I’m sitting at my desk, looking out at the tourists strolling through the Türkengasse. Right in the center of this ancient right-of-way a very large black cat is reclining, totally oblivious of the horde of camera-clutching humanity streaming past. Like a rock in a fast-moving stream, he has found his perfect spot – and damned if he’s going to move.
I admire that about him, for I know him well. His name is Hobo, and he adopted us about five years ago, back when we still lived at Highgrove, up on the highlands of Eastern Pennsylvania, almost fifteen miles from the nearest town.
Linda saw him peering out from beneath a bush, near where she parked our old car – just a smudge of black fur against the glossy green of the newly-sprung leaves. Just a glimpse - then he was gone.
The next day, he was a little bolder, and the next….
After a week she broached the subject. Could we, perhaps, put food out for him?
We did.
The next day, when she went out to get into her car, he had left her a mouse, on the grass, just by the driver’s door.
That evening, when she returned home, he followed her into the house.
Unerringly, he made straight for the kitchen. After all these years it is still his favourite room in any house in which we live.
He’s not what I would call ‘a sociable cat’. You can sit a foot away from him and call his name – and he will gaze, fixedly, over your left shoulder as if at the most absorbing scene – and then march off, twitching slightly.
I like that. He’s his own cat. That’s as it should be.
Everyone who lives in the Türkengasse adores him – and he treats each with the same benign contempt with which he treats us. He has at least four other houses at which he is welcome and where a comfortable bed is provided, should he decide to stop the night. I am sure that he often dispatches four or five suppers, before drifting off to wherever cats go, when they dream. I base my opinion on the fact that he cannot now fit through the cat door in the laundry room.
His feet, on the other hand, are as diminutive as they were when he first entered our lives., giving him a rather comical aspect, rather like a balloon in the Macy’s Parade. His small feet are, perhaps, the only thing about him that I do not find endearing. In the middle of the night, he has developed the habit of jumping up on the bed and parading up and down, to inform us that a state of emptiness pervades his dinner plate. Shiatsu can create no greater pain than a corpulent cat, on ballerina toes, strolling across one’s belly.
These past months I have spent much of my time in bed. My aged kidneys are failing and the doctors tell me that dialysis looms ever closer on the horizon. As my world grows ever smaller, the people in it grow larger. Hobo has taken to staying home more, and sleeping with us. Linda hopes he may become a lap-cat. I trust he will not. I believe his master-plan is to turn everyone in the Türkengasse into lap-people.
Outside my window he stands up. He stretches—and settles down in a new spot, opposite the Buschel’s front door. The teeming horde splits and reforms in the new flow-pattern. He appears contented. Control is maintained.
I admire that in a cat.
