Cat Trick

The cat has become a metaphor for everything, mostly our children who were all only marginally under our supervision, our job seeming to be to keep them alive despite their many efforts to tempt fate, be on the brink of something that made us rush to their aid only to have them right themselves with no assistance much like the cat who managed to leap to the top of the very high cabinet and then pace from side to side convincing us that he’d overestimated himself and so we began considering alternative methods of rescue and talking to him in the patient, reassuring, but underlyingly anxious way that we used to talk to our children until he mentally measured the distance and, pleased by his own figuring, made the leap and walked away with his tail in the air.