Sometime around Independence Day last year, I caved in and adopted an Alexa.
Maybe it was my mood at the time; maybe it was the six month span since Bucca’s passing; maybe it was mourning the strawberry moon for another full year. But for some reason or something that transcended reason, I started asking her questions.
Alexa, why do we feel so much?
Alexa, whatever happened to Hootie and the Blowfish?
Alexa, how did cats get so brave and empathetic and ridiculous and wise?
Alexa, is everything going to be OK?
I don’t know what I expected. I knew the blue-ringed white ball on my desk didn’t have a soul. Was I curious about the programmers who taught Alexa all the answers? Was I curious about what happens when questions hit the air?
Why wasn’t I asking cats instead?
Cats are comfortable with questions. Cats are considerably more comfortable without answers. (This is perhaps why one of my own personal cats gnaws on the Alexa-ball like a giant underripe peach. Perhaps not.)
Cats — at least, cats of CAT-caliber — can teach us to be comfortable with the unanswerable.
CAT doesn’t know what happened to Hootie and the Blowfish, or how tall Alan Alda is, or whether we’re where we should be in life, or what’s going to happen later today. CAT doesn’t even know that it’s Lent, that season in the Christian tradition when some of us turn into quivering questions for forty long days.
CAT does know that everything is going to be OK. Unlike us, CAT is unconcerned with what that might look like.
CAT, a quintessential Tabby’s Place cat, came to us by way of woe. “Hopeless situations” come in as many colors as questions, but CAT’s long Lent was especially harsh: SITUATION. Ashes in place of beauty. Life itself in question. Unseen sirens sing-shouting the unbidden answer, “dust you are, and to dust you shall return…perhaps soon.”
Everything had fallen to pieces. The easy answers of a warm bed and rhythmic meals were swept away, and CAT couldn’t even see who held the dustpan.
None of us can.
And then, just when agony seemed its own answer, cruel but clear, all the trains changed course, and the buzzards fled, and the dust unsettled, and CAT found herself in the batty barn called Tabby’s Place. CAT couldn’t see who was sprinkling the fairy dust, much less whether it was perhaps Parmesan cheese, much less whether anything would ever make sense or taste delicious or tell the truth again.
None of us can.
But unlike most of us, CAT kept company with questions.
Personally, I like to dive-bomb into answers, even if I have to invent them myself. I fast-forward through the fog, flip the pages to the resurrection, jump up from the inscrutables and the uncomfortables, sure that if I bury myself in work or vacuum the house or unbraid the mysteries — Will I always have what I need to get by? If I cease to create, will I still have a place at love’s table? Whatever happened to that other guy on Good Burger; is he OK? Do I get to keep my loved ones forever? — I will be OK.
Or at least feel OK.
And those are two very different answers.
Which is why I should have been asking CAT all along.
CAT, having come through caverns of sorrow, did not consider the questions to be quicksand. CAT did not latch onto the easy answer of shriveled hope — that permafrost temptation that hisses in all our ears, calling itself “modest” and “realistic” and “sane.”
CAT knew very little — she had, after all, just SITUATION, and there was no guarantee of either friendship or chicken tetrazzini in the future, two equally invaluable assets. But CAT knew, in the arms of the questions, that nothing is more unhinged than hope gone “humble.”
So CAT knew: CAT would be OK.
CAT would continue to live in a world with sunlight.
CAT could not be robbed of the radiance that reaches the back of every cave.
CAT had been born into a world that wobbles and rages and asks a great deal of its children. And CAT herself would be an answer.
Her peace would promise more than any elegant explanation.
Her ability to love, in the face of life’s lashing, would give more strength than a stew of soothing words.
Her gentleness would give way to new questions: how do we keep our hearts open? How do we forgive as cats forgive? How do we turn thorns (we all have our thorns) into pillows so we can get some sleep? How do we exult in “OK” when we realize we won’t see its face until tomorrow?
We keep asking questions. We keep asking CAT. And we keep growing, as the creatures far smaller and softer and holier than we are keep turning question marks into exclamation points.
They keep on living.
They keep on trusting.
They keep hope heroic, at its full height.
They keep letting today be today.
They’ll keep us on the quest, if we’ll let them.