Far gone

I’m pretty far gone, I guess. In love with my cat. I stare at her, contemplating her mysterious wonderfulness, and she stares back in benevolent appreciation of my utility. Filler of bowls, emptier of boxes, scratcher of cheeks and chin.

Witness the large ziplock bag of fur I’ve collected brushing her over the years. I’ll have it spun into yarn when the bag is full, and I’ll have the yarn made into a scarf that she’ll wear on special occasions. Witness the whiskers I sometimes find around the house and keep safe inside a tiny pewter sarcophagus because throwing them away is not a reasonable option. Claw tips, too. The ones she sheds, I mean. I never clip her claws.

If these are symptoms of an undiagnosed Toxoplasmosis Gondii infection, I say God bless it. That’s the “mind-control” parasite spread by contact with cat poop and observed to make mice suicidally mellow. In humans, the parasite is said to cross the blood-brain barrier, wreaking upon our grey matter a hopeless affection for cats, but scientists have no firm evidence of this. It’s far gentler with us than the cordyceps fungus is with ants, at any rate. Cordyceps turns ants into zombies, yes, but then it makes their heads explode.

Another symptom might be my admiration for the cat worshipers of ancient Egypt , although archeologists tell us this practice went harder on the cats than one might expect. Nevertheless, what a remarkable people they must have been, those ancient Egyptians, slavery and so on notwithstanding.

Along similar lines, and by way of contemporary example, there’s a cat meme you might have seen online: a Renaissance-style painting of a bi-colored Scottish Fold receiving her crown and ermine from winged cherubim. The caption reads,”I googled ‘Ruler of the Internet.’ I was not disappointed.”

And books. Behemoth in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Tom Jones in May Sarton’s The Fur Person, Spit McGee in Willie Morris’ My Cat Spit McGee, a cat with no name in Soseki Natsume’s I Am A Cat, various talking cats in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka On the Shore and a whole town of cats in IQ84. Sinclair Lewis features a cat named Lady Vere de Vere in Free Air, although her sudden, pointless death did cause me to rip a valuable first edition in half. (You might be interested to know that 100-year-old hardcover spines tear almost as easily as bread.) I sheepishly replaced the first edition some time later with a second edition, in memoriam, and read to the end. Not his finest work.

And icons. A giclee print of Acadia’s best baby photo, the one of her sitting in half-silhouette on a window seat at the Mill. A coffee mug from Two Cats in Bar Harbor. A sheet of vintage Kliban wrapping paper mounted on gatorboard. Many others.

All of which might be the Gondii talking, I’ll grant you.

Not that it matters much.

Gone is gone.