A Life Lived Rough

She was a cat who lived, island-like, at the fair. She would not come anywhere near the human side of life. Over the years, she cranked out litter after litter. I stole and kept some of her kids, deceiving her away from them with daily food.

In 2008, I baited a live trap and caught her. I got her spayed and ear-tipped, knowing she would always be wild. In fact, she broke out of my office the night I locked her there to recover from the spay. But she came to expect the food. We worked out an understanding, of sorts. I wouldn't try to tame her, she wouldn't run from me.

Each autumn, I left the fair to move back to the city, knowing that I would worry about her making it through the winter. I left an automatic feeder, outdoor heating pad and a heated water bowl. It was never enough, though: I had to drive down and check. I think the moment I got her spayed, I had to assume responsibility for her.

 

So in 2010 I trapped her one more time - it took days because she was wise to me by then - and moved her to the farm where I kept my horses. Up in the hayloft, I released her from the trap. She darted to the wall opposite of where I crouched. "This is where you live now, Harlotta," I told her. "I can feed you every day and you can be master of all you survey. Please stay here."

And she did stay. Even when that farm blew apart and I had to leave, she stayed. It was impossible for me to catch her and take her with me. Instead, someone very kind there took over for me. I brought food out from time to time, and I knew she was all right, but it haunted me that I'd left her. It didn't matter to her, though, and why should it have? Her needs were met, and they continued to be met after I was gone.

She listened to me. She never left that farm, and that's where she died, in her sleep, on Sunday morning. Now I can let go of her in the only way I ever wanted to, with peace of mind and relief. Hers was a life lived so roughly, but still, it ended in a better place.

Still, Lives

I interrupt my regularly scheduled program of over-analyzing and hamster wheeling to acknowledge the presence of things that require nothing more of me than to get out of my head and notice them.

I'm an existentialist. I don't perceive that a godlike entity or higher consciousness created all living things and cast them as players in a divine plan. I guess, instead, that here is here, that it is now, and all the rest, no matter how compelling, is daydreams. But... I admit to imagining that some kind of natural blessing exists in animals. I take it as a positive thing to have the endorsement of their proximity.

My festival summer is about to begin, so I'm preparing to move my life out of the city and into another time. H.G. and I surveyed our shops lately and were happy to see several guest tenants making use of them.

I confess that I take things like these as signs, recognitions, even, of my place in a world where I'm not so different from anything or anyone.

Silkwood

Silkwood is a movie that has stayed with me ever since I saw it in 1983. Meryl Streep portrayed Karen Silkwood, a blue-collar whistle-blower whose groundbreaking efforts to improve worker safety at an American nuclear fuel production plant may have cost her her life. The film also cast Cher in a breakout role that proved she could really act. Silkwood was a good movie, but it has lingered in my mind for all these years because of a single  line of dialogue.

Kurt Russell plays Drew, Karen Silkwood's live-in boyfriend and plant co-worker. Though he grudgingly believes in her cause, he's also terrified of the price he fears she may have to pay for her stubborn activism; he wants her to let it go. When she refuses to stop, they quarrel bitterly. He tells her, "Don't give me a problem I can't solve." I understood exactly what he was saying, and I thought of his words today when I read about the live animal key chains being sold in China.

What is wrong with we human beings?

These are the moments when I think it would be easier if my head just exploded. Because there is no place to keep a story like this once I have read it, but I can't forget it, either. I cannot, cannot, imagine being a person who would buy one of these things knowing full well that the living animal sealed within would eventually die. Don't they know what a living thing is?

For now, I guess this journal is where I'll park such a wretched story, if only to keep it out of my head.