Stray Cat Strut

Stray cats are not uncommon in my neighborhood. There is a pretty grey one that comes around our house at twilight, sometimes being bold enough to rest on our porch. In the mornings we are frequently visited by a black and white cat that stalks the neighborhood like a lion on the pride. America has about 58 million stray cats, roughly the population of South Africa. In earlier times, cats found on the street were a kind of currency, you could enter the Tower of London for free provided you brought one to feed to the lions. The English have never been particularly kind to their feral felines, when effigies of the insurrectionist Guy Fawkes were burned in the 17th century, Englishmen would stuff them with live cats so they screamed while up in flames. Even today, a British motorist must fill out a report for an accident involving a dog, not so if you simply hit a cat. If the British burned their strays or threw them to the lions, the Belgians tossed theirs from high places as part of the Kattenstoet, a medieval festival in which cats were flung from the belfry. In modern America, we have more humane ways of dealing with strays (who apparently prefer to be called "community cats"), the Des Moines city council recently allowed feral cats to be captured, spayed or neutered and then released, which the ARL calls Operation CatSnip. If the grey cat who comes around at night ever allowed me to pick him up, he may remind me that there are worse things than being flung from a tower. 

I mention all this because as I was running last week, two black cats burst from the bushes in my neighborhood and ran right in front of me in what the law calls "attempted sexual assault." A few weeks ago, I disclosed that I am a reluctant optimist, that my sunny hope is in stark relief to my sense of myself as a hardened realist. Similarly, I am superstitious in spite of myself. I believe superstitious to be silly, idiotic wastes of time that make astrology look like particle physics and yet, in the last week, I have stopped myself from going to the bathroom because the Cardinals were clinging to a narrow lead in the late innings. I know this is nonsense—the Cardinals won that game, by the way, because of Adam Wainwright's right arm and a few timely hits and the post-game analysis by both the players and the commentators bore that out, not a single one thanked my bladder. And yet, I have a routine of jumping and touching the ceiling that must be observed between every pitch in a save situation lest I fail the team. I don't know why I do this but I suspect its hereditary. My mother called me during a game last week and said that since she didn't watch the night before and the Redbirds scored 16 runs, she was sacrificing by not watching tonight. We talked about it as if it were a real thing for some time and I believe I said the words "That makes sense" when, of course, it doesn't. And yet, it's always been this way. I have a lucky suit for important meetings or interviews. I have avoided walking under ladders or on especially egregious cracks in the sidewalks. I have avoided saying certain things to avoiding jinxing them, a concept that my rational mind does not believe in. It gives me some comfort that Russian cosmonauts, who certainly must be empirical scientists of the most serious order, urinate on the right rear tire of the bus that takes them to the space shuttle to bring them luck but I have a suspicion that we are all acting ridiculously. 

Still—two black cats! I mean, that can't be good, right? And they ran right in front of me. Part of cat's western reputation problem is that they are the receptacle for western civilizations fear of women, specifically as witches. The story goes that a father and son were throwing rocks at a black cat sometime in the Middle Ages, which I guess passed for male bonding at the time, and the injured animal scampered the home of a woman suspected of witchcraft. When the women emerged later with a limp, the rumor that the black cat was a witch in disguise, a remarkably durable bit of nonsense, began. Black cats were suspected of being both witches and their assistants, helping them in their nefarious deeds which were troubling indeed. According to a 15th century book on the subject warns that witches stole men's penises and keeping them in birds' nests, a practice that doesn't sound that different from Operation CatSnip, to be honest. Black cats and women were often persecuted together, put on trial and burned as a team. More relevant for the moment, black cats were associated with disease and were thought of as omens of the latest pestilence (and, to be sure, the morning after I saw the two black cats on my run, Rocky woke up with a fever). 

There is a certain narcissism to superstition, that your actions are so important that they can affect the outcome of a baseball game happening hundreds of miles away and if I truly believed that I could control the outcome of an athlete swinging a bat, isn't it monstrous that I don't use my jumping and urine-withholding powers to help scientists cure cancer or relieve tensions on the Chinese-Indian border? The fact is, of course, that I know I'm being irrational and I do those things to relieve nervous tension about something for the very reason that I can't control it, just as I couldn't control the two black cats that ran across my path. I don't believe they are witches because I don't believe in witches but I don't necessarily doubt people who do. I've never seen or heard anything that rationally suggest the existence of the supernatural but when a friend tells me about an encounter with a ghost, I try not to dismiss it out of hand, even if I'm not convinced. After all, the blind don't see what we see and they don't think we're crazy.