Mario Monkey Mouse (Mr. Fuzzy).  He was found, tiny, in the back of a PG&E truck in a PG&E yard by my uncle, his brother and his sister.

He came to my parents’ house a few weeks before I moved back to Danville.  The first time we met I called him “silly”.  I have been raised among cats.   I remember all of them, each was different.  I will surely be a cat lady when I shove off, but when I met Mario I had been living without the company of animals for several years.

He was so small, huge eyes, rat-tailed and fearless.  The courage that comes with complete innocence, and requires fragility.  I was not the same.  I was leaving a home, my boyfriend, all that had been safe for several years.  I was on a rush of ok change is now let’s ghost ride the will… and scared solid, crystallized in my resistance to admitting vulnerability, heading for some speed humps that would come soon enough.  Little naked Mario was silly to me: that was all I could feel for fragility at that time.

The whip cracked.   Danville came in a rush of dark dawns and strange connections, obsessions, and a wake coming in slow and heavy, unstoppable.  No control became evident.  Where do you turn when the concept of direction is null: in circles.  Walking in circles, drawing circles, thinking in circles, speaking, praying for circles, for spirals… to live to live, anything as long as I can keep that…never before in my life had I asked to keep living.

The first cat I knew was white with one blue eye and one green eye, her name was Macha.  I remember when she was dying, gasping on the hunter green wall to wall carpet of my childhood duplex.  My mom was crying, she felt guilty for some reason, I felt sad about that but I was too fascinated to cry, the moment was too important of a lesson to lose focus.  It was my first consciousness of absolute truth, life’s truth, true acceptance, helplessness and courage.

The first time I actually felt these absolutes came later, then I cried.  This was a circle too- child loses pet, thinks of loss, child loses self, realizes loss, and love (that’s why, that’s the reason for all this spinning).

Because the love was what I had lost, the love was what I lost myself to find.  And how could I find it if I kept standing in the way, blocking the view?  I do that some times.

I saw Mario tiny on the bed and knew I was missing out on something.  I thought I was the crystal, seeing everything ahead of me in prismatic clarity.  But I was the mirror, seeing nothing greater than myself.  And after the shattering ( what was the shattering?  physical, emotional, familial, careerial, lots of stuff… we have our stories), I look at my cat and I don’t see silly anymore.

And I can honestly say I love him.