Written by Angela Townsend
I have loved nearly 4,000 cats. Each one made me feel like a child. Oversized childhood is not
always holy. There is a difference between feeling like a starfish and apologizing for being a
jam-faced urchin. It has taken nearly 4,000 cats for me to appreciate this.
The first was Fig Newton, a darling clementine and clinical psychologist. Figgy was my
consolation prize for fresh-squeezed Type 1 diabetes, and we were inseparable from the hour I
chose him.
“Him!” I shrieked with certainty at our rural shelter.
“Do you want to look at some other nice cats? Look! This is Pumpkin. She seems sweet. How
about Oreo?” My mother did due diligence.
“No, he’s the one!”
When you are nine, you know things you will be too cautious to claim at ten. I had a few weeks
left of the single digits when I met Figgy.
Weeks before, I had met childhood’s match, the end of maple syrup and sprinkle cupcakes, the
start of ophthalmology exams and orange-capped needles. Figgy, two pounds of guileless icing,
was up to the task.
On the “Cat Age Conversion Chart,” Figgy was a human toddler. This was the right age level for
his calling, caretaker for a nine-year-old girl at risk of turning eighty.
Boneless in my arms, Figgy let me dress him like Strawberry Shortcake. Half-mooned into my
side on hyperglycemic nights, he gazed green back into my eyes, purring at the frequency that
heals tendons and terrors.
Growing up together, Figgy and I stayed young. He dreamed beside me as I wrote terrible
fiction, loved me like a revelation, and taught me what a little girl needs to know about playing
and praying.
He was the first, the emperor of cats to come. He was the maestro for a 4,000-piece orchestra in
the wings.
The first hint of this absurd armada came in the same pediatrician’s office where my childhood
got complicated. Dominating the wall was a poster taller than me, entitled “One Hundred Cats
and a Mouse.”
It was just what it sounds like: a century of psychedelic felines, fat and brash and wispy and
grand, with a single rodent somewhere in the fold. I found the mouse and forgot him instantly,
but the cats were my consolation every time we saw Dr. Skourinotz. I studied them as though for
a final, remembering #5’s pinwheel eyes and #27’s blue scarf, #82’s triangle tongue and #44’s
turbulent cheer.
I was staring at them when I learned my life would change. I was staring down the years to 2007,
when I began work at a sanctuary for 100 cats.
Our 100 cats come from hopeless situations, leading to endless comparisons with starfish. The
shoreline is covered, and we can’t save them all, but—splash!—we can save that one, and that
one, and that one. We tell ourselves we are doing the saving, anyway.
Working at a sanctuary for 100 cats, you learn. The species is thick with benevolent egomaniacs
who demand cheese, complete creative control, and an unconditional cosmos. Belly rubs are
generally a bad idea. Aqueous poultry is a good idea.
You learn some things only over hundreds, then thousands, of cats. You are always a good idea.
You—solemn and silly and at perennial risk of turning ancient—are a potential soul-friend,
appreciated primarily for procurement of cheese, but almost as much for your essence.
You are essentially a child. This was the message of the cats, the languid hug-muggers and the
pinwheel-eyed gymnasts, gluttons and gentlewomen, lithe liquid lovers of life.
Paraplegic cats, prehistoric cats, gastrointestinally festive cats, and diabetic cats were unanimous:
the only proper response to breath is astonishment. The only proper response to aging humans is
crisis counseling. In Figgy’s zestful train, they performed heroic counseling every hour of their
thirty-six thousand lives.
Trying to keep up with cats, I found myself acquiring extra lives by osmosis. Pinned to the poster
at nine years old, I saw more than nine astounding lives yet to come. I sensed their pleasure in
existence. I sensed, physically, that my instinct for resurrection was keen. If the cats could come
back from bone-rattling hardship—abandonment, disability, cheese deprivation—and become
boneless in life’s arms, reborn and reborn and reborn, I could be a child of the cosmos, too.
I have lived many lives over four thousand cats, resurrected from so many deaths that I have no
business being afraid again. My confidence, my writing, and my trust in my friends and my God
have all collapsed, only to rise up, crooked tail in the air, pinwheel spinning.
The cats kept me young and ridiculous. The cats kept vigil when a darker childhood came
calling.
There is a difference between childlike astonishment and childish shame. One can protect you
from the other, but only if you practice resurrection every day. I got out of practice. I got
clobbered. I toiled, and I spun, and I lost my pinwheels, trying to please, please, please forgive
me for using the wrong side of the sponge, please forgive me for wearing the wrong sweater to
Thanksgiving, please forgive me for being impulsive and impossible and inscrutable and
incapable.
If I was a bad child to my husband, I was still a cosmic child among the cats. Cats are incapable
of very few things: opening cans, understanding cryptocurrency, deferring dreams of global
domination, and being wrong.
The cats got me right. The cats gave me another childhood. The cats filled my shore with
starfish, and I came running.
It was once believed that starfish were blind, a reasonable assumption for creatures without eyes.
But biologists have lately learned that these orange oddballs are actually sight-spangled, covered
in eyes all over their bodies, remarkably like the angels of the Old Testament.
Four thousand angels have been watching out for me. Let the pinwheels spin. Wave your crooked
tail. Resurrect. It is good to be a child.
.
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Dappled Things, Fathom Magazine, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two merry cats.