Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Little Mira has always been an outside cat, even when she was a young thing. I would supervise her on the back porch as she sniffed timidly around. She’s had multiple encounters with other cats, and possums, and gangs of raccoons, and even a dog on one startling occasion, but she learned to do the right thing each time. Run home.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen her blast in through the cat door, or vault through the open window, to escape pursuit from some creature intent on violence. I’ve chased foreign animals out of my house, out of the back yard, off the roof.

I do not look forward to the day when Mira fails to come home, or comes home injured as I have seen other cats do. But I accept it nevertheless, as the cost of keeping her the way I want her to be, the way I most enjoy her:

I want a cat that is sane!

All those cats sitting in windows? In silent houses, staring into space? They’re all as nutty as fruitcakes! Totally bonkers; left reality years ago and never came back. What else can you expect when you take a creature whose reactions are so fast it can casually slap a fly right out of the air … and you lock it in a silent, lifeless purgatory?

I know Mira is happy here, because being home is a choice she gets to make.

Today I woke up after only 7 hours, at 7:50 in the morning. I think it was the cat scratching at the bedroom door that did it. I let her in and crawled back under the covers, and she made her adorable meow-trill at me and then hopped onto the bed and slunk her way beneath the sheets, where she curled up in the hollow between my chest and my left arm. Then, for some inexplicable reason she decided to lick my armpit. It tickled like hell and that woke me up the rest of the way. I was too comfortable to move, though, so I just dozed for another hour or while Mira crammed her cold feet repeatedly into the gap between my torso and the mattress, and fell asleep and twitched and made little "rooop" noises.

When she roused herself and squiggled out of the bedsheets, I decided it was time for me to rise as well. I took a brief shower and put on a long-sleeved shirt, anticipating cold weather outside. Then I tooled around the house for a while, cleaning up in the kitchen, moving more stuff into jars to mouse-proof them, feeding the cat, poking at the computer. I did some firmware upgrades and moved some files around, then wandered out into the back yard and got inspired to pull weeds. I observed that the runny nose I had inside the house was dissipated after only 15 minutes outside. Yep, there's something my immune system doesn't like in there. I should try to be outdoors as much as possible.

I snarfed some dark chocolate and peanuts - a small but strangely effective breakfast for me - and tuned up my folding bike, then rode out with my backpack to run errands. First stop, the bank in Emeryville to deposit a check. I played my old biking playlist and discovered that I was having a really good time bopping along. I felt strong and healthy in a way I hadn't for months. From the bank I went across to Piedmont and bought a bike valve adapter, and had a discussion with the mechanics about my 20-inch rim that needed repair. "Bring it in. Sounds like a custom job but we can do it," they said.

From there I rode down to Lake Merritt and locked my bike up at Whole Foods, where I loaded the backpack with groceries: Oranges, bell peppers, corn chips, a tiny wedge of cheese, two nine-volt batteries, a dozen eggs, two boxes of rice milk, a huge plastic box of salad greens, a big bag of peanuts, and many packets of squishy cat food for Mira. Plus a snack to eat in the parking lot. It wouldn't all fit, so I had to carry two paper bags on my handlebars as I rode home.

Now that I had a valve adapter, I could use the plastic floor pump in the living room to re-pressurize the tires on my big upright bike, and ride that around instead of the folding one. So I stowed my groceries, installed the 9-volt batteries in the smoke detectors, and tuned up the big bike for an excursion. But then I hit a snag: My helmet was missing. Actually, I couldn't even remember if I'd worn it home from the store. Had I left it in the packing lot back there? Was there a chance it would still be resting on the ground next to the bike racks, or on the hedge near the sliding door, or wherever I'd left it? Only one way to make sure... So I rode the upright bike to Whole Foods, retracing my route.

As I did so I was surprised to observe that I was moving very fast on the bike, and without a lot of effort. My GPS doodad told me I was going 17 miles per hour along Grand Avenue, on a slight uphill grade. A few months ago I remembered working pretty hard just to reach 15mph in the same place. That's the funny thing about being in shape, I suppose. My performance was different and since it didn't feel like I was working, I was failing to notice the change. There wasn't any novel stimulus, like being short of breath, or sore, to make me think about it. How weird. But how delightful!

Hey kids, here's a great idea for getting in shape that you can do in your spare time! RIDE 1300 MILES IN ONE MONTH. (Bonus idea: Haul 50 pounds of gear along.)

There was no helmet. If I'd left it at the store, inside or out, it had obviously been stolen by someone during the last hour. It didn't feel proper to ride around without a helmet, so my next task was to pedal over to a sporting goods store and purchase a new one. That set me back 30 bucks, but it didn't dampen my mood. It just felt great to be out in the world getting stuff done.

Traffic in the east bay area is fast and streets can be messed up in unpredictable places, but on the other hand, drivers are very used to bicyclists and have a better sense of what is and isn't proper space and timing around them. After riding in urban areas of Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio, dealing with hellaciously damaged curbs and sidewalks, and drivers who treated bicyclists like criminals or space aliens, I actually found the Oakland streets easy to deal with. The more I thought about this, the more bizarre it seemed, yet the feeling persisted. Amazing what a little perspective can do.

Anyway, after the sporting goods store I tried Home Depot, looking for a large container made of metal or glass that I could use to store cat food, since the old plastic container was no longer adequate protection against mice. They had nothing suitable, so I tried Office Max, then Target next door. They had a selection of massive jars, so I bought the one that just exactly filled the entire space inside my backpack, and brought that home. Mission Accomplished.

I transferred the cat food, fed Mira, and then mucked around on the computer some more. If I concentrated I could smell the faint odor that lingered throughout the house - a menacing combination of dust, animal detritus, and mildew. Clearly, if I wanted to preserve this plateau of good health, and good feelings that rode on top if it, I needed to be outside. I knew it was going to be difficult since I still had plenty of chores to deal with. Perhaps I could find a cafe with wifi and do most of my computery crap in there. Maybe that one down by Lake Merritt...

Anyway, I was quite hungry, so I decided to treat myself to Pho downtown. This time I rode the folding bike, and stashed it just inside the restaurant doors against the wall. The managers of Kim Huong - a husband and wife team who also served the food - didn't seem to mind.

It was a pretty good meal, though a bit on the salty side, and I had plenty of leftovers. The woman asked some enthusiastic questions about my bike, then implored me to come back again, soon, any time, great to see you, any time, no really, maybe this weekend, et cetera. I rode home showered and chased the cat around the house, then settled into my bed to type, with my stomach radiating heat in a very comforting, relaxing way.

In the great scheme of things, the big massive cosmic scheme, I suppose I didn't get very much done today. I didn't follow any job leads or inspect any new living spaces. I didn't make any major life decisions. But I've grown a bit tired of major life decisions these last couple of months. After seeing so many people in so many cities, people living from beginning to end without half the experiences I've already shoveled behind me in just the last ten years alone, I feel a little stupid for obsessing about such a big picture. Many years ago I had a job in a library shelving books, and I came upon a textbook about nutrition and spent hours reading it, and then scrawled a short sentence into my journal: "Health shapes mood shapes mind." Somewhere during the last two years I abandoned that basic knowledge, and became extremely distracted trying to figure out who I actually was, and make sense of my own disturbing and desperate actions. If so many other people around me were apparently content to live exactly the life I had assembled, why didn't I feel content? With so many people beating on the doors to work where I was, live where I was, and act how I was, why wasn't it enough for me?

Well, long story short, it just wasn't.

My only condolence is that I learned - or at least I hope I've learned - a valuable lesson about driving my life forward. No one can do it but me.

Our little cat hasn't been alive for a year, but she's practically an adult. Today we wrapped sticky gauze around each of her legs and bathed her. She got away from us a few times as we applied the tape, and La and I couldn't help but laugh as she tried to run. She wiggled each foot in turn, and it looked like she was trying to gallop and do kung-fu at the same time.

But the tape stayed on, and we got her covered in two kinds of soap. One kind to remove poison-oak oil, and another kind to kill fleas and clean her off. The only place she would sit still enough for us to rinse her was on my shoulders, behind my neck, so I stood in the shower and held the sprayer back over my head. The sound of the hair dryer drove her crazy, so we did our best with towels and then just let her go. Last time we did this she was smaller and thinner, and we were afraid she would go into shock. That time she crept under my sweater, between my arms, and shivered as I sat in the rolly chair.

This time she did half the drying herself, by grooming. I sat on the bed and watched her. For the first time I realized that her routine was more sophisticated than just licking. She would lick her fur to straighten it, but only until she found a tangle. Then she would bite down behind the tangle and pull up, using her teeth like a comb to break it. I always figured that the biting was prompted by fleas.

This realization led to another, more interesting one. She couldn't have learned how to do that by herself. She just doesn't have the brains to figure that out. It must come from the same instinctive place that all the other grooming habits come from. That makes sense and it shouldn't be surprising to me, but this procedure for breaking tangles looks so much like a product of reasoning. Mira is using her teeth as a tool here. Isn't that pretty sophisticated behavior?

But after a while of watching this, I realized that I was trying to oversimplify things. I wanted to believe that her grooming arose from genetic memory alone, because that's all she had to start with. But like any living creature, her genes and her needs and her environment interplay over time. The results of this process can make some very smart looking behavior.

She may have started just with a simple urge to lick herself when she's feeling well. Her mother licked her when she was tiny, and perhaps that feeling of safety helped to establish that urge. Her mother also had a distinctive smell, which she got on Mira when she groomed her. Mira herself probably smells like her mom, and perhaps when she licks herself she is looking for that smell. Perhaps that feedback established its own pattern: Now she licks herself until she finds that smell again, which means she licks herself until there's no more dirt or water or foreign oil obscuring the smell. An urge to find a particular smell is a pretty small and meaningless urge by itself, but if it combines in sequence with an established habit of licking, it can suddenly turn licking into grooming.

If this is the kind of process at work inside Mira, then I find it pretty amazing. I probably don't have the details right, but I bet I can get ahold of a biology textbook that does. Even more amazing to me is that this process repeats itself, in cat after cat after cat, for as long as cats are around. It repeats in all of us, really. We all respond to environmental cues that are billions of years old, and the ways we respond are prompted by our genetic memory of that environment.

At this point I'm talking about things that are obvious to everyone. I think I'm just dwelling on it tonight because I've been spending a lot of the last few days thinking about my future. Sometimes I imagine an infinite progression of selves, stretching into the past. Each one of them has lived inside the interplay of environment with instincts. Each one of them has had a cat like Mira, prowling around nearby, repeating a similar interplay in the role of all cats, providing a living demonstration and a reminder of how many times this process has repeated. When I think too much about this I feel myself slip out of time, almost out of my own existence, as though I have only the lightest grasp on the individual that is me, among the crowd of selves that I never was. Letting go is like falling back into a place of complete and infinite silence. It's not just a place where nothing happens; it's a place where there can be nothing TO happen.

The future has some changes in it. Perhaps it will help me distinguish the self that I am from the selves I remember, or only imagine. Perhaps it is time to make some noise.

Mira has grown. These pictures were taken about five months after we found her.

In the spring we started letting her outside, into the garden. At first she was chaperoned the entire time ... a wide-eyed fuzzball hopping around ahead of us and trilling excitedly. If she went sniffing around the sides of the house, we corralled her back to the garden. Eventually she learned that the backyard was her little safety zone.

Now, we leave the door open while we're home so she can wander in and out. She loves the garden, and her freedom, and when we want to leave the house we often have to chase her all over the place to get her back inside. It can be exasperating, but she's so happy in the garden that I couldn't bear to keep her shut inside all the time.

She squats down under the eaves of the celery stalks and pounces on bugs. She sniffs around the base of the fence and catches the scent of other critters in our neighborhood. She claws her way up the plum tree, trills at the beetles in the compost, and climbs into our half-barrels of potato plants and pokes her nose into the leaves. Her latest sport is chasing after tennis balls I roll along the ground.

Once, when the back door was open, I walked in from the living room and saw a different cat in the kitchen. I had to look twice because the cat was almost exactly like Mira. A little bulkier, a little less white on the paws, probably male ... same age ... I could only conclude that it was one of Mira's siblings. The cat looked back at me in confusion, as if to say, "What are you doing here?", then turned around and strolled out of the house. I followed him out. He trotted right by Mira, who was standing on the steps looking shocked, and jumped from the ground to the lid of the hot-tub up onto the fence. He gave one slow backward look at me and then disappeared. He and Mira were way too calm around each other to have been anything but family.

A week or so later, we found that cat in our bedroom, perched at the top of the armoire where Mira likes to hide. Perhaps he was looking for her. He cried in alarm from his high perch, because La had just shut the door to the room, inadvertantly trapping him inside with us. When I opened the door again he leapt down and dashed out of the house.

I also have another tale to tell, and this one makes me a little sad. Some time ago I came outside and saw Mira sniffing excitedly along the bottom of the backyard fence. Through the vertical gaps, I could make out a much larger cat doing the same routine on the other side, following after Mira. I wedged a plastic chair against the fence and stood on it, and when I looked over, this is who I saw:

It was Mira's mother.

She couldn't have been anyone else. I don't know if she remembers how she lost track of a kitten many months ago, or if she just knows one of her children is nearby and wants to make contact. I got down off my chair and grabbed Mira, who was sniffing at a sourgrass flower, and held her up over the ledge of the fence so she and her mother could actually see each other. Upon sight of Mira, the other cat sat down, tucked her front paws inward, tucked her tail around her side, and made a very unique little yapping meow that sounded to my ears like the cat equivalent of, "Come here, child."

Mira saw the other cat, struggled in my grasp, and leapt down out of my arms to the garden on my side of the fence. She ran all the way back into the house. Not only did she fail to recognize her mother, but she was running in fear from a large foreign cat. It looks like it's just too late for them to have any kind of relationship.

On the other hand, Mira is becoming increasingly independent with her outside trips. Several times now I've seen her walking along the top of the fence, like her brother did. She is well within range of meeting her mom again. ... Perhaps she already has.

Some day we'll move away from here, hopefully to a place with even more garden or some forest along the edge, and Mira will have some real territory to patrol. But until then there's plenty to do in our little backyard.