I Suppose I Should Make a Furtography Joke

Leave it to a Seattlite to put a camera around their cat's neck once a week for a calendar year.

I often wondered what kind of adventures the cats would have back home as I was growing up. It usually consisted of one of them coming back with a split ear or a claw sticking out of the back of his neck. The funny thing is that this cat never had a "OMG I'm hurt" kind of attitude. It was always one of "Hey guys, I'm back. Oh, yeah, that gash across my nose? I got in a fight. It was awesome." Totally tough, totally blasé about it.

Yesterday, home sick, I spent an entire day lounging on the couch with Spaz and Vivido. They were curled up in a ball together, periodically shifting, stretching, and optionally consisted of one grooming the other. (As I discovered today in a copy of Cat Fancy magazine, Vivido is a Norwegian forest cat, so is naturally inclined to be socially needy and amicable around other pets and people.) I think they got up a total of once — when they heard the food dispenser go off. I wonder what life must be like for a cat sometimes.

I've also been spending more and more time thinking about the cats back home. My sister has made sure to consistently grow her brood and recruit fresh strays from all over the neighborhood. In a way, this feels alienating, because when I go home for holidays and such, the cats don't recognize me, and I don't recognize some of the cats. Tom Wolfe was right.

The holidays are a time to retreat, withdraw, regroup, and reflect on the past; preferably in ways that will illuminate and improve the future. In thinking so frequently about the cats, I think I'm really focusing on my unresolved feelings of the growing distance between me and my past. Going home has ceased to be a heart-warming, battery-recharging activity for me. It seems far away (in more ways than one) and everything I see when I'm there is simultaneously seems strange and surreal. It's a little like the scene in Grosse Point Blank where John Cusack sees that the house where he grew up have been replaced by a convenience store.

I've decided to skip going home this winter in lieu of a time next year when the weather is nicer and I can at least go outside a little. I've decided that I'm not going to invest in a 2009 kitty calendar — it's too painful to change from one month to the next. I've decided that ruminating on my supposed halcyon days presupposes that my current days are somehow unhalcyonic and that's just not a factual supposition. I skipped my ten-year anniversary for a variety of reasons, so why can't we let bygones be bygones?

Ricky Jay's narration in the Magnolia film is spot-on in this regard: we may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us. Now it's just time for a rain of frogs and we're all set.