…and the Reappearing Collars.

Breakaway collars are de rigueur for cats these days, for all the obvious reasons. The trouble is, well, they break. Away. And disappear. In the few months that my husband Neal and I have not-owned Geronimo (see “Here Cat!”), he has come home collarless three times.

The first collar to go missing was his original collar, the orange cloth one, the one he was wearing when we met him, which had his name and the phone number of his real mom engraved on a black disk dangling from a metal loop. That disappeared months ago. His real mom replaced that with a sporty medium green one with a bell, upon which she wrote her phone number in black Sharpie ink, having no more black disks.

One day, he came home without that and Neal and I went to Safeway and bought him a bright red one with a red bell, and we wrote Real Mom’s phone number in black Sharpie on that one.

He’d been wearing the red collar for awhile when one day, Neal found his green one, dropped on the stoop of our back door. Amazed, Neal brought it in to show me, and we pretty much agreed that Geronimo had brought it back. When I e-mailed Real Mom that after a long period of absence the green collar had returned, she wrote back, “Geronimo wants to wear that one; I’d put it back on him.”

Well, Neal and I being procrastinators as to Non-Urgent Matters — and switching cat collars is most certainly in that category (pardon the pun) at present — we left the bright red collar on and tucked the green one away for future use. Experience had taught that we’d be needing it.

And sure enough, about a week later Geronimo came home without the red collar. However, Real Mom got a call from a woman who lives a block over from us; she’d found the red collar and would hang it on her mailbox for retrieval. I did indeed walk over to get it but, meanwhile, we put the green collar back on Geronimo. And tucked the red one away for almost certain future use.

Then for awhile all was quiet. He came home every day and voila! Green collar was still intact.

But a few minutes ago, Neal and I were sitting on the couch talking and we heard Geronimo outside crying at the living room window. He usually does that when he comes home from wandering, so he can get his food. But this afternoon his cry sounded odd and choked. I asked, “Is he sick!?” Neal said, “He’s got something! It’s another cat’s collar!” We both went running around to the side yard. There was Geronimo, standing on the patio. Wearing his green collar. And looking down at — his original orange cloth collar with the black ID disk, which has been missing for months.

Just goes to show you — well, I don’t know what it goes to show you. We now have three collars. Knowing Geronimo, we’re going to hang on to all three.

Past a certain age, one seems not so much to be learning life’s lessons but to be re-learning them. Lately, I’ve been working on non-attachment. It started with the cat.

A few months ago, we began being visited by a sweet little one-eyed tabby. We discovered that he belongs to a woman across Broadway but he so loves playing in our creek bed that he risks all nine lives to cross five lanes of traffic to get here. Born feral, he’s a wanderer. His “mom” and Neal and I have had numerous conversations about how best to manage little Geronimo’s care and safety. Early on, when we mistakenly assumed he wanted to be with us (when it’s actually our neighborhood he pines for) his mom even “gave” him to us – but we discovered that he can tolerate being indoors only three minutes at a time, then he howls like a banshee: “mee-ow…me-OUT!”

The bottom line is this: he’s neither ours, nor not ours; he’s neither here nor there; he belongs to all of us, he belongs to nobody. He’s his own cat.

So I’ve had to assign him to a special part of my heart – like a bad boyfriend, every encounter with him comes with internal whispers: “Don’t fall too hard!” and “He’s going to love you and leave you!” It’s quite the challenge.

Geronimo has become a near-constant reminder of one of life’s most important lessons. He’s a living, breathing variation of every quote about “letting go” we’ve ever heard, sent in a greeting card, or uttered to others in comfort: “Happiness is as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don’t even remember leaving open.” ~Rose Lane

I don’t remember leaving a door open for Geronimo – yet here he is. For now. And right now, there is happiness. It’s all I ask. That, and a lot of purring.

As I’ve mentioned, we live a few blocks from the Sonoma Plaza, so it’s not exactly like we live in the country. Nevertheless, we do have the occasional unusual animal sighting. Well, this morning I stepped outside the apartment and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a mother duck followed by six tiny baby ducklings, marching right up France Street. I called Neal and we watched, astonished, as she crossed the street with her brood (I had to stop an oncoming SUV) and took them to the Nathanson Creek Bridge next door to our building. Then, stymied, Mama Duck stopped and stared at the concrete bridge while her little ones immediately plopped down around her, arranging themselves into adorable little fluff-balls, and awaited further instructions. Mama looked this way and that, and we could almost hear her thinking, “Now where did that creek go?” Then, remembering, she got up and walked around the bridge and down the embankment to the creek, followed by her obedient babies. I ran over to be sure they all made it down safely into the water, and they did. Just now Neal went over to check on them and came back saying, “Hey there are two deer in the creek!”

A good day to be alive.

Note: This was written on March 6, 2009, long before Geronimo ever appeared on the scene [see "Here Cat!]. Wolfie was the first cat to insinuate himself into our lives; at the time I wrote this tribute, I never dreamed another Sudden Cat would soon fill the void.

As I write this, there’s a cat on my income taxes.

He could have his pick of any soft spot in the house – our bed, the green director’s chair (which, after he claimed it as his own we began to call “the cat hammock”), any number of pillows, or even a sunny spot in the carpet. But this morning, for some reason, he jumped up on the kitchen table and curled up on the blue folder which contains our unsigned 2008 tax forms. And, though it is Friday morning, which is a day of energetic house-cleaning for us, now neither of us will vacuum or be otherwise noisy, lest we disturb the sleeping Wolfie.

Wolfie — a beautiful silver-black-grey Tabby — does not belong to us, and I don’t mean in the sense that cats don’t truly belong to anyone. I mean, literally, he’s the neighbors’ cat. He belongs to C & Z, the young couple across the hall in our apartment building. When they first moved in and I realized there was a cat on the premises, I panicked. At the time, I was truly madly deeply in love with a mated pair of California towhees who lived in our side and back yard. After research told me that cats kill 568 million birds a year in the U.S., I asked cat-lover friends how I could humanely keep Wolfie away from my towhees. Their answers had me chasing Wolfie around the backyard, trying to spritz him with orange oil (don’t ask). I still remember him crouching in the junipers, no doubt vastly amused by the crazy woman with the aerosol can.

Then, after a long tenure, the towhees died. We grieved, put away the birdseed along with our hopes of ever having them eat from our hands, and moved on. Then a strange thing happened. Wolfie started visiting us.

At first he just came in for short stays, encouraged by our sharing tidbits of whatever food was on hand – sardines, tuna. Then he began to find places to curl up and stay awhile: under our bed, in the aforementioned green chair, in a box in our closet, on top of Neal’s tall drum, under our coffee table and, most recently, way on top of the entertainment center. I always waited for him to find the one perfect spot which would lure him back again and again, but instead the opposite happened: he would often surprise me by curling up in a spot he’d never before considered – like behind the door where we keep the ironing board. And he began to hang out with us for hours on end – sometimes all day. And, in the process, he snagged both our hearts, big-time.

IAMS catfood started showing up on the grocery list. We stored the big green bag on top of my piano and often Wolfie would jump up there and start caressing the bag with his beautiful tiger-striped face, to our amusement and delight. The mat by our back door became the cat’s feeding place, decorated with two little Pyrex dishes – one filled with IAMS crunchies and one with fresh water.

I’d never had much interest in cats before, but now I started surfing websites, looking for secrets to their care and happiness, and trying to learn to speak Cat. Wolfie has so many different sounds, that what we teach our children — “A cat says ‘meow’” — is a tremendous disservice. He trills, he chirps, he growls, he “merps,” and, when he’s looking at birds, he makes chittering sounds. We watch, fascinated. I learned that a cat’s purring can heal their bones. One day, I sat and watched him take his entire bath, from face-pawing to tail-grooming, and it felt like a meditation. No need to turn on the TV – watching a cat bathe is tremendously entertaining.

I learned that sometimes Wolfie will seek out affection – this morning, unbidden, he came to me and rubbed his head all over my hands, arms, and torso, before licking my finger with his emery tongue – and sometimes when you reach out to pet him, as he passes he will lower his body just under your hand such that he remains an inch below your efforts.

Through Wolfie, I learned cat. Oh, not fluent cat, but just enough cat to get by. And though we really couldn’t call him “ours,” we couldn’t love him more if he were. I have a million nicknames for him, my favorite being The Enigmatic C-A-T. The young couple later got Wolfie an adopted brother, Maguro, whom I called The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee. Predictably, Wolfie hated him and we think that the appearance of Maguro may have even been the reason that Wolfie began visiting us in the first place – to escape the energetic and annoying black kitten from hell.

Every animal story has an unhappy ending.

Last week, C told me that, because their baby will be born soon, she and Z are moving. Oh, not far away, but far enough away that we will likely never see Wolfie again. My eyes fill with tears as I write those words. Stupid cat. It was so much easier when I was chasing him around the backyard, daring him away from my birds. I’ve fantasized about catnapping him, asking the neighbors to leave him (“You’ll have a baby; won’t you be too busy for a cat, let alone two cats?”), or even going to the shelter to try to find my own Wolfie-like Tabby.

But that’s the thing: there will never be another Wolfie. Wolfie who had a way of showing up at our doorstep to comfort us on the mornings when my husband had to have a medical procedure. Wolfie who was sleeping one day in the green chair while I was trying to put away the vacuum, noisily, and when I finished I looked up to see him standing in the chair, neck craned around with a look on his face like, “Do you mind?” Wolfie who “merps” at us every time we go near the refrigerator, in hopes that we’ll feed him some $7.99 per pound chicken lunchmeat (of course we don’t, do you think we’re fools?). Wolfie, who lets me stroke his beautiful striped tail for long hours. Wolfie, who purrs from the bottom of his soul and makes me feel like purring, too.

Soon he’ll be gone. Right now he’s keeping my income taxes warm. I think I’ll go tell him merp.