Opening

Spring opens

Behind closed eyelids

Dark in the quiet morning.

It is the first stirring

Of consciousness

In bed, nest, and den—

Each day holding 

The quiet possibility 

Of surprise.

Portrait of a Lion

When I was 22 years old, I lived in an apartment in the City of Buffalo. One night while I was taking out the trash, a tuxedo cat who was visibly blind in one eye came up to me and asked if I would take him in. I picked him up and said, "Hi Hawkeye!" like we were old friends and he purred and rubbed his head against mine. He was very thin and flea bitten. There were chunks missing. So I carried him up the four flights of stairs to my apartment and fed him a can of tuna fish, and then went out to buy a litter box and cat dish. I had always had a cat growing up. I don't know how normal people get cats. Mine have always found me. 

At the vet a few days later, they said he had worms; had been hit by a car (hence the bum eye) and that he'd been neutered on the street (hence the cut ear, as a marking). And he needed a home (hence the human paying the bill). 

The first night he slept with me in my bed, I hardly slept at all. He couldn't stop telling me how happy he was. My vague impression is of a lion puffing out his chest on top of the covers to stake his claim. Still purring. And when I would come home from work every day, he RAN to me to pick him up and I would hold him in my arms and we would rub foreheads VIGOROUSLY for AWHILE. He missed me. 

After awhile, he settled into a better way of sleeping with me. I would hold up the covers after I got in bed. He would walk under head-first, make a U-turn, and lay on my outstretched left arm. I would wake up with him still lying next to me, head on the pillow, like a human. 

When I started law school I put two chairs in my home office, one for me and one for Hawkeye. I would work my fulltime job, go to school fulltime, come home at 6:30, sit with him and read until midnight, and then go to sleep for 5 1/2 hours (also with him) and start it all over again. The only thing I allowed myself to take breaks for was to pet him and watch him for awhile as he laid next to me in his own chair.

Later, I got married and we moved to West Seneca where he howled at the walls for being in the wrong places for the first few days. Then when I got pregnant and gave birth, I labored mostly at home. He came and laid in the crook of my arm just as he did when I would sleep. He stayed with me for hours and hours like that, purring and letting me pet him, helping me to stay relaxed. He put me into a kind of almost-sleep until it was time to go to the hospital where the baby would come within an hour. 

Sometime in those early years, I took him to a feline ophthalmologist who said he would inevitably develop an eye tumor in his damaged eye which would take his life unless we paid to have the eye removed. I was still in law school at the time, and had no money, and couldn't afford it. The doctor said if I couldn't pay the bill, she would do the surgery and keep my cat as her own. I couldn't imagine. So he didn't have the surgery. 

A couple of years later he did develop precisely the cancer that she had predicted would kill him, and I watched him slowly waste away. We eventually put him down. I still remember him on my lap on the way to his last vet visit, looking out the window, curious at his surroundings. He had been so lethargic for so many weeks that it was shocking to see him interested in anything again. It made it harder to let him go. 

I have learned from the cats I've had over the years that most of companionship consists of shared routines. Looking at each other. Doing little things that relax each other. To have a life so intertwined with your own that is devoid of what we call language is a unique and powerful thing. His life story is a part of mine. It seems a shame not to tell it.