Spencer the Wonder Cat -- my boon companion, kitty poet and pillow mate -- took off the other day. It happened right after we moved into my like-new mobile home -- the last affordable housing in Silicon Valley.
It was so hot that day that you'd brand the back of your thighs if you sat bare-legged on something metal. So I opened the doors to try to conjure a cross breeze and the rascal bolted.
I found him next door on the west side, sitting in a sun spot, doing advanced calculus problems in his head, or whatever it is that cats do when they lounge in those rays that have come so far just to warm us.
I slipped my fingers under his front paws and pulled him away from his calculations. He gave a protest meow -- not an angry one, but an indication for the record, please, that he had been quite close to solving a difficult problem and would now have to start over.
I took him back inside and shut the doors. Spencer is an indoor kitty. After years of having cats with outdoor privileges and paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars in veterinarian bills to patch them up after nocturnal bouts of feline fisticuffs, I decided to limit Spencer's world to the 867 square feet of my previous two-bedroom apartment.
Now that we've relocated into a relatively spacious 1,100 square feet in our very own double-wide, I chose to make Spencer a kept cat, and an inside one at that.
Somewhere in the continuing chaos of moving in, he slipped out a second time. It was, after all, unbearably hot and I guess I left the door open again as I fluttered about, unpacking boxes and attempting to instill some order onto this colorful collection of clutter.
I called for him and there was no answer.
"Spencer!" I yelled.
Nothing.
So I searched the Lilliputian backyards of my new neighbors, adding the sound of his name to the casual chatter of all the birds and squirrels chittering about.
"Spencer!"
No answer.
Now, my catastrophic thinking can go from zero to 120 faster than an Italian teen-ager in his daddy's "borrowed" Ferrari. Spencer had been gone for maybe 10 minutes and my mind had him unanesthetized on a cold metal table in a perfume-tester's laboratory, strapped down and yowling for help.
I walked up and down my curving street with all the homes side-by-side. If I were up in a helicopter, the homes would have looked like members of a marching band spelling out the "S" in Spencer in a football stadium.
No answer. So I took several deep breaths, reminded myself of the tools at my disposal and -- here's a concept -- actually used them.
I did the half-smile, a great trick I learned in a mindfulness class. With this technique, you relax the corners of your mouth into a neutral position, then slightly pull them up into a smile, mimicking the famous one on the Mona Lisa's face. Then you do the same thing with your eyes, pulling your entire face into a half-smile.
I sounds silly, I know, but it is an incredibly powerful meditation technique. The other day, a Yahoo-ligan cut me off while driving and them compounded his transgression by flipping me off. As I felt the testosterone clutching my body into a massive fist of retribution, I remembered to half-smile.
The simple act of breathing deeply and half-smiling stopped my anger cold. It was as if the gods had dropped a prize-winning Halloween pumpkin onto my internal surge protector, immediately shutting off the power to my Y chromosome. I continued driving, calm and at peace, and completely ignored the miscreant.
Although the half-smile allowed me to regain my perspective, it didn't bring Spencer back. I went inside, planning to try again at dusk.
My mind rolled tapes of Spencer in my head as I waited for dark to fall. My kids and I had rescued him from our local Humane Society when he was a three-month-old ball of fur. I picked him because he's a handsome cat with his charcoal grey and black-striped body, his blazing green eyes, those black tiger stripes across his grey and white face, the classic tabby "M" on his forehead in black with white highlights, and the tuft of snow on his chin.
He looked healthy and energetic, scampering through his cage. Little Spencer purred when I held him, resting his tiny head on my arm. We were sold.
After filling out several forms and swiping about a hundred and fifty dollars onto my credit card, my "free" kitten came home with me.
And now he was three years old and gone. At dusk, I walked up and down the mobile home park, in between the double-wides, calling his name. I even walked over to the adjoining neighborhood on the other side of the park, where real houses cozy up to our trailer park, like lovers lying spent front to back.
Nothing. So I said my prayers and went to bed, fully expecting him to make his way back home by morning, even though he was unfamiliar with the new neighborhood. I left my windows open so I could hear his pitiful cries when he came back, demanding food and a soft bed to lie on.
Morning came. I walked outside. I strolled over to my neighbor's backyard. No Spencer.
My 13-year-old daughter, Ellery, had spent the night and she was upset, too. So she set to work on my PC making a flyer we could pass around. She downloaded a picture of our missing cat, importing it into my word-processing program. I added the title, "Missing!", along with Spencer's description and how to contact me.
Ellery helped me go door-to-door, which is way outside my comfort zone. But I screwed up my courage and was undaunted as I searched for my errant knight of the dinner bowl.
We passed out more than 70 flyers, leaving them on the door step of each mobile home. If someone seemed home, I knocked on the door and explained our search. All seemed friendly. Some had stories of their own lost pets to share. Some didn't speak English very well, so I pantomimed Spencer's escaped and my search.
They pantomimed back some form of "No, I haven't seen him," or "This crazy gringo has been out in the sun too long." Either way, I thanked them and we left.
We returned to my home, hot, tired and discouraged. I drove my daughter over to her mom's house, ran a quick errand and went back to my place.
Once inside, the gods told me to launch another search party. The feeling was vague but powerful and I believe it's rude not to answer when the universe calls.
It was about noon, 24 hours after Spencer took off, when I walked outside. I went next door first and thought I saw something grey 50 feet away, sitting on its haunches in the backyard near a small pile of rotting wood. I walked toward the animal but it scurried away.
Spencer? Is it Spencer? But he wouldn't run from me. We were boon companions, snooze partners, cat-brush campadres.
I caught up to the animal, who was trying to burrow into the wood pile. It was Spencer!
I yelled his name and stooped to pick him up. As I grabbed him, he yowled loudly and twisted away.
"Spencer!" I shouted. "What are you doing?"
I cradled him with both arms, which seemed to bother him less, but he still tried to pull away.
I carried Spencer inside and examined him. He was hot, very hot, and he swore in salty cat language whenever I touched his side. He was hurt. My immediate guess was that he had run into the neighborhood trailer-trash bully, a savage, tattooed, buffed-out, Big Gulp-glugging beast who attacked my Spencer, a bookish, refined, civilized, NPR-listening cat who's in touch with his feminine side. Spencer never had a chance.
So I found a local 24-hour, seven-days-a-week veterinarian clinic on the Web and drove Spencer over. An interminable wait later, a doctor examined him. I pointed to a small tuft of fur stuck together on his right side. She pulled it off, revealing a puncture wound through his grey skin.
One peculiar thing about cats is that they have the healing powers of a super creature. If they get a cut on their body, it will close very quickly, almost before your eyes.
However -- as with all super creatures -- this preternatural healing ability comes at a cost. If a cat is bitten through the skin, its wound will close off within a matter of hours, leaving the bacteria from the other animal's bite inside with no place to go. The bacteria procreate as all God's creatures are wont to do, and the result can be a nasty, potentially fatal, abscess.
The doctor caught Spencer's abscess before it could completely close over, which meant that he was probably bitten in the early hours that same day. So after shaving off his fur around the puncture wound and giving Spencer an IV-bag of fluids, along with antibiotic and anti-inflammatory shots, Spencer was saved -- for a total of around $225, including the week's worth of pills I needed to give him twice a day.
It seemed a bargain compared to past emergency vet bills. So I swiped it onto by faithful credit card and thanked the staff.
As I drove poor Spencer to the safety of home and recovery, my thoughts turned to my wonderful friend Vivien. She's an ebullient, smart and lovely Chinese colleague in her early twenties who not long ago came to the San Jose, California, area to work for a month. She chose Vivien as her English name.
Vivien lives in Shenzhen, China, and worked in employee communications at one of my previous company's hard disk drive manufacturing plants. She reported to me on a dotted-line basis and came to San Jose to learn about American culture and to teach us about hers.
Vivien taught me a great deal about how employee communication worked in her country and the cultural barriers that needed to be overcome. I tried to reciprocate, explaining what did and didn't work among U.S. high tech workers.
During one of our many lively chats, I told her about Spencer and mentioned that cats had recently overtaken dogs as the most popular pet in the U.S.
"Do you have a pet?" I asked her.
"Oh, no," she answered, shaking her head and frowning.
"Why not?" I pursued.
"In China, we're still trying to feed ourselves," she said, with no hint of irony or malice. It was a simple fact, a truth with a small "t".
"We're not ready to feed an animal, too," she continued.
It made sense. I suddenly felt silly and embarrassed. We have so many riches in this country compared to almost everywhere else in the world. And we extend this wealth and our love to cats, dogs, horses, birds, lizards, snakes, amphibians, even fish.
We're a country in the enviable position of being able to care about the welfare of a turtle when there are so many human beings in the world who go to bed hungry every night.
So one day, as the Chinese people use their entrepreneurial skills, hard work and access to western markets to get wealthier and the Communist state falls -- its back broken by the weight of 1.3 billion hungry people yearning for blue jeans, YouTube and freedom -- maybe then my friend Vivien will get herself a cat.
Then Spencer can have a kitty pen pal in China. And Vivien and I will make a pact that stretches across the Pacific Ocean. To protect our extended family members -- and to keep them from squandering their precious lives -- both of us, at all times, will keep our dear kitties inside.
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