This is about the Cat Circle. It kinda looks like this, except ours is brown and beige, really, really old, and kinda well-loved.
How old is the Cat Circle? Well. . .we bought it for Max! who was always cold. Not a Maine weather kind of a cat, Max! More like a Daytona Beach guy. This is Max!:
He lived with us between June 1992 and May 2006. Yeah, we expect to keep our cats around for a while, here at the Cat Farm.
So, anyhow the Cat Circle got pretty heavy use at first, then not so much. Kodi adopted it for awhile (I don’t have a picture of Kodi on the computer, and if I start going through photographs, we’ll be here into next week and none of us will have gotten anything done. Kodi was a polydactyl brown cat. She was a cat genius who went blind around the time she had completed half of her twelve years, and she totally Administered this place like it has never been Administered, before or since. She adopted Max!, who was none too bright, and kind of kept him both out of trouble and in the loop. After she lost her sight, he became her guide-cat and more-or-less constant companion.)
Patia disdained the Cat Circle. Nicky liked it, off and on, but really preferred my lap.
Within the last couple months, Mozart has started using the Cat Circle, which had become a kind of auxiliary cat toy box. He’ll snug down amid the ping-pong balls and the catnip-stuffed mice and fishies and do some heavy-duty dreaming.
And now, Socks has adopted the Cat Circle. Possibly, he’s done so because it’s one of The Big Guy’s spots. It’s important to study The Big Guy, after all.
…which brings us — or at least, me — roundabout to Archie’s Book.
This is Archie:
Archie was my very first cat. He was orange and white, and very wise. He taught me everything I know about cats. And, as house legend has it, he kept a diary, a Book, for the cats who would come after.
While all of our cats have been their own unique person, they will sometimes behave in ways that are clearly Archie-like.
Such as begging for salted peanuts (and then licking the salt off, and batting the remaining nude nut around the house).
Or getting on top of the countertop (then crying because the countertop is off-limits to cats).
When one of the cats acts in such a way, we say that they’ve been reading Archie’s Book.
But now, the Cat Circle has got me wondering. Wondering if it’s not so much a Book that’s passed down the line of cat lives, but a Dream Repository — heck, several Dream Repositories — throughout the house, which are accessed from time to time, and added to, with the filed dreams becoming deeper and richer as each successive dreamer adds to the repository.
I kind of like that conceit, myself. And now I’m wondering if there isn’t some way to. . .download the Dream Repositories — to back them up. Or if doing so would alter the dreams on file. . .