A Cat on the Bookcase Instead of Other Things

I share with you a picture of my cat eating his dinner on the bookcase. His bowl is placed there to keep it away from Swirl who has been known to take advantage of an accidentally left open office door to barrel in for a cat food appetizer.

The cat bowl is next to my father’s ancient Underwood typewriter, the one he used to type up my mother’s obituary while I sat next to him. He no longer typed like a bat out of hell, but he was pretty fast. When he died, I brought the typewriter back to Wisconsin from Michigan and now, of course, wonder what will become of it when I’m not here to claim it for my bookcase. It’s an awfully heavy keepsake.

My two university coffee mugs and a couple of awards are also on the bookcase. The cat picks his way around these things, careful not to disturb anything, but, still, it feels risky to have him leaping and stepping and eating where I have these little artifacts. They are important to me, but they’re going to end up at Goodwill someday, or the trash. Which is appropriate, although the cups are worth saving.

All of this is inconsequential. I am aware. But I write about my bookcase so as to not write about other things like the tenth anniversary of Dontre Hamilton’s death at the hands of a Milwaukee police officer or the fact that the dismembered body of a woman murdered in our city has not all been found, and her family and friends have been forced to wade through the shoreline and search rivers for her because, for some incomprehensible reason, law enforcement seems to have lost interest. There’s no doing justice to either of those things so I focus on my cat and my bookcase.

That makes sense to me.