financially responsible, in her bones she believes that he wouldn’t be treating her this way if she weren’t doing something to cause it. She tiptoes around him and keeps the children out of his way. She scrutinizes herself endlessly to think of ways she might change herself to make him happier. John, however, does not appreciate her efforts. Indeed, that she lets him hurt her again and again only tells him that she “knows” that he is right. Of course, this is ruining the lives of Sara and the children. At the same time, it is obvious that the only way he will ever get out of the hole he is digging is by accepting responsibility for the way he is destroying both his relationships to his family and his own life. Thus, I should have seen at the time how my enthusiasm for blaming myself when something went wrong was keeping me from acknowledging that there was something seriously wrong with Nick when he changed personality. I also mentioned earlier, however, that there was a second, deeper reason I didn’t recognize the seriousness of this change in my cat. Very quickly--frighteningly quickly--I simply accepted the dreadful conclusion that what Nick had become was just the way Nick was. In other words, I adapted to his mental state as though it were perfectly ordinary.

Human beings are breathtakingly, horribly adaptable. Now don’t get me wrong. Our adaptability is a wonderful characteristic of our species. Our adaptability genes are probably responsible for our development of the use of tools, including fire and the wheel. They allow us to thrive all over our globe in the most inhospitable places and to form communities with seemingly infinitely various sets of laws and customs. Across the centuries they have enabled us to keep going and maintain life through earthquakes, plagues, wars, famine, and extreme poverty. While I know all this is true, however, we can also blame those same adaptability genes for a part, at least, of our various human cultures’ ability to come to see the monstrous and indigestible as something we can accept and live with. Examples of what I mean are to be found everywhere. Remember the systematic callousness we human beings habitually exhibit toward other human beings around the world. How easy it is to get used to racism or sexism when we are not victims of it! How easy to deplore lack of gun control while we adjust to children massacring children in school with readily available weapons. Think of how we are able to close our newspapers that are full of pictures of famine victims or victims of massacres in Africa, say, or in Eastern Europe. We don’t just adapt to the way things are in our larger culture, either. We adapt even more quickly in our individual family lives, too, to situations that would break our hearts if we let ourselves face them honestly. Nearly all of us, I suspect, are like Jane and her husband, Sam, whom we have known since our children were small. In those long-ago times, the two of them seemed to me to be such wonderful parents, attentive and kind-hearted, content to car-pool, attend school functions, and help with homework. While Jane and Sam’s three boys were little, I was often envious when I thought of them in their tidy house , happy, cozy, and seemingly without problems. The time came, however, when everything seemed to change. It happened as the oldest boy went into puberty. In the eighth grade the placid child became moody; then he got in with some dangerous high school boys. He started climbing out of the house at night after his parents were asleep. He was probably on drugs. He refused to do his school work. He took the car out and drove it without a license. He was hostile and rude to his parents’ adult friends (including me!) when they came to the house. A few months later, he became lethargic, stayed in bed all day, and refused to go to school, eat, or dress himself. Then one day he got up, and he was wild again. At first, Sam Jr.’s parents were angry with him, then worried. Most scary to his parents’ friends, however, was that after a while, when they couldn’t intervene successfully, Jane and Sam just got used to the situation. Yes, Sam Jr. was “a handful,” and yes, Sam Jr. “had a few problems.” Of course, the boy went through times when he slept a lot; teenagers did that. Of course, their son did actually knock his mother down once, but basically Sam Jr. was “a good kid” who

just might take a little longer to settle down than most. After all, the world is different than it used to be, and besides, everybody knows that adolescents have problems. Fortunately for Sam Jr., when he went away to college, his suite-mates in the dorm, who hadn’t yet had time to adapt to him, were alarmed. With the help of one of his professors, they got him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as suffering from a serious mental illness to which his parents had adapted themselves. Of course, it wasn’t because they were heartless or unthinking that they had adapted. I suspect, rather, that they were afraid that if they admitted to themselves what was happening, they would also have to admit that they were losing their son. None of us easily accepts the loss of those we love, not to mention the loss of a familiar life. As thoroughly social animals, even if we are abused or neglected, we find ourselves bonded to those who hurt us in such a way that, after a while, the very thought of their loss fills us with the dread of death. If my loved one can’t or won’t change, we tell ourselves, we must adapt to how things are. Then, we hope, we will not only have the loved one again, we will also be back in the same safe place we once shared--safe because it is familiar, even if that place never existed anywhere but in our minds. So, we lie to ourselves. “Yes, but Mama is getting old and she really loves me no matter how she seems to treat me.” “Yes, John accidentally gave me a black eye, but he was so sorry afterward. He really does love me.” “Everybody knows that teenagers sleep a lot.” It was out of just such lies, I think, now, that I failed to acknowledge what a wrong turn things had really taken with Nick. Like the mentally ill adolescent, Nick was acting completely out of character. Still, he was our cat who lived with us, whom we had rescued from death, and who had become part of our lives. Our family had bonded with Nick. We couldn’t afford to let ourselves know how bad things had become with him. But the whole question of how we finally come to leave our own bent vision that always curves back to ourselves, so that we really can truly see others, brings us back to the question of what was wrong with Nick and how we discovered it. I can tell you now that it didn’t happen through anything we actively did ourselves. Rather, week after hot week went by that first summer as he sat in his now-familiar spot under the camper top on the front lawn across the street. Slowly, the hazy air thickened and the grass turned brown around him; his eyes grew wilder as he crouched there as implacably as a revival preacher preaching hell. Though his triangular face framed in white metal and glass was invisible from our front porch where I did a lot of my work, I could feel his baffling, hostile presence. Wounded, confused and worn out by the ongoing, inexplicable behavior of this strange cat of ours, I could do nothing, and so, adapting as best I could, I got on with my life.

Soon it was the end of August. As school started up again for the year, I found myself far less preoccupied with home doings than with teaching. The beginning of the academic year is always an energy-draining time. That year my large class had its usual share of absorbing problems, discussion groups mismatched with discussion leaders, folks complaining about the amount or kind of work required, difficulties in scheduling rooms, grumbling or frightened students, dealing with forgotten but vital details in the syllabus, and so forth. The new students in my supervised ministry class, in spite of their massive anxieties, were slowly forming themselves into a working group. Committees were meeting, community worship was going on, and faculty relationships were being renewed. By the end of September I was exhausted. At night, I missed Nick’s formerly happy presence while I cooked, and I missed him on the weekends as I sat at my computer. The rest of the time, however, school was everything. I had no energy even to think about the cat still hunched up under the camper top across the street much less take him to the vet even if I had decided he needed to go. Then, one night at bedtime, as I listened to the radio for the next day’s weather forecast, I heard that it was about to turn cold. I rummaged in a top drawer for a sweater that had been put away since the previous spring. Ruminating only about blankets, flannel nightgowns, and the cool fall that was upon us, I went to bed with my warm husband and slept. We got up the next morning, which was, indeed, cold, to the sound of a terrible scratching coming from the back door. When I opened the door to see what was causing it I was so surprised, I was speechless. There before my eyes was a dreadful looking, skinny gray cat that was looking up at me and purring fiercely. I crouched down beside him at once. “Nick?” I said incredulously. “Is it really you?” Though the gigantic, bony paws, the yellow eyes, and the long, scruffy tail possibly could have belonged to other cats than ours, the distinctive nicks, cuts, and hole in the ear could leave me in no doubt. It really was Nick, and he was back. From that day until the weather turned hot again, he was the cat who had originally come to us. Though it was a few weeks before he bulked up again and his fur looked healthy, he resumed his old habits at once. He ate a lot. He wanted to be in our laps or asleep on the sofa. From the corner of my desk he supervised my writing and he kept me company cooking. He had no interest in being outside at night and a great deal of interest prowling the chipmunk holes and the ground under the bird feeder in the day. He was the same smelly old Nick he had been before our problems started. Our cat had come home, at least until the following summer when the whole amazing cycle started over again for one more year.

Still, in those days we were never able to figure out what had caused Nick’s changes. Why had he switched personality in the first place? What had made him distrust us so, and kept him unable or unwilling even to eat or drink for all those months? And what, besides the obvious onset of the cold weather, was the origin of the return to his original self? Why did this happen two years in a row? Believe me, in trying to make sense of it, I pondered this strange behavior of Nick for a very long time. Loving, paranoid; loving, paranoid. Having seen manic depression up close over a protracted period, I sometimes couldn’t help wondering if my cat could possibly have this mental illness that afflicted humans. As soon as I caught myself, however, I squelched my thoughts at once. It was too fantastic an explanation of Nick’s problems. Certainly it was too anthropomorphic, too much my own projection of human categories on a defenseless animal. Cats, after all, were only cats. Surely it was not possible for them to experience the complex mental, emotional, and physical patterns that people suffer with this illness. Finally, even I could see that Nick’s trouble was not simply my imagination. It was not my problem, it was his. It was only many years after Nick died, however, when our daughter, Anna, came to work for a vet that I learned that yes, it really was possible for cats to be manic depressive, and that yes, this is almost surely what had been the matter with him. She had suspected it herself and had taken on the task of asking the vet about it. The fact is, if Nick were manic depressive it means that it wouldn’t have done any good to have taken him in to the vet that first summer, because there would have been no way to diagnose what was wrong with him. Even if he could have been diagnosed, there would certainly have been no way to treat him: cats are not given lithium or, to my knowledge, any other antipsychotic drugs. Nick was mentally ill. This is a hard thought to entertain, but it explains a lot, most notably this: in my experience, it is very difficult to be around a person for a long time who is seriously mentally ill without being drawn so completely into his or her craziness that our ordinary ability to make noncrazy judgments is almost lost. It is almost as if the spouse, friend, child, or parent is continually broadcasting the message, “If you love me, or if you even expect to communicate with me, then you must adopt my view of the world, including my view of you.” So, while we may retain the sense that there is a craziness present in which we are participating, we can easily lose our sure knowledge that the original source of the craziness is not in us. A spouse says, “This is not my problem; it is yours,” and we believe him or her. A child says, “I act this way because you don’t love me enough,” and, castigating ourselves, we accept it as true. It is odd, and frightening too, how often we Christians do something very much like this as we relate to God. It isn’t that we anthropomorphize God (how could a Christian who confesses the Incarnation object to that?). It is, rather, that, like the

mentally ill person whose illness powerfully sucks into it all those who live close to it, out of our own mentally, emotionally, and spiritually wounded selves, we falsely project our familiar, frequently religiously sanctioned patterns of mental illness onto God--unpredictability, implacable anger, neglect, jealousy, violence, fierce judgmentalism, or a driving desire for vengeance, alternating with compassion, mercy, attentiveness, generosity, faithfulness, and love. Then, having falsely ascribed such dangerous patterns to God, we learn to live with them as though that is who God really is. In short, we adapt, telling ourselves as we do it, that if we live in fear of God’s judgment and it causes us pain, it is only because God is good and we are sinful. All of this is much to our hurt, and, I believe, because it separates us from God, as well as from our own true selves, it is to God’s hurt, too. If God really does love us, after all, with the dependable tenderness, delight, and even courtesy that Julian of Norwich tells us of, and we cannot let ourselves know that steady love, feel that love, or respond to it, what else can God do, but suffer?

5--What Happened After That

The second year he lived with us, Nick went through the same cycle as he had his first year. In the house he was his familiar self throughout the rest of the fall, the winter, and the spring. He slept on my desk, lay in our laps, and kept me company in the kitchen. He purred a lot and welcomed guests with enthusiasm. He took many naps on the furniture, shedding a great deal, and leaving behind a greasy-looking smear when he woke up and jumped down. He was his old self outdoors, too. Though he went out, he stayed close to home. He rarely caught one, but he chased the squirrels in the autumn. In the spring, during chipmunk season, he hunted chipmunks and left the tails straight and neatly parallel to the doorsill outside Richard’s study. Occasionally, the feathered three-quarters eaten remains of a blue jay would appear on the back patio. On Easter morning, he deposited a perfectly dead but whole baby brown and white bunny on the driveway, close to the back door. When he wasn’t hunting, he was sleeping peacefully on the driveway or front patio in the sun. Then, one hot day toward the middle of June, the whole round of craziness began again as Nick was off once more into that same old paranoid, miserable space in which he had spent his previous summer. Though we were not so shocked by his change as we had been the year before, we had no more idea what to do this time than we had had the previous summer. We had learned, however, that it would be fruitless to try to pretend not to notice, to attempt to keep him in the house, or to make him eat. Still, we wanted to protect ourselves emotionally and to watch out for him in the hope that he would return to “himself” again. We put out food and water, therefore, and we continued and go out and talk to him as he crouched, rigid and furious, in the driveway. As for me, my expectations were low. I hoped that he didn’t wander into the road and get hit by a car. I didn’t want him to get eaten up by wandering dogs or torn to pieces by larger, healthier cats. I didn’t want him to run off and be adopted by some other, gullible family who wouldn’t give him up when and if I ever found him again. I didn’t want all his fur to fall out and all his bones to show, and I didn’t want him to die. There were days, looking at his bony ribs and his wild eyes, when even this little seemed unreasonable. Thinking about it now reminds me of a conversation reported to me by Carol, a good friend of mine. Carol had run into Beth, an ordinary, plump middle-aged, middle-class woman in the supermarket. After a

brief exchange of news, the two women began to bemoan the state of their grown children’s lives, and the anxiety they felt for them. “You know,” Carol reported the woman said to her, “I worry about what will become of them all the time. Are they ever going to straighten themselves out and act like adults?” “I just don’t know,” Beth had gone on. “When they were teenagers, I used to tell them that all I expected was for them to graduate from high school and get honest jobs. Now, when they let us know what they are doing, I just look at them and shake my head. Right now all I ask is that they don’t do hard drugs and they get short jail sentences!” Whether or not that woman’s children are involved in substance abuse, there was not much chance then that Nick had ingested illegal drugs. Since they had sold their camper top in the front yard over the winter, Nick couldn’t even sentence himself to do time under it as he had the year before. This was a relief of sorts, I suppose, at least for me. The fact is, having been so badly burned by what still felt to me like his abandonment the summer before, I tried my best from the start of his second summer to withdraw emotionally from what was going on. That I remember so little of his behavior during his second crazy period suggests I must have done a pretty good job of disconnecting. Once Nick came to his senses the following September--I recall hardly anything around the time he came back, though I know his return was much earlier than the year before--he was more or less back for good. In the last analysis, however, I can only offer an hypothesis for why, from that time on he finally stayed at home. It goes something like this. After a long, cool spring and a reasonably hot early summer during which Nick, against expectation, continued to hold on to his sanity, our good neighbors and friends, the folks in the house next door, had their much-longed for and longawaited first baby, Maxie. On the Fourth of July, while everybody else was sunning themselves at various pool parties around the city or eating themselves into a stupor at family picnics, Chip and Syd brought Maxie home from the hospital. Since she was a bit jaundiced, they dressed her in a little shirt and diaper, and set her out in her brand new baby carriage under the roses by their back door to soak up some sunshine and fresh air. Within five minutes of the appearance of the carriage, Nick had slouched over to investigate. Of course, the baby had not been left outside by herself. While Syd took a nap upstairs, Chip sat next to his offspring in a lawn chair where he could keep an eye on her and admire her. Nick, for his part, was not surprised in any way by Chip’s presence by the back door. Having decided long since that he wasn’t going to smoke in the house,

Chip was already accustomed to spending a lot of time sitting in that chair and talking over the events of the day with his regular visitor, Nick. Chip and Nick seem to have understood each other. From Chip’s perspective, at any rate, Nick was a “man’s cat,” a tough but kind cat who had no interest in observing the social conventions. That Fourth of July, therefore, when Nick came over to see what was going on, Chip naturally picked Nick up and put him on his lap to show off his baby to his friend, the big gray cat. While Chip thought this was a great idea, I was not so sure. In fact, watching from the patio behind our house, I held my breath. Though I had never believed that cats actually suck the breath out of babies, as the old legends had it, I did believe most of the other stories I’d heard of cats who were jealous of new babies encroaching on their territory. I already knew that Nick was perfectly capable of strong, peculiar, and not always predictable emotional responses. Anxiously, therefore, I wondered. Would Nick glance toward the baby, then sit in Chip’s lap and take a bath, or would he stare right past her, pretending not to notice her at all? Would he go rigid, puff up his grimy fur and hiss at her? Or worse, still, would he take one look, pounce on her as though she were a small animal, and slash at her soft baby skin with his sharp and dirty claws? I needn’t have worried. Though every other cat in the world would have done it, Nick certainly wouldn’t have bathed. Nick was the dirtiest cat in the universe. On the other hand, he didn’t do anything malicious, either. Instead, that day, before my very eyes, Nick fell in love with the baby. One look at Maxie and he was smitten. Struggling in Chip’s arms to get closer, he stretched out his front paws, claws sheathed, and rested them on the side of the carriage. His big yellow eyes got bigger and rounder as he fixed them on the tiny face not much larger than his own. He pushed his dark gray nose toward her pink one and drooled a little, purring his loudest. I let out the breath I had been holding. Chip laughed with pride and let Nick pat her face. His baby had impressed his friend. Whether from that day it was the presence of Maxie that kept Nick from running away, I can’t say for sure. I can say, however, that Nick never again left home in the summer or crouched down on the driveway and acted as though he hated us. Instead, from that time forward, Nick watched out for and watched over Maxie. Whenever she came out in her carriage in the yard, Nick was next door purring away, in Chip’s lap, lying down by the wheels, or on a chair beside her. If, God forbid, the weather was inclement and she didn’t come outside, he would wait by the kitchen door until Chip or Syd let him in the house. His concern for the growing baby did not let up. The next spring when Maxie was crawling, then learning to walk, Nick was more attentive than ever. She would bang out the back screened door awkwardly in her sunsuits or tiny dresses, looking all around and calling him in her unintelligible baby talk. She would shriek

happily when he ran up to her. Sometimes she would fall on top of his back, laughing as she hung on to one of his ears or his tail. Just as often, she would squat in front of him while she stuck her fingers in his mouth, patted him on his head or sides, or tried to pick him up by one or more of his feet. “Gently, gently!” the ever-present grown-up would fruitlessly warn the baby. The warning, however, was never necessary. No matter what new atrocity Maxie committed upon his person, not once did Nick so much as stop purring, much less put out a killer claw to threaten her. It’s hard to say what Nick “thought” his relationship to the baby was. A friend in England once showed me a picture of a dog he had had who had been given a litter of kittens whose mother had been killed on the highway. There in the snapshot was the mama dog lying on her side, with five little tiger cats’ mouths arranged in a row, in the long black fur on her belly. At first sight of the starving little animals, my friend reported, the dog, which already had a puppy of her own, had taken them in and nursed them. Though I doubt she was able to teach them the ways of their own kind, she reared them, too. Long after they were old enough to use their sharp teeth to eat solid food from a dish they stayed close to her, sleeping with her at night and napping during the day in a mixed pile of apparently perfectly contented dogs and cats. Did this loving dog believe her kittens were just some odd form of puppy to which she had given birth and which she had somehow previously overlooked? Or was it the case that she was perfectly aware that her foundlings were little cats? Was she simply unable or unwilling to let the baby animals go uncared for, even if they were of an alien, even enemy, species? It’s impossible to say. I hardly think, however, that Nick made the mistake of believing Maxie was a cat, much less that she was his kitten and he, her mother or her father. I’m not sure male cats are even much interested in their own actual, flesh-and-blood kittens except, if they should be forced to be around them, as nuisances who more or less interfere with their naps and threaten their food supply. Nevertheless, from the beginning, Nick was deeply bonded to the baby. He certainly never again fell into the dark hole of his hateful summer personality. Indeed, apart from the way Nick behaved when Molly was born two years later--that is, exactly the same way as he had with Maxie--we never otherwise saw this proud, fiercely protective, and absolutely tolerant behavior in our eccentric cat. It is hardly possible to know whether Nick’s mental illness was cured by his strong ties to the children next door, or, as I have already suggested, whether Nick was actually manic depressive in the first place. I don’t imagine there has been much research on this illness or any other mental illness in cats. Manic depression in human beings, however, is another matter. Modern research tells us that it is a genetically transmitted disease. Though social environment and stress certainly affect it, I have not recently heard of anything, much less love, that simply makes it disappear all at once.

Certainly, I do not want anybody to think that, by recounting this story of Nick, I am suggesting that mental illness is curable if a person is loved or loves enough. Perhaps it is, occasionally; miracles happen, no doubt, to animals as well as to people. Still, to think that all a cure takes is love places a truly impossible burden of expectation, duty, and blame on the suffering person, her or his family, and friends. Thank God, that though parents and children may still tell depressed family members to get a grip, to quit feeling sorry for themselves, and to think of somebody else for a change, the medical profession doesn’t much say this to them anymore. Nor, thank God, are the families, and particularly the mothers, of disturbed or otherwise severely unhappy children told these days that, if they want their children to get better, they must “simply love their children more.” The outrageous implication hidden in this previously common medical advice, of course, was that the real reason the children were in this shape in the first place was because their mothers didn’t love them properly. All that aside, what continues to amaze me and fills me with wonder in my deepest heart is the way in which Nick’s care of the children demonstrates how love can transcend not only family, but species. Listening to the news certainly doesn’t suggest that human beings naturally extend love to strangers within our species--or for that matter, even see others who are not like us as sharing our same species. Yesterday on the radio I heard a series of interviews with representatives of an ethnic group in Eastern Europe who have declared war on another, smaller group that has been living peacefully as neighbors among them for years. With her questions the interviewer was trying to discover the dominant group’s reasons for the atrocities which had already been committed against their victims. “Why do you want to ‘rid your country’ of these folks?” she asked one angry man, obviously eager to express his convictions. “Aren’t they really just like you?” “No, they are not,” he replied. “You don’t understand. They’re like snakes; they are not even human.” His response was horrifying. What made it truly terrible, however, is the way in which our own society in more or less equally open ways reflects the same sort of “if they are not like me, then they are not human” thinking. “Why should poor people be allowed to receive food stamps or get ‘free’ medical care? Let them earn their keep like the rest of us,” we hear people say. “Who cares if children kill each other in inner city housing projects?” “Why should gays and lesbians be allowed to enter into holy unions and undermine heterosexual marriages?” “Why should illegal immigrants’ children be allowed to go to school if they aren’t even paying taxes?” How can we take anybody seriously who is pro-life, or who is in favor of abortion; who dropped out of school at sixteen, or who is an egghead; who doesn’t like football or who doesn’t see football for the dirty game it is; who votes Democratic, who votes Republican, or who doesn’t vote at all? Who is black, white, over thirty, a teenager, retired, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim,

atheist, liberal, conservative? You can name any group even in our Christian churches and some other group within the church is denying their humanity. It isn’t just “bad people” who do this. All of us participate in this way of thinking. It’s terrible, and it’s terrible precisely because, like the animals, we human beings do it so easily. Though I saw the picture of the dog that raised the kittens, I didn’t know her. I can’t truly say, therefore, whether she simply wanted puppies and was willing to settle for any babies she got; whether she really didn’t realize that what she was feeding was a batch of little cats; or whether she was “only” a compassionate creature who was willing to nurture any living creatures entrusted to her care. I suspect it was the last of these. At least it seems to me that this was the case with Nick, Maxie, and her sister, Molly. Certainly Nick was a smart and loving cat. He was male and would never have been the mother of babies. Furthermore, when he was not in a paranoid state of mind, as I said, I can’t imagine that he would have confused the little girls next door with kittens. Still, Nick’s crossspecies love for those human children was obviously deep and lasting. If neither animals nor human beings normally act like Nick did with his two children, then, what was going on with Nick? Is there any way to make sense of such love? Who can ultimately say? As for Nick’s behavior in general we have already established that he was not a “normal” animal in all sorts of ways, including his mental illness. Still, that he wasn’t “normal” is hardly an explanation of his caring behavior. On the other hand, when I ponder this cat now from the perspective of the ancient theology and spirituality I teach, I can hardly help wondering if there was anything “abnormal” about Nick, or for that matter, about the dog that took in the kittens. Perhaps there was simply something profoundly natural about them, and about all the love that flows so mysteriously and deeply between animals and humans. It all depends upon your definition of “natural.” Certainly, the majority of the great Christian teachers of the early church were absolutely convinced that not only were human beings created in God’s image, but that creation itself “naturally” mirrors the very being of God. As far as they were concerned, though we often can’t see it, the structures of reality itself tells us who God is and what God is like, which is, above all, love. In a third-century summary of the Christian faith, Irenaeus of Lyons declared that this divine love is best symbolized in the cross, a symbol which is found everywhere in nature itself. Think of the way the four directions cross each other on a map, he asks us, or even of the way that the beams in the mast on a ship form the shape of the cross. The love of God in creation is all pervasive, encompassing, and ever-present, and it is the same indiscriminate, even promiscuous, divine love we meet in the Incarnation. By very definition, since it is God who created both “nature” and “natures,” it is also “natural.”

There is a beautiful hymn to the Christ Child written by Ephrem the Syrian in the fourth century that reflects on this love: How bold You are, Babe, [he sings to little Jesus,] Who bestows Himself Upon all. At everyone who meets You You smile. To meet everyone who sees You You eagerly wait. It is as if Your love Hungers for human beings. You distinguish not Your parents From strangers, nor the one who bore You From maidservants, nor the one who nursed You From harlots. . . . What moves You to bestow Yourself Upon each who has seen You? . . . From where did it come to You So to hunger for human beings?1 The answer to “what moves you?” of course, is, “that is who you are as God.” God, in whose image we are made, “hungers for human beings.” It seems to me important to ponder the fact that in the ordinary course of things, not just baby Jesus but all human babies of a certain age are equally indiscriminate in their bestowal of smiles and affection on family, on friends, and on strangers alike. This ought not to seem as odd to us as it sometimes does. For our ancestors, since we human beings most especially are made in the image of God, and it is our loving God who provides the very structures of reality, we should understand that what is not natural is hatred, fear, and marking ourselves off as unlike--and therefore better than--others. Here, I have to say that I agree with them. Why, after all, should it be that we who are so manifestly wounded in our ability to love should define ourselves as normal, we who treat not only animals but also other human beings who do not belong to our group as though they are alien to us? What a dreadful history of hatred and violation all of us Christians, who should be mirroring God’s love, have! If a primary characteristic of God’s love is its indiscriminate, nonobservance of an instinct to stick to one’s own kind, then, as I hope by now we have established, it was the otherwise very odd Nick with his cross-species love of the children next door, who was “natural” and we clannish humans who are not. On the other hand, as the eighteenth century English practical theologian John Wesley felt it necessary to point out, just because a person is able to embody God’s love fully as a created being doesn’t mean that that person is able to avoid the kind of disastrous errors that arise in life as a result of natural limitations and vulnerabilities. Though Wesley was talking about human beings, the same can surely be said for cats. Loving, Nick certainly was, but he was also capable at the

same time of exercising remarkably bad judgment, even downright stupidity. In some pretty significant ways, like the rest of us, Nick was an animal who not only wouldn’t, but also didn’t seem to be able to, learn from his mistakes. The story of Nick, Pam, and Pam’s canoe illustrate just what I mean. Before I recount this story, however, let me say a thing or two about Pam. She is a special person. Pam is, ironically, a practitioner of Wesley’s theology, as well as a teacher of it and a writer of books. She is a minister who uses her combined and considerable gifts in the service of her passionate commitment to the church’s doing something about children and poverty. She is also an excellent colleague and a wonderful friend with whom I have had over the years, not just deep, ongoing conversations, but also some notable adventures in the wilderness. Early in the spring in question, Pam had been in the process of going through some life changes, as they say, and for a while she stayed in our spare bedroom as she tried to figure out what she wanted to do. During those weeks she was with us, both Richard and I enjoyed her presence. Pam was an easy guest, eventempered, cheerful, affectionate, intelligent, and full of energy and enthusiasm for everything that came her way in spite of the upheavals that were going on in her life. She was an early riser; most days she was up, out of the house, and at the gym before our alarm clock went off. She was neat in her living space (neater than we), she shared in the rudimentary housework that had to be done in a household like ours, and she did her own laundry. Though she was rarely with us at dinner, when she was, she gobbled down her food with enthusiasm and appreciation. Nearly every night at an obnoxious hour, as Richard looked on, bemused and entertained, Pam and I made dubious music on our violin (Pam) and flute (me). Richard, Pam, and I had a great time together that spring, laughing, talking, sometimes crying. Even crying, however, if there is anyone who could actually be described as “sunny” without it being a cliché it was, and still is, Pam. There are people we all know who fill a room with light just by walking into it; Pam was one of them. She still is. Delightful as she was, nevertheless, from our perspective Pam suffered from one weakness. She was violently allergic to cats, and most especially, to our dirty old cat, Nick. Though Pam was generally in energetic good health she suffered dreadfully around Nick and, though not to such an extent, around Romana, too. (I am sorry to report that by this time our little black-and-white half-Siamese, Julius, was dead.) Not only did Pam’s head stuff up and her eyes water when she came in contact with Nick and his awful gritty fur, she couldn’t even breathe around him. Always shy and stand-offish at the best of times, Romana could tell that her company was not welcome to Pam, and so she left Pam alone. Nick, however,

was another matter. With Pam, Nick did precisely what he was so very good at doing: he took one look at her and fell in love. From the beginning Nick was passionate about Pam. Wherever Pam was, Nick wanted to be. On the other hand, though Pam did her best to like him, Nick’s love was sadly unrequited. In the natural course of things, he never once showed the slightest sign of feeling rejected. Short of packing Nick off to a boarding house for cats, we protected Pam from Nick as best we could. We closed him out of the room in which she slept. We tried to prevent him from lying on the tablecloth on the dining room table where she ate, and we tried to keep him off her papers where she was working. Nothing discouraged him. She invariably made a face at him when he made his overtures and spoke to him in a deliberately discouraging tone of voice. Still, though she shuddered and threw him off whenever he jumped in her lap, Nick was like the Hound of Heaven. He did not give up. From the moment she came in the back door and walked through the kitchen, he would weave around her legs and rub himself devotedly on her shoes. When she was reading or talking in the living room he tried his best to sit on the drop leaf end table beside her favorite armchair and poke his wet gray nose and dirty whiskers against her face. At mealtimes he continued to long, ardently and in vain, to be on the dining room table in front of her, staring her soulfully in the eyes and nibbling off her plate while she ate. As much as she wanted to and tried to because she knew we loved him, of course, Pam couldn’t stand him. How could she? Nick probably “saw” himself as full of ardor. Pam, from her perspective, saw him to be more like a crazed boyfriend who was stalking her. He loved her with his whole cat heart, but he gave her the creeps. Though she was much too polite to say so, I suspect that by the time she moved out Pam loathed the animal who afflicted her and was even, perhaps, a bit afraid of him. She certainly couldn’t help her reactions to him, and at the same time, I have no reason to believe Nick, being a cat and not a human being, could have chosen to keep away from her, either. As bad as the situation with Pam and Nick was over the weeks Pam was with us, things didn’t really bottom out, until one very hot day in July long after she left our guest room and moved into her own small apartment. It happened like this. In the garage of the house in which she had lived the previous year, over the fall and winter Pam had begun to build herself a beautiful canoe of wood strips. Having no other place to store it when she came to stay with us, of course she had brought it with her. She kept it behind our house, covered, on two saw-horses on our back driveway. When she moved into her new apartment, once again, she had no place to keep it. She continued to leave it at our house, therefore, taking it on a short trip to a nearby lake whenever she had the chance.

We were not surprised, therefore, when one hot morning in July Pam phoned. “Bobby? (this was her private nickname for me)” she said when I picked up the phone. “It’s Pam.” She sounded excited and happy. “I’ve been working since six this morning and I really need a break. Do you want to go out to Stone Mountain Lake and paddle around with me this afternoon?” The sun was shining and the air was clear and cooler than usual for July. Longing to play with my friend, I equivocated. “Well, um, I don’t think I’d better,” I replied. Pam immediately sensed the desire that lay behind my refusal and pounced. “Come on; the exercise will do you good,” she answered. Though I had not been as busy as Pam, I’d been working hard myself, and the temptation was overwhelming. The exercise would, indeed, be good for me. Still, what passed at the time for common sense, however, took over in the end. “Pam, I just can’t,” I said at last. “I’ve got a deadline to meet. I’m going to have to sit at my computer and think of you enjoying yourself on the water. But listen; why don’t you have lunch with us before you go?” I went on. “At least we can visit that way.” My cheerful friend realized that there was no use in trying further to change my mind. “Okay,” she said. She sounded crestfallen. “I’ll be there soon,” she replied, resigned to my spoilsport decision. “I can get the canoe loaded up on the racks on my car before we eat.” An hour later, Pam was there in her high-topped canvas shoes and paddling clothes. She got the canoe off the saw-horses where it stayed, hoisted it onto her car and tied it down while I continued to work, then she came in the house to find me. Together, Richard, Pam, and I scrambled some eggs and dug a few leftovers out of the refrigerator, as Romana watched us politely from the doorway into the dining room. Uncharacteristically, Nick was nowhere in sight. Thinking nothing of his absence, the three of us loaded our plates in the kitchen, carried them into the dining room, and ate, sharing our intentions for the rest of the day as we did it. After that, we took our dishes back to the kitchen and cleaned up our mess. Then Richard and I said good-bye to Pam. With the new canoe gleaming invitingly on top of her car, Pam backed down the driveway and headed off down the street. I was back at work at my computer twenty minutes later when the phone rang once more. By then, I was already into the state of near oblivion that overtakes

me when I am writing. Distractedly, and with a certain amount of irritation, I snatched it up from my desk and put the ear piece to my ear. “Hello,” I said into it, “Bondi’s residence.” “Bondi------------?” A clearly distressed but unintelligible male voice delivered what seemed to me to be a long speech from the other end of the line. “Excuse me,” I replied when finished. “I think you have the wrong number.” “No, no.” This time the voice was louder and even more distressed. I did not hang up. I could understand “no” well enough to make out that something that I needed to attend to was wrong. Another long speech followed; I concentrated hard to make sense of what I was hearing. This time three words or phrases emerged for me from what he was apparently trying to tell me. “--------cat--------,” he said, then “--------friend--------,” and finally, “ --------Golden Buddha--!” At last I thought I understood. When she was at our house for lunch, Nick must have sneaked into Pam’s car as she opened the door. She had just discovered his presence, and she needed to get rid of him. For some inexplicable reason, rather than bringing him back herself, she had stopped and asked one of the Chinese-speaking employees at the Golden Buddha Chinese restaurant along her route to ask me to come and get him. “Okay,” I answered the voice, not sure of what he could understand. “Thank you for calling. Tell her I will be right there.” Quickly, I put on my shoes, picked up my keys, and called goodbye to Richard. Fifteen minutes later I was driving into the parking lot of the Golden Buddha. I had expected her to be flagging me down impatiently as I drove up. Pam, however, was nowhere to be seen and neither was Nick. Indeed, being the middle of the afternoon, apart from Pam’s car, the restaurant parking lot was deserted. Puzzled, I parked my car next to hers, jumped out, and peered in the window. Clearly, Pam was not in the car, though Nick certainly was. He was curled into a ball in the driver’s seat, his head on his paws, his tail wrapped around his blue gray side, and his eyes closed. Somehow, in spite of the perfectly ordinary pose in which he lay, he gave the impression of a cat pushed well over his limits of endurance. It was clear to me now that whatever had happened, it could not have been what I had imagined. Leaving Nick alone for the moment, I looked around again for Pam. I found her sitting on the curb some distance away from the car, her back bent over and her head in her hands.

“Pam! What’s wrong?” I called out as I walked toward her across the empty asphalt. Startled, Pam stood up and turned around. She looked more exhausted than the old gray cat in her car. Pam wrung her hands and shook her head in bewilderment. “You won’t believe it,” she replied. Knowing Nick, I figured whatever she told me was bound to be improbable. “I was driving down Clairmont Road when several people started honking their car horns. I knew I had tied my canoe down tightly, but I figured that somehow, it must look to them like it was loose, and folks were trying to warn me. So when they honked, I would wave politely and just keep going. “Then, when I stopped for the light at the corner where you turn in for the library, the driver of the car next to me rolled down his window and yelled, ‘Lady, you have a cat on your car!’ I couldn’t imagine what he meant, but I needed to find out, so I pulled in here and got out to look. It was horrible!” Here, Pam stopped for a deep breath. “Right on top, underneath the canoe was Nick. He must have jumped onto the car and into the canoe at your house, then gone to sleep on the underside of the canoe seat where we couldn’t see him. He had to have jumped back to the top of the car when it started moving, but couldn’t get off. When I found him, he was standing up there, absolutely rigid. All four paws were like suction cups, holding on for all he was worth. “I was terrified he was going to jump down and run into the traffic, so I peeled him off the top, put him inside the car, and slammed the door. As it is, I don’t know what kept him up there; I was going forty miles an hour or more the whole time people were honking at me.” Poor Pam and poor Nick! I shook my head in sympathy as I opened the door. Then I picked up my cat from the car seat where he still lay like a dead thing. Nick was a wreck. Though he purred and opened his eyes to look at me for a moment, he dangled in my arms like a boneless creature. Though cats are not supposed to sweat, he was soaking wet, and the pads on his paws seemed swollen. He was one traumatized cat. Nick was a cat who had had a very close shave with death, and Pam and Nick both seemed to know it. Pam blamed herself, although I assured her that I would not possibly have been able to hold her responsible something worse had happened to Nick. I gave her a hug and sent her off, still shaken, to the lake with her canoe. Nick, I loaded onto the front seat of my car. More limp than ever, there he remained in the position in which I had placed him all the way to the house. When we got home, he let me carry him inside, then he spent the rest of the day on the corner of the couch, sleeping off his terrifying experience.

The whole thing was dreadful. Pam was traumatized, and so was Nick. We were lucky we still had him. He so easily could have fallen off the car in traffic and been run over, or have jumped down and staggered off at some intersection, never to be seen again. I was consoled as I thought about the whole incident later that afternoon by the idea that it had been so horrible for Nick that we surely wouldn’t have to worry about him making the same mistake again. If only I’d been right! With her canoe still on the top of her car, two days later Pam was back at the house for a little while to play the fiddle. At the end of the visit as she drove down the driveway I saw a familiar gray shape crouched once more below the canoe. No matter how careful we were, we found Nick up there a few more times that summer. It’s a funny thing with love. We Christians know we are called to love, to love God, our neighbors, and ourselves with our whole being, body, soul, and mind; in our thoughts, in our dispositions, and in our behavior. We long to love, and not only to love, but to love in the right way, too, but so much of the time the job seems so impossibly hard! So often it can seem as though no matter what we do, in spite of our good intentions, our attempts to love end only in failure. Struggling with guilt and self-recrimination over our supposed failures as parents, we pray, “help us to discern what is best for my child,” and we still make the wrong decisions. We care passionately about the hungry. Nevertheless, when the mentally ill and homeless person shows up on our doorstep to ask for money, in spite of our prayer for her, we don’t know what to do. We are nearly certain the money will be used for alcohol. We ask ourselves in vain, is it more loving to give her what she asks for, to make her a sandwich and pour her a glass of milk, or to send her to the nearest soup kitchen? Again, we try so hard to offer genuine sympathy to the complaining but lonely old woman who lives across the street. Still, no matter how we time things, her feelings are hurt or she is angry if she wants to stop us to talk as we are going off to work or to an appointment we can’t possibly miss. In all these perfectly ordinary situations of everyday life we are baffled and wounded in our desire to love, for how can we speak of love when we feel so helpless even to know what to do? How demoralizing it is to try our best to love, but not even to know what love would seem to require of us! All this being so manifestly true, how can we escape believing that Jesus had to be exaggerating when he asked us, his followers, to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves with our whole hearts, minds, souls, and strength? What point is there in even aiming at such a radical transformation of ourselves into love, if all we do is mess things up no matter what our best intentions? Thank God, with the help of the theology of our eighteenth-century Christian ancestor, John Wesley, backed up implicitly by the early monastic abbas and ammas that I teach, I can think of smelly old Nick and his return performance under the canoe and remember what we are all actually about. In the Great

Commandment God offers us all the hope of becoming perfectly loving. Still, as long as we live, we will make mistakes, even serious mistakes in judgment. True, God asks of us that we be as discerning in our love as we can. We are mortal creatures, nevertheless, always genuinely limited in our ability even to know the depths of ourselves, much less to understand and make the “right” judgments on behalf of someone else. We may express the most godlike love in the world, but we will never be able to keep from erring in our judgments. When we can’t see what to do, or when, after giving it our most serious consideration, we make a decision that inadvertently results in harm to someone else, this does not mean that we haven’t loved enough or in the right way, only that we are displaying the limitations with which God has created us. Love does not ask more of us than this.

6--The End of Nick

We lost our old cat one more time in the last years of his life. Our problems with Nick had always occurred during the summer. We were not surprised that his last adventure also took place during an exceptionally hot month. Happy little Molly had been born next door the preceding spring, and Maxie, the older of our neighbors’ little girls, was just beginning to emerge from babyhood. Though Nick still spent many hours a day supervising the children, he seemed to have decided that his self-imposed responsibilities toward his small charges had lessened enough to take a much needed break. Although he would cross our driveway to their back door several times during a twelve-hour period to check on how they were doing, he appeared to have decided that now he could afford to spend some time at home, as well. I appreciated Nick’s efforts with the children, but I must say, it was nice to have him back. Once more in his own house, he was there to give me the help I needed for my writing projects by sitting or sleeping on the corner of my desk by the computer while I worked. He took up his old place in the middle of the kitchen floor as I cooked, and again, we had long conversations about the indignities of aging, including our flabby stomachs, the problems of parenthood, and generally, the meaning of life. Thank God, Nick took up napping at home once again. For these naps he was rarely on my lap in his favorite upside-down, belly-exposed-and-paws-in-the-air position because it was so hot. He did, however, spend hours at a time stretched out on the cool patio behind the house or curled up in a gritty gray ball in an outdoor chair on the front porch. Never one to sleep on the bed with Richard and me at night, the first thing every morning, nevertheless, he would hop up on the bed to wake me with a wet kiss on the nose and a soft brush of his tuna-flavoredcat-food encrusted whiskers. It was wonderful to have Nick fully present in our household again. In spite of his ongoing problems with personal hygiene, Nick was more than good company. He would have continued to be good company, too, that summer, if we hadn’t had to have the house re-roofed. Heaven knows, the house had needed it badly for a very long time. The previous owner of more than fifty years had been forced by the county to sell our nice old house to the public transportation system well before I bought it. The county’s plan had been to tear it down, along with several other equally comfortable

homes on our street, in order to build a parking lot for the rapid transit train station immediately behind our lot. The house sat, abandoned and deteriorating for five years until the county changed its mind and sold it by auction. With a neighboring house, it was bought up by a bank, and the bank had a lumber company, now defunct, re-roof it for the purpose of selling it again. Its second owner was a man who acquired it from the bank, not to live in it himself, but as an “investment.” As I was sorry to discover, this meant he intended to do a little dry walling, a bit of painting, and a few cosmetic repairs on it, then sell it for a killing to some gullible person who didn’t know any better. I was that gullible person, though I must admit that I was too infatuated with this perfectly ordinary 1930s house to exercise good judgment from the moment I saw it; I’m still smitten, for that matter. I only began to discover that it had electrical problems when the children and I moved in. Fortunately or unfortunately, the full extent of the electrical problems did not emerge until a year later, after Richard and I were married, and he insisted on having an electrician go over the wiring for the whole house. I will never forget the day our dark-haired electrician, stiff-faced and shaking, descended the ladder from our attic to give us the news from his whole-house inspection. The news was terrible. Apparently, the previous owner had known nothing of electricity; he had rewired the house himself wherever he could get away with it with a combination of bare copper wire and old black telephone cord. The electrician not only couldn’t understand why the house hadn’t burned to the ground over the previous year with Anna Grace, Ben, and me in it; he was obviously terrified that it was about to burst into flames before he could get out of it himself. Years passed after we paid for the new wiring, and took care of several other major and minor repairs to the house that had to be attended to. At last it was time to do something about the roof. The roof, which the bank had had installed before they had sold it to the man who sold the house to me, had clearly been put on in the same spirit in which the original rewiring was done. To say that it was a shoddy job would hardly begin to cover it. From the first rain after we moved in, the roof leaked in all its corners, and the water destroyed the paint and ruined the plaster walls beneath the paint. Why this was so, no one could say. No matter how many times we had a roofer out to work on it, it had continued to leak until at last we found a roofer who was willing to nose around long enough to discover what was wrong with it. Whether or not it was with the knowledge of the bank that paid for it, the shingles in the new roof had simply been slapped on top of the old ones without any repair work or preparation for making it watertight. Most important, rather than first laying down the absolutely necessary strips of asphalt tile or even copper

sheeting in the valleys where the different angles of the roof come together before covering the valleys with shingles, the lumber company had left the valleys totally unprotected, except for the top layer of shingles which was there for looks alone. In other words, while our roof was, indeed, new when I bought the house, it could hardly do a thing about keeping out the rain. That summer, having acknowledged that the house was going to have to be reroofed, it was clear to Richard and me as well as to the roofer we hired that there was no way to do it right without tearing off many old layers of roofing materials, replacing rotten lumber, and starting over from scratch. The roofer no doubt rejoiced. For our part, we wished a pox on any of the folk at the bank or the lumber company who might have known how the corners had originally been cut, gritted our teeth, counted our money, worried about the noise and the time it would take, and committed ourselves to having the job done correctly. It wasn’t going to be an easy job. One morning right before breakfast two large white trucks drove up our driveway and parked behind our house close to the place on the back patio by the bird-feeders where Nick was accustomed to hunt and nap. Within minutes, a large crew of muscular looking roofers in leatherlaced work boots jumped out of one truck and unloaded a passel of heavy ladders from the other. Shortly after that, those same workmen swarmed up the ladders with their red boxes of roofing tools and other equipment and went to work. By nine o’clock that morning, from the inside the house felt and sounded as though we were living through the gusts of a hurricane. A large radio sitting on one corner of the roof above the back gutters blared out loud and shapeless rock music. The sounds of heaving heavy hammers overlay the music as the roofers pried out the old nails and tore off the disintegrating shingles. Pieces of asphalt tile sailed off the top of the house like leaves in a storm and fell thudding heavily into the yard onto plants, grass and bushes below. Roofing nails rained down from the sky like shining spikes of hail. We still find some in the yard or gardens years later. With all the racket, obviously, there was no working at home that morning. Richard and I locked up the house and left for the day as soon as we could. When we returned at six o’clock, the shingles were stripped, the workmen were gone, and the top of the house was covered in crinkling blue plastic tarps. Romana, always an even-tempered creature, was waiting placidly for us beside her cat food bowl in the kitchen, but there was no sign of Nick anywhere. We looked for the old cat in all his usual places, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. He wasn’t sleeping on the porch, or curled up under a bed; he wasn’t next door in the yard with the children, and he wasn’t on my desk in my study. Though by bedtime he still had not returned, we still weren’t really worried. Nick never had liked noise; we were sure he was off somewhere simply trying to find some

quiet. We had no reason to think that he would run away, after all; he had been exhibiting none of the symptoms he used to display in his crazy periods. A cat who never intentionally missed meals or socializing, we figured that wherever he was, he would have to be home soon. By the time the roofers returned the next morning, however, Nick had still not come back. He was not there at lunch, nor again, at dinner. Finally, we began to get worried. We looked for him in his familiar haunts one more time without finding him. The next morning, we tried to ask the workmen if they had seen our cat, but it was no use. All of them but the boss, who had not come with them after the first day, spoke Spanish and no English, and we spoke no Spanish. We never were sure we had even succeeded in making ourselves understood by the dark-haired, dark-eyed men who stood around us in the driveway, shaking their heads and looking puzzled though earnest as we described our absent cat. By the evening of the third day the new roof was on the house. We wrote a check to the boss. The workmen picked up most of the old shingles from the ground and whatever nails their eyes happened to fall upon, then they packed up their ladders and hammers, climbed back into their white trucks and drove off. By the next morning, one of us had already had the first in an endless series of flat tires caused by the remaining roofing nails we couldn’t see, and Nick was still not home. Phone calls to the neighbors confirmed once again that he had not been over to see the children next door since before the roofers had come, nor had he been across the street with the family Julius the cat had come from. No one had seen him anywhere. It was obviously a well put on roof, but it was impossible to take pleasure in it. We drove around the streets of our neighborhood every day for a long time after that on the off chance that he had wandered away and found a new place to stay while the noisy work was being done. As we went, we stopped to examine the pitiful body of every cat that had been hit by a car in traffic. None was Nick. Anna Grace and Ben visited the various humane societies around Atlanta in search of him. I can’t remember whether we actually put an advertisement in the newspaper; I do recall we talked about it. What could have happened to our good old cat? The only explanation that ever made sense to us at the time was that he had somehow done the equivalent with one of the workmen’s trucks that he had done with Pam’s canoe. There were multiple perches suitable for a cat’s nap, not to mention dark inviting hiding places, among the ladders, steel boxes, packages of shingles and shelves in the back of those white vehicles. Nick must surely have found himself one of the inviting spots almost immediately, then curled up and gone to sleep. Presumably, the roofers inadvertently carried him off with them when they went to lunch or even home for the night. If this were the case, then Nick would have awakened some time later to find himself at an unfamiliar intersection or even an unknown

driveway in another part of town, jumped down and wandered off. There were places, after all, that Nick couldn’t find his way home from. Wherever it was he went, we finally gave up and accepted the fact that Nick was gone. Richard, Benjamin and even Anna, who no longer lived at home, grieved for him throughout the rest of that month and most of the next. As for me, Nick had always been my special friend. Now I no longer had him to sit with me while I worked or to keep me company while I cooked. I was desolate. I had lost my middle-aged companion once again. I felt disoriented without him, and the pleasure had gone out of the summer. As the second week of August approached, Benjamin began to get ready to leave home and return to college in Indiana, and Richard and I had to plan for the starting up of the new school year. For the most part, though there is more to the job than any one person can do in a humane manner, I am happy when I am teaching. At the end of that summer, however, I could hardly stand the thought of the gruesome schedule I was about to have to take upon myself once more. Most of all, I couldn’t bear to contemplate the loss of the nearly grown-up Ben to his life away from home. I tried not to dwell on the inevitability of the passing of all things, but try as I might, I grieved for Nick. I couldn’t help wondering if he was still alive, and if he was, where he was and what he was doing. I missed my old companion painfully; I longed for his fringed ears, his dirty fur, and his enthusiastic, licking affection more than ever. Being a cat who appeared to live in the present, I was pretty sure that he never thought of me. One night, however, just as I was about to put supper on the table, the phone rang. Ben, who had been helping me in the kitchen, went to the wall by the refrigerator and picked it up. Though I wasn’t paying much attention, I saw that the call was for him. Whoever it was on the other end, it was a short conversation. “Mom,” said Ben when he hung up. He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve got to go out in the car for a little bit; I’ll be right back.” “Do you have to go now?” It was irritating that he would even think about it. I was just finishing up the mashed potatoes that I had made with the skins left on and lumps in them, just the way he likes them. (As is the way with mothers, this particular effort was intended to cheer me up as much as him.) Of course I didn’t like the idea that he was going out, just as we were about to sit down to eat. Oblivious to my peevishness, Ben took the car keys out of his pocket. “Sorry, Mom,” he replied. “I promise I’ll be right back.”

“Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him for a while,” I said to myself as he roared out of the driveway. “What does he think I’m doing; running a short order joint?” As I set the food on the table for Richard and me, I prepared the speech I intended to make to Ben when he came back later in the evening, unwilling, no doubt, to eat the potatoes I had fixed for him as a little present before he went to school. I never got the chance to deliver my speech. Just as Richard and I were about to sit down, Ben came barreling back up the driveway in his battered old car. A minute or two later, he was racing through the laundry room and kitchen doors, calling as he came. “Mom? Mom, come and see what I’ve got.” Richard and I jumped up from the table to go into the kitchen and look. Sure enough, nestled in his arms and purring away like crazy, was a cat that looked exactly like our old gray animal, Nick. For a moment I was speechless. Then, I went over to take the cat from Benjamin. “Nick?” I said to him as I held him close. I examined his ears, his fur, and his big paws to make certain that it wasn’t just a similar cat, but our own cat. “Is it really you?” Purring louder than ever, the cat looked at me with his yellow eyes, stretched out his neck, and licked me once on the nose. His breath was disgusting and something was caught in his whiskers. There was no question that it was, indeed, Nick. Ben was so delighted with himself that he could hardly stand still. “Where did you get him?” I thought at last to ask our preening son. “Who was that on the phone?” Ben was more than glad to tell us all about it. “Oh, that was my friend Joe calling from his cell phone.” Joe had been Ben’s friend since they both began high school. “Joe was over delivering a pizza under the viaduct on the other side of East Lake Road. When he walked up the steps he was almost sure that it was Nick who was sitting on the family’s porch. The only trouble was, that animal was wearing some lacy pink collar. He rang the bell, handed over the pizza, and asked the lady at the door what the cat’s name was. When she told him it was Rosie he started to have doubts. That’s when he called me to come and look for myself. I didn’t want to say where I was going until I was certain it was Nick. I knew how disappointed you would be if it were just some gray cat sitting on a porch. “I drove over to the house where Joe had seen him, picked him up, and rang the bell.” Benjamin went on. “Those people really liked him. They didn’t want to let him go, but then I told them when we lost him and what it was like to live with him and they had to admit he really must be our Nick. I think the hardest thing for them was learning that he wasn’t a female.”

A female! Remembering the estrogen shot it had taken to counter Nick’s continuing high testosterone levels after his surgery, silently I contemplated the mysteries of gender. Richard took Nick from my arms and began to scratch under his chin. Ben washed his hands in the kitchen sink, then walked into the dining room and sat down, very pleased with himself, to tuck into his cold dinner. I knew better than to wash my own hands. “Ben,” I said, sitting down beside him. “You’re a great kid.” Nick slithered out of Richard’s arms and leaped up onto the middle of the table. I scratched under his chin as Richard pulled out his chair and sat down with us. “Thanks, Mom,” Ben answered, smirking a little, “I know I am.” In his chosen spot among us, Nick stretched and yawned, then lay down with his battered head on his big paws and closed his eyes. None of us would have dreamed of throwing him off the table. That was the last time Nick left home. As far as any of us could judge, Nick’s final years were as peaceful as a cat would want them to be. He took up hunting chipmunks outdoors once more and he continued to ignore the birds he couldn’t catch. He slept a lot on the front porch and the patio behind the house. He plumped up to his former size as he returned to his old favored diet of tuna fish cat food. Never again to our knowledge did he fall asleep under a canoe or climb into the back of a workman’s truck to drive away with him. He took up his old spot on the corner of my desk and once again conversed with me while I was cooking, and he resumed his duties with respect to the neighbor children. By the autumn, baby Molly was playing with him on the sidewalk by her back door, and he and Maxie were better friends than ever. Still, after that summer Nick wasn’t quite the cat he once had been. Where only a few years before, the vet had informed us that he couldn’t figure out how old Nick really was, now when Nick went in for his yearly shots, the same vet told us Nick was geriatric. During his time away, he had lost a tooth. He would need anesthesia to have all his teeth cleaned so that he wouldn’t lose any more. Nick turned picky about his food, too. Often, when mealtimes came he would stand in front of the dish and look at it, then walk away without eating anything. Anna Grace, our daughter, who knows more about animals than all the rest of us put together, told us cats locate their food by scent. Because old cats lose their sense of smell, she informed us, we must heat his tuna in the microwave so he could find it. We did this for him, and it worked for a while until, with the advice of

Anna Grace once more, he graduated in the last year of his life to heated baby food. It seemed as though his old age came upon him all at once. By the next summer, in fact, Nick had aged so much that he could no longer move as he had been accustomed to. Jumping onto the couch or the dining room table clearly caused him pain, even when he didn’t miss, which was about half the time he tried. He had always been the only cat I had ever known who smelled; now, he became as rank as an unwashed old man. He slept more than ever. In spite of the pain he was in, he continued to take his duties with the children next door seriously. He was cautious around adults when he was petted, which often appeared to hurt him. Sometimes he growled a little if he were touched unexpectedly. With Molly and Maxie, however, he was much the same as he had always been. Several times a day as I glanced out the kitchen window I would see him with the baby, who was just learning to walk. Supervised by her father or her mother and Nick, who was right at her feet, Molly would take a step or two. Then she would stumble. Our old cat never let the baby hurt herself. Always, he would manage to position himself in such a way that, when she fell, she landed on him. She would giggle and call his name, “Nick, Nick.” Usually she would grab hold of his ears or tail, poke her tiny fingers in his eyes, and burrow her face in his patient side. Though I often noticed him hunching down with pain in a way I never had before when she let her weight fall on him, I never saw him pull away. There is no way I could have helped knowing what was happening to Nick, but I simply couldn’t acknowledge it to myself. I’ve done the same before. I remember the last year of my father’s life, when he was dying of the dreadful emphysema that finally killed him. He was a proud and loving man who learned through his illness an enormous amount of compassion for all suffering creatures. It continues to grieve me that at the end, his pride kept me away from him. I tried in vain during that whole year to go up to Connecticut to be with him, but he wouldn’t let any of his children come because he didn’t want us to see him so sick. Still, it wasn’t just pride that kept me away. I should have been able to acknowledge what was going on with him and gotten myself up there, regardless of what he said he wanted. Now, I often recall that when I would phone him during those last months and ask him how he was, he would uncharacteristically say to me, “Not good.” I am certain that with these words, he intended to tell me more than how he was feeling at the moment. Whatever his intentions, I didn’t want to hear what he was saying to me. When my stepmother called to break the news, I was entirely undone. Not only was I unprepared for his death; I reacted as though I had never even known he was ill.

It was the same with Nick. In the middle of July I went off to a two-week conference far away in Rome, and I never thought of my aged cat once. Not that I simply went off and enjoyed myself. I was exhausted when I got there, and as is generally the case for this sort of happening, there was almost no time amidst the speeches and other serious events that was allotted for rest. I couldn’t have had a good time even if my roommate hadn’t stayed out half the night and awakened me to talk when she got in. On the one hand, I wouldn’t have felt at home in the magisterial atmosphere in which our mutual work was done, no matter what my roommate did. On the other hand, where it had been unpleasantly hot in Atlanta before I left, the weather was so hot and close in Rome that I could hardly breathe, much less sleep or talk intelligently. I was so grateful to arrive back in the Atlanta airport at the end of this horrendous trip that I hardly knew what to do. It was like cold water on a hot day or a good bed after hard work to see Richard, who was waiting for me, as soon as I came off the plane. He gave me a hug, kissed me, and took the luggage I was carrying with me. I leaned my head on his shoulder and sighed with happiness. “I’m afraid I have bad news,” he replied to my sigh. I caught my breath and pulled away. “What is it?” I wanted Richard to tell me at once. Was something wrong with one of the children? Was my mother all right? For that matter, was Richard all right? “I didn’t want to let you know while you were away from home,” he went on, deliberately stalling. “I knew you would be really upset by it.” “By what, Richard?” I nearly shouted. “Just tell me what it is!” “It’s Nick,” he said. “Nick died while you were gone.” “Nick?” I answered, faintly. I sat down at once in one of the airport chairs by the gate from which my fellow passengers were still emerging. “How could Nick have died?” “I don’t actually know,” said Richard. My husband sat down next to me and put his arm around me. “I can only tell you that he didn’t come home for supper or breakfast for two or three days in a row, and I started to get really worried. Molly and Maxie kept calling him until Chip and I went out looking for him, but we just couldn’t see him anywhere. “A day or two after that, Chip was mowing the lawn when he found our cat. Apparently, when Nick got ready to die he just crawled under a bush in their yard

all by himself and did it. The funny thing is, it was the same bush their cat Mischief died under five or six years ago.” “Oh, no, not Nick,” was all that I could answer. While busy travelers streamed past our plastic seats, I sat and cried. Remembering the muscular body under his solid gray fur and his loving yellow eyes, I was stunned. Richard handed me his clean handkerchief and I blew my nose. “What did you do with him?” I asked when I could speak. “Well,” said Richard, “Chip dug a hole for him in the back by the fence, right between their yard and ours, and I made a tombstone for him out of a piece of lumber and some copper pipe. Then, we had a funeral for him. I poured each of us a shot glass of bourbon and we raised a toast to send Nick off.” “What did you put on his tombstone?” I had to know. I knew better than to ask, but I couldn’t help myself. “To Nick, a damned fine cat,” Richard replied. It was loathsome, an epitaph dripping with testosterone. It didn’t remotely do my good cat justice. At least Richard had the sense to look a bit embarrassed. Then I remembered; Nick really wasn’t just my cat. Richard and Chip had their own relationships with the big gray cat. I wasn’t the only one who loved him. If that was the way these two men wanted to remember Nick and bury him, then let them do it their way. Whatever it said on his tombstone, this time, Nick really was gone, and gone for good. It took us all a long time to accept Nick’s death. Romana, our beautiful black cat, fell immediately into what would have been described as a depression, if found in a human being. Apart from crouching down and watching him with her round green eyes, or hissing at him if he ever tried to give her a friendly lick on the head in passing, Romana had never seemed to pay all that much attention to Nick while he was alive. Once he was gone, it was another matter. Though I don’t recall her reacting to his absence one way or another when he went away with the roofers, now she lay down in the driveway and wouldn’t get up except to eat. It was impossible to tell what was going on in the mind of Romana, our one remaining cat, except that she moped for the rest of the summer, through the fall, and into the winter. Eventually, she began to emerge from her gloom. She began to follow us around the house, lying or sitting close to us wherever we were. She didn’t take up Nick’s old spot by the side of my computer when I was working, but she did lie on the rug by my desk. She even took to sleeping at night like a dead weight of soft fur on the foot of our bed; though she was never a lap-sitter, it was obvious she liked to be near where we were.

Maxie accepted Nick’s death matter-of-factly, which was better than the rest of us. For several months she would remind us that Nick was in heaven where he was really, really happy. About a year after he died, her grandpa also died. Maxie, with blue-eyed, plump-cheeked Molly trailing behind her, came over one afternoon to tell me about it. “Oh yes,” she said to me, drawing herself up in her serious way, “Grandpa has gone to heaven to be with Nick.” Molly didn’t say anything, though she nodded her blond head in agreement. “Nick will take care of Grandpa, you know,” Maxie concluded. It was a hard time. For my part, it seemed to me that, in spite of the fall of the cat population in our house from three to one, after Nick’s death my allergy to cat fur got worse and not better. Several times a day I would look at Romana or stroke her soft fur and resolve, for my health’s sake, not ever to have another cat once she died. Richard and I had had at least two cats at once all the years we had been married. It was time to quit. If cat fur filled up my lungs and head, caused me to sneeze, and made my eyes swell shut, surely the only sensible thing to do would be to learn to live without a cat. In spite of himself, Richard, who loves cats and perhaps even missed Nick as much as I, agreed. Romana would be our last cat. Needless to say, having made the decision not to have another animal in the house, from that time on, Romana was a pampered cat. She was fed table scraps when she asked for them. To the justifiable disgust of my mother and our friend Pam, we never again made her get off the dining room table when we were eating. We didn’t even put her off the bed when she got in the way of our feet. She never, however, quite went back to being the cat we had known when Nick was alive. She moped and spent long hours lying in the driveway every day. For a while, she was off her food. About a year before she died, she was hit one night by a car driven by a visitor who could not see her in her spot by the edge of the front lawn. The mailman and I found her the next day, crouched down pathetically by the side of another neighbor’s house. An X-ray at the vet’s revealed that her hip and tail had been broken. The vet was sure her tail would need amputation, but he was willing to wait and see what happened. Romana was confined to cage rest on the front porch for a month to keep her from jumping and hurting herself. Though she didn’t seem to limp, her poor tail hung straight down like a wet dishrag. We tried to spend as much time with her as we could each day and she clearly enjoyed the attention, but she hated the cage. Miraculously, after a few weeks the tail recovered, as did the hip, and Romana was let out. Except for an apparent desire to stay closer to us than ever, to all appearances, she was herself again.

Whether she really had recovered fully, we will never know. A year later, on Thanksgiving, our little black cat with the beautiful fur and the emerald eyes had a stroke. What I intended to be the last cat who would share our life died on the morning of the next day. I mourned Romana far more than I ever expected. Richard and I had taken her in almost in spite of ourselves. He and I had gone on a short walk one morning, leaving the children at home. When we got back, we found a small black cat cowering on the porch and Anna Grace and Ben sitting on the floor beside her, crying. An old woman in the neighborhood (whom we always suspected had first waited for the adults to step out for a few minutes) had brought Romana over, looking very frightened, in a cage. She proceeded to tell Anna Grace and Benjamin that the cat had belonged to a friend of hers who had moved out of town. Unless our family adopted her on the spot, the old woman said, she would take the quivering animal to the pound, where she would be put to sleep at once. Naturally, the children, who were traumatized by the very idea that someone could kill an animal--particularly this animal they could actually pet--just because it wasn’t wanted, told her to leave the cat with them. Angry at this cruel ploy of our neighbor and not sure how we could accommodate ourselves to a third cat, we told the children, nevertheless, that they could keep her. Romana turned out to be a gentle animal, as well as a beautiful one; she never bit or scratched in all the years she lived with us. At the same time, of all the cats we ever had, she was the one who accommodated herself the least to human ways. A solitary creature, she clearly wasn’t a cat much used to interaction with human beings. She enjoyed teasing the blue jays that had their nest in the wild cherry tree at the edge of the driveway. Still, she didn’t learn to communicate through “talking” as our other cats did, and though she wanted to sit or lie close to us in her old age, she disliked being on anyone’s lap or being picked up. I missed her when she died. I missed her quiet, somnolent presence on the rug in my study while I was working. I missed her graceful beauty, her emerald eyes, her round face, and thick, glossy black fur. Although I suspected myself of unwholesome anthropomorphizing, it made me sad to think that Romana had been so withdrawn in so many ways. Once she was dead I worried that she had been lonely, and I wondered if I should have talked to her more. With Romana gone, we had become a household without cats, and I didn’t like it. I missed every cat who had lived with us. Whatever folk may say about cats sitting on your lap only because you are a warm body, or purring when you talk to them just because they know you will feed them, I will never believe it. Kitty, Cinnamon, Pansy, Julius, Romana, and Nick never seemed to act as though I was just “there.” All of them shared my world with me through hard times as well as happy ones. Even Romana, withdrawn as she was, was a social creature. Over the years, these animals provided me with companionship and sympathy,

attentive eyes, and soft paws patting my face or kneading my chest when I needed them. Where my temptation has always been to worry about the past, what was and what might have been, and the future, what and who might be lost in it, the cats had been good models for living more in line with Jesus’ advice to “take no thought for the morrow.” Having a peculiar gift for life in the actual present, playing or sleeping, they obviously threw themselves into whatever it was they were doing. They reminded me, just by being who they were, to pay attention and live in the concrete, everyday reality of God’s now. And yet, in spite of all this domesticity, all their lovableness, all their ability to participate in their own way in our world and to draw us, politely, into theirs, our cats remained mysterious. They lived, as all creatures live--birds, earthworms, fish, deer, alligators--in a world of their own, closed off to human experience. Behind those watchful, even sympathetic eyes, lay a consciousness no human being could fathom. What does a cat really see when it looks at us? Its world is self-contained, structured in such a way that the cat and the needs of cats are at the center of it. The invisible lines connecting men, women, and children to each other, of family, culture, larger place and smaller object, language, food, God, even other animals, run differently in cats. The life of the cat is forever out of reach to us. The immediate knowledge of the inalterable otherness of cats had been a gift that came from living with the animals that I sorely missed. How much I needed their alienness! Every day, with every prayer, I longed to be reminded concretely of the basic mystery that lies at the heart of all creatures, all human beings, and all things! Every one of us needs this reminder. We are not the center of the universe, after all, the point of convergence the entire creation moves toward, the Godappointed masters of all that we might dominate and subdue, no matter how we act or what we want to believe. None of us has absolute ownership of anything that “belongs” to us--not land, not money, not children or spouses, not animals. If nothing else, death forces us to abandon what we think we most surely own. Yet even Christians have been tempted to live as though this is not the case, as though the creation stories in Genesis gave us a mandate to deny the mystery and to believe instead that we can own, dominate, or discount the other creatures with whom we share our world, as though their lives have no value except in so far as it is convenient to us human beings. Forgetting that having been created like ourselves, they have their own covenant with their creator about which we can have no knowledge, we arrogantly write them off as “only animals.” To think that God has put anything or any creature in a world merely for our own pleasure or convenience is a distortion of scripture as I understand it. The Psalms are full of hints that all that exists has its own joyous life in God. Paul speaks to us, not of our need or right to subdue our world, but of the world’s

suffering, of the groaning of the whole creation under our heavy human hand as all of us, plant, animal, and mineral, together await our final release from bondage. And Paul also reminds us Christians how, when God came into the world in human flesh to teach us how to be human once again, God came, not as one who dominates, who masters and subdues all God touches, but who gave up that dreadful power and lived in the world in humility, for the sake of love. Like our relationship with God, our relationships to the animals with whom we live is a deep and wonderful mystery. They are like us and at the same time utterly unlike us. They teach us compassion for our own kind. They also, like God’s own self, show us how to love across species in a way that is “homely,” to use Julian of Norwich’s word, and paradoxically beyond all power to understand it. Such love and mystery fill us with awe, as well as a sense of the presence of beauty beyond anything we can imagine. It makes us humble; it teaches us gentleness; it opens us to joy. I found, in the end, that I couldn’t keep up my resolve. Allergies or no, though I tried my best, I couldn’t live without an animal. Romana died the day after Thanksgiving at what was nearly the end of the school year. I was inundated with papers, the last of the semester lectures, faculty meetings, and finals as well as the planning, shopping, wrapping, mailing, and cooking that went with the approach of Christmas. I counted on pressure and activity to distract me from the absence of the green eyes of Romana watching everything I did at home as they peered at me from her round black face. The pressure wasn’t enough. During the first week or two, I called her name when I came in at the end of a long day and when she didn’t respond, I looked for her curled up in her favorite spots. In spite of myself, something in me wouldn’t accept that she was dead. By the third week, I knew in my heart that she was gone. I worked hard; I graded papers, saw students, and prepared for Christmas, and I felt terrible. On the eighteenth of December, I met with my old friend and teaching partner, Bill Mallard, to finish the work for our joint course in church history, so that we could turn in the grades. Being the kindhearted and observant person he is, at some point in the afternoon, he noticed I wasn’t myself. He decided, characteristically, to address it directly. “How are you feeling?” he asked me as I moped over the papers. “You look a little under the weather.” “Oh Bill,” I replied, “I feel awful.” Then, I burst into tears. “Of course you do,” he answered, undeterred. “You haven’t got a cat. How can you, of all people, expect to be happy without a cat?”

I looked at him in astonishment, my resolve abandoned in an instant. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll get Anna Grace this very day, and she can help me find one.” And that is what we did. That afternoon we went together to the Humane Society and found Sophie, a nearly grown black-and-brown-striped, green-eyed tabby as beautiful, affectionate, and playful as any cat I had ever seen. Sophie has been with us ever since. She isn’t like Nick, of course, whom I’ll always miss. She is a cuddler who puts her paws on my leg to be picked up in the morning when I get out of bed, and a fierce hunter of felt mice which she bats around and leaps upon. She isn’t like Cinnamon or Pansy, or any of the other cats who had ever lived with us, for that matter. She is absolutely her happy self, a wonderful companion who is lying full length at this very moment on the side of my desk. One of her soft paws is laid gently on my arm, and her delicate ears twitch while she sleeps. Occasionally she opens her eyes and looks at me, then goes to sleep once more. Sophie is an animal as I am, and we have much in common. At the same time, like every living creature, she is her own self and not just an extension of who I am. As far as Sophie herself is concerned, she is, above all, a cat. Most of the time, waking and sleeping, what is in her mind is a mystery.

1. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, trans. Kathleen McVey, "Hymns of the Nativity 13," lines 12-15, pp. 138-39.

Nick The Cat Christian Reflections on the Stranger (return to cover page) » About this Title « Copyright © 2001 by Abingdon Press All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN37202-0801. This book is printed on recycled, acid-free, elemental-chlorine–free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bondi, Roberta C. Nick the cat : Christian reflections on the stranger / Roberta C. Bondi. p. cm. ISBN 0-687-081424 (alk. paper) 1. Christian life--Anecdotes. 2. Cats--Religious aspects--Christianity. I. Title. BV4501.3 .B66 2001 242--dc21 2001040183 Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. Quotations on p. 53 are from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers:The Alphabetical Collection. Translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG. Foreword by Metropolitan Anthony. © Sister Benedicta 1975. First published by A.R. Mowbray &Co., London, 1975. 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA