guys day out

Someone’s paw taps my face in syncopation with the alarm clock.

“Morning already?”  I stretch with an indulgence that pulls a whine out of me.  My eyes flutter in the hard light.  My body pops and cracks with lament as it tries to transition into the new day.

But Toby is calm.  We’ve been here before. 

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up.  Like a video character resurrected from my last losing battle, I remember my circumstances: adrift in the time of Covid with a cat.  Oh!  And then the existential pain!  I put a hand to my side.

Before I can transition myself back under the covers, Toby lets loose with an imperative meow that verges toward yodeling.

“I’m up,” I insist and stagger to the kitchen.  I put a scoop of food on his plate and wince at the day.

Toby looks up at me with a face that asks if I can please take my audible issues to another room while he eats.

Fair enough.

I go into the dining room and stare out the window at nothing.  I remember, as a kid, my parents asking me when I was ill or hurt where the pain is.  I remember being able to point inside where the greater part of me was in dark mystery.  Pin-pointing the source of discomfort was fairly simple, within a few inches.  Now it’s even easier.  It’s all over.  Inside and out.  My scalp cringes, my hairs dither and curl.  My red eyes sting.  My soles ache.  My stomach (a.k.a. pain central) swells and collapses.  It all hurts, thrums, beats and bleats.

The joyful crunching in the kitchen stops.  Soft padded steps approach, and someone hops up onto the standup piano beside me.

Why? Toby asks.

“Why what?”

He holds his side and makes a pained over-the-top expression. 

“Oh.  That.”  I consider the list.  It follows me, even into sleep.  “You know.  This past year and its hydra of viruses that have continued right into this year.  The hate, the violence, the conspiracy theories and alternate facts (seriously?), masks and lack of masks, the divisions between groups, the isolation…and that little thing called covid 19.”

Toby tells me to sit down on the piano bench and take several cleansing breaths.  He instructs me to rest my wrists on my knees and form a circle with the thumb and middle finger of each hand.  Now he asks if I can close my eyes and do absolutely nothing. 

“Are you kidding?  Nothing is about the only thing I can still do well,” I say with generous self-pity.  “I know nothing….I got nothing…I can do nothing like nobody’s business.” 

When Toby hisses at me, I shut up and do what he says.  I close my eyes.  I take lots of rapid cleansing breaths.  I clench my teeth and concentrate with so much effort that the zero in each hand collapses with a snap.

“Is that supposed to happen?” I ask him.

Toby shakes his head.  He says I’m doing it all wrong. 

Clearly. 

He says I need to relax.

“Relax…relax.”  It sounds like a spiritless cheer at a stress workshop.  “Okay.  This is what I’m going to do,” I tell him.  “I’m going to stop watching the news.  I’m deleting all my newsy podcast subscriptions.  The world is the one doing it all wrong and it is tearing me up.”

Toby assumes a lotus position and suggests it is wrong to think I can bend the world to my will.

“I know.  I can hardly impose it on myself.  You see all the bags of kale chips and exercise bands collecting dust.”  I laugh as the tide of stress begins to rise.  “I just need to stop listening to all the news.  It’s all bad.  And after so much of it, it just feels bad to be in-the-know.  It hurts to be informed.”

Toby points out that the news—real news and not alternative news—is knowledge.  Knowledge is power.  In fact, he says, it is more than power, it is direction for action.

“Yeah.  Well, I say turn it off.  Don’t they say that ignorance is bliss?”

Toby deplores a few nails as he turns my face back to him. 

Being informed, he wants me to know, enables us to know what needs to be done.  But there is a caveat.

I slap my leg.  “I knew it!  There’s always a catch.  Like a self-renewing magazine subscription and no phone number or option online to stop it.”

He stares at me with a cat’s deadpan expression. 

“Sorry,” I tell him.  “You were saying…there is a caveat.”

He nods and reminds me that I am not all-powerful. 

“Ok-ay.”  I don’t know where he’s going with this.  I’ve already demonstrated that I can’t even do nothing effectively. 

Toby points out that he doesn’t get treats every time he meows at me.  And no matter how much he kneads my chest at night, it is never as soft and cushy as he would like. 

“Are you trying to tell me you want a treat?”

He tells me I should embrace my limitations.   

“What?”

My feline Zen-master suggests that recognizing what I can’t do, accepting it and then not trying to do it anyhow, could be liberating.  I might save a small fortune on Tums.

“Okay,” I answer, willing to indulge him.  “How?”

Since I am clearly too worked up to meditate properly, he suggests pretending—for the moment—to be a petal on the water. 

“A petal on the water,” I scoff.  “It sounds like you’re trying to trick me into meditating.”

With a great big Chesire smile, he tells me I am absolutely right.  But we could call it something less poetic and more in-the-world.  Like going with the flow.

“Okay.  That sounds more doable that floating.”  I get dressed and ask my furry guide to lead on.

Toby licks his paw and holds it up to test the current flow.  Treats, he says.  The crunchy kind.

I slap my leg.  “I knew it!”

After a quick snack he licks his paw again and holds it up.  He turns his paw slowly, trying to pick up on the faintest signal.  Finally, he yawns and suggests a nap.  So I kick back in the reclining chair in the den and Toby hops onboard.  Naps, I have noticed before, figure heavily in a cat’s flow.

When we wake up, Toby licks his paw again and tests the winds.  This leads us to sit on the edge of the sofa and stare for a long time at something that isn’t there. 

Next, another nap. 

It’s curious that the only thing I wanted to do when I was still in bed is no longer of interest to me.  Once I’m up, I want to do things.  But the one thing the cat says I need to do most—relax—remains just beyond my reach. 

I ask myself if relaxing necessarily involves a loss of consciousness.  And while I watch Toby resting like a veritable petal on my chest, the phone rings.

“Loch, it’s Telly.”

“Telly?”

“Yes.  That’s why I introduced myself that way.”  My ninety-two-year-old friend is just tickled at himself.  “Say, could you do me a favor?”

Toby opens one eye at me.

Telly explains, “I need someone to drive my car around the block a few times.  It needs to be driven every so often.  I would do it myself, but I’ve fallen onto my very comfortable couch and can’t bring myself to get up.”

This actually sounds promising.  Telly’s needful car is not just old, it’s classic, as in somewhere in the 1950’s classic, with beautiful blue curves and chrome retro-futuristic molding and bumper.  Inside, it’s a no-frills car, no FM radio, no automatic transmission, no seatbelts.  But it is packed with personality.  And for the old guy who let his driver’s license expire years ago, it’s packed with memories of his late wife Alexi, who was the one who drove it.

Real quick, I lick my hand and hold it up.  So poised, I reason that if I say no to my friend, I could be bucking the flow my little guide is asking me to follow for the sake of my empathetic gut.

Now both of the cat’s eyes are watching me.

“Telly, we’ll be right over.”

The cat on my shoulder points out that going with the flow is not always as easy and as obvious as this.  The flow doesn’t always use the phone to call our attention to it.  Toby just doesn’t want me to have unrealistic expectations for tomorrow.

“Are you really trying to derail my flow-going with a warning.” 

He gives me a Cat-nod.  And I think I might just be learning something.

When we get to our friend’s house, he is waiting for us next to the car whose slip cover he has already removed.  He hands me a key with a string tied to it.

“Be gentle with her,” he says.  “Remember, she has some age on her.”

“Do you want to ride with us?” I ask.  “That way you could keep an eye on me.”

He shakes his head.  “I trust you.  Besides, I need to get back to my memory-foam sofa before it forgets me.”

Toby and I get in the car and roll down the windows.  I crank the engine and back the car into the street.  I know my friend is watching us, so I let the car coast ever so gently to the end of the block. 

“Where to?” I ask my co-pilot.

Toby licks his paw and holds it out the window. 

We spend the next hour driving around our small town, going wherever the day or Toby’s paw takes us.  The windows are down.  The wind is in our hair and fur.  We end up at the lake behind the college and park on a gentle slope where we can watch the politics of geese.  “Look how close those honkers are to each other,” I say.  “And not one mask between them.”

I’m just trying to be funny, but the cat doesn’t take it that way. 

Toby marches across the seat and settles himself adamantly in my lap.  At once, he begins to purr like a lullaby, doing the very thing he has spent the day advising me not to do: trying to impose my will on another.  As a general rule, it doesn’t work and then it leads to stress.  My stress.  I try to work up a little indignation about my teacher not walking the walk he has advised me to take.  But I can’t.  There is just no resisting the purr.  It works like a psycho-soothing machine generating its own flow, going directly into me via pain central.

The cat knows this. 

And so, I take the only action available to me.  I let go.  And relax.

Toby shows off his new tattoo sleeve on our guys day out.