The Cat's Tale

Once upon a time, there was a kitten, who was dropped off at our house after being located in a box in the rafters of a garage, and mother having become exterminated was left to die unweaned before you bottle fed human infant baby formula. I named it Wallace Stevens.

The cat died. It died approximately 24 hours after I said to my wife these words: "I'm going to go ahead and say out loud that I think that this cat might be one of my favorite animals I have ever had."

It scurried outdoors one night, which was normal. We often let our cats out since we live in the country, and our house is a purposeful walk from the nearest neighbor. The next morning I got a call from my wife as I pulled from our driveway on the way to work.

"Turn around," she said.

What she had seen, and what she had wanted to deny, was that our cat Wallace Stevens had been struck by a car in the road near our front yard.

And you know, when I sat down to write this story I thought to myself, "Self, you ought to feel something important about yourself because you named that cat Wallace Stevens, and then it died, and then you coped with that by reading 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' aloud to your daughters at the hasty funeral we had for it in the month of December or January (January, likely, since that is the month of my birth.)"

I remember coming home from school one day when I was about the age of my daughter Evelyn who is in the fourth grade. Or perhaps I was the age of my daughter Emmalee who is seven years old. In either case, my cat, which was a yellow tiger-striped cat to whom I owed no particularly strong sentiment, was flattened in the road before our driveway. I m sure that I had loved the cat in some of those moments, but overwhelmingly, I was curious to know about the nature of death. Here had been a cat that I had known, and now it is dead.

Schroedinger.

In the case of the 20th1st Centurians, like me ---

WHOAH.

Do you realize that if you are able to read this, there is a very good chance that you are someone who was alive in both of those centuries? You are the same as Frank Lloyd Wright?

In 1867,
   In January,
      African-American men were granted the right to vote in the Capital of our Country.
   In February,
      The first ship passed through the Suez Canal.
   In March,
      The University of Illinois was established*
   In April,
      Alaskans enjoyed their first full month of American citizenry.
   In May,
      Canada was born.
   In June,
      Frank Lloyd Wright was born.
   In July,
      The missionary Thomas Baker was cannibalized.
   In August,
      A Negro man voted for the first time in a southern election.
   In September,
      Robert Freeman graduated from Harvard.
   In October,
      The natives agreed to relocate to western Oklahoma.
   In November,
      The Rose was born in France, Marie Curie in Poland, and Das Kapital in Germany.
   In December,
      Charles Dickens read a book to a crowd in New York City.

Wallace Stevens was born in 1879. I was born in 1977. I hope you are understanding the connection.

(I also wrote a poem about Haiti on

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2010

POSTED BY BENNY AT 6:49 PM 

*Okay, folks: the new post-post-modern period everyone is thinking about. Here is what it is called: The Age of Self. In the popomo culture, the story only matters in that it intersects with the Self. There it is. The Self and the Story: 

Duly defined.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English with a Minor in Comparative Literature (English).

Then, there was Jerome, who disappeared. I must have ridden my bike through the neighborhood streets a hundred and ninety-two times looking for that cat.