Short Story: Learning To Purr

It's been a long time since we've seen one of these, hasn't it? I wrote it on the plane between Detroit and Oakland. I hope this means I'll start getting into writing more short stories again but only time will tell.

1336 words

Learning to Purr

It was on an ordinary summer afternoon, hot enough to melt us into the big living room chair before we realized it, when I clearly heard the cat talk. She was lying in my lap and I was absentmindedly brushing her ash grey hairs into clumps that would ball up at her tail then launch lazily into the stale air and float to the ground, shining a brilliant gold for a brief moment as they fell through the window light. We had existed, nothing more than existed, this way for who knows how long – an unwatched half hour in summer’s heat can be in reality either a couple minutes or an entire afternoon – and the cat purred sleepily into my side until suddenly but expectedly she looked up to me with sad and curious eyes and spoke: “How come you never purr when you stroke me?”

Her mouth didn’t move, yet her speaking was the most natural occurrence in the world. She used a voice so familiar that it would be impossible to describe, so commonplace that it defies characteristics, like that of a friend you’ve spent your life with. It was the universal voice, I have come to realize after years of pondering our conversation, of summer. I moved my eyes from a puff of floating grey hair to my cat without turning my head and saw her relaxed, troubled disposition, her question fading in the air like a question asked from one sleepy lover to another at the crack of dawn.

“It’s not how I express enjoyment,” I murmured.

“Ah, but you do enjoy it, don’t you?” she cooed, her mouth still not moving, the upside-down V still frowning under her nose. “When you stroke me, I mean. You know I find it incredible.”

I nodded with slow movements.

“Sometimes I can’t tell,” the cat went on. Her head flopped back onto my thigh. “You never purr. Sometimes I feel like you’re only doing it to humor me.”

I said, “No.”

“Because I do want you to be happy,” she said with sudden intensity, lifting her head and pointing her ears up with ferocity. “I wish I could make you purr, oh, I wish it! What can I do?”

“There’s nothing,” I replied. “I don’t purr. It’s not my thing.”

“So how can I know if you’re enjoying yourself?” Her ears drooped ever so slightly, yet giving the unmistakable air of immense disappointment.

“I do enjoy it,” I said. “Believe me. I wouldn’t pet you at all if I didn’t like to. And besides,” I added as I straightened out my back a bit, “you know by now that we’re very different creatures. I express enjoyment differently. Cats purr. I smile or laugh or sigh, or sometimes I just say it.”

The cat thought this over for a moment, watching a tuft of hair turn gold in the window light. “You do smile as you stroke me,” she said to herself. She snapped her head back up at me. “But every night before you go to bed, your wife tells you she loves you and you repeat it back to her. Word for word, ‘I love you.’ Like a parrot.”

I smiled at her, partly on purpose. “So when you purr it means you love me?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed with exasperation. “Do you know how awful it feels to hear nothing back when I say something like that?”

“Well, I do love you.”

She shook her head. “Words are so emotionless,” she lamented, staring out the window. Outside on a tri-legged black wire stand stood the orchid I’d bought my wife for our anniversary, two long green stalks curling at the top into yellow petals on either side of a bulb that looked like dragon lips. Sunlight filtered through the trees and passed through the orchid’s petals so we could clearly see the deep red veins inside. Beyond the orchid was the eternal front porch, beyond it the patchy, weed-covered lawn littered in patches by the neighbors’ kids’ candy wrappers and their dog’s shit; beyond that the sidewalk, heat oozing out of it, making the concrete shudder before my eyes; beyond that the car – the black one my wife refused to drive in the hot summer; beyond that the street, beyond that the neighborhood; beyond that the city; and beyond that the future. “You can’t even describe sun coming through a flower petal with words,” said the cat. “Try it. There’s no emotion when you put words to it. Words muddle up what’s in front of us. People can talk about two completely different things without realizing it. But with a purr there’s no question. When a cat purrs you know for certain she’s unequivocally happier than anything.”

“It’s not that I prefer words,” I interrupted, still looking out at the orchid. “I can’t purr. It’s not the way my body works.”

“Oh, it’s not hard,” said the cat carelessly. “Physically, that is. You just make a little tremor in your voice box by bouncing air around it as you breathe in and out.”

“Bouncing air around it?”

“Like a rubber ball.”

“That doesn’t sound easy.”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s because I used words. The purr has to come from your belly for it to mean anything at all. If you really feel it then it’s easier than walking.”

I gave it a try, but the noise sounded more like a growl than a purr. I could tell the cat was trying not to look hurt.

“It’s because you don’t feel it,” she said. “You don’t like stroking me and you don’t love me.”

The cat never spoke again. Two months later she died. A drunken teenager whipped down the street with his parents’ SUV in the middle of the night and flattened her. There was barely anything left; I couldn’t look so I can’t say what she looked like. My wife tells me the head was completely separated from the body. She knew about the conversation I’d had with the cat, and of course she didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it myself once the heat of summer started to die down and on came the first rains and cool structure of a fully acclimated new teaching schedule – especially because the cat acted as if nothing had changed between us. She still fell into my lap when I sat on the big living room chair, she still purred, she still nested her wet nose into my side, her grey hair still clumped up and turned golden in the window light.

Yet after she died, I felt more and more certain that our conversation really did take place. I had indeed tried and failed to purr for my cat and she couldn’t hide her heartbreak at my failure. As time passed following her death I began to believe what she said was true: I didn’t love her. I hadn’t looked at the carcass and I hadn’t cried. I also didn’t feel loss but instead overwhelming gain and responsibility. I plunged into the world of my students and class work without having a chance to retreat into personal sanity. In losing our aimless half-hours together I gained tension and focus. In losing her warmth on my lap I gained a new cold determination that neither satisfied nor disappointed. I was snapped back into the rigors of daily life with nowhere to retreat, like a lover fully awake and prepared, yet ferociously longing for the warm blankets as if clinging to a precious fading memory. The cat faded into my memory: her voice so natural sounding on the day of our conversation now utterly impossible to recall, her grey hair only ashen as a word, her purr only a tremor. The memory had nearly gone before I realized its importance, only after I had begun to notice how passionlessly I was saying “I love you” to my wife each night and how there was no unequivocal tremor rumbling inside me to better communicate that precious message. 

Performing Music Again?

The minute I walked through the door Nana was reminding me to play the piano for the other seniors at dinner, and along with it reminding me how much I didn't want to. She had that wide smile and mischievous glint as she asked, too, as if she knew and enjoyed how divided the prospect made me feel. For I didn't know why I was so afraid to play. In Portland I'd put out a bike helmet on Hawthorne Street and sang with my guitar - made 37 cents too - but I'd been scared then too. I couldn't even look up as I sang, so I bet no one heard me. It was guitar, though, not piano which is an instrument I'm far better at. I was terrified of performing on an instrument I'm supposed to be good at.

It came up a couple more times before dinner too, inevitably at the moment I started hoping she had forgotten - after looking at student letters from the school she had volunteered at, after going through pictures on my laptop, and again after a wind strong enough to throw cars blew up out of nowhere, followed minutes later by a fierce rain, followed by an eerie, uneasy sunshine. We even played a game of checkers for the right to abstain from the piano. I lost - Nana cheated, and announced it with a laugh. She got me to play a couple blues tunes while Liz, Papa's main caretaker, was still here. They said I was good, and it gave me more stage fright than the actual playing, and Nana insisted that I should play on the dining hall piano. It felt the same as when I played on the piano in Bahcesehir Koleji and suddenly became aware of small lungs breathing and turned to see a pair of my Turkish students glowing behind me - that unmistakable feel that I was somewhere I didn't belong doing something I shouldn't have been doing.

Well, I did end up playing, delaying and fumbling all the way. I played Blue Monk and later a sort of medley - All Blues until Nana hovered over me and whispered "Summertime" in my ear until I segued into minor. And all the while, conscious of the performance-style nature of what I was doing, I heard myself from years past pushing the keys and watched my old music training struggling to flow through my fingers. It was a trial. I didn't like feeling that way, the way I'd felt before. I didn't like feeling like a musician. But that's not entirely true - I like performing on guitar and self-taught voice much better. It had to be the thought, I realized, of playing this instrument I'm supposed to be an expert in after studying music all my life, being praised for it (as I was), and knowing I now was no good compared to this past that I have tried to reject.

Credit Rating

So here I am, in the Detroit area visiting with family, and I see this article in the New York Times about Standard and Poor's downgrading of the US credit rating. Its emphasis is on how lawmakers are questioning S&P and other credit rating agencies' legitimacy as financial evaluators. (Funny, no one seemed to care about S&P's legitimacy while we had a perfect credit rating)

This kind of thing really irks me. It's so typical of a politician to royally screw up, but after being called out on it by someone or an organization, the reaction is to ridicule that person or organization and create false doubt in their competence. Totally hackneyed and bogus blame shifting tactic.

Is it because Congress is pulling dumb stunts like this that they can't get anything real accomplished?

Susan B [Who?]

Today Mom and I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum here in San Francisco to see the exhibit on Gertrude Stein, moments following a phone call from the Obama campaign that really offended her. It's kind of galling to think he'd be soliciting money right after the brutal debt deal he's putting America through, especially since Democrats here in Berkeley are probably the most alienated of his liberal base right now. You all probably know that I'm still a supporter and I've always thought people unfairly labeled him farther left than he really is, but after this debt deal that seemed to make no one happy would make him want to hold off asking for donations for a time. It's just not smart.

So we went to the museum and had a really wonderful time. The exhibit was well designed and pleasurably interactive, a couple of iPads scattered around the rooms with sound catalogs of audio recordings, cartoons, newspaper clippings, quotes, and so on to browse. It was easy to take at whatever pace felt most comfortable for me, even with my mother going at a different pace.

But I was most moved by the original posters for Stein's second opera, "Mother Of Us All," about Susan B Anthony and celebrating her accomplishments. For some reason I was particularly touched by that, as if women had only gained the right to vote last week and I was living in monumental history, finally having achieved something embarrassingly basic but fought so long and hard for. The right to vote, something so small that too many of us throw away with negligence or disdain, felt worth struggling and protesting for even now that we take it for granted. Such an inalienable right has rarely felt so present for me - I'm not a woman so I've never been confronted with equal protection discrepancies; I could have gotten married to a stranger in Nevada when I was 16, and because I'm not gay I don't know how it feels to be barred from marriage in most of the United States, disgustingly including California; I have white skin so I've never felt the butt of racial slurs, segregation, or cultural alienation. And yet I walk through each day without even paying any attention to my great fortune, nor to the many who aren't as fortunate. And in comes Susan B Anthony to uncompromisingly remind us and to win those forgettable but essential rights for those without.

Who is our Susan B Anthony of today? Who's out there fighting for what's undeniably right and deserved for the unfairly persecuted and the unrecognized minorities in the world? Looking at the posters for "Mother Of Us All" I thought about Mom's anger at the Obama caller earlier in the day and the deep frustration inside her, feeling that the man she voted for won't fight for her rights or well-being. I voted for Obama because I thought he would be willing to compromise, and I turned out to be too right. Mostly it's great to compromise, but there are some rights (equal marriage, for example) that can't be won through compromise. The most-remembered leaders throughout history aren't remembered for how they sacrificed their convictions to the pressures around them. No one would know the name Susan B Anthony today if she'd struck a bargain at the polling office, and women would've had to wait for even more painstaking years for the rights they're due.

Before and After the Wedding

Greg Mulford

 My family and I have just returned home from my cousin Andrew's wedding - and what a wedding it was! It was on a public beach, complete with the sandy children with their boogie boards and a sunglasses-wearing man probing the sand with a metal detector in the background. The groom put on his ring while wearing sunglasses and sneakers, and the bridesmaids and groomsmen didn't wear shoes at all. And within this layer of fun and childlike joy there was also a serious sweetness, quite a few tears, quite a few more cheers, and a wealth of good wishes and good feelings going forward. Congratulations Andrew and Lindsey!

My brother Joel and his sunburn

Bert, Joel, and my father

Nana and Great Aunt Bea under the blanket... it was a cold evening!

 I didn't take many pictures of the event because there were professionals running rampant all over the place so there wasn't much of a need. All the pictures you see here were taken at the dinner on the night before the wedding.

Now I'm preparing to take a trip into Detroit to visit the rest of my family, leaving no stone unturned! Next time I write it will probably be from the motor city.

Dad posing for his book cover

Nana and myself, or as I like to say, "Homie G(rannie) and the pimpin' pop top"

And finally - how could I have forgotten this? - I failed to mention in my Portland posts about my trip to the TV on the Radio concert. I wasn't expecting much because when I saw them in Oakland after the release of "Dear Science" the show wasn't that great. But they nailed it on this tour. I was most impressed that they played a lot of their old music, waiting until the third song to play something from their newest project, "Nine Types Of Light" (the second song, a southern-rocking-feel version of "Wrong Way," left many in the crowd in the outdoor venue standing around wondering if it was a cover, but I was geeking out over how utterly amazing it was). They ended up only play about half of the new record, which was great because it left room for "Young Liars" (another geek-out moment) and the encore set finisher, "Satellite" (my heart geeking all over the grass). It was ridiculously fun. This is a tour worth seeing.