Every day, in the middle of morning, he asks me to open the door. He has a date and he does not like to be late.
I oblige and crack the door just enough for him to run past my feet in anticipation of his partner’s arrival. Soon, there she is — in all her glory as beautiful as he ever remembered:
The 10 o’clock sun.
She floods through my bathroom windows, reminding me they need to be cleaned, and peeks through the half-shut bedroom door, resting in the shape of a lopsided triangle upon my bedroom carpet.
He saunters over as if he had forgotten she would be there. Oh, hello — fancy meeting you here. Mind if I just have a sit?
Then the plump, grey house cat — who has either a head too small for his body or a body too big for his head — curls up like a croissant with content, squinted eyes and settles inside his golden triangle for a sunbath.
This is serious business; this sun chasing. His courtship is not subtle.
He chases her from their mid-morning date by my bed to a noon rendezvous on the piano room rug. I may find myself wondering where Sam the cat is — and all I have to do is find her.
With all the eagerness of a young lover, he puts himself in the most precarious of positions to attract her affections. His belly bellows over the side of a too-small window sill; he perches on the corner of the couch like a laying hen.
In his self-aggrandizing way, he peers flatly with a bored yawn through the back window at our golden farm dog who killed a rabbit and left it outside her dog house as a gift. How barbaric, he muses with a turned up nose, sniffing the air.
For as a Creature of Leisure, he doesn’t have time to think about such frivolous endeavors. When he sees a lone spider scampering about the wood floors, he barely has the energy to turn his head in its direction. If it’s close enough, he may extend a paw for a simple pat. But the spider escapes him once more. He has better things to do.
And so he does.
He waits for me to take on a knitting project, so he can lay on his back and flail about, immersing himself in a tangled blanket of yarn — an experience both thrilling and infuriating for him.
He waits for me to feed him.
He waits for me to fold laundry so he can sit on it.
He waits for me to sit so he can sit on me.
And then, he looks for her. His familiar friend who he pursues with all the ambition of a creature in love. And when he finds her, he rests like one who has reached the end of his journey — only to find an hour later, she evades him once again.
