High school and college students all over the country are preparing for their graduations. And there will be hundreds of commencement speakers offering advice.
If I were asked to give such an address, offering advice to young people at the precipice of their futures, I’d start with my cat.
Cats have nine lives. We don’t. First, let me tell you about Sandy.
During the early years of our marriage — now 47 years and counting — my wife and I acquired our first cat: a brown striped tabby cat: healthy, lean, agile. To make life easier, I installed a small cat door from the side porch so that the cat could come and go at its leisure. The cat ate well, sat on our laps, and caught a few birds and chipmunks in the yard. An ordinary cat. In his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway had it right: “No animal has more liberty than the cat.” But, as always, with liberty, there are risks.
One day I suddenly realized that Sandy was missing. The cat food wasn’t eaten. I didn’t hear the click of the cat door all day. I didn’t pay much attention until the next day and still no cat, so I began a small neighborhood search.
I posted a few notices on the local telephone poles. I asked neighbors if they saw the cat. By the end of day I was ready to call our local animal shelter as I walked around the neighborhood one last time.
“Sandy? Sandy?” I called and then I heard a distant mewing sound, a nearly imperceptible, plaintive cry from a direction I couldn’t identify. I walk to the left of our house. The cry became weaker. I walked to the right of the house and the small mewing was perceptively louder, but not by much. I kept calling the cat’s name. The cry increased. I walked past three houses, and then I was sure the cry emanated from somewhere around the third house, perhaps in the backyard.
I walked down the neighbor’s driveway toward his back lawn and that is when I heard a clear mewing from inside my neighbor’s garage. Fortunately, the garage door wasn’t locked, and when I lifted the door, Sandy zoomed out from the dark shadows and ran home.
I knew our neighbor had left two days before on vacation. I did not know that they inadvertently locked nosy Sandy in the garage. When I arrived home, the cat was happily eating its food and later found his usual spot on my lap as my wife and I watched Wheel of Fortune.
A few months later, Sandy was missing for a week. This time I was sure the cat was gone for good, but then one afternoon, while I was writing, I heard a car door slam shut, a car zooming off down the street and a moment later, click, the sound of cat door and Sandy jumped on my lap.
Scene three. Once again, the cat was gone: one day, two days, and again I began searching the neighborhood, and again I heard that familiar desperate cry that led me to a small patch of woods just down the street, and there I found Sandy with its bloody paw caught in an old, rusted trap.
The paw was swollen. The vet gave the cat a shot, and bandaged the paw and said that it wasn’t broken, and the cat would be as good as new in no time. Which was true. Mighty Cat roamed the neighborhood once more.
Well, at the risk of your incredulity, Sandy was missing a fourth time! Sigh. And again I did my usual neighborhood search. Sigh. And again I heard the same plaintive “Meow!”
Once again the cat was stuck in another neighbor’s garage, and the closer I looked the more aghast I became. Sandy had a chain around its neck. A chain! I rang the neighbor’s doorbell and the mom answered.
“Hi Chris.”
“Hi. I think my cat is in your garage, and it has a chain around its neck.”
“I don’t think so,” my neighbor said as if I were joking.
“No, no. For real. Take a look.”
She and I walked to the garage and there was Sandy curled up in the corner with a locked chain around its neck.
At that point my neighbor’s 8-year-old daughter joined us and her mom asked “Do you know how this happened?” The girl burst into tears and ran into the house.
After I freed the cat from the chain, my neighbor was profuse with apologies. She later told me that her daughter always wanted a cat and thought she could, well, adopt (kidnap) Sandy.
I wish I could tell you this story has a happy ending and that Sandy is sitting on my lap as I write this column. Sigh.
For some reason, Sandy developed a monstrous amount of fleas in its fur. No matter what we did, powder, pet groomers, fogging the house with bug killers, the fleas returned and my wife and I suffered from relentless bites.
We both finally agreed: the cat had to go. Fortunately, we had friends who owned a dairy farm and happily took Sandy where, I imagine, the cat spent its last years chasing barn mice, drinking fresh cow’s milk and grateful it had escaped the dangers of my neighborhood.
My father lived to 100. My mother lived until she was 99. Shakespeare lived for 52 years. Toni Morrison made it to her 88th birthday. Albert Einstein was 76 when he died. Queen Victoria lived for 81 years. Joe DiMaggio died when he was 84. That’s a lot of baseball seasons. Martin Luther King died when he was only 39. Dick Van Dyke is 99 years old!
No matter how I do the math, no matter how I calculate it, people only have one life. Cats probably do have nine lives. So if we had nine lives you could get caught in a trap, suffer chains around our necks, endure being kidnapped, and enjoy fresh milk in our retirement, but if we have only one life, and if we know for sure that someday we are going to die, I think we ought to listen to what the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her poem When Death Comes: “I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.” She wrote that she didn’t want to find herself “sighing, and frightened or full of argument.”
And in her poem The Summer Day she may as well have asked all graduates this spring: “Tell me, what is it your plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”