Yesterday, I brushed my cat for 15 or even 20 minutes. I didn’t have anything else that I had to do, and he was happy to be that spoiled. I noticed how good it felt, just to be in the moment of what was happening….which was nothing. It was marvelous. Most of the time in the world, I feel rushed. I constantly feel like I’m in a hurry, and I hate that feeling. Covid-19 has taken a lot of from us, but it has given some to us, too. Slowing down is one of those things. The cat and I enjoyed some hanging out time.
I remember another instance when I had plenty of time to play with my cat (the previous one.) It was summer when I wasn’t teaching yet. (I used to teach community college). I was just getting ready for the fall semester. When you are a teacher, people often say, “Oh, but you have your summers off. You get three months off!” I used to laugh at that, because it’s far from true. Which months? I ask you. School got out in June, grades had to be completed within one or two weeks (how marvelous: I’ve already forgotten, even after 23 years “in the biz,” so to speak). So that was June-ish. The first two weeks of “real” summer, as I used to think of it, would start in July. That’s because the rest of June, after grades were submitted, I needed to sleep, which I did, every day. Everyday for the first two weeks of June I slept in, recovering from the semester which was always a long one, after the academic year which had passed. Blessed, glorious sleep to soothe a body and soul that was simply tapped, wrung out. “I gave at the office,” I thought to myself. My entire career, I gave all of it at the office. 100% so that there was nothing left, the first two weeks of summer lost to what was more a body-repair emergency than a celebratory, “Yay! Summer!” I was too tired to shout, “Yay, Summer!” I was too tired to shout anything at all.
The myth that teachers have summers off is a good one, a fantasy. Any job that lets you have “summers off,” sounds good to the innocent. Reality looks quite a bit different. Recovery first two weeks. By August, I would be prepping for the new semester. Prepping starts one-two weeks before the semester begins, when students start attending. The only “summers off” teachers get is July. Ah, blessed July. July, and only July, is the glorious, the true, “summers off.” A girlfriend of mine who is also a teacher, just spent her entire summer preparing to teach in the new Covid-19 world. One week before her school started, the school principal changed her class to 5th grade, after she had spent her summer preparing for third grade. Ugh.
One of those “summers off,” is one of the other times I hung out with my cat an inordinate amount of time. It was a different cat, and a different time, long before Covid struck the planet and wrung us all out to dry. Bob, the cat, was feeling particularly rambunctious that day. I was going to work (summer, so no time constraints), and Bob was leaping and playful. He just didn’t want to stop. So we kept playing. As long as I pulled the multi-colored rainbow snake thing, he would chase it. (We called the game “hippy snake”). So I kept pulling, and he kept chasing. I was enjoying it, enjoying him. Ah, sweet, sweet Bob, our strange rescue cat who had just appeared one day while we were out of town for Christmas. Our cat sitter, Bee, took pity on him, fed him more than once, and by the time we were back for New Year’s, Bob was ours. Feed a cat once, he’s your friend. Feed a cat twice, he’s your family. Bee had fed him more than once.
So, on that summer’s day, I had time, the glorious gift of time. I don’t know how long Bob and I played. We just went with it. It was one of those great things, so fun, made all the more special because it was the last time I played hippy snake with Bob. It was, in fact, the last time we played anything, because that day Bob was hit by a car on our too-busy street and he was killed. Horrifically, Bob did not die instantly. He pulled his soon-to-be corpse out of the road and to the side of the house. Then he died. The last time I played hippy snake with Bob was the last time we played anything.
So today, when I was brushing my beautiful Lynxy cat, I thought of Bob, and the gift of time. I took a moment (well, okay about 20 minutes) to brush Lynxy and just enjoy him, remembering too well how glad I had been the day I played with Bob for what had seemed like an extraordinarily long time on his last day of life. I brushed, and brushed, and I appreciated the luxury of time.