“There’s a big cat looking out the window,” my friend said, after I had climbed into her car, and she had driven out of my driveway. She had previously seen the cat while attaching bags of food to my door. I told her that the cat had been eyeballing me when I walked down the pathway beside the apartment that it (apparently) ruled. “I have a relationship with that cat,” I said to my friend. “I’m not sure what it is, though.”
My downstairs neighbor has a cat that sits in a window; when I travel the driveway into and out of my apartment, it watches me. The cat is orange, and has eyes that seem permanently startled. The window is closed, and the cat cannot not hear me, so I do not speak to it. I speak to rabbits and squirrels, but for a long time, my neighbor’s cat and I had not had any conversation. And one day, I saw the cat outside “What’s up, dude?” I asked him. He gave me a wide-eyed, orange-faced stare, but kept his distance. I saw him outside more frequently, and spoke to him in a soft, respectful way, until one day, he approached me. For those among you who do not know cats, a cat approach is a mute interview: “Who are you?” I did not answer the question, because I knew that the cat — it’s a cat — would not care what I had to say.
For days I would see the big boy (I thought it was a boy) and would speak to it, and one day when I was bending down to look at my car’s soft tire, a blur of fur made me leap into the air. The big orange cat shot by me, stopped, came back toward me and lifted his tail at my car. I interpreted this nonchalant behavior as a friendly overture, and carefully put my hand down toward him. I did this carefully because I am afraid of cats.
I am not a cat person: I am a dog person. Dogs wag and slobber and fetch, and won’t get a nail caught in the drapes. Cats will only do one of those things, because cats have unlicensed weapons in their feet. Despite my fear, I have had a cat (which I once had to rescue from a sewer) and my two good friends rely on me to cat-watch while they vacation. These exposures and experience with cats have softened my childhood memory of when a cat split my lip with a claw-slash. And my neighbor’s cat has won me over with his combo-meal of “I Like you/I care not.”
When I open my door and step outside, I will see my buddy, and he will dash past me and curl back. He will wiggle his tail (a suspicious activity) at the fender and tires of my car, then come to me. I speak to him and stroke his head and body and he looks up at me with yellow-eyed interest, then lowers his head to grind his ears on my leg. And he has taught me the “cat-weave:” he winds in and out of my legs as I walk down the path. And one day, as I was locking my door, I glanced up to see my neighbor and the cat. My neighbor had apparently been trying to corral the cat, but told me, “He wants to say ‘Hi’ to you.”
My neighbor did not know that “he” was my podjo, my buddy, my boy, my cat, my “Dog,” my cat below.