We once had a house cat. He was amazing at first, the funniest kitten I’d ever seen, and I’m a connoisseur. A totally fluffy gray furball with longer white hair, he looked frosted. We named him Pussy Willow Catkin, Willy, for short.
As Willy grew, he developed issues with me, the discipline person who floated through the house in those wonderful reversible gauzy skirts, draped armloads of sheets to the laundry, and popped open trash bags, all of which activities scared him.
Not only that, but I often exchanged his raunchy litter box for one that smelled good, an activity he took as very personal rejection.
Eventually he learned which side of the bed was mine and occasionally he dumped on me. He knew which chair I would least like full of gray fuzz. He knew which floor was most problematic if peed on. He knew which windowsills had breakable brick-a-brack. He used all his information to pay me back for scaring him with my floaty, drapey, trashy ways.
I only did one thing right in his eyes: catnip. He loved it; I grew it.
The day came, though, when we weaned him to be an outdoor cat. After an initial wild exploration, he settled in to sleeping in the bird feeder. The birds frowned about that. He often fantasized that he could catch a bird, although all his forays into the wonderful world of the hunt were flops.
Especially the last one.
Around our property lived a mockingbird, which I don’t care what Jem’s Dad said, they do harm. They deliberately flaunt their senseless songs and seducing dances from atop the huge light pole that holds not only several wires and a yard light, but also the transformer for a few families. They do this only if a cat is in sight. Every time our cat would start up the tree near that pole, our mockingbird would keep up its cat-courting ritual just long enough to irritate the cat, then fly off.
One morning, Willy did not show up for breakfast. It wasn’t long before we discovered where he was: at the very top of the pole. At 5:00 a.m.
We decided he might learn a lesson if he had to wait until normal business hours to be rescued. We never dreamed what would happen next.
The skies opened up and dumped an inch of rain in 15 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like that and I’m also a connoisseur of rain. Love to watch it.
At this point, cat is drenched and bird is wherever birds go to survive downpours. Cat decides to take matters into his own hands and discovers that the perfectly safe props that got him up are now hot. Live. Murderous. In a moment, Pussy Willow Catkin lies at the base of the pole, basically dead.
We had another cat, once. It was fond of hunting and spent long days away, causing us to never-mind when it was gone. We reasoned that the Ma cat was teaching it to hunt and it came and went when she did. The Ma cat often spent time away, was not altogether tame, in fact.
We always called this cat “the other cat” because it so resembled Black Jack that we had trouble telling them apart. It was not Black Jack, though, did not have Jack’s and Earl’s hilarious dominance gene.
The Other Cat always held back, if there was a tussle for the food dish. It usually did not prefer petting and seemed somewhat afraid of touch, in general. It ate and hung around with its siblings, but was the odd man out and didn’t seem to care.
I’ve known people like this, too. With people, long ago, we used the term “wallflower”, indicating the loner, the shy one who held back. I remember a classmate who hung around like The Other Cat. Her short hair had transformed nearly into a helmet with hairspray. She wore beige makeup all over her face, including beige lipstick, and didn’t wipe the excess off her eyebrows, which made her face pale and featureless, as if she were about to pass out. Like many popular girls, she sewed her own clothes, but they were—I don’t know—somehow blank-looking. Maybe color hurt her eyes, or something. She probably bathed every Saturday, but she often glistened with the need for a midweek dunking.
She never arrived first and always took the leftover seat. She never spoke much—only if called upon in class. She offered correct but lifeless answers, parroting the textbook but seeming unable to think aloud. When, at the bell, others bolted with gusto from the classroom, she gathered books with limp hands and slipped out onto the fringes of the hallway melee.
No one flattened her, which, now that I think about it, amazes me. Yet, this, too, adds to her persona: A collision, at least, would have proved she existed.
No one took offense at her. Sometimes the kind girls reached out to her, but no one kept it up. Her wan smiles hardly rewarded us enough and we were too young and untrained to care deeply. Boys would walk around her, embarrassed to make eye contact, but never insinuating the ridiculous remarks they saved for targeted girls.
I wonder about her, now. Now that I care about the downtrodden, now that I invest time to draw women out of themselves, I wonder about her home life. Did her parents encourage her? Did they abuse her?
Regreso del hijo pródigo, Louvre (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Our gray cat, Earl Grey, has a big brother that is mostly black, and is the alpha-cat. We call him Black Jack.They are gorgeous, almost identical, except Earl is paler.
Jack has devoted himself to developing his dominance of our property during Earl’s recent trip abroad. With Earl’s return, Jack has sulked at our joyfully cuddling his little brother.
You know, the original Prodigal had an older brother. The older brother never strayed, never wavered in his loyalty to the family agenda.
He sulked, too.
It was just an agenda though, that held his loyalty. The family, itself, never entered his mind, we might think, from reading the Parable. He stayed home, labored diligently, amassed wealth, and never even asked for a small bit of food for a party with his friends.
We have to wonder why not.
Had he no time, at all, for people? Was the agenda so vitally important that he never enjoyed one perk, in all that time?
I imagine a stressed and angry man, telling himself that since Junior decided to bolt, all the work fell on him.
I imagine him using a self-imposed workload to excuse anger so abundant and so freely spent, that his few friends cared little for him.
I imagine he worked so hard, partly, because he would never have to share the results.
I imagine he gloried in all he was building for Dad—and that he would inherit.
He was weak.
In the midst of his wealth and strength, he flirted with self-pity, a serious weakness. Self-pity can cause you to forget the important things. It can cause you to forget to feel sad when your brother goes missing and to forget your dad’s sadness. It can cause you to think wealth is most important, to glory in wealth, to devote your life to self-wealth, self-pampering, and self-excusing.
It can cause you to be glad Junior is gone and to act messed up if he returns.
Both brothers suffered from the same problem: self. The younger spent everything on self-gratification. The older saved everything for self-gratification. Neither used wisdom, thought of Dad, nor were good sons.
The saddest thing is that only one repented.
The one who left had decided he would return as a servant, would devote the rest of his time to building Dad’s and Bubba’s wealth. Dad proved his righteous joy and reinstated Junior, but Junior would happily have gone without the robe, ring, and sandals.
He would have been satisfied to wash his brother’s feet, instead.
He would have been satisfied to work the rest of his life building up his brother’s “self”, instead of his own.
I can relate to Junior. Junior returned, physically and emotionally but we have no assurance that Bubba ever did return, emotionally. I’m guessing that from that time on, Junior was all the way home, and Dad knew it.
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