The quarantine cat

“I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”

--Rudyard Kipling

I saw it out of the corner of my eye.  Maybe I'd seen it before?  If so, it hadn't slipped through my brain's filters, hadn't slipped into my consciousness.  A dark sweater in a hammock?  Hanging in a dorm window?

Virus or no virus, I walk through the University of Washington campus every two or three days.  Just one of my several daily walking routes.  I wind my way through a maze of new dormitories -- since March, a somewhat eerie experience.  The dorms are uncannily empty, aside from a few die-hard residents who linger on.  These are new dorms that were built over the old McCarty Hall and its parking lot, places which half my mind believes still exist.  Alternate realities.  

As was the sweater in the hammock, as it turned out.

The window was on the ground floor of Madrona Hall, almost hidden in surrounding foliage.  I had walked past it when the alert rang in my brain: "A dark sweater in a hammock?  Or was that a cat?"

I retraced my steps, and saw what my photo above reveals: a cat, a gray tabby, suspended in the window.  Sleeping.  It continued sleeping, throughout that first sighting.

I've since passed that same window seven or eight times.  The cat is always there.  In his (her?) hammock.  Usually asleep.  Sometimes curled up, as though asleep, but with eyes open, watching, sizing me up.  Once, it was sitting in the hammock, looking out the window alertly.

The hammock has never been empty.

The cat appears healthy and well fed.  It is obviously a pet.  From the exterior, I can't tell whether the cat room is a residence, or a dorm office, or a common room.  It could be any of those.   The curtain is pulled behind the cat, hiding whatever lies beyond.

I had never noticed the cat (or an old dark sweater) until after the coronavirus shut down the university.  Maybe he's been living there all year.  But I think of him as "the quarantine cat."

And really, doesn't the cat represent us all during the "stay at home" era?  Or, as cats so often do, represent an idealized version of ourselves?  He stays at home, without protest.  Or, in the cat's case, he stays in the hammock.  Not because he's leashed, not because his "owner" ordered him to, but because he chooses to.  The cat is a content creature.

I'm sure that, in his early days in Madrona, he explored the hall sufficiently to satisfy a cat's curiosity.  He was provided a hammock in which to repose, in which to observe the outdoors.  The hammock served his needs and in the hammock he passes his days.

Not -- as we tend to be -- bored, or stir-crazy, or angry.  Not raging against his Fate.  The cat views himself with his inner eye, and knows that he needs no entertainment, no distraction.  He is complete within himself, contemplating with contentment his own existence.

He actually reminds me of a Buddhist monk, as does every cat.  He has sufficient food to stay alive, and a hammock of his own, free from external annoyance.  He has an "owner" who loves him, and, I assume, to whom he feels some semblance of love.  But he does not depend on his owner -- not for food, not for safety, not for contentment.  Like a monk holding out a bowl for a gift of rice, he happily accepts his daily food.  But he is not "grateful" for the food, because he wisely knows that the owner obtains happiness of his own -- if not "karma" -- by so giving.  If the food stops being served, if he were to be abandoned, he would not despair.

He would not despair -- although he might grieve -- because he is a cat.  The cat who walks by himself.  Unlike the servile dog, he has kept all the instincts of his wild ancestor.  Like a good boy scout, he can live off the land.  And, in so doing, remain content with his own existence.

When I see him watching me as I pass, I approach the window.  The cat never flinches.  He never acts awkward or averts his eyes.  He stares at me calmly.  I might sometimes mistake his calm stare as a sign of hostility, but I'd be wrong.  I would be falsely interpreting his sense of self-sufficiency, his knowledge that he is equal with me as a fellow creature, his failure to show a craving for affection, as "hostility."  If he were a dog, perhaps so.  Not, however, a cat.  Or at least not this cat.

In a couple of days, I'll be walking once more past Madrona Hall.  My heart will beat slightly faster as I approach his window.  He may or may not see me approach.  Either way, I doubt his heart will beat faster.

He may eventually, however, give me a brief nod of recognition.  If so, I probably will react giddily.  But then, I'm not a cat.