PART ONE- They die anyway.

It was a bit of a joke as I was checking out at Wal-Mart, happy to have an actual cashier. “You buy them pedialite and baby food, you get these absorbent pads to stick under them, you do what you can, and they die anyway.”

The cat hung on for years longer than we thought it would, and yet, when I came out to the mud room it had taken over for the last few months, found it dead, away from the spot it had been pretty much stuck in for the last few days, aimed for the door, I was considerably more saddened that I would have imagined.

I’ve seen this before. As a first responder with the local volunteer fire department, I came into a scene where the patient, someone I had been a member of various crews that took him to the emergency room twelve times, each time in the middle of the night, each time with him in a panic… on the thirteenth aid call he was gone, halfway out of the bed, halfway into his pants, reaching. It is an image I cannot forget. Reaching.

The reaching is far from the only mystery connected with those moments before death. After death; for all our pondering, we don’t have much more than a few clues.

If I don’t dwell on thoughts of mortality as much as I could, I am, occasionally, faced with the reality. Everything dies.

I dug a hole in one corner of a flower garden by the driveway (appropriately) used the same shovel to carry the cat to it. A bit deeper, out of respect. I put a tile over some of the dirt, added some more, put in another tile. I broke that one up. Same shovel. There is no marker over the grave. I don’t know what religion the cat practiced.

NOTE: When I read this part to Trish, saying Oreo might have been a Buddhist, she said, “Hell, no; that cat? When she was younger… she was a killer. I used to have to throw rocks at her, run the hose on her to keep her from killing birds… she was horrible.” There was a suggestion that Oreo may have been a holy roller. Nothing specific.

PART TWO- Not Our Cat

A lot of thoughts go through your mind when you’re burying a cat that was never yours. The neighbors at the head of our driveway moved away and left the cat. This was a few years ago. Dusty Dave, who claimed he couldn’t catch the cat, called it Oreo.

Not allowed in their house, Oreo would, invariably, be stationed outside their pumphouse. Let me describe Oreo. She was, obviously, black and white, but, somehow, the placement of the colors gave her the appearance of a cat that had lost one too many fights. Kind of like a broken nose thing, plus, perhaps, a few pieces missing from her ears.

It isn’t actually surprising, with a succession of renters also not caring for it, that the cat started moving our way. We have had, over the past forty years, a succession of cats that started out as feral and ended up as ours. We have one now. Oreo never adapted. Not a house cat. At first, in the winter, she was an outside/mudroom cat. I pretty much turned over my drawing room (more like a closet) and our mud room to the cat. Then, when she got more feeble, and at Trisha’s insistence, I added an outside area/cat run (quite nice) so Oreo could kind of be outside without being way-too-easy prey for the numerous predators quite willing to carry her away.

PART THREE- “I had to bury a dead cat.”

That was the text I sent Aaron. He was going to help me with a project and I was running late. Taking a break halfway through the job, Aaron said, “Oh, you actually did have to bury an actual cat.” “Yeah. Actual.” “I thought it was a euphemism for taking a dump.”

“In the future, it will be.”

“Swamis” UPDATE: I have the latest version complete and out to several people I know will be honest in their feedback.

HEAT UPDATE: It is unfortunate that heat waves and actual waves do not always happen at the same time. WAVE UPDATE: I did do some surfing recently. WAVE FORECAST: Flat with occasional non-flatness.

OH, WAIT!- The last time I went surfing, one of two kooks in the parking area was kind of raving about the last time he had gotten it really good at that spot. “I have a photo.” He stuck his phone in my face. There were some waves in the background. “Hey,” I said, “That’s my van!” Somehow, though I had to tell them it wasn’t, like, all time good, just seeing my van in the photo became the highlight of my day.