This Month's Story
One moment in Annihilations Waste,
One moment, the Well of Life to taste ...
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing ... Oh. make haste!
From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The Edward FitzGerald translation
It’s getting late. I press a key and save the day’s computer work and then check my e-mail to see if I have any messages. There are none. I’m done for the day.
It’s late. At my feet beside me, extending diagonally out across the floor lays Lucci.
Now that I’m done for the evening, I will have to wake him to leave my office. He lies still, stretched away from me, not really asleep, wailing in a semi-doze for me to get up from my work desk and go to bed.
I look at him and realize I don’t want to move him. While he lies there and I don’t move, our time is frozen. In the brief time of our lives together, I have learned to love him, and, much to my amazement, I have found that he feels the same about me.
His presence with me in this room is for that very reason. He and I are alone in a speck of a long series of temporal specks that extend back through our personal part of eternity.
I have no understanding of the whys or reasons for this but it is so.
Earlier in the evening, when I sat down to check some work that I had been doing on the computer, Lucci had jumped up on the desk and meandered through the multitude of wires behind my two computer screens.
He moved carefully among the jungle of wires, not touching a one; then, laid down on one of the two broad Corian window sills to stare out the window on one end of my desk. He laid there a long time, watching the oncoming night.
He does this often in the late evening. He will stay there even when it becomes completely dark. He sees things in that dark and watches them closely. I don’t have this ability, and to me the window is a just a big patch of black, but I know he is seeing things. He often leans forward to watch something either on the nearby stone wall that separates my land from the farmer’s field beyond or stares past the wall into the field itself.
Earlier, a train had whistled on the train track a half mile further up our country road, so I know there are things out there. “Whistle” is not really the word for the noise a train makes. Certainly moan, or whatever the sound is, it is not a disturbing noise, and if I had not been watching Lucci, I would not have even realized that the engine and the long drawn out murmur of rolling stock behind it had passed.
The track runs north-south beside the long mountain ridge to my east. The tram’s whistle uses the ridge as its own private echo box, and its mournful wail is thus spread out across the comparatively flat land to our west.
Our house lies directly in the path of a good part of that echo box. That whistle in the long summer’s evening as we sit on the porch it is a delightful sound to hear, a wonderful part of the evening’s existence.
Stella and I have lived on this farm now for nine years, far from our former home where our closeness to the water was the continuous reminder of things at night; things that were there beyond the blackness of my nighttime office desk window.
That home lay by the water’s edge, and at night I could hear things that told me what was taking place between our house and the water, as well as in the water itself.
Many things happened, and I could, as a trained waterman, tell what each of them was. Not seeing them, knowing they were there only by their noises was all I needed.
That home by the water is now long gone and I have found myself not knowing but at least becoming accustomed to the blackness of night that makes up my more recent office window.
I can hear at times, such as tonight, the occasional sound of a freight train moving its long way against the side of the tall ridge that makes the first of the wrinkled hills we call the Laurel Highlands.
The train noise is nothing to Lucci; he lies there still, not moving, waiting. I am the deciding component here. If I decide to go, he will go.
But now it is late and Lucci lies still, patently waiting for me to get up and put an end to this single day’s passage of his and my time.
Lucci has been with me now a year and a half. That is not long in terms of togetherness. Holly, our other tomcat now long gone, was with me fourteen years and I felt that was forever.
Six months after Holly died, a friend brought me a feral black tom that had hung around the woodshed by his bakery. This cat, as sworn to by my friend, was by all appearances a clone of Holly. He fed the cat, but it had never been in the bakery no less his house. He told me that the cat had lived in the woodpile for about one winter and was just over a year old.
Despite my protestations that I didn’t want another cat, he drove a goodly distance to our farm (he lives in Vandergrift) and brought the cat into our house in a canvas animal carrier. I sat on my couch watching him place the carrier on the floor and slide the carrier top open. A second passed and then Lucci lifted his head out through the opening, looked around and jumping out, leaped up on my lap and in seconds was fast asleep.
That as I said was about a year and a half ago. Now, as I stare down at him, it seems as if he has been with me for years.
I turn and stare at the two screens in front of me.
They hold nothing of interest. My days work has long been done. If I get up now, Lucci will wake instantly from his non-nap and we will go back to our bedroom where Stella has already closed her day.
I don’t want to go.
I want this day to go on for ten thousand years with its black windows and mournful sound of trains; but leaning forward, I press the sleep buttons on the two screens. The screens go black and the computer makes the inhuman noises it always makes at these times.
Lucci stands up and walks to the office door.
He knows where we are going
