My cat, Kringle, turned ten years old today. According to Calculator Cat, that would make him 57 in cat years. July 27, 2001 is not his real birthday. When our family picked him up from the shelter on December 27th, they had him listed as a 5-month old kitten. We stuck with the 27th, subtracted five months, and decided to use July 27th as his birthday. I could also tell you about the elaborate back-story my brother and I created for him. About how he lived with Fidel Castro while growing up in Cuba, and preached revolution in his previous lives. Or how he batted leadoff and played centerfield for his shelter baseball team. Or even the eight illegitimate children he fathered with two different women. But all of that would bore you.
Kringle's backstory was very important to us as young teenagers, and was instrumental in the development of my love for storytelling. But more than anything, creating a narrative for Kringle was necessary because cats are just plain boring. They sit, they sleep, they eat, and if you're lucky, they provide a change of pace and lick their ass for a few seconds. You can only play with a cat for the first year or two of their life and then they start to become bored. Really, you're going to make me chase around that feather again? I'm too old and wise for this shit.
Talking about Kringle's past exploits allowed us to create some excitement when there wasn't any. None of it was true, but I'll be damned if I didn't start to believe in it. Yesterday night, Kringle tip-toed into my room and began sniffing around. My bedroom windows were open, and a glimpse of the outside world for a house cat is what reality TV is to humans. My windowsill is about three feet high. In his younger days, Kringle jumped up there with no problem. Despite the two-inch width, he would always manage to measure up the height and time his jump perfectly to land on the windowsill with ease. Nowadays, he's more hesitant.
Kringle looked up at the now Goliath-sized windowsill. He stared for a minute, poked is head around, checked out the other windowsill, and realized he couldn't make the jump. He hasn't been able to make that jump for some years now, so he's taken to jumping on my desk and then stepping on to the windowsill. My desk is about two and half feet high. I've never seen him have a problem with jumping up to the desk.
As usual, my desk was a mess -- empty water bottles, empty beer bottles, laptop, obnoxiously large books, keys, wallet, glasses case, etc. I pushed most of the crap to back in an attempt to clear out some space for him to jump up. Kringle sniffed around some more and surveyed the now-open space. He stretched out on his hind legs, and batted his paws at the top of the desk. I interpreted this as a way to psyche himself up. Kind of like when a boxer jumps around in his corner during introductions and punches himself in the face before the fight is about to start. Kringle did the super-stretch a few more times before settling in. He crouched down real low in preparation for his jump. Glued to my desk chair, I stared. I was riveted. He looked at me, and before I could react, he jumped up to my lap, jumped on to the desk, and stepped on to the windowsill in the span of two seconds. The once one-step process turned two-step process, is now a three-step process ten years later.
I guess that is what getting old is about. There's no easy way to do anything anymore. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a flashback of the times we coaxed him into jumping five feet in the air to track down a noise-making ball. Or of the times I had convinced myself he made diving catches in the outfield. The reality is: he's ten years old and has lost his athleticism. And some of that athleticism was imagined to begin with.
As Kringle lay on the windowsill and stared into the blank night, I decided I would blog about this. I hadn't posted anything in a month and figured my five loyal readers were probably wondering if I was still alive. So I disappeared into another room to find a camera. I was going to take this visceral, even symbolic picture of Kringle staring into the black vastness of the world and use it for the top of this post. Camera in hand, I made it back into my room. As I steadied the camera and just about took the picture, Kringle turned around and jumped off the windowsill. The photo above is what I was left with. The perfect, fleeting picture I burned into my memory morphed into the picture I actually took.
I can't help but to think that too is what getting old is about.
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