The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, December 27th. It is the 24th of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Christmas Eve, Longfellow, and the Quiet Darkness
I find it now and then a bit funny, this human conception that we are the endpoint of evolution. That we are the non-animals among the animals. That we are the ones crafted “in God’s image.” That the universe was made for us. This isn’t to say that the human mind isn’t staggeringly beautiful, or that the marvels of mankind’s progress aren’t Godly and mesmerizing. Those things can be true while also accepting that the universe will yield, and likely has yielded somewhere out there in the cosmos, lifeforms with minds superior to our own. Those things can also be true while accepting the possibility that perhaps the universe was made for us, but was made for the others along the way as well: The dolphins, who know pleasure. The crows, who display grief. The cats, who appear capable of an especially transcendent form of euphoria.
Christmas morning was a good time to be Barnaby. Barnaby, our rich, sleek-coated tuxedo cat, who spent most of his life overweight, the latter half of his life with two reconstructed ACL’s, and the last few years of his life receiving fluids from an IV bag every morning (to give his kidneys a little boost), was always a happy cat, as many cats are. But on Christmas morning, the joy was particularly divine.
Barnaby’s stocking did not hang above the fireplace, like the rest of ours. It was smaller—just large enough to hold a can of Pounce (which, for those of you who didn’t serve your cat Pounce during the can phase, is slightly larger than one of those half-sized cans of soda). It appeared homemade—whether by my mother or my grandma or someone who just made it look homemade, I don’t know. It hung from the crank that opened and closed the window right next to the fireplace. Early in my life, Santa filled that stocking with, as mentioned, a can of Pounce. Later, it bore toys, many laced with catnip, and sometimes it held the good stuff: straight and unfiltered and inebriating to the feline race. Beneath the tree, my mom would use a soft, white foam—probably a pillow insert or something of the sort—in place of a tree skirt, and Barnaby loved that foam, sleeping in it, beneath the tree, so often that the year it had been stored for the offseason in a box with vanilla candles, Barnaby walked around for the whole of Advent and all twelve days before Epiphany smelling quite royal, which was fitting for a cat of his demeanor. With yarn and ribbons to play with, and with plenty of the aforementioned illicit substances available to his little nose, Barnaby often ended Christmas there beneath the tree, in a doped-out bliss. Even in one of his final years, right around the time he went blind, Barnaby tromped over the minefield of wrapped packages to assume his rightful place, alternatively sleeping and gazing out at all of us opening gifts. Supervising.
This cat’s Christmas merriment amplified my Christmas merriment immensely. Barnaby was, after all, my best friend. He was well past three years old when I was born (a full-on adult cat, minus the biological ability to procreate), and for whatever reason—misplaced maternal instincts, observation that my parents were busy with two older sons, or some other working inside that fastidiously-washed noggin—he took it upon himself to help raise me. He joined me in my crib to bathe my infant head. He sat with my mother when she read to me at bedtime, rubbing his cheek against the corners of works like Narnia and Laura Ingalls Wilder. He gracefully tolerated the multitudinous injustices cats and dogs must tolerate when living with elementary schoolers.
Even after Barnaby’s watch was complete and he’d successfully overseen my parents’ efforts to keep his large, hairless kitten alive into ages approaching the teens, he remained a reliable presence in my life. There was nothing more interesting to me than that cat. When my brother, racing to the refrigerator to beat the clock in a game of Guesstures, accidentally brought the entirety of the contents of the refrigerator door crashing down upon himself, my concern was not for my brother, but for Barnaby, who’d been standing in the vicinity when the calamity occurred. When I spent far beyond my allowance on trinkets over spring break, it was an ecstatic moment to learn I could work off the debt by feeding Barnaby and putting him to bed every night (this cat spent the nighttime locked in the basement, having made it abundantly clear in his early years that he would be happy to serve as the house’s alarm clock in return for a 4:00 AM breakfast). For a stretch there, we had a minor mouse problem, and when Barnaby successfully cornered one of the rodents between storage bins under the ping pong table, only to grow so tired over a few hours of standing guard that he ultimately slept through the mouse’s escape, which was routed directly across a certain pair of white-socked paws, untold scores of my classmates heard the tale, many more than thrice.
Perhaps most importantly, Barnaby was a wellspring of love. He had love on tap. Ceaseless love. Ever-available love. The cat was a prolific purrer, and when I found myself sad, his purr was the comfort I sought and the communication of love I received. There’s something about a cat’s purr—I think it’s the totality with which it’s offered—that can make a person, or at least me, feel spiritually embraced to a degree I’m not sure mankind can communicate, through words or actions or music or anything else. Scratching Barnaby’s head and receiving that purr in return, free of hesitation or questionable motive or anything else my anxious brain can (and does) tell itself invalidates the expression of love from another, I felt the most loved I have ever felt. There was no doubt in those moments. Barnaby loved me. And that love made my existence feel justified.
I don’t know that it’s that extreme with most people and their pets, and I’d guess it certainly doesn’t go acknowledged that way, but as my dad put it after Barnaby finally passed away that summer after my freshman year of high school, “Pets teach us a lot about unconditional love.” I suppose you could take this as evidence that the universe was, indeed, made for us. Pets, perhaps, exist to love us, and to teach us. I also acknowledge that Barnaby was a unique case, possessing what seemed to be as giving of a spirit as one could imagine a cat to have, with his own desires so perfectly attuned to mine that our exchanges of scratches for purrs and purrs for scratches harmoniously intertwined, neither of us wanting anything more. But at the same time, confronting oneself with the existence and camaraderie creatures so kind and just and good casts doubt upon the notion that the universe was built just for us. More likely, it seems, the universe was built for all of this, built, among other reasons, for the sake of pets giving us their love, and us giving pets their lives.
After a few years of Barnaby’s fondness for that foam insert beneath the Christmas tree, my mom got wise and gave the guy a pillow filled with the stuff to serve as his bed. It was soft, and cozy, and pink and floral, and it fit the big softy perfectly. It was on that pillow, the morning after Barnaby’s hips let out, and he started struggling to walk, and he dragged himself up the stairs to be with us, and we carried him outside and sat with him in Mom’s garden while he stretched out on the brick beside the catmint and the sun set over Crystal Lake, before I went to a baseball game and Mom and Dad took Barnaby to the vet for his last visit—one where he never had to leave my mom’s lap, that I said goodbye to him. He rarely mustered a purr at that point, maybe because of discomfort, or maybe because he was just all out of purrs. But I scratched his head, and I told him how much I loved him, and I told him how much I would miss him, and quietly—faintly—from that same wellspring from which he had blessed me for those previous fifteen years…One last time, Barnaby purred.
Next week’s essay: On New Year’s Day, Hobbes, and the Big White Sheet of Paper
This brought tears to my eyes…