I came up against my major weakness last month. It's the weakness of avoiding any sort of confrontation. There were three aspects of it: one was with family, one was with the rental manager, and one was with the so-called owner of the cat.

Let me tell you the story.

My daughter's family and I have been living together in an apartment - euphemistically called a "town home" - since last March. Facing our courtyard are ten units, five upstairs and five down. We're up. There is a porch that wraps around all the front entries. There's a tree - a locust - in the courtyard, and we park right in front along the driveway that serves us and other similar units.

As summer came along and tenants left regularly, there seemed to be, fairly regularly, cats left behind. And inevitably, they would come yowling around our porch. Sometimes I felt they felt my empathy. Directly below us lived Kathleen and her family. I think it was probably she who would call the manager to have the city's animal control officer come and get some poor, leftover cat, and the yowler would be gone.

Sometime in July, I think, I began to notice a very skinny and small grey tiger cat that seemed to hang around, yet always ran away when I got too close. After several sightings, I called the manager who thought it was a stray because it had been seen in an empty house unit (this place has houses, too). Then, in August, I started seeing a charcoal grey kitten. It, too, would hide. It was Kathleen who finally clued me in.

The grey tiger belonged to the people who lived next door to her, the ones whose kitchen window I could look into when I climbed the stairs. The charcoal kitty was the last of her litter, which she, of course, had when she was barely out of kittenhood herself. No wonder she was so skinny! Kathleen said the other kittens had been taken by others.

Within a couple of weeks, Charcoal would climb up into my lap when I was sitting and talking with Kathleen as she sat outside her door, smoking a cigarette. Charcoal didn't seem to want to go into her owner's apartment, although one day when I went by, she was perched inside the open kitchen window, meowing to come out. There was no one home. When their two little girls came out to play, Charcoal would disappear under the porch - every time.

One morning when I returned from a walk, I heard her meowing and finally located her up in the tree, which had about eight feet of branchless trunk. I tried to talk her down to the lowest branch, and finally Kathleen's visiting son climbed up enough to get her.

It got so that there were three or four of us putting out food for Charcoal and Grey Tiger, but mostly for Charcoal. Kathleen had a box with a blanket underneath her little bench where Charcoal frequently slept. Unfortunately, Kathleen was allergic to cats, otherwise she would have gladly taken the kitten in. Would that I had been so brave.

I was caught in a bind. I had given away my cats when I moved from Vermont. We lived in a place that required $200-300 pet deposit and additional rent that I couldn't afford. And the two little girls considered the kitten theirs, even though they couldn't get it to come to them. My three-year-old granddaughter could pat it easily. (Goes back to trust, which "Transmutations" discussed several months ago.)

Then Kathleen moved away. I arranged a box with blanket outside my door, and Charcoal moved upstairs, so to speak. By November she generally slept there, and I fed her daily. Occasionally when I came home late, she would be sitting by her owner's door, but she did not meow to get attention. And they were never out there looking to let her in. Although Grey Tiger mother would sometimes sit outside my open window and meow if she were hungry and being ignored by her owners.

Charcoal climbed the tree when other cats came around. Of course, the largesse of food being around outside was telegraphed to all the neighboring cats, and there was a huge yellow cat with the most god-awful meow that scared her regularly.

One afternoon I looked out the kitchen window and saw her sitting at my eye level near the top of the tree. She caught my movement at the window and looked my way. I told her that there was no way I could get her down, and she would have to come down herself. When I looked out twenty minutes later, she was still up high. Then I started praying for Spirit to give her courage and help her down. Ten minutes later she was halfway down, and another ten minutes she was sitting on the lowest branch. I went down and was able to help her back down the trunk until she turned and jumped off. From then on, she managed to get down the tree by herself.

Occasionally, after everyone else was asleep, I'd bring her into my room for a little while. Her fur was dense, soft, and could be cool on the outer tips and snugly warm down in. When I'd walk down the stairs, she'd follow me and stand beside the stairs with her nose through the spindles waiting to be petted. She'd follow me to the car and would have jumped in with no qualms. That was the trouble; she didn't have a good fear of vehicles.

In December, I was slowly getting to the point of asking the management if they'd waive the extra charges. I was hearing a story or two about some leniency with adopting stray cats, and then if it was positive, I'd ask my daughter if it would be okay to take Charcoal in. I still could not make myself confront its "owners."

About ten days before Christmas, I headed out for a quick walk before going to rehearsal. My daughter had arrived home shortly before with their pick-up truck. As I headed down the walk, Charcoal followed me but then dived between the parked cars. She didn't follow me any further. When I got back, my daughter was pacing the sidewalk, and Charcoal lay beside her truck, badly hurt. She had climbed up into the engine, and Kate had come out to run an errand. And that was that. She lived another day and a half in the animal hospital but never recovered function after the trauma to her brain.

For fifteen years, I've had anywhere from one to eight cats at a time. Except for four, each has met its own end somewhere out there - in the woods or on the road - and I've detached fairly easily. Although the loss of Cleo who lived with me for seven years was not so easy and several years later, losing two to feline leukemia was even sadder. And I ended up with eight cats because an adopted stray had two litters before I got her spayed, and I could only bear to give one away. My cats were out-of-doors cats, and I experienced, more than I wanted to, their not returning at some point in their lives.

But Charcoal - Little Cat Spirit - her death resolved my problems and clearly showed me how gutless I can be. Letting the issue ride was not the answer.

The following Sunday, I was in a labyrinth workshop and met a woman who does Reiki for humans and animals. I didn't know this until the next day when I read her business card. I shared the overwhelming sadness that I was (and still am) feeling, during the workshop. As we were getting our cars ready to leave and shared a hug, she told me that the little cat had its reason for leaving and everything was all right.

I can believe that, in a way, but it doesn't make me fully accepting of the loss.

Little Cat Spirit lingers and reminds me that no decision and no action is a decision and an action, and the outcome may not be what I truly desire.

(Copyright by Cherie Staples - No reproduction without express permission from the author)

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