by Richard Risemberg
Of all the cats I lived with over thirty years, the most remarkable was a small gray tabby we called Sasha. She was with me the entire time I lived with my son's mother, and if I were superstitious I'd say she was a spirit of some sort who kept that marriage stitched together till she herself died at around eighteen. That's giving too much credit to a cat who had plenty of her own business to mind, after all, but she did in fact stitch not only many disparate lives together in her accidental way, but many different worlds as well, worlds that usually coexist unconscious of each other and which we pass through blindly in our daily lives.
She was a people cat. She had, according to legend, somehow lost her mother when she was not quite old enough to be on her own, and had apparently been beaten once as well. She kept a slight limp till the end of her days, and when she came to us was terrified of men. Some soft words, caresses, and edible bribery ameliorated her apprehension of the rougher gender, and over the years she became, like Kipling's Mowgli, "friend to all the world"--and, like that literary orphan, not one to be trifled with. From a timid kitten she grew into a small but fierce fighter who would never allow her self-possession nor her comfort to be infringed upon, not even by her stepdad, me. Nevertheless she kept no chilly distance from society, but reveled in the company of people, in or out of the Hollywood house we lived in then.
Some cats live indoors, some outdoors; Sasha flowed in and out of the house like the breezes of spring. Not that the breeze called you to open the door for it! But whenever someone human was home, and the weather was good, we kept a door or window open for her all the time. In the apartment, which faced a narrow Spanish-style courtyard with tiles and planters, she preferred the window, and seemed to make a game of leaping in from the walkway to the living room floor without touching the sill. Oddly enough, though there was plenty of soft rich dirt for her to dig in, this city cat would come inside to use her litter box, then launch herself back out the window to sit by the neighborhood thugs on the front stoop, chase moths, or just stretch out in the sun.
Once we moved to the house, where all the windows but one had screens, she of course had to use the doors most of the time, but the one unscreened window--the one by my pillow--remained her preference; from there she would drop straight into the patch of geraniums by the lanai and hence to the back yard, where there was always much to explore.
Explore she did, turning up in all the neighbors' yards, on garage roofs, on the roof of our own house, sometimes at head-level in the shrubbery that covered the back fence. Of course she was looking primarily for edible playmates, which she found in abundance, but the explorations were much more poetic to us who were watching, for they brought to our notice worlds that we would otherwise have ignored: the complex and brutal societies that lived among the intertwinings of bougainvillea and ivy on the fence, the lacy citadels of the birds in green branches over the garages, the secret warrens of the snails and roaches that lived under the porch steps…all these were part of Sasha's world, and out of reach of our own habit-fettered eyes most of the time. I recall countless occasions when my son and I might be sitting on the front porch steps doing nothing, Sasha by our side with her eyes half closed, when she would suddenly perk up and leap eight or ten feet down the front walk to pounce on what turned out to be a microscopic beetle or even an ant. Or she would turn her head brusquely and begin to stalk in the direction of Ramon's yard next door, where we would finally discern a small brown bird, excellently (but not sufficiently) camouflaged, foraging in the ragged grass while Sasha plotted a new fate for her.
But human company seemed to interest her the most. She was, when not feeling temperamental, a consummate lap cat, and, indoors or out, wherever people might be, she would most likely be there too. I remember that when I used to leave the house on foot, she would follow me for half a block, calling raggedly, before she would give up and go back home. If I left by car or bicycle it didn't bother her (or perhaps, since I had trained her to stay out of the street, she was simply staying within her bounds.) If a neighbor came out on his porch, Sasha would go sit by them (assuming their dogs had not come out as well); if nearly anyone simply strolled by, Sasha would wander out to the sidewalk and observe them, perhaps accepting a caress. (She did, by some sort of discernment, avoid nefarious-looking types…and she wasn't reacting to our own apprehensions, as I observed her doing so even when she was out front alone.)
Even children, which were numerous and noisy on our street, didn't bother her. Many times she would walk out into a group of kids playing ball on the front lawn and plant herself in the middle of the activity. The kids, who all knew her well and petted her often, would play seamlessly around her, the ball never (or rarely) bopping her little gray head. When the kids tired and sat down on the porch, Sasha would join them, sitting a little to one side, never seeming to pay attention to anyone in particular but never leaving till the company left. She became in a small way famous in the neighborhood, to the point where some kids pointed her out as "that really cool gray cat," and even came to visit her when my son might not be home. Her friendliness made her a subject of conversation in the neighborhood, and helped make the neighborhood itself a friendlier place.
She also tied me into the universe in quiet ways I never expected from her. On hot summer nights she preferred to sleep outside, and when I would wake in the wee hours, thirsty, and go to the kitchen for water, I would look out the window with the lights turned off, just to see the texture of the night. I would often enough see Sasha sleeping on the driveway, outside of the gate, a small soft shadow curled up on itself on the hard cement, open to the approach of dog or man or any other cat, yet serene in her strength and perceptiveness, certain that nothing could come near without her knowing it. I thought of how small she was, and how big the city, how deep the night, and how perfect her courage and her calm….
In her old age, she became deaf, and no longer slept on the drive, nor would she go outside alone, but waited for one of us to go out first. That was the time when I made a practice of stepping out the back door for a few minutes every night before going to bed, to feel the air and look at the sky, and Sasha would inevitably come out with me. And deaf though she was, she would turn her head this way and that as motions invisible to me caught her quick eye. I never saw what she saw, but she showed me that the universe is a busier place than we coarse giants can ever imagine, and that even in the city there flow currents of wildness that we'll never know. It was a gift she gave without caring or knowing that she gave it, but I'll cherish it forever.
Text and photo by Richard Risemberg
