Sunflower and cats

Yesterday I was stumping the streets of my neighbourhood looking for my stupid cat. He had stayed out all night and all day, and I was worried about him.

Of course I took a camera. I found a lot of nice gardens on Cambridge St. Lots of sunflowers, and where you get sunflowers, you also get bees.

Not far from the yellow sunflowers of Cambridge is the stunning yellow house at Gladstone and Cambridge.

I love the yellow house! Too bad it’s just temporary. As I heard the story, the old house (formerly a pawnshop) is being held for a condo development. It began to fall into disrepair, and the city told the owner he had to clean it up, so he spray-painted it yellow.

Next door to the yellow house is a boarded-up brick house, part of the same land package I guess. Pigeons have taken over that one.

A couple of doors down, right next to the 7/11, is this place.

I think it pretty much sums up what’s going on in that neighbourhood — settlement of Muslim immigrants from north Africa. This is just a few blocks from Little Italy, now a well-established, prosperous neighbourhood, and Chinatown, whose population seems to be as much Vietnamese as Chinese, and which now has four Korean restaurants and two cool coffee shops.

I think this is a great place to live. As for my cat, he came back. We’re still working it out.

If he’s going to go out, I’d prefer him to go out in the daytime. Then he’d get tired and sleep all night. That’s the theory anyway. But as my cat always says, “Fat chance!”

He doesn’t even care about going out in the daytime any more, now that he knows how much more fun it is to go out at night.

I don’t know where he went yesterday. I think he might have gone a little farther afield than he was ready for, and maybe it took him longer to get back than he expected. Maybe he got confused and took a few wrong turns, and he probably tucked himself into some dark place to sleep. When he came in the house he had weeds in his fur and he was acting like he couldn’t believe he was in the right place. He went around sniffing at everything, as if he couldn’t quite accept that he was really back.

I couldn’t either. I really thought I’d lost him.

Lots of people warned me to not let him out at all, but that just isn’t going to happen. He’s way too insistent about it. He wants to go outside so much that I wouldn’t think I was allowing him to live his real life if I made him stay in.

Maybe what’s happening now is that he’s educating me. He’s teaching me that no matter how much I worry about him, he really does come back. But nothing can guarantee that he won’t get hit by a car.

Here’s a picture of my cat. It’s a reprint from this post. Don’t you think he has soulful eyes?

Zoom showed me this blog post from Yarn-a-go-go.com, about a cat who came back after being gone for four months. It’s good.
Yarn-A-Go-Go: Look What Dragged The Cat In
You should also click on the link for the eulogy, because it’s really good too. You’ll probably cry.

I don’t remember going through all this agony about other cats I’ve had. My cat Kitty seemed to fit in just fine on Bagot St. in Kingston, which is a rough sort of downtown street. Even when we moved over to busy Montreal St. she did fine. She went out whenever she wanted to, and I never worried about her at all.

It was only when we moved out to the country that she took off. She took a look at the house we were supposed to live in, took a look at the endless bush all around it, and took off like an arrow for the bush.

I know she couldn’t have survived the winter out there, but I still think she didn’t make too bad of a choice. I think of her living for one endless summer and fall, dining in style on all the little voles and shrews and stuff that they have out there in the woods, and when she was full she’d spend the rest of the day basking in the hot sun on a big flat rock in a clearing with insects buzzing all around and a soft breeze rustling in the trees, just like real cats are supposed to do. I like to think she chose a short life but a good one.

I was interested in this post on the Logan-the-dog blog, about how nobody owns cats in Israel.

When my cat disappears like that I start thinking I won’t have a cat any more, and I miss him. I live alone at this time in my life, and I like having a cat. I like having this cat. But even more than that, I feel guilty that I might have cost him his life by being so irresponsible.

Like I said, we’re still working it out.