The Black Cat Surprises

In their ceaseless attempts to make sense of the chaotic universe they live in, humans delight in assigning labels to things. Identifying and classifying various aspects of the world features into many creation myths from around the globe, Adam naming the animals in the garden of Eden is only one example. Always craving simplicity, humans love if a concept can be simplified down to a matter of black and white. Binary concepts are often the preferred way to see things.

Nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first millennium there are people whose online dating profiles read merely “Cat Person” or “Dog Person.” In an age where the economy of attention moves so quickly that any marketplace requires that maximum information be crammed into as little space as possible, to get more bang for your byte, so to speak, this works to a surprising degree.

Someone who provides one of these self-applied labels along with whatever glamorous, sexy, or goofy pics they choose to represent themselves is actually giving prospective suitors a lot of information to go on. My online dating bio says “Space Cadet'' with a UFO emoji, but I am most certainly a cat person. Spend long enough among felines and you will learn many things and see a few miracles. One time I saw Blackie, a former street cat from Brooklyn, perform an act of gracious humanity that my family still talks about today. Blackie was a special cat, a “Person Cat,” if you will.

I do not dislike dogs. I tolerate most of them, and there are a few I have loved. When I did trauma resolution therapy some years back, it was my best friend’s boxer who I chose to accompany me in my mind as a protector. He is gentle and wild and I can certainly see the appeal of having a dog in one’s life.

However, my birth was attended by three midwives and as many cats. I was but hours old when Dude, our gray tom who terrorized the neighborhood, leapt into my crib. Every dog Dude had ever met bore a scar across the pad of their nose. From time to time he would be seen riding one up and down the road like a maniacal little jockey. The pendulum swings both ways, though, and even spring-coiled violence like Dude had a tender side.

A now retired special education teacher, my mother is a literal angel on earth and a known softie. This made her an easy mark for the little girl who sought her out at the end of a school day some years before I was born. “My dad’s gonna drown this cat, if I bring her home,” is how Sunshine joined the family. It was feared Dude might attack the little calico kitten, but he licked her and comforted her and welcomed her home, just as he did with me on my first day on Earth.

Cats will tell you that All of Everything was made just for them, but why shouldn’t they? The average feline is capable of feats of parkour athleticism that no elite human could possibly manage. Their brains are a fraction the size of ours, and yet they are able to calculate trigonometry mid-air to catch a bird on the wing. How slowly do you think time unfolds for them in those moments?

Dogs may be man’s best friend, but they are joined on that podium by horses and cats. These four species have marched as allies for millennia, with humanity’s favor ebbing and flowing as their needs change. Cats stand apart, though. They are the only animals who initiated their own domestication, and it seems retaining much of their wildness was written into that covenant.

Cats in antiquity granted humanity civilization when they offered to guard stores of grain for a warm place to sleep. Ever vigilant, they protected our food, as untempted by their charge as eunuchs standing watch over a harem. Millennia later, cats remain the better mousetrap. Well, not Blackie. A few winters ago, during a mouse infestation of my mother’s kitchen, he was known to look at her and jerk his head in the general direction of any vermin he detected in the other room.

Unlike horses, cats have pivoted as emerging technologies have changed our needs and their roles. These days, they expect to be plied with treats and comforts merely for being cute. Amazingly, we oblige. If one believes in a creator, how could they not spare a thought that all this was created for these soft, slinky hunters who inhabit nearly every corner of the globe? Perhaps their sense of entitlement is well deserved.

If all things do happen at the whim of some omniscient intelligence, Blackie clearly believed he had been misplaced. He was living under a car in a parking lot in Brooklyn when I met him. He was one of the first cats in the neighborhood to be trapped, vaccinated, neutered, and released. Subsequent ferals subject to this treatment would have their ears clipped with tiny little notches to indicate their participation in the program, but Blackie had a huge triangle of flesh snipped out, which gave him a dangerous air, despite being the gentlest cat I’ve ever met.

Blackie wasn’t just smart for a cat, he was smart for a person. When I first met him he would come sit in my lap on the sidewalk, giving every indication that he would be a perfect inside cat. Once the door closed behind him he sat on laps perhaps a dozen times over the next nineteen years. At first I believed he simply thought it was unbecoming, but in time I came to think he saw himself as a person, and the people he knew never sat on each other, so why should he?

All cats vocalize, and it is said that the common meow was developed specifically to communicate with humans, but Blackie had a whole language. His lexicon included different sounds to indicate whether he had seen a dog or a fox or another cat. He hated other animals. Perhaps the sight of them, on their four legs, served as too stark a reminder of his own true nature. He had an eerie cry that sounded like a person saying “Hello,” and instead of waiting by doors, would approach you and say “Out.”

He was my cat for a long time, but eventually moved to my childhood home, once the domain of Dude and Sunshine, to become my mother’s familiar. She was his grandma, and once that transition occurred he rejected all cat food. The freshly cooked shrimp he had once gotten only on holidays became the staple of his diet along with copious shreds of deli turkey. He had a fondness for tapioca pudding, but would leave the bowl full of glistening black beads licked totally clean.

Blackie had many adventures, not the least of which was appearing in a movie, Game 6, alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Keaton, a role for which he has his own IMDB page. I hear he was quite the little professional on set, and I flirted with the idea that he could be a cat actor, but in the finished film he is so black he merely haunts his scenes like the shadow of a cat.

Lazy, entitled, and deliberate, Blackie always seemed more like a foreign dignitary than a cat. Or perhaps he was merely riding his Hollywood fame as far as it could get him, but he used to greet me in the mornings, affecting an air of annoyance at my tardiness, no matter what time I rose, ready to go outside and lick dew off the grass. He loved plants and flowers, sniffing intently at every bloom with the care of a botanist at work and tasting every bit of water he could sniff out.

When a cat enters one’s life there is an expectation that, in return for food and shelter, they will let you pet them. Blackie was not much for petting. I believe that, as he never saw the humans around him petting each other, he was not interested in such displays of affection. He displayed a distinct preference for sitting in chairs, as humans do, and during gatherings would situate himself among us, but always out of reach.

Over almost two decades with this peculiar creature, one act of his stands out. My parents were undergoing a particularly contentious divorce, which irreparably fractured the already tenuous bonds of our family. Supporting my mother were myself, my sister, and a few of her friends. Little thought was given to Blackie when we left the house for court that first morning in a whirlwind of stress and uncertainty, but when we arrived home that evening it was clear that not only was he aware of the tension in the air, he intended to do something about it.

I must reiterate, at this point, that Blackie was never a particularly affectionate cat. By and large, we assumed he merely tolerated us, but from time to time he could surprise us with acts that revealed what I believe was a capacity for great love. He was also not a hunter. It almost seemed as if he considered such pursuits somehow beneath him. Yet, when we returned to the house that day there was a dead mouse on a plate on the counter.

He had never done anything like that before, and he never would again, but in that uncharacteristic display, I believe he was saying “I’m here for you, too, Grandma.”

We lost Blackie earlier this year and I have had to pause frequently while writing this to wipe the tears off my glasses. I have never grieved for a person the way I do for this remarkable cat, whom I miss more than I can express. My mom misses him maybe even more than I do, but what I said to her, and what I truly believe, is that “If there is a cat heaven, nothing will change for him.” Of particular note is that right before he passed, another black cat appeared on our patio. Just as Blackie left, Beans joined us and all is well.

I could ramble on about Blackie for another thousand pages, but it still hurts, so I won’t. Nothing I could write could do full justice to him, anyway. But this small act, once upon a time, by a rather special cat, perhaps gives some insight as to what I have always found so magical about these creatures who share humanity's journey and who have shared my life since my very first day.

It is not lost on me that unless someone finds favor in these musings of mine, Blackie may yet outlive me. That wouldn’t be so bad, All of Everything is for them, anyway, at least as they tell it.