Monday, April 18, 2016

Cat magic





I hate to quote myself, rather I retain an abiding belief that others should do so for me.

Take that Oscar Wilde.

And yet here I am compelled to bring forth this nugget on my own from out of yesterday's missive:

Of all things in this world, magic is both the most skittish and the most friendly.

Even as I wrote it, and could not at that moment in literature travel down the path of it, I thought, like cats. Just like cats

And perhaps there is why the cat is the common and appropriate familiar of all things magic.

A couple of nights ago my wife and I got out of our car, unaccustomedly parked at the front of our house because our garage was being painted, and we heard an insistent,  plaintive mewling. Honestly it sounded like the fake cries of a cat, too loud, too cat-like. But they were no fake cries. Down the middle of our street, on a gorgeous, windy Spring night, came a fluffy, but short-haired gray cat. He was crying out that he utterly needed us. I crouched down. My wife stood in place. The cat reminded me of Olive, a sleeker gray cat who once roamed our neighborhood, eviscerating bunnies and paying us visits. This cat was well fed and collar-less. He swirled around my wife's ankles. He tucked his head into my open hands, rubbing and bumping his face against them. He made a dozen repeated rounds of us, at my wife's feet and pouring through my hands. I pet him. His tail whacked me with a friendly thwap in my back. I thought "This is our cat now, he will never leave us. What will we do?"

And then after ten minutes of utter communion, he was gone.






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