Slipping Away

Lolo, our new kitten, came to us when she was just a couple weeks old, having been rescued from the mulch pile at Lowe’s by my wife who was working there. Lolo was heartbreakingly tiny then and had to be fed with a miniature baby bottle which she attacked with amazing ferocity bordering on insanity. I would have to straightjacket her legs with one hand while forcing the bottle into her mouth with the other. Our persistence prevailed and she grew like a weed. The cute little ball of fur that had previously preferred to sleep in the crook of my neck and shoulder now bounded though the house like a small weightless cheetah, flashing from room to room, skittering across the floors, leaping on and bouncing off the furniture, flying up drapes, dresses and pant legs. She is fast, determined and relentless in her pursuit of human flesh to capture and gnaw on. It is an amazing sensation to walk across the floor in sandals and feel her sharp biting and scratching seamlessly alternate step by step, back and forth from one ankle to the other as if you are walking through a quicksand of teeth and claws.

Our cats have always lived the indoor, outdoor life style and I made the mistake of letting this feline cub get a taste of the suburban jungle a little too soon which probably resulted in her acquiring a case of fleas. Even supervised visitation with Mother Nature is now forbidden until she can get spayed. However, she remains undeterred in her quest for adventure al fresco. She sees her big brother exercise his freedom of movement and follows him right up to the door before being forcibly detained. When we open our front door from the outside, it is like triggering the lid on a jack-in-the-box. She has obviously learned the embarrassing sound of our SUV’s rumbling muffler allowing her to lie in wait and spring out into the porch at the first crack of light. It is hard to maintain constant vigilance for an unrepentant, recidivist escape artist during our normally unconscious habit of exercising ingress and egress.

Inevitably, I let my guard down and release the Kraken. Usually, her escape is short-lived as I bend down to confront her under the chaise lounge, grasp the closest portion of furry anatomy and gather her up in my arms, apologetically assuring her of my love while scratching her under the chin to soothe the savage beast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when she finally did successfully elude immediate and easy recapture, it would be under cover of darkness. I came in from lounging on the porch one evening for just a moment to retrieve a book and my reading glasses. When I returned I realized I had thoughtlessly left the door to the porch open. After a cursory search of the house determined that the prisoner was missing, I grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the dark world of unlimited possibilities that must have stretched out before her.

I was aware of every second ticking by as I fell through the trap door of fear and self-loathing. I’ve been down there before. My first son eluded my supervision when he was three and there were a few minutes of sheer terror and imagination run amok before I found him tagging along with our golden retriever as they blithely explored the neighborhood. Obviously, searching for a cat wasn’t as terrifying an experience but it does play the same accompaniment of regret and self-criticism to the mental melody of the search protocol. In between my observations of the way the street lamp lit the hilly contours of the neighborhood lawns with an empty yellow-green smoothness and the way my flashlight would cause bush leaves to project shadows moving in reverse toward me, momentarily looking like my dark little escapee, I thought about how I had let so much in my life slip away. Girlfriends, my mother, my first son, my career. I had lived for the moment and lost the strength of memory. I just never had a strong grip on the steering wheel of my life whether through carelessness, laziness or just reveling in my imagination.  When your head is in the clouds, the world slips through your fingers.

After having circled the house for the third time, I decided to take a closer look at the area underneath the van in the driveway where I had shined the flashlight from a standing position earlier. That extra effort to get down on my knees yielded the result I had been searching for.