CAT will answer to “CAT,” but that’s just a coincidence.
CAT answers to himself.
CAT answers to adventure.
CAT answers every ringing thing that spreads rumors of life.
“Life” would be a fitting name for CAT, so crammed is he with sizzling wires and drizzly dreams. “Greedy” would be CAT’s preferred name — he told me this, as he tells me many things — since he has determined that greed is compatible with generosity, at least when one’s name is CAT.
People do not immediately think of cats as “generous,” at least not until a cat has called them by name.
You, more than anyone, know exactly what I mean.
They may be strutty egos on four legs, carbonated entitlement under triangle ears. But connect with a cat, and you’ll uncork compassion like you’ve never known.
CAT knows compassion like he knows his own name. The cat who came from PAST, underwanted and underrated and underlavished with liverwursts plural, comes with no illusions about perfect lives. He knows there are no such things.
There are, however, lives.
Lives! Oxygen and eccentricity and fat toes and choruses of capillaries under the sun. Time and hunger and humor and neon mice under the moon. Smitten people and Transformers blankets and one dizzy sanctuary devoted to transforming “hopeless” to wholeness.
Lives! How did CAT get so lucky as to get one of these? He’s just a pinch of carbon and carbonation upon the earth, and yet he’s been gifted a life.
Lives! Is there anything more fitting than to fill them with greed? Is there any greed more glorious than the gluttony of the grateful?
Lives! Have you noticed that they’re bubbling all around you, pyrotechnics purring or pouring coffee or pouring their love into days that are too small to hold it all?
Lives! Don’t you realize that being a living creature is the loveliest, most improbable gift this side of Gruyere? CAT told me this, as he tells me many things.
Greedy as he is, CAT dreams of lives by the dozen, a full collector’s set lined up on the ledge of his solarium. But he will take one, this one, this impossibly scrumptious one, so long as he can live it for selves.
Selves! CAT loves them nearly as much as he loves lives. CAT’s own self is his favorite revelation, an underground radio station of revolving mercies. There are no oldies on the turntable, no gnashing of the teeth over PAST. Teeth are for trout nuggets, and life is for today, and music is for strutting like a gelatinous Rolling Stone in invisible tight pants.
Selves! CAT would love to schedule a Bros’ Self-Care Weekend with Mick Jagger (he told me this, as he tells me many things), but he will settle for a Self-Care Lifetime with You and Me and All Our Friends.
Selves! CAT revels in the ways we care for him, while leaving room for Reuben-scented improvement. But a cat with a past is never so future-greedy as to resent the present. The present is the presence of you and me and all our friends, and CAT is the presence of gravy. (The Presence of Gravy is also CAT and CAT2’s Garth Brooks tribute band. CAT told me this, as he tells me many things.)
Selves! CAT is here for every living self. CAT is here to be greedily generous, a sloshfest of selfless slathering. He is indiscriminate and undaunted, smitten with the just and the unjust, the strangers in sweatpants and the shining strivers in sequins. He lives to give himself to selves.
When you are equal parts greed and generosity, your gravy boat brims with grace. CAT can’t get his fill of love, but he’ll try his best. CAT has an IQ of 280 (he told me this, as he tells me many things), so he knows that the best way to fill your life is to pour it out. The best way to feed your greed is to love like a lavish, liquid lunatic.
The best way to answer other lives is with your sweet, shining self.
Liverwurst is also an acceptable answer.
CAT told me this, as he tells me many things.