As human beans, we jump from thought to feeling and forget we have bodies at all.
As perfectly integrated individuals, cats forget nothing.
That’s not entirely true. Cats — and they gave me written permission to say this — forget a few things. Cats forget the dates of Civil War battles; the fact that they already consumed their second breakfast today; and most of the eighth season of The West Wing.
But embodiment? Never.
CAT does not get so lost in a daydream, she misses the hot fizz of June humidity.
CAT does not drill so deep into his worries, his head is down when that impossible sunrise comes up. (Again! Will it do it tomorrow? How could any body dare to miss it?)
CAT does not yearn so long and hard for dinner that he sleep-eats through lunch, much less dunch (the most critically underserved meal of the day).
While you and I sometimes move into the attics of our heads, cats fill every fiber of their bodies. And let the reader understand: cats are extremely high in fiber, almost cruciferous, the broccoli of mammals.
Writing and worrying and thinking and working and worrying and writing and worrying and planning, I can get marooned in my mind. Meanwhile, the bushy tail brushing my leg goes uncelebrated; the bite of my ginger tea tastes toothless; the green CAT eyes urging me to explode in poetry (or at least a pause for a neck-skritch) fall to the floor in prose. I ignore my hunger and my wholeness. My feet fall asleep because I am asleep. The fire in my belly forgets it can’t blaze in my brain.
And then the cats have to intervene.
CAT clatters up the wall like a speed-ivy, like Spiderman, like Spiderman’s tragically underappreciated college roommate Squirrelman, like a radiant rodent sent here to wrangle my attention to the moment.
CAT lunges into my lap like a gymnast, a rare gelatinous kind, stretching the limits of his leotard and my seriousness, until I seriously feel the fullness of a warm, wombat-sized friend, my own legs, and my own life.
CAT and CAT and CAT carry on with conversation too loud and strange and musical to ignore, cheeps and chirps and (there can be no question) coarse language, lolling and roaring and walrusing triumphantly, like a herd of Jabba the Hutts upon some sandy shore called SUITE.
And for the moment, I am again smile and song and belly laugh, eyes and ears and 42 years.
And then I forget again, and take a bullet train to my brain. The cats, being cats, carry on, and move on to you.
CAT is completely present to your five fingers in his fur, and the ridiculous sight of CAT attempting to reenact Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” on the scratching post, and the sacred scent of unidentifiable meatish product, and the unholy sound of humans gossiping.
CAT fully inhabits the mercy of your face on her neck, and the misery of meats delayed, and the majesty of moonrise over the solarium, and the mealworm-mindedness of being placed upon a scale every single month, when clearly such a creature as CAT cannot be weighed in any balance.
They are full physicality, at no cost to their mental fitness, spiritual courage, or soul-goals. In the cat, body and mind and spirit and mystery are best friends. They live in all four simultaneously.
They miss nothing.
They forget nothing.
They remember their bodies, and they rejoice that their bodies are good.
So I wonder: do their bodies remember everything, too?
There’s a groundbreaking book called The Body Keeps the Score, and I ponder whether this applies to the long-tailed bodies we love best.
Their spirits sing, their pit of self-pity is empty, their resentments are zero…but do their bodies remember?
Does CAT remember that it was July when he was left behind, a homebody without a home, a lonelybody without a friend in sight?
Does each November give CAT an involuntary shudder, a sliver of a shiver down the spine, as his bones and his stripes remember the time he was so terribly sick?
Does CAT enter summer strangely hungry, hunted by the empty belly of a leaner year?
Does winter wallop CAT with particular prickles, as she feels the cold of an old outdoor ache, and her very whiskers whisper “you’ve been here before”?
As their hardy hearts move on, do their bodies pull out photo albums?
I don’t know.
But Tabby’s Place does know bodies.
Tabby’s Place is all about tending to bodies that have seen and heard and felt and smelled and tasted the worst of what this world has to offer.
Tabby’s Place is all about teaching bodies that there can be new birth for old cats, and bounty for the broken, and love that cheats death at its own greedy game.
Tabby’s Place is all about blanketing bodies in belovedness, taking new portraits, writing new stories, wiring new pathways in physical and metaphysical minds.
Tabby’s Place is besotted with these bodies — CAT and CAT and CAT and CAT — in their full embodiment, the fat and the graceful and the unkempt and the most-kempt and the most-important, which is to say all of them.
Tabby’s Place is re-membering these bodies with enough memories to settle old scores.
Maybe that means there’s hope for all of us brittle, beautiful, brave beans.
Maybe that means we can take new steps, smell new smells, feel new fur, see new sunrises, and listen to the limbs and lungs and eyes and ears that can only make us better, which is to say more catlike.
Maybe whatever scared us off our blinkered bodies back when we were baby beans can be healed.
Maybe it’s the spastic cats and elastic cats and drastic cats who can nudge our neuroplastic brains — those physical wrinkle-balls, not the metaphor-minds — to a new sunrise, together.
That would sure be unforgettable, wouldn’t it?