I’m listening to a lot of Koko Taylor, getting ready for the cat. It seems cat appropriate (everything seems cat appropriate). I am cat obsessed. Last night I apologized to customers in the restaurant. I mixed up their order, they insisted it was their own fault. I looked around suspiciously and leaned in. “LISTEN,” I whispered, “Its not you, its me. This cat is making me CRAZY.” They looked around. What cat? I had to explain the whole thing to them.

Tell me THIS song isn’t about cats:

“I got 29 ways just to get to my baby’s door
I got 29 ways just to get to my baby’s door
And if he need me bad I can find about two or three more

I got a way through the front,
I got a way through the back,
I got a loose hole and i can ease through the crack
I got 29 ways just to get to my baby’s door
And if he need me bad i can find about two or three more.” Koko Taylor, Twenty Nine Ways (to My Baby’s Door)

My lovely friend Christina, owner of the divine Miss Petunia, went to the MSPCA with me yesterday. The adoption center was bustling. We were issued strict instructions: open one cage at a time, sanitize the hands between cats. I recognized a lot of the cats from petfinder.com; surely at least some of the cats recognized ME from my blog. The cats were in cages, with their name, age, sex, and a silly “autobiographical” paragraph posted on the door. Sample:

“Hi, I’m Tina! I was found in Boston as a stray and brought to the adoption center. I am a sweet 5-month old tortie girl. I love playing with toy mice! If you don’t have any toy mice around, I will just play with your toes instead! I am still very much a kitten- I have tons of energy and I love to explore and play! Don’t worry, I also have a sweet side. I love to snuggle. My favorite is sleeping on the pillow right next to your head while you sleep. I also love sunbathing. I am just the perfect combination of playfulness and snuggliness!”

As it turns out, ALL the cats are a combination of playful and snuggly. I found this out by asking the MSPCA volunteer on duty. He and Christina had tussled over the hand sanitation issue. After that, I approached him gingerly with some (I admit) rather open-ended questions. “What’s this cat like?”

“That cat,” he said, “Does not like when I pick it up. It likes to play. At night, it will snuggle right up next to you.”

How about this cat, sir? (While sanitizing my hands in his clear view.)

“That cat bites me when I try to pick it up. But it will snuggle right up next to you. And it has a playful side.”

What I learned is I don’t think cats like to be picked up. The mans was a “cat pimp.” Christina had told him that I was a single guy, living alone. He was pimping me a cat to cuddle with at night. It was the psychological hard sell. It took all of my cool level-headed-ness to walk out of there without signing some papers. I had been seduced.

In particular, my eye was caught by one mixed Maine coon cat’s fluffy tail, its name was Smoke. The cat bit me, pranced around in the cage, and then totally ignored me and started eating. I was going to adopt it, but then thought better of it. Smoke was such a dynamic, fantastic cat that I am sure he will get a good home. I want the rare cat that needs me. Sometimes I like to play, other times I like to snuggle. Don’t pick me up.

The book I am reading spoke directly to my anxiety about my future cat. I was worried about the cat’s fur, the dander, how it would get on my stuff, coat my apartment. The litter box was another concern. My apartment barely seems big enough to contain a human bathroom, sometimes. The book spoke to and soothed my worry. The arriving cat will not be a future cat but a very present cat. The pheromones, the litter, the floating fur, the flash of a darting tail, the small sounds, will be inseparable details in the cat experience. A cat to guard my apartment with its energy, and enrich my life with its presence.

“The experiencing body is not a self – enclosed object, but an open, incomplete entity. This openness is evident in the arrangement of the senses: I have these multiple ways of encountering and exploring the world – listening with my ears, touching with my skin, seeing with my eyes, tasting with my tongue, smelling with my nose – and all of these various powers or pathways continually open outward from the perceiving body, like different paths diverging from a forest. Yet my experience of the world is not fragmented; I do not commonly experience the visible appearance of the world as in any way separable from its audible aspect, or from the myriad textures that offer themselves to my touch. When the local tomcat comes to visit, I do not have distinctive experiences of a visible cat, an audible cat, and an olfactory cat; rather, the tomcat is precisely the place where these separate sensory modalities join and dissolve into one another, blending as well with a certain furry tactility. Thus, my divergent senses meet up with each other in the surrounding world, converging and commingling in the things I percieve. We may think of the sensing body as a kind of open circuit that completes itself only in things, and in the world. The differentiation of my senses, as well as their spontaneous convergence in the world at large, ensures that I am a being destined for relationship: it is primarily through my engagement with what is not me that I effect the integration of my senses, and thereby experience my own unity and coherence.” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Does flight molt exist? Do chickens, faced with intense fear, molt their feathers, such as in a tornado, or in the mouth of a chomping coyote? This is the province of 19th century scientists and Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard:

“Several live, featherless chickens attracted much attention after a recent tornado. In order to determine the wind velocity needed to pull feathers from the chicken we experimented as follows. A six-pound cannon was loaded with five ounces of powder and a freshly killed chicken, with its feathers. The gun was pointed upward and fired. My conclusions are that a chicken forced through the air with this velocity is torn entirely to pieces; so tornadoes likely posses wind speeds of less than the measured chicken speed of 341 miles per hour.” Elias Loomis, 1842

A hundred and thirty three years after Loomis’ study, Bernard Vonnegut published his famous article, “Chicken plucking as measure of tornado wind speed,” in the meteorology journal Weatherwise. He argued convincingly in favor of the elegant theory of flight molt. It was unclear, however, how evolution would favor the featherless chickens that escaped near-death. Chickens that molted their feathers would no longer be able to fly. Would these be the chickens that passed on their genes most successfully?

The topic is explored at length on This American Life, Poultry Slam 2008. I first heard it in the car with Eliot, and have since listened again, after Peter Rodger’s new documentary “Oh My God,” reminded me of the hour’s Act Five – Chicken Coop for the Soul. “A short story about an orthodox Jewish man who dies on the operating table and goes to heaven. Where he meets God. Who has way more feathers than he expected. The story is from Shalom Auslander’s book, Beware of God. Shalom is also the author of a memoir, Foreskin’s Lament.” Maybe God is not a chicken, but just Chicken…

In the news, the story of the week for me was that of Francisco Hernandez Jr., a thirteen year old boy with Aspberger’s syndrome, who ran away from home. He rode the NYC subway system for eleven days, using the station restrooms and surviving on snacks and water. The NYT quoted Francisco as saying, “At some point I just stopped feeling anything.” This small blurb stopped me in my tracks. One of the two most common disruptive behaviors in institutionalized persons with dementia is wandering. As a child, I was in the grip of the other; sundowner’s syndrome. My fear would peak each evening with the sun’s disappearance and I would be terrified without the physical presence of other people.

After getting in trouble at school, Francisco took the battery out of his cellphone and boarded a train. He rode to the end of one line and switched trains. For eleven days he lived on ten dollars, subsisting on junk food and Coca Cola. He wore a winter hat and sunglasses to avoid detection, but was finally recognized. When found, and brought back to his mother, the psychiatrists asked what he had been afraid of. Did he think his mother would punish him? Yes, he said. Would she take away the TV and computer? Yes. Did he think that running away was worse than the initial trouble? Yes. What was clear to me, however, was that the psychiatrists would not get to the bottom of this any time soon. Francisco Hernandez probably doesn’t even know why he rode the trains for eleven days.