Cat canoodles

Francesca Battistelli is singing Write Your Story as I write this story, the one about the black cat who lives with us.

We have a cat, well, actually we have canoodles of cats, but we have one particular. Her name is Elsie, which best I recall is a second name after the first one she tried on didn't work. I have no idea where her second name came from, but it stuck like mud in spring.

She's possibly entering her final days, or she might just out-live me. She is incredibly thin, but she's always been. I check her on occasion to see that she's breathing. Always has been.

She was a kitten from a batch served up from her mother about 12 years ago. She's survived her mother sitting on her and flattening her head for a bit. She's survived Hurricane Katrina and an evacuation, and being lost about three weeks in the woods around my Mother's home before returning to the garage right before we were to come home. She's survived five moves in her 12 years or so. 

Our granddaughter Emma says she walks like an alien, and despite not knowing quite how an alien walks, I can't argue with her. Her back legs kinda rotate around in some kind of Tim Burton movie thing and her front are straight ahead, and through it all, she glides.

She has never come to either my wife, Mary, or myself, never got in a lap, never done anything to promote or accept affection. She is deep black, cauldron black, witches' apprentice black with thin green eyes that are open about 20 minutes a day tops.

But she goes with us when we go, and we go a lot. This is my 17th Easter at (counting more than one church on a charge separately) 13 churches. We left our own home in Lacombe seven years ago and have lived in four parsonages since. She's journeyed with us to each one.

She might be indestructible as far as I know or can prove or maybe alien DNA actually does live in slivers in her.

But she's part of our story. 

I've spent some time very recently looking at Facebook to find friends I grew up with, and most of those guys simply aren't there are. I wonder how their lives turned out, what river bends and forks there were in them. Two of my old baseball buddies are in jail, a malady that affected them later in life. Some of my buds never left the area where I grew up. Some did, including me. I haven't been back to my mother's house since we sold it in 2007.

I was thinking about Elsie, and about how I've lost so many friends over the past few years to all sorts of calamity and disease, and about how much of my mother's family is now gone and I look at Elsie and wonder what it must mean to live a life for all intents and purposes without love.

The great thing about Holy Week is that we can begin to understand what and how we are loved in a way that can't be better explained. A person who loved us enough to die for us while we were yet sinners is about as a concrete a love as one could imagine. 

We are not indestructible. We are not aliens. We are clay jars, so fragile that we're unable to successfully live without that love.

Wished Elsie would agree.