Being Luke

The last few days I've been watching our cat, Luke, with more interest than usual. He's a really interesting cat.

He was one of four not that long ago, but the other three died over the last couple of years. Luke has really taken to being an 'only cat'. I may have mentioned this before, but Lukie has always been our 'puppy cat'--he comes when you call him (unlike our Puli dog), he rolls over and shows you his belly when you walk by him, he begs for food along with the dog Bela when we're eating. And whenever one of us comes home, he comes running to greet us.

Yet, there are things about Luke that confound me. He has several sleeping places during the day: on top of the piano, in an upstairs window, in our bed (he's not allowed in the room at night because he walks on your face and wakes you up at 5 a.m. or so....but during the day he is on the bed a lot. And there is some place he sleeps that I don't know and can't find because sometimes I go looking for him and he seems to have evaporated from the house. But at 3 p.m., wherever he is, he comes down to the kitchen to be fed. If all our clocks were suddenly taken away, Luke would tell us when it is 3 p.m. so we'd know that hour, at least, every day.

He often sits on the table that is beside the desk where I sit and type this. He will sometimes lay on the table and put his head on my desk and look at me with those yellow eyes like he's saying 'here I am....I'd let you pet me now.' Luke keeps me neat because if I don't keep that table orderly, he knocks stuff on the floor beside me or down the back steps into the downstairs.

I also have been noticing his different speeds. Sometimes he just moves slowly, languidly, as if he had no where to go but was just going somewhere. Other times he races through the room and away, like something important is happening somewhere else that he needs to get to. And he has different approaches to the dog: carefully, as if stalking or being stalked; thoughtlessly, as if he knows what Bela will do; surreptitiously, not really sneaking up but more like testing the waters. I sometimes find them together in mid-day, sleeping on our bed in perfect peace and contentment. Sometimes, mostly when food is at issue, Bela will jump him and drive him away.

I have no idea what Luke thinks. He seems to have a schedule and routine that has nothing to do with me. He's always sticking his paw under our bedroom door as soon and he hears Bern or me stirring--it's an 1850 house, there are spaces under the doors.

But much of the day he operates on a rhythm incomprehensible to me. Disappearing, re-appearing, always there at 3 p.m., sometimes MIA all day. Bela is easy. He is seldom, except for his mid-day nap with Luke on our bed, more than a few feet from either Bern or me. His schedule is our schedule, whatever that is on a given day. Not Luke--his drummer is not my drummer but a different one.

It would be interesting but not surprising, I imagine, to be in Bela's brain. Dogs are pretty predictable, after all--"love me, love me, feed me, feed me, take me out, take me out"...stuff like that.

I would resist being Luke. It might be a labyrinth of a mind from which I could not extricate myself, a place from which I could not return.

Dogs are comfort and caring and need and consistency. Cats are finally Mystery embodied.

I wouldn't risk being Luke.