Following a Black Cat

Here I am sitting in what once was my grandfather’s chair in the backyard, drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, but being totally alone, not even a  single squirrel in sight. It’s been a long time now that I have been alone. No wife – she died in a car crash five years ago. No son – he moved to Australia ten years ago, and won’t answer my calls. No brother, he is in ‘the home’ for the aged, and never speaks when I visit him. No pets in my life either, our last dog was in the car with my wife in the car crash. I don’t want to go through such an agonizing pain again.

My quiet was disturbed by something rustling through the bushes. My first thought was ‘raccoons again’, but I would be wrong. It was a black cat that emerged right in front of me. Of course I knew the old saying/superstition of the negative effects of a black cat crossing a person’s path. My second thought was, ‘I can’t be on a path when I am sitting in a chair going nowhere.’

The black cat walked back and forth between the two tall trees on either side of the end of my property, purring loudly. I have no fence there, just bushes separated by small spaces. The black cat appears to want me to follow it, so I do so for no particular reason I can name. The cat keeps looking back after it has advanced a certain distance. It does not take long before I see what I believe is the destination it is leading me towards. The cat stops at the end of a cliff, and looks back in my direction. I approach it and stand beside it, looking deep into the rocky valley far below us. I shiver and wonder. Loneliness could end in a flash. The pain would not last long. I totter for a few moments, but decide that I do not want to give up on life that way. There had been an ounce of temptation, but it was outweighed by a ton of fear, and and a firm pound of hope that something better could be in my future.

The black cat checks me out, meows, and starts strutting in another direction. Offering me an alternative? I have no idea whatsoever what that might be. Yet I still follow it almost religiously. Although I’ve never had a cat for a pet, so I don’t understand them, I just feel that it is trying to tell me something.

It does not take me long to figure out where the black cat is leading me, as I have been there before, several times, but not recently. We are headed towards the home for the aged that my brother calls home, if he even speaks any words at all. There are several people outside walking around the grounds with what does not look to me like any sense of direction. A few see the black cat and call out to it with a ‘here, kitty, kitty’. The cat pays them no attention. I do not think of my new friend as merely a ‘kitty’, but something somehow more substantial.

So, is the cat asking me whether I consider this to be an option for me?  But it is not anything that I want in any way. So I turn away, and the cat does so as well, scampering ahead of me at a speed I did not think that a cat was quite capable of. 

My furry friend heads off in another direction, and, of course, I follow my guide to another perspective on my future. I wonder where it will be this time. The second choice was marginally better than the first. Perhaps the third will be even better than the first two.

After we both walk for about half an hour I see that we are headed to the high school I attended as a teenager. I have no idea why the cat might be doing that, but I will continue to follow its lead. At the very least, it is a distraction from the typically boring days I have been experiencing for the longest time. 

I don’t expect anyone to be in or near the school as it is the summer. It turns out that I am wrong. There are people of a broad spectrum of ages going into the school. Then I remember reading something in the paper about there being an event there for former students. My first reaction was to not go. There might not be anyone my age there, or just people that I did not know well, or didn’t really like.

The cat goes straight to the entrance of the school and then turns around. I feel that it is somehow communicating the idea that I should go into the building that was once so very familiar to me. I decide to enter when a young man opens the door for me.

At first it looks like my negative prediction was pretty much bang on. A lot of youngsters are there. I can’t feel that I could talk to them or listen to what they have to say. I consider leaving the place as I walk down the halls, but then I see a room that has a number of people who are around my age. I decide to walk inside and see whether I know any of them. I feel that it is possible.

Someone calls my name. I am surprised that anyone would recognize me after some 50 years apart, but this person does. It is a woman’s voice. Somehow a flow of recognition hits me like a tidal wave when I see her. It is Wanda. She had been in several of my classes through the years. I always liked her independent and generally bizarre nature, but never had the nerve to ask her out. Her rejection would have had teeth.

We went into an empty classroom and sat down at two desks that we pushed together side by side. Almost immediately we started making fun of some of our fellow students from the past, the more popular ones, that had nothing to do with either of us in our high school days. They certainly snubbed me after the Halloween when I went to school dressed as a wizard. When I mentioned that, she told me of how a number of classmates referred to her as a witch.

Then she asked me “What made you come to the reunion?” I replied by saying that a black cat had crossed my path and led me there. She smiled, but did not laugh. She asked me where the animal was, and I told her that the last time I had seen my guide was by the front door. Then she stood up and said, “Let’s go find him!” I saw no reason why we should not. If she had been a witch in fact, not just in high school rumour, she would doubtless be comfortable with such a creature.

When we went exited through the front door I was in for a surprise. When Wanda saw the black cat, she called out, “Come here Shadow. You have done your work well.” Shadow came running towards her and started purring by her feet. Although I wondered how Wanda knew where I lived, I didn’t think that it was necessary for me to ask her. She would have her ways, and right now I am glad that she had them, and might share them with me in the future.