The iceberg

Paperwallet’s “Desert Cat” Tyvek wallet designed by Ali Gulec, which happened to arrive while I was reading Natsume Soseki’s odd and unsettling “I Am a Cat.”

“Is that a cat on your wallet?”

I’m at the checkout counter paying for a meal. She seems amused.

“It is, it is,” I say, amused also, but not because I think the cat wallet is funny, which it objectively is. Rather, I’m amused because she doesn’t know she’s looking at the tip of an iceberg.

She doesn’t know about the cat litho that hangs above my reading chair, or the cat giclee it faces. She doesn’t know about the cat watercolor I commissioned a few months ago to complement the cat greeting cards, cat books, cat magnets, and other cat paraphernalia scattered all around.

And while she might reasonably assume a cat in residence, a living cat from whom all good cat things flow, she doesn’t know that being separated from the living cat for any extended period makes me feel as if I were a balloon slowly leaking air.