Where are you from?
Ringoes? Conshohocken? Manunka Chunk?
Or the brink of destruction?
This is a place, as much as any other.
I have a feeling it is not a place with which you are unfamiliar.
More on you in a minute. But first, let’s get a little more familiar with CAT.
Speaking strictly rationally, which is rarely wise, CAT was born in New Jersey (which is rarely wise). But speaking in the swirling script of story, which is where living things really live, CAT was born on the brink.
Although they fancy themselves saber-tooth snow leopards and jet-powered jumbo jaguars, domestic cats are delicate. Living outdoors, they are jaunty Fiats among SUVs and semis. The road is long and loud, and there are more potholes than pizza rolls.
Felis catus, born outdoors, is on thin ice.
CAT was not only a small, silken creature among teeth and thunderstorms. He was a sensitive creature, with a gossamer ORGAN, on an expressway to the end of days.
If you sent him a birthday card, you would have to address it, CAT; Brink of Destruction; America; Earth; Milky Way; Ever-Expanding Universe.
Life was brinky-dink, to say the least.
But just like Jersey children learn to love being underestimated, outdoor cats learn to love their lives as they are.
He may have had untreated DISEASE. He may have had a devastating dearth of hugs and ham salads. He may have had perilously few whimsies left in his winter, doomed days dangling from the eaves like icicles. But CAT was content, even in peril. CAT put the footloose in feral. CAT is a creature of such calypso cheer, he probably looked his peril in the face and named it Beryl.
We, on the other hand, are not on speaking terms with Beryl.
And so we skated across the brink and brought CAT home.
And all at once, everything and nothing changed.
Everything, of course, changed. The final countdown stopped four seconds before zero, and CAT now lives in a comfortable cuckoo clock, complete with a long sing-song future and legitimate hope of ham salad.
CAT has learned not to underestimate the capacity of humans, especially New Jersey humans, to melt misery like butter in love’s cast-iron pan. It’s difficult to resent the place you’re from when it’s the place that pitched you into mercy’s mitt. It’s impossible to hold a grudge against life when it’s led you to hundreds of huggers.
Let us pause for a moment to sip CAT’s story, slow like tea (or, CAT would suggest, like a teacup of melted butter). CAT was a charred crisp of a creature, deep in peril’s pocket. CAT was a single small cat under a steel sky. CAT was no one’s.
CAT now has hundreds of huggers at his command. Literal huggers. Hundreds.
It would seem CAT has come a very long way from the brink of his birth.
But the living story of a living creature is seldom so simple.
CAT may be a happy ham, warm as toast and chunky as peanut butter. CAT may be safe from the elements, away from the owls and bears and free-roaming New Jersey humans of uncertain intentions.
But life remains brinky-dink.
Life, if it’s more than still life, is always a risky road.
Life is what CAT loves.
Strong in our love, CAT is still fragile, felis catus, breath and wonder under a big sky. CAT is home now, but we all make our home together in a story that is splendid but not safe.
Tomorrow, CAT’s DISEASE may go off-road. Next week, Congress may outlaw squeeze-poultry. Come springtime, CAT’s favorite huggers may move to Conshohocken.
CAT lives and loves and even luxuriates on the brink.
This is why CAT is a safe deposit box for hearts like yours and mine, brinky beasts that we are.
This earth of ours is good but not guaranteed, rich but not FDIC-insured. But if we keep close to CAT, our brinky heritage will make us more, not less, alive.
When you’ve dangled your legs over the brink and looked all the way down, you know how to look up.
When you’ve tangled with Beryl, you’re not threatened by knots.
When you’ve seen what most of us have the luxury of forgetting — that everything is gift, and everything is astonishing, and nothing is inevitable — you see what most of us forget.
We get to live in a world with towns called Manunka Chunk, and people who make time to boil ham for faint cats, and shorelines of sea lions roaring, and hundreds of huggers adoring, and gratuitous tomorrows to get it all wrong and right again.
We get to come back from the brink of destruction hundreds of times every day.
We get to pull each other home.
We get to pull together for the cats.
We get to be fragile buttercups wearing jet packs of love.
We get to write sentences like that.
We get to love CAT.
Let’s get to it.