Cats and The Divine

I grew up in a relatively small town in Northern California; 30,000 people or so, and it was called Los Gatos. The town was originally established in the 1860s, and was given its name after the Spanish land grant. My town became essential for the logging industry in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains, a favorite getaway destination of mine.

My father was very proud of his town, our town. He would often preach anecdotes to my three older brothers and I of its old-western roots and its outlawed nature, and as a teenager I would roll my eyes. I didn’t care to learn about the cowboys and sheriffs battling over which unaccounted person would one day decide to grace the town’s single-street attractions. I only wanted to get out of Los Gatos. I wanted to see what else was waiting for me. I thought, “This isn’t it for me, right? Of course not”. The lazy, slow-paced and white-privileged ways of the town would not be my life, I often told myself.

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The divine nature of the cat was held firmly in the minds of Egyptians. They worshipped a Cat Goddess, an ethereal being who was often represented as half feline and half woman, called Beset.

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I remember the first time someone told me I looked like my mother. It was a stranger at the grocery store. My mom and I were standing in the check-out line, nine-year old me gingerly holding her hand, glued to her side like I never understood what it was like to be truly alone, and I hadn’t yet. The man blurted, “The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree huh?” I didn’t get his reference. “Look at the blond hair on the both of you!”

I remember how blatantly my mother ignored the man, looking forward with her mouth cinched shut and her eyes fixed on the card reader positioned on the counter. As a child I didn’t know why she ignored him, or why she spoke nothing of the interaction to me in the car ride home.

At twenty-one though, I think I understand what she was protecting me from.

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I read somewhere once that an average house cat can travel up to ten miles per day, just within its own neighborhood. It never gets lost, or strays too far from its home. I learned that the cat’s exploratory nature stays within the boundaries of the only area it has known its entire life, and yet she is completely satisfied after hunting in the same garden she did the previous day.

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When I was twelve my mother’s father died of a rare type of liver cancer. I don’t remember much about my grandfather other than the fact that he was the tallest of the Syres side of the family, towering over my brothers and father. He was also extremely quiet, and smelled like old flowers and paper. I remember one thanksgiving I had the overwhelming urge to find him sitting alone on the couch, watching the kids play the way grandfathers do, and sit on his lap. Neither of us spoke a word to each other, and the only noise I could make out was a low, deep chuckle humming from his chest.

My mother didn’t cry when she told me he had passed, in fact she didn’t show a single shred of emotion at all. I think that is when I figured out that I get it from my mother; suppressing every bit of negative human experience I’ll ever go through in life and pretending that I am completely okay. I didn’t cry either, not at first. After she told me, I went upstairs and shut the door to the room I shared with one of my brothers. As soon as he left for work, a cashier job at the local Whole Foods, I let a few tears fall. No one will ever see me cry, I thought to myself.

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A cat’s brain is biologically more similar to a human’s brain than it is to a dog’s. Both humans and cats have identical regions in their brains that are responsible for emotions.

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My dad liked to smoke cigarettes. And cigars. And anything else to fill his lungs besides the overwhelming weight of figuring ways to feed four children.

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A cat’s back is extremely flexible because it has up to fifty-three loosely fitting vertebrae. Humans only have thirty-four.

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Once when I was seventeen, I went shopping for a new pair of jeans with my mother. While I was at a point where I could finally see the resemblance of our faces; blue eyes, a rounded ski-jump nose, glasses, bleach-blond hair, our bodies were quite different. My mother was and has always been very thin, with wonderfully long limbs and a delicate frame. My brothers used to joke that I inherited Dad’s body; short, curvy legs and hips with a slightly cinched waist, but one I wished was much smaller even still.

I tried on two pairs of jeans that day before giving up and leaving the mall in a fit of anxiety-ridden rage. I couldn’t stand the way the dressing room made me look, made me feel. Attempting to squeeze into another pair of baby-blue jeans, the same ones my tiny, prepubescent friends at school were wearing, made me want to vomit. “Why don’t we just get you the next size up?” my mother would suggest. I felt the hot tears welling up inside my waterline. “Please let’s just go.” I would say.

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The world’s rarest coffee, called Kopi Luwak, comes from Indonesia where a type of wildcat called a luwik is it’s native. The cat eats coffee berries and then passes them through its stomach. The beans are harvested from the cat’s excrement and then cleaned and roasted.

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The first time I tried coffee was when I was a freshman in highschool; I thought it was a rite of passage. Of course, as was any emerging adult who enjoyed cream and sugar, I was absolutely hooked. I even ended up working in a coffee shop for my first years of college, studying creative writing and commuting to class regularly. While saving money was a huge beneficiary, I was stuck in Los Gatos, the town where I swore I would get out of one day. “You don’t have to follow anyone’s timeline but your own,” my mother told me.

But I had my sights set on Portland, a literary mecca. I was to become a poet.

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The ability of a cat to find its way home is called “psi-traveling.” Scientists think cats either use the angle of the sunlight to find their way or that cats have magnetized cells in their brains that act as compasses.

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I left for Portland in December that year, on a Tuesday. My mother took the day off of work to see me off; my father worked from home so he had to make no such arrangements. The moment I walked out the door of my childhood home, the Victorian on the corner of Los Gatos Boulevard in Los Gatos, California, was the same day my coffee went cold in my mug, and the same day I decided I’ll never be back here again.