SPOT the Cat
(My newsletter is now called WOOZA WOOZA. And why not?)
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it - Helen Keller
It was very small and it smelled. A friend of a friend owned the house and had agreed as a favor to rent out the tiny basement studio to me for cheap. I took it. It couldn’t have been more than 300 square feet with a couple of chest-high windows, one of which looked north onto a sloping backyard that featured a huge azalea shrub. In the spring it bore stunning orange blossoms and when the afternoon sun hit the backyard, the azalea bush would blaze for a brief moment, the only happy touch to the place. No sun light ever made its way indoors. It was always dim in there. “What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?”, poked a Bob Dylan lyric.
Ouch. It was a low time.My roommate was a cat named Spot. She became mine when Dan, the head waiter at the chichi waterfront restaurant where I worked the lunch shift, had to move. She was of medium small build and sported a short velvety dove gray coat. Spot loved being outside and we maintained a seamless system of door-openings for her comings and goings. I knew when she wanted to go out, or she knew that I knew or something like that and the whole thing functioned beautifully sans kitty litter box, thank God! because where would I have put that? Spot liked the taste of brewer’s yeast sprinkled on her crunchies and always protected the perimeter. She had chewed-on ears to prove it. In, out, feed, pet, in, out, (random cat fight), feed, pet, etc. We had a rhythm.
One day I had come home and dramatically walked the ten steps to the bedroom, thrown myself face-down across my mattress-on-the-floor bed and started to cry. Who knows why? “My life,” I thought. Nothing was right. Everything was wrong. I wailed in the dimness.
Approaching a level of inconsolable-ness, normally reserved for two-year-olds, I felt a light weight on my back with one, two, three, then, four small pressure points. Spot had decided to join me. Undaunted, I returned to my crying jag and tried to pick up where I had left off. Spot nestled in and contentedly purred in tandem with my pitiful weeping, gently kneading her paws into my sweater. Occasionally a claw pierced my clothing. I called off my lament. It was impossible to maintain a dignified level of despair with a purring cat on my back.
Spot, it seemed, had executed a flawless intervention on my crying jag. She was attentive to the moment, with me in my pain or rather, on me in my pain and except for a couple of tiny scratches, gently demonstrative. Isn’t it true that in our emotional distress we rarely need fixing, cajoling, bargaining or false assurances? We just need a purring-kind-of presence. Can we do that for ourselves?
On my journey to self-love the really difficult, almost impossible thing I have had to do is let go of the notion that someone else can give me the love I need, can make me ok, can assure me that everything is going to be all right. How I wanted someone else, anyone, a passer-by would do, to tell me that! But no one can really tell an adult that everything is going to be all right, because as adults we know that no one really knows that everything is going to be all right. You can tell children such things, but not grown humans. I had to let it go and accept the fact that the job was mine and mine alone. That was the truth. My desperate clinging to a false notion had only brought me pain and suffering. When I gave it up, my life changed.
Spot is long gone and the azalea bush was bulldozed to make way for a fancy apartment building. Today I patiently try to do for myself what is mine to do and remember to take a page from Spot’s playbook, “I love you, kb. I love you,” I purr with all my heart.
Sweet Girl Like You from the INFIDELS album, 1983, Bob Dylan