cats

Empty windows

As always, things end before we were really ready. Returning from a month abroad, we find our living room faces a newly empty apartment. Across the street the walls are bare, save for a horse painting. It will be left for the next tenant. The curtains that had obscured the kitchen are gone, leaving a clear view of the small space two women shared for the past two years. The apartment looks both larger and smaller, in the way of these things, with all their furniture gone.

We wonder where they’ve moved, these women we never spoke to but shared some slice of life with. For two years we have seen them come home late, the lights often going on at last at eleven pm, work finally over. We’ve watched them host dinners on Friday evenings, welcoming a handful of friends with wine and laughter. Mostly we have seen their cats, and they ours, as the animals watched the world or lay on the dining tables that face each other across the small street that separates our buildings. For two years we have shared the occasional wave and the knowledge that we are not alone, that despite the lack of communication we are happy to see each other, happy to watch the cats grow up.

And now the apartment is empty. For us, returning home after travel and quarantine, the loss is instantaneous and the shock unexpected. Out of all our neighbors, the cluster of shared windows and barely visible lives, they were the two we appreciated most, two women and two cats. We miss them, and wish them good fortune. For ourselves, we wish for neighbors with cats, and we wonder when we’ll see those lights go on again.

Off hours

The kind of quiet Monday I last enjoyed in the spring sneaks up on me. I rise early and make coffee, acknowledging the cat by leaving the sink tap dripping for a bit. He prefers to drink running water with quick laps of that tiny pink tongue, and I prefer to let him. In the dark of the kitchen we make space for each other, me pouring boiling water over grounds and him two paws down in the sink, two paws up on the counter, making tiny splashing sounds.

We retire to the office once the coffee is done, where I scrub emails and reach out to factory staff to plan visits later in the week. It’s too early for them to be on site yet, and in an hour I’ve accomplished enough to pause until they reply. The cat and I wake Tara with tea and move to the sunroom to read the news and lie on the rug until she arrives. We read and she plays the guitar for a bit until the neighborhood is fully risen. These minutes of morning together are likewise a gift of this kind of Monday, and we appreciate them. Quite often one or the other of us is traveling, is at the train station early or the airport even earlier, and there is none of this shared peace, reading while the children next door leave for school.

After a while the neighborhood is awake, children out and office workers likewise. The shops open and deliveries start to arrive, and Tara departs for work, a short bus ride or walk. Again this commute is a gift of our life here. No longer are the bus rides an hour plus of private shuttles down the peninsula. As she leaves I set the robot vacuum to work, appeasing the cat with a high perch safe from the trundling commotion. He accepts this reluctantly, and naps while I follow up with the responses arriving from factory staff and US teammates. These colleagues are conducting a ritual I know so well, that of the Sunday evening email scrub to prepare for the week. It’s a part of life I have left behind in my journey to the future. In return I now work Saturday mornings, a few hours of quiet catch up on the end of the US work week. These hours are a fair trade, as they overlap with some factories sixth working day. I’m happier with this schedule, trading Friday dinner time emails in the US for Saturday morning ones, letting Tara sleep in while I chase shipping documents and wire transfers. There’s an unspoken rule in this exchange, a pact we all mostly keep: one day a week without email. Saturday in the US and Sunday in Asia are sacred, a shared time for everything else in our lives. One day a week of peace. And as a result the last quarter of my weekend sometimes comes, strangely, on Mondays.

So it is that afternoons like this Monday, where replies trickle in and there is no specific urgency to any situation, sneak up on me, for they are not planned. Instead, upon realizing myself so gifted I head to the gym or to the grocery store. Occasionally I write, or nap with the cat. Days like this are rare. Last week on Monday I was on a 7 am flight to Taiwan. The week before I was already in Japan. The week before that I was already in San Francisco. More than a month, I think, since the last of these quiet mornings with the cat. And so I relax and appreciate the gift of living once again in the future, in UTC+8, and working at least partially in the past.

Rituals reshaped

Mr. Squish watches me make coffee and tea from the corner of the counter. After the electric kettle is filled and the mugs prepared, he leans his head in to the thin drip of the faucet to drink. We share the kitchen comfortably in these early mornings, moving past each other with no sounds. My eyes are barely open as we start the processes.

On alternate days I grind coffee by hand, which takes some time, while he drinks. When he is done, front paws removed from the sink one after the other, I clean his automatic feeder, which holds two days of food. While the coffee drips and tea steeps I clean his litter box, turn on the light panels, and wash my face, eyes finally fully functional. These are the moments of variation, depending on the weather. Often he will leave the counter while I am gone, returning to the living room rug or sofa to relax. On days like today, though, he stays comfortable on the counter as I take tea to Tara and coffee to my office and begin to write. On rare mornings he is still there, in the again dark kitchen, when I return to check on the second cup and clean out the grounds, his eyes closed and muscles relaxed. I leave him there, water dripping, just in case.

These are the rituals of those comfortable in their space, and a few months in we three are indeed. Our actions are familiar enough that visitors from SF would recognize them, but reconfigured for our new apartment, our new tools, and our new schedule. There are no seven am bus rides to Palo Alto in this new life, though there can be seven am Zoom calls. Mostly the mornings are our quiet hours, and we try hard not to rush them. On the best days, like today, I return to my coffee and Squish to the bed where he curls back up on Tara’s legs and starts to knead. These are the moments without stress, without further chores or tasks, and without the buzz of messages from colleagues and friends that permeate our waking hours. For a few more minutes there is nowhere else to be.

Moving is a chance to change our lives. We suddenly can revisit not just in the biggest facts of location, language, and employment, but also the smallest ones like where the coffee grinder sits in the kitchen and whether it is electric or not. These mundane changes would seem to have been possible in our old environment, and they were, yet they faced the obstacles of “good enough” and “works for now”. Resistance, in our daily lives, isn’t a decision not to change but the gradual accumulation of not changing, day after day. As I wrote once long ago about the impetus for starting over, “habits, rather than small patches of comfort against the wind became small fences of restraint against desire” As with so many things, the echoes of who we were are the best guide to who we will be.

And so, having moved, we are again building our lives with new furniture, new haunts, and new friends. Most importantly we are rebuilding our habits with each other, trying hard to write more, to play music more, and to walk more together. The goals are good, I think: to savor the simple hours together and minimize the stressed hours apart. Mr. Squish approves of these changes, and having traveled far himself is busily building his own set of patterns in our new surroundings, glad to have so many windows, sofas, and hours of company.

Fur drifting

A new season has come to our San Francisco apartment. Like the cottonwood fluff of my childhood, cat fur drifts in small tufts, buffeted by the fan kept on at all hours. Truly warm weather is rare here, and I don’t expect it to stay much into June. Soon Mr. Squish will miss all that soft under fur he has left on the sofa, on the bed, and everywhere else he’s been this week.

Like most good memories of childhood, I’m not sure of the season of cottonwoods, though I remember mowing through grass covered enough to look like snowfall with their white spores. It’s a good memory, now, as I’m safely removed from allergies by time and distance. The cat fur not as much, and I pull it off of my shirt and out of my coffee. Mostly, though, I catch it drifting lazily by, held up by breeze and lingering feline magic. It’s the soft under-stuff that drifts like this, the kind of fur that makes people shocked when they pet Mr. Squish for the first time.

“He’s so soft!” they all say. He is, though there are plenty of sharp bits.

“Like a rabbit,” some note.

I agree. It’s a luxurious feeling, this cat of long fur that mingles into downy softness. He’s a strange cat, and the fur is definitely a contributor. As Tara says, he really has one job: turning kernels into fur. It’s a responsibility he takes very seriously.

Somehow though this drift doesn’t create much of a reaction in my sinuses, which is why we get along so well, and can share this very furry one bedroom apartment without issue. It’s luck, fate, and probably mostly strange genetics. The furriest cat I’ve ever lived with is also mostly nonallergic. And soft.

As I watch him in the morning, sitting on a stool in the kitchen sniffing the open window, I can see the wind ruffling his fur. Every once in a while the morning breeze causes some to separate, and flutter off out of the kitchen into the hallway. It’s a slow motion, appropriate to the cool San Francisco morning. In the heat of the afternoon he will nap in the sun, and the shedding will be much more active, an intentional reaction to the warm beams.

It’s almost time to vacuum.

Again.

Naps

When the sunlight comes in our west facing windows, if the house has been cleaned and the laundry done, and if our bodies have been exercised and fed, we nap. These are hours of contentment, after long workouts and good meals. They are fragile hours, and rare. Often there is an activity in the afternoon. Sometimes the house is not clean, or the laundry not done, and so those tasks or similar take up the hours that could be devoted to rest. Yet just frequently enough to be a habit, we nap.

It’s a luxury, of course, to be able to be so self-focused at thirty eight. To be able to rise, make coffee, write, work out, go eat, come home and sleep. It is a luxury have so few constraints, so few impositions, and so much personal space. A luxury to have a gym membership and a bicycle route to and from, to have money for coffee and lunch out, not to mention for an apartment in this ever-more-expensive city.

It is also a luxury to have a furry black cat to nap with, a creature so content in the sunbeams and so glad to have his humans at home. He loves being able to see both of us, or better yet to be touching one of us and in sight of the other. He can be ornery, just like us, and demanding, but his joy at cohabiting with two humans is something to appreciate. As I say often when people ask me about living with a cat, it’s like sharing a home with an alien. It is a creature we can only sort of understand, only sort of communicate with, but who has agreed to snuggle in cold weather. Both sides see benefit in that.

In these lazy post-nap evenings, when the sun still pours in as the days lengthen, life expands wonderfully. Tara makes art, or plays the guitar on the rooftop. I read, write, and mail letters. We plan for the future, with the slow determination it requires. Eventually we cook dinner and watch as the darkness settles on the city, the sun having already gone behind Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower.

But first, in the afternoons when we are lucky, we nap.

Pattern the mind

In the quiet mornings of a weekend alone I get up early and sit at the kitchen table to write. Keeping notebooks has been a habit since I was eighteen, but the focus on early mornings, on what I am thinking in the first half hour awake, is new. Part of that is fewer afternoon hours in coffee shops or leafy green spaces. Part of it is the plethora of distractions available as soon as I am willing. Mostly, though, it is the dedication to building a habit, to building a person.

We are on this planet scant years, exact number unknown. We have so many opportunities. The cumulative work of our species is maintained and built on to make our lives more free, more luxurious. Unlike my cat who relies, as I do, on human inventions to provide dripping water. No other cat has built him a series of pipes that will bring water up to our third floor apartment. He is alone in his quest for survival, aided once by family and now by the humans who have chosen to nurture him.

We humans are so lucky, to no longer have to farm, to no longer have to build most of the things that we own. I do not know how, a fact that brings both joy and shame. And so our question becomes not “will we survive” but what will we do with our time?

I am working on small habits to answer that question. Making time to learn, and putting in effort with others to understand how to act better, singularly and as a group. Time spent these ways is of value, in that it will aid me and hopefully aid others. Writing is one of these habits, in that it makes a better human internally, and if that is successful perhaps externally as well.

And I spend time out of doors, looking at the sky. I think of my parents, who owned no TV, spent hours each day reading when they were able, and shooed their children out of doors as often as possible. They moved from the town to the country to raise children, believing it would be better, believing it would be worth all the time in the car. They were right, or at least I appreciate their decision. I am happy to know what it is like to build tree forts in woods no one will ever find; to be a person who has played war with other boys across acres of woods. Happy also to remember making log bridges and exploring river banks, to have floated both sticks and icebergs along pathways of water. Worthwhile, that move, to make me a boy who chased my cat through wild raspberry bushes to bring him back inside before dark.

Forcing ourselves into better habits is not easy, but it is worthwhile. In the fall of twenty sixteen I study for an exam, I work on opportunities near and far from home, and I try to build flexibility into my damaged core.

All these and more to make the next decade easier, to make myself healthier, happier, and better to live with. Because who knows what we will share our lives with, having already taken in this strange furry cat.

Twelve paws

For a few moments tonight, in the heat of a late San Francisco evening, our entire family was in the tub.

On hot days we fill it with cold water, just an inch or two to cool the feet. It’s a cheap means of refreshment. We leave it like this all day, and frequent it between projects. Sometimes we catch each other standing quietly in the tub in the dark reading something on our phones. This is modern life, combining fast internet and rising temperatures.

Today, relaxing at home on the first weekend of the off season, we taught Mr. Squish our trick. As cats go he’s comfortable in water, a result of taking baths twice a month since he was very small. In hot weather he minds them less, the drying process being a benefit rather than a hassle. Today he took a cold shower, a more recent discovery. He padded around in the simulated rain quite content for a full five minutes before deciding he was done.

And so this evening in our dark apartment, lit only by the purple LED christmas lights that we are certain cause no heat, we all stood for a few moments in the tub, twelve paws together in the cool water. We humans crouched to put our hands in too, and the cat sniffed our faces. After a first aborted try Mr. Squish seemed to understand. He waited patiently with us until the chill seeped up his legs and into his body.

It’s a good way to spend a Sunday together, I think: lying on the floor in front of the fan and then standing in the bathtub. And then standing, slightly damp, in front of the fan, eight dripping sets of prints leading from one to the other.

The changing weather

In twenty fifteen the first week of September bakes San Francisco. Several days break 90 F and fans are out of stock. In the Mission temperatures close in on 100 in the late afternoon. At work in Oakland, which is hotter than SF, everyone complains, their houses not built for such temperatures. There are few wrap-around porches in Berkeley, less air conditioning in San Francisco. Heaters for the foggy summer were our primary concern when picking apartments. Heaters and windows, to let in the scant sun.

Instead we brainstorm ways to keep our apartment, picked for its long exposure to the afternoon sun, cool for Mr. Squish. Our first tries are not successful, and we come home to clouds of black fur drifting through the still air as he tries desperately to shed some insulation. On the hottest night we bathe him, and he lounges in the water. Afterwards he wanders the apartment contentedly, wet and dripping in the evening breeze. We sleep with every window open, happy to be part of the slowly cooling city.

On Wednesday, unwilling to leave him to bake, I take him to work. We drive together across the Bay bridge and lounge in the office’s air conditioning. He is a favorite there, drifting from room to room unnoticed until he leaps onto a colleague’s desk in search of snacks. As cats go he’s calm in the face of surprises, and welcomes the adventure.

In Tahoe the weekend before the low lake level was a constant presence. We had to swim or be ferried out to the boat, and most docks were constrained to shallow-drawing vessels. Watching their skeletal structures rise so high above the water I thought of the foresight to have built this far out in the first place, and of droughts that must have come before. I thought of Shasta, already low some four years ago, and wonder if house boating would be fun still. Could we enjoy an escape in an environment so obviously lacking sustenance, so clearly in need of water?

In Tahoe we could, relaxing in the breeze coming off the lake. In San Francisco, that first week of September, we cannot. In the western portions of the city this weather is less extreme, and the ocean provides some breeze. In the Mission, flat and rarely washed clean by rain or wind, heat that endures past dark is a rare feeling. Brooklyn, a few weeks ago, was both hotter and more humid, but the stick of an East Coast summer is to be expected, and evenings out of doors stretch late as the sky cools.

And yet how quickly all weather disappears. This morning, sitting with the windows open, San Francisco is a pleasant 61 F, and Mr. Squish joins me beneath the blanket I’ve spread over my feet, glad of the cover. Neither of us can remember the week prior and our reluctance to touch. Our bodies have forgotten, holding only what they can feel at the moment.

Weekends off

For the first time in two and a half months, Saturday is a quiet one that begins in my own bed. I wake late, fold laundry, buy groceries, and relax with the cat. San Francisco is beautiful today. The Sutro Tower is obscured by fog before noon.

In the afternoon I walk for an hour along Valencia, looking for nothing. Alone for the weekend I am trying to rebuild my sense of self after weeks on the road. Since the last quiet weekend post in March I’ve spent weeks as a ghost in hotels, visiting old friends on days off in Shanghai, and watching my cat on video chat instead of on the sofa.

It’s a strange life, being myself like that in the odd corners between hours of work, in odd locations between hours of travel. Now in one place for a few months I am trying to figure out how to be more Wil and less someone else, trying to remember what it is I like to do, when given free time. It’s a slow process.

As the sky darkens the fireworks begin. The Mission comes alive, people out on all corners with sparklers and small rockets. Feeling the blasts begin I think of Chinese New Year in two thousand five, and of the fourth in Colorado in two thousand nine.

In between fireworks I take the cat to the roof. He is curious, and loves the wind. It’s foggy, the fireworks dull pops of color against the murky sky. I love this weather. He sniffs the air and watches the flashes intently, not sure of their origin. How to explain fireworks to a cat? Flashes of light made by people, shot into the air for fun? A M80 goes off on our block, and his opinion changes instantly. Claws out wide and muscles tense he tries to jump out of my arms. I hold him tight to avoid scratches. Slowly I set him down, and he disappears into the stairwell, heading down. A moment later he re-appears, curiosity winning over fear, sniffing and looking out from the safety of the doorway.

Boom

He is gone. I find him a few minutes later, under the bed. He won’t come out for several hours, until the strange banging dies down and people go home.

Happy fourth of July Mr. Squish.

Biking with a cat, part 1

Yesterday after work, with a friend’s offer of dinner in mind, I threw Mr. Squish in my backpack, with his leash tied to the top handle. Knowing he’d be unhappy eventually I put his furry bed in too, folded as a liner for the bag. And I got on my bike, helmet and all, and set off across the city. He handled it well, head poking up through the unzipped top of the bag, peeking out at the world whipping past. It was cold but not unpleasant, and we rode up through the Richmond and into Golden Gate Park, up JFK and out into the Panhandle. I was worried about him in traffic, because he doesn’t like cars much and busses even less, but he handled it fine, never moving much. He’s really a champ of a cat in most respects.

When we arrived I pulled the bike inside and he scrambled out of the pack, leashed to me while I locked up. He knows the house, having stayed there before while we were out of town, and was excited to see the resident cat. She might not have been as excited to see him, but at least they can cohabit a bit.

Going home was a different adventure. It was dark and cold and Mr. Squish was tired. He had no interest in staying put in my backpack. Halfway back through the Panhandle he was up on my shoulder, crouched with his head facing the wind. Not my ideal way to ride, as he could leap off at any moment and, because of the leash, be dragged by the bike. Once I got into the park I slowed down, and sure enough he jumped off. I did too and for a while walked the bike with him running along side, still tied to my backpack. This wasn’t too bad, we go on walks a lot, but it wasn’t a fast way home, and it was almost midnight. So I pushed him back in the bag and started off again, figuring any bit of the ride I could do on the bike would be worth it.

He scrambled out again almost immediately, up on to my shoulder. Worried about the jump but wanting to keep going I headed up onto the sidewalk, figuring I could ride slowly along it and he’d be ok.

Wrong call. About twenty feet from where I got on the sidewalk the sprinklers started. The first one hit us both in the face, him crouched by my head. No one was pleased, cold water added to the cold wind, and at least three more sprinklers ahead. I did the stupid thing and tried to keep going, grabbing Mr. Squish with my right hand and biking with my left, somehow thinking I could make it through these 3 more sprinklers and be ok. Squish wasn’t having any of it. The second one got us both, but by now I was holding him dangling by the harness as he frantically tried to avoid the third sprinkler. We never made it to the fourth one. After the third I was soaked, scratched to hell, and holding the harness but no Squish.

This is my worst fear with taking Mr. Squish out on the leash. It’s a harness that clips around his middle and neck, connected by a strap with a loop for the leash. Pretty secure, but I know from experience that if he gets really spooked he can squirm his front paws out of the thing and somehow get it off his head.

I hopped off the bike, throwing it to the ground, and headed back to him. He was squatting in the middle of the sidewalk between two sprinklers, huddled in a wet ball. I was pretty soaked too, and bleeding from my hand, though I didn’t notice then. I managed to gently grab him and pulled us both back onto the road, away from the sprinklers, where I calmed him down, somehow got the harness back on, and got him into the backpack. At this point I just desperately wanted to make it home, and I’m sure he did too. He was cold, wet, and at least a little banged up from the scramble and fall.

He stayed in the backpack, just his nose peeking out, all the rest of the way home to Tara, who took him and brushed him and put him in front of the heater.

And that’s how Mr. Squish’s first bike ride went.

Hopefully the next one will go better. And be in the daylight.

Cat variations

Coming home from the north I enter the courtyard along with the first shadows. Heading west, the sun has dropped beneath the roofline, our building’s three stories enough to provide shade. In this light, still bright but indirect, the courtyard is a peaceful place, ferns in the corners and small trees along the sides providing some measure of growing things against the concrete. Finally out of the car I can relax on entering, safe again in my own space.

From beneath the leaves of one potted plant she watches me, sitting delicately in her hunter’s pose. As I approach she says nothing, waiting patiently. As I pass she does not strike, letting out the faintest meow, saying hello and look at me, hiding in the shade of these leaves. I reach through, scratching behind the ears, shifting my bag to my other shoulder. Crouched down now, close enough to hear her purr, I coax her from behind the leaves. The sun is quickly leaving the courtyard, shifting towards the ocean though there is an hour of daylight left. Knowing her true goal I rise, keys jingling, and head up the back stairs three flights.

Chelsie lives down on the ground floor, her owner lets her roam in the afternoons, after work and before dinner. At first she lies in the sun, relishing the heated concrete. As it withdraws so too does she, to her spot beneath the leaves, to play at being a tiger in a jungle small but all her own.

Until I come home, and then she’s out again, following me up the stairs in swift strides, her body almost coasting upwards. I unlock the door and she brushes by me, purring, heading for the desk, the chairs, the window’s sun. For when her apartment and the courtyard are wrapped in shadows mine, high above on the north west corner, is filled with sun. At the top of the building, windows facing west to the Pacific, it gets warmth longer, holds the sun’s gaze later, than any other in our building. Chelsie knows this, used to visit the previous tenant, and staked out her claim to our floor, to the desk once it arrived, to a chair if there’s a cushion on it, as soon as we’d moved in. Her owner Peter knows exactly where she’s gone and comes knocking, the courtyard dark and dinner ready.

“Is Chelsie here?” he asks, knowing full well she is curled in the last rays of warmth, purring loudly, clouds of fur everywhere around her.

“Of course,” I say, and then “Ok Chels, let’s go.”

She perks up, hopping off of the chair and prancing towards the door.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Not at all,” I answer, “she’s welcome any time.”

In an apartment too small for animals, where the lease prohibits them anyway, Chelsie’s visits are like the sun itself, a gift in this land of fog and wind. The sneezing and the sweeping up of fur are an easy price to pay for this time cohabiting with an animal we do not need to feed or clean.

And, like the sun, when the fog is thick and heavy, Chelsie does not see the light of day, Peter’s door closed for weeks on end. So now, on days when I round the hills of Marin, head down to the Golden Gate, and see the city spread out before me with not a cloud around, I open the gate to our courtyard with a little grin, looking for the eyes beneath the bushes. Pink and grey in the strangest of shades, Chelsie waits for our apartment to be opened for her so she can lounge as she likes, cat not of one apartment but of them all in turn.

Circus of cats

A year ago I sat on a rooftop in Hong Kong and watched the cats roam Sheung Wan’s streets from far above as the day’s heat soaked back out of the concrete towers and into the sky.  In Houston this last month I have watched them again, how they prowl and play once evening approaches, content out of doors once the sun has fled.  In this complex of houses become apartments there are many, of all colors and temperaments.  With time, patience and an interest in their doings, we become familiar with one another.

Winnie, longer-haired orange and sleek, a rescue from Galveston who spent ten days on a rooftop post Hurricane Ike, is the new king.  The tufts of fur behind his ears attract attention, and he spends the evenings on his brick doorstep, content to watch others antics in the fading heat.

Magic, skinny young and short-haired black, chases a bullfrog into the shrubs, wild-eyed and bounding.  Winnie waits a moment and then ambles after, as though curious to see what Magic would do with this strange-sounding beast.  Unimpressed he slinks back to his stoop, and ten minutes later Magic is sitting on the wooden bench licking his paws, the bullfrog forgotten.

“How long do their memories last?” a friend wonders, sitting outside on the patio furniture watching a large orange and white cat flirt with Winnie, lured by his low profile and huge ear tufts.  “Do they remember each other or just vague impressions, do they know people or just where they are fed?”  None of us know the answer, and in the perfect warmth of ten pm no one moves to discover it.  Instead we speculate on their behavior, watching Boo Boo, an indoors-only Siamese mix with light blue eyes who has come to the window, his fur pressing through the screen as he watches Winnie and these people.

Milo is the old man of the neighborhood, in time here if not in years.  His family has cut a cat door into the building entrance, dignifying his comings and goings beyond meowing for a helping hand.  Yet he is uneasy as the population swells, Winnie’s arrival followed by another smaller orange and white, and then a black and white hunter, a grey tiger indoor cat, and more.  Milo eyes them from a tree across the street that only he seems able to climb. Finding him there one evening I think he remembers a less-crowded block, where he could prowl behind shrubs by his lonesome.

How long is a cat’s memory, we asked. Packing this apartment, with it’s squirrel highway and it’s windows, with it’s odd hiding places, I wonder instead how long is the memory of a place?  Will Winnie remember us when we leave?  Milo?  This apartment?  How long until no one remembers us standing here in the fading light, seeking out the hunters where they stalked behind the bushes?

The black and white, name unknown, chases a lizard as we pack the car, dropping it’s squirming body from mouth to pavement only to bound upon it again as it races away across the pavement.  It is a favorite activity, the lizards numerous and slow in the morning heat before all things retreat to shade near noon.  They do not remember, I think, these small creatures that flee vertically, climbing the brick out of the reach of Milo’s claws.  This apartment has no memory, save that of holes and scrapes, of hangars left in closets and marks where the dresser touched the wall.  Like the lizards it will be here tomorrow, no outward sign of vacancy.

How long do even we remember, though, haughty in our questioning of cats?  Hong Kong, a year ago, has already begun to fade, and this apartment too will be shrunk down, condensed to a smattering of images, like those cats seen from rooftops and visits from old friends.  We move on, inhabiting one place after another, confident in our memories, though less durable than these walls and their scars.  Maybe Magic will wonder where we’ve gone, lying mid-driveway in the morning light where we used both to watch the mail arrive.

For a little while so will I.

Rooftops, carts, and cats

The streets of Hong Kong are packed with delivery motion. As Manhattan swirls at three am, so does Sheung Wan bustle in the morning as dried fish in vast quantities is hauled off trucks by men with giant metal hooks. At break time they leave these implements carelessly in giant bags of rice, handles up, points embedded in the compacted mush. Each sack in turn is flung from truck to cart, bundled up into a store, frontless, wares open to the air. Each bag is sliced open and dumped into bins for later measurement again, into smaller bags individually carried home. So many stairs in this city, so much vertical travel, and all of these homes furnished, all of these kitchens filled, all of this waste removed. What of this massive expenditure every day, to carry vegetables home to supper? The cost of yet another tower does not include this.

The carts themselves, ubiquitous on the streets, will be tied to poles at the day’s slackening, around three. Their metal handles, circular and hollow, will fold down to the bed, compacting the entire device into a rectangle of green steel with four blue wheels. The wheels are fixed. These carts are so basic, so mass-produced, and so communal that they have neither names, nor dates, nor manufacturer’s brand. The flat slats of metal that form their weight-supporting base seem not to mind the pounding of sacks tossed from trucks, the blue wheels seem not to heed the curbs they are perpetually banged into up and over. At least one per shop, the carts outnumber the trucks, themselves a half-dozen, most with Japanese engines. There are, later in the evening, twenty carts scattered around unoccupied and seeminly unowned on this three-block stretch. A sense of public space pervades this city, which has so little that all must be carefully shared.

In a park near Lan Kwai Fong a trio of ladies rehearses a dance routine at mid-morning, before the rush of lunch and smokers, after the street sweepers have cleared the broken bottles away.

From our Sheung Wan rooftop the cats seem multitude. They scale the construction site, they swarm the streets and fences, alleys. This vantage point reveals their secret paths, startles one with their numbers, the city below in constant motion. Strange too, as most of the cats I find on the ground spend large periods of time hunkered down beneath some shade. It is early April and Hong Kong is beginning to sweat. We lie on the roof top at night, assailed by mosquitos, in gym shorts, barefoot and considering the skyline. Rooftops like this are a gift, sitting as it does above an apartment that barely slept five, all laid out next to each other, last November. The rooftop triples the floor space. The rooftop raises the ceilings to the clouds.

Which are themselves coming down. The air here is getting worse, the view shorter than it used to be. So they tell me, people everywhere during these few weeks. So I can see from my vantage point, high above Sheung Wan and watching. The air may indeed be getting worse, smog pouring out of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, all of the motherland to the west. Hong Kong remains the most beautiful city I know of, a mass of thin towers and green peaks that slide into the water in a confusion of street vendors and colonial organization. For a few weeks in April it is a gracious host to me, a peaceful place of feline grace and hand-pushed cargo transport, and I am glad of the hospitality.