Memphis Earlene doesn’t ‘get’ cats, thinks they’re a trivial pursuit.

Grand passions, the seductive call of self-destruction and substance abuse,  feeling like a motherless child? That’s  Blues territory.

Cats don’t get the blues.  They give them.

They tear up your rugs, sit on your lap when you’re trying to read and turn your furniture into  scratching posts.  They shed. They eat your plants and puke and shed some more.  They train you to feed them at 5 AM because you are an absolute sucker.

And then they die.

It’s been a week, long enough to sit shiva if I was an observant Jew and Charlotte had been a Jewish cat.  Cat’s don’t ‘get’ monotheism.  Worship of one Supreme Being who isn’t you? That’s for dogs.

Cats worship themselves, and expect you to as well.  Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of Charlotte sitting upright on a file cabinet, her tail wrapped around her paws, in direct communion with all her past and future lives.    

Charlotte’s eyes were green.  She was 99% gray with a touch of white at her neck and on her front paws.  Otherwise, this is what she looked like.