Kittens, do you ever worry that you long for too little?
Do you ever wonder what it would take to become as big as a cat?
I am painfully aware that I am, at best, only half cat. This is nowhere more apparent than in my deepest desires.
On the surface, I appear as complex as any feline. I want to raise sufficient funds for Tabby’s Place to save thousands of cats a week, until all the cats are saved and we need a new business model (e.g. getting them elected to Congress). I want my parents to live forever. I want Jimmy Fallon to whisk me to Paris, where he and Emmanuel Macron will have a fist fight in a fountain over my beauty. I want warm socks and no condemnation. I want cinnamon cake and hand-written letters.
But scrape off all the icing, and you’ll see that my longings come down to two.
I want to be cozy, and I want Bad Things Not To Happen.
Cats don’t waste their wants on the latter.
Cats, even those walloped by life’s worst, do not dally over the dreadfuls. They are not scanning the sky for hawks or falling pianos, not even if they have been pancaked by heartbreak daily for a decade. Loss after loss can lash them like waves, and still all they really want is the sunbeam of the hour.
The safety of the day.
The coziness that is too modest to be anything but great.
CAT is a study in such grandeur, a safety-seeker with monumental dreams. She makes The Quest for Cozy look like Indiana Jones’s ultimate adventure. She makes simplicity look like the “stretch goal” of a lifetime. She longs for the littleness of bunnies in the den and campers under the stars.
She does not waste her wants.
Kicked off the cloud when her beloved human went into a nursing home, CAT knows what can fall on a life. Her vast heart was broken, splashing sea water and salty tears. Mercy sloshed her into Tabby’s Place, but it takes time to find one’s sea legs. CAT grieved and trembled. CAT longed for light and lullabies and anything familiar. CAT ached for the ordinary.
CAT craved cozy.
And cozy came, as cozy does for all who are large enough to want littleness. There were the blankets, bliss-heaps of fleece and grace, first good for hiding, but then a colorful canvas for posing. Persons with cameras were a press corps of cozy, mushy paparazzi who made CAT feel safe and shiny all at once.
There were the meals, pot roasts disguised as dollops of aqueous poultry. But when your heart is cozy, everything good tastes like home.
There were the squeals and the zeal of the army of sea lions and seals, formally known as human beings but clearly semi-marine. How else to explain the yelpings of love, the perpetual applause that greeted CAT simply for being CAT?
There were the cats, the copious cats, snugglish and stern, ginger snaps and cinnamon sugar, butter and pesto, but all saved, all safe, all complex enough to cherish the same, different simple life.
There was light, so much light, light through the sky-squares, and light in the lilting songs of the seals, and light in the solaria that CAT honestly felt little need to visit, so concentrated was the incandescence indoors.
There was little left to long for. CAT was the most rebellious thing on earth: content.
CAT did not crave adoption. Cats never do. Much as we know how this will turn their lives ever more heavenly, they do not need to be chosen to feel cozy or safe.
CAT did not crave celebrity, much as she enjoyed the press corps’ coos. If you told her today’s blog was CATcentric, she would plod in concentric circles, curl herself tight as a sea scallop, and take a cozy nap. CAT does not need splashy goals to make precisely the correct-sized splash.
CAT certainly did not long for Bad Things Not To Happen.
In CAT’s tale, no less than yours and mine, the Bad Things have happened. The Bad Things bob around our sailboats, fins gleaming. The Bad Things have made no false promises never to return.
The Bad Things will bully us, if we let them. Being at best half cat, I let them, entirely too often. Even when everything is cozy, my worries run up and down the hall, checking doors until they find a loose knob. I wait for the other shoe to drop and forget that most days are barefoot, like cats, like wisdom itself.
And then I have the audacity to angst myself over whether my dreams are too small.
Is it enough to crave the cozy life, a world where every cat and human and sea lion simply feels at home?
Is it sufficient to long for littleness, good food and good cheer and good sleep and a good conscience?
Is it too humble to hunger for Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns with a lapful of cat, Fig Newtons out of the box, and friends who hug tight?
Or is all of this the greatest dream on land or sea?
Is a safe, sweet life precisely the kind that changes the whole world?
Is “cozy” colossal after all?
Dare we live as large as a nine-pound CAT?
Dare we do otherwise?