The Next Life

(The StoryADay.org prompt for today was to write a piece involving a missing dog and a revolver on a kitchen table. It led me to a memory of my cat, Cir, who came into my life about one year before my husband Jim did and brought me a great deal of peace, tranquility, and joy. The chaos of Jim, his cat Woodsie, and a sudden surge in the feline population of our household sadly didn't quite work out for Cir. He spent two years with me, and was about eight or nine years old when he departed. I dedicate this story to him.)


When I first moved to Hawai'i, a lot of people told me that they never locked their doors at night. Few people had air conditioning because the cooling ocean breezes of the trade winds produced a natural, often plumeria scented comfort in homes. Few people worried about robbery or theft because, well, it wasn't part of the aloha spirit to be concerned with such matters. Your unlocked windows and your open doors were like an invitation, in a climate where it was understood that if you were in need, you could help yourself to what you needed. With a caveat. Only take what you need.

Reality, of course, was quite different. Thefts, robberies, sexual assaults, and break-ins did occur. I did lock my door at night, but I also left my windows and the back screen door to my fourth-story lanai open. I liked the plumeria scented comfort, and when Cir came into my life, he enjoyed the openness of the balcony. So much that once I peeked over and found him investigating the inside of the unit next door to me. He had slipped into through their open lanai door. Apparently, they liked plumeria scented comfort, too.

Back story:

When I announced in Seattle in 1995 that I had received a fellowship to study for one year in Hawai'i, panic among my friends ensued; What are you going to do with your house? What about your cat? What about your garden?

Their panic was my panic, for a minute. I was young, in my thirties, and fairly convinced I could work it all out. And did, for the most part. Friends rented the house for the fellowship ship, and when the stay extended ten more years into graduate school, I found a more permanent tenant. I had a plot in a community garden for awhile, and containers of tomatoes, herbs, and peppers on my lanai. The worst casualty was my cat, Barrio. She lived in quarantine in Honolulu for 120 days because of a now-defunct state law, and then moved with me from a shared plantation-style cottage to an apartment in a densely populated neighborhood called Makiki, where the open sliding door on the lanai became too tantalizing a taste of freedom to ignore. One night I came home from a late-night dinner with a friend with no sign of her whatsoever. I searched for traces for two years, to no avail. The last memory I have of her is lying on a futon mattress on the floor with her curled up in a ball pushed tight against me -- a gesture that I have come to interpret many years later as a cat's way of entering the next of the nine lives.



Cir was born the same year that Barrio left. He was found abandoned as a kitten on a street corner in Philadelphia by a man who used to call himself Misha and a woman who was Misha's girlfriend at the time. The romance faded and Misha ended up in Honolulu with cat Cir. I met him in late 2002 at a winter solstice ritual where he tried to seduce me into joining him in his so-called Tantric Temple. I ignored the temple but when he abruptly left Honolulu a few months later for reasons that were never quite explained, I offered to bring his cat into my home.

I had just turned forty and I was lonely. Several friends had proposed that since I felt too afraid to date, I might consider adopting a cat. Barrio's departure still weighed on my conscience, until Cir appeared. A Philadelphia fighter cat, he had a boxer's paws and a fighter's jaw. I saw him devour a bird on my lanai, and leap from the floor to the coffee table where my laptop sat to a bookshelf, then refrigerator -- all to sabotage a gecko. He frightened me at first, but when he started to curl up against me late at night as Barrio had, we quickly became friends. Other single female friends in my life at the time loved him, too, and for several months, he enjoyed status as the ever-present center of attention.

Then, Jim arrived.


Now, one point must be made quite clear. Jim is not the antagonist in this drama. Jim is the patron saint of all animals, and especially loves cats, to the point that he had three while living at one point in his life in Virginia Beach. A Navy man, he completed several deployments in the 1990s to the Persian Gulf, then was dispatched to San Diego for an aircraft carrier overhaul. The cats could not travel around the tip of South America with the ship and Jim could not find new owners. So one night he opened all the windows of his home and invited the cats to walk free. In the morning, he woke up to find five cats with him in his bed.

So Jim loves cats, perhaps too much. He displayed his love for Cir right after meeting him, and Cir, for the most part, reciprocated. Jim also had a cat named Woodsie, and when it appeared that Jim and I might become a couple, Jim proposed a slumber party for the cats.

Woodsie came over, and Cir -- being the elder cat and, of course, the Philly fighter -- quickly established the pecking order. Woodsie, who was certainly no push-over, put up a little bit of a fight. But Jim went off to work at 6 a.m. and I left for campus at 8:30., leaving the two cats alone. We both returned in mid-afternoon and watched as Cir and Woodsie walked into the apartment from the back lanai. Cautiously they circled and then, their noses met.

Jim whooped with joy. "We can get married and have children now!"

Children, however, were not offspring of the human sort. Two weeks later, Jim came to my apartment with an abandoned kitten who came to be known as Mini-Sox. Two months later, a trip to the Hawaiian Humane Society yielded another abandoned soul, a black-and-white tuxedo cat named 'Aina. And, then, a Honolulu fighter, Pascha, scuttled across a heavily-trafficked parking lot and jumped into the car of a friend. He was six weeks old, one pound in weight, and so scrawny that his back legs didn't quite operate. He needed a home, and so we took him.

By now, we had moved out of the apartment in Makiki and into a fairly spacious two-story modern flat in the neighborhood of Manoa. Set in a tropical rainforest against lush green mountains, the flat had two lanais and an open patio that led to a small yard in the back. The landlord gave us keys but told us the last robbery in the neighborhood had been in 1964. We figured it was safe to leave the doors and windows open.

Caught up in the changes unfolding all around me, I wasn't attentive to the effect that a multi-cat household was having on Cir. He retreated into himself, and if others -- cats or human -- tried to approach him, he snarled and flared his fighter jaw. His paws could wield a powerful punch, which quickly gave him access to the most inaccessible areas of the house -- a high shelf in an upstairs closet, the deep recesses of a lazy Susan cabinet in the kitchen, and ultimately the tropical outdoors.

He curled up in a ball against my body one night in November, and then disappeared for a week.

He came back, voluntarily, and then left again. Jim spotted him one night three weeks later on a street corner in Manoa and we coaxed him into our car and brought him home. He stayed two days, and left again. A man who lived near the Chinese cemetery in Manoa -- some three miles from our house -- found him looking for food six weeks later and took him to the Humane Society. They identified us as owners by his micro-chip, and we went to the shelter to pick him up. He sat in a box and glared at us, not particularly eager to come home.

We decided to let him re-acculturate to domestic life slowly. He had a free run of the house, but all doors to all lanais and patios were closed. After five days, he seemed to relax into a routine of spending most of the day on the high shelf of the closet and some of the night curled up in a tight ball against my body. We took him to the vet and he was found to be healthy, with exception of infected teeth that the vet recommended be extracted.

On the night before the surgery, Jim and I went out for dinner.

All four cats -- Cir, Woodsie, Aina, and Pascha -- were in the house alone.

We came home to find the downstairs sliding door to the patio pushed open, and three cats instead of four.

Like Barrio, Cir had disappeared into the next of his lives, leaving us no trace of his whereabouts, leaving us feeling all alone.