Observing an animal

He sits with his front paws on my thighs and stares until I look him back in the eyes. His posture shows his intensity and his ears swivel forward when I speak. His eyes alternately open wide and narrow as his jaw lifts and his head bobs in time to my speech. I will never have an audience as attentive to my words as him. When we first brought him home, he was a tiny orange puff. He was the single bright spot in a cage full of dark bodies and, while we went in to the shop sure we wanted a gray, he was so eager to interact and so vocal, we chose him to keep. He has remained the most social cat I have ever known, demanding of attention and affection and quick to respond when called. Where we are, he is. Like the best of people, he has faith in his friends, he is peaceful in his habits, he is patient and humorous and easy to love.

He spends most of his observed time lounging. He is sprawled over cushions, stretched out on furniture, flat on his back on the floor. When he extends to full length on his back, he is surprisingly large and long. He is at ease and does not move to protect his exposed belly; we step over and around him and he will not move. He favorite spot is on the back of a chair or the sofa, whipping his tail and dangling a single paw. The paw is ready to reach out and swipe at passersby. This is done casually and without claws, an acknowledgement of your presence and a request to acknowledge him by a scratch or a stroke. When both he and my son were smaller, we would watch “Big Cat Diaries” on Animal Planet. We laughed at the big cats on the savanna up in a tree and our own smaller one, up on a chair back. We saw the same attitude on the screen and in the home- idle cats, limbs slack but the tail showing their awareness of everything and everyone.

He waits for me each morning, ready for the treats he gets in his bowl. When there is white showing at the bottom, he herds me like a sheepdog to the dish. He will come close and yowl, run a few steps and yowl again, come back and push me with his head. Yowls some more. Since he eats from the center out, the food may be inches up the sides but the white showing at the center means an empty dish. When someone in the house is up, he cannot live with white. He is familiar with the rhythms of the day and of our home and knows to within a few minutes when his dinner is due in his dish. He is alert to the sounds of the fork, the fridge and the plastic sandwich bag the can lives in. He eats with relish but only small amounts at any sitting. He drinks from the back of the bowl and after he eats is wet all down his chest from dipping his ruff in the water. He keeps toys- rubber spiders, coated paperclips, glass jewels- in his food and water dishes and these must get washed daily along with the dishes.

He is amusing in his love for black licorice; I fight him over his theft of Good and Plenty’s from the bag. He is quirky in his need to have his possessions in his food, which he will hunt out and replace if removed. He is charming in his lack of stealth- with an un-catlike thumping up and down stairs, he sounds like a Shetland pony.  He is devoted and will sit for hours in the window waiting for me to come home from work or errand, leaping up when the door opens. He is bold and will stare down the largest and most aggressive home invader. He growls and nips at bees and wasps. He pounced and swatted at a spider as large as the palm of my hand. I dropped the Oxford English Dictionary on that spider and he pushed hard with a paw to move the text off and get at it again. He sharpens his teeth on the emery boards I use to file my nails and we are often at war over to whom they ultimately belong. Now when it is time for new, I buy two so he can have his own. He still takes mine. His presence is both a necessary and beautiful comfort and a demand to pay attention, like the yoga pose that simultaneously encourages sweaty effort and mindful meditation.