A Rumi Moment

Oh Rumi. Rumi, Rumi. What are we going to do with you?

Cats are funny (read "you wonder if you'll wake up whole") creatures to live with. Anyone who has lived with a cat will be nodding at that. They twist the truth, they re-write the code, they shed fucking hair everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere. A genetically modified for extra hair -shedding woolly mammoth could not shed as much hair as a domestic cat. Seriously. They've done tests. You want to know why so many shuttle missions failed? Cat hair in the intake valves. Really.


Despite all of this, you worry when the giant trolling food hoover doesn't show up for one of the meals that as the designated human I am obligated to provide. When he missed breakfast as well, I initiated DEFCON3. This is as high as you can go without seeing blood. Actually DEFCON3 really just involved checking under the house again and calling my mother so I had someone to talk aloud to as I reasoned through the last time I saw him and could that large dog roaming the street last night have gotten past the hair defences and 50 million razor sharp claws and actually have possibly hurt my missing puddy wuddykins?

A million million (is that a pentillion? No, it's a billion. What was a pentillion then? A billion billion? Huh. Have to ask the maths ref again.... anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, OK maybe 3) scenarios played through my sluggish and understaffed mind. I made a coffee and sat pondering life's imponderables on the couch (ie no thoughts at all, just waited for the coffee to kick the motor over). Riley watched. I could see he was weighing up the variables and figuring out if he was going to get a walk or not. He decided the odds weren't good and went back to bed, leaving me with a creeping sense of guilt that I had been judged a bad human and Rumi had simply decamped to better feeding and shedding grounds. I wrestled somewhat with my conscience. Tried again to figure out when I'd last seen him. Couldn't. Was it breakfast yesterday? Had he come in at all in the afternoon? What matter did this make? If a cat doesn't want to be found, you won't find it. I let the matter drop. There were things to be getting on with, after all, I was up at the crack of 10am and a day doesn't just get underway by itself.

Laundry is one of those household chores I like in that a machine actually does the hard work once you put the stuff in and press Go. There was enough for a whole load just from all the towels. Made toast, squinted, hung out wet things, stumbled to bathroom to open cupboard for actual clothes for washing and scared myself shitless when I reached in and it was warm. So help me for a split second I thought the Alien mother had laid eggs in there and I was about to have something horrendous force itself down my gullet and gestate in my abdomen until killing me for food. But no, I had woken Rumi. Not quite so different normally from Rumi really.

Which was how I knew things were pretty serious and he had been in that completely dark cupboard for a loooooong time. He stretched, gave a yawn, and strolled off with eyes almost completely devoid of irises. He ignored me. He made no snide comments. He made no showy exit. He walked around the house, he walked outside around the yard and came back, and asked for some breakfast. I felt very contrite, I served the special Chicken/Tuna combo he doesn't get very often. He ate a little to show there were no hard feelings, drank some water and sat on the back step. Not cleaning himself, not anything.

Eerie.

A tumbleweed rolled through the tableau.
Riley, quite pointedly, was no where to be seen.

Rumi came back inside and ate a little more of breakfast. He sat and turned to me.
"Here it comes" I thought "the reaming to end it all."
He looked me in the eye for a moment and said, "Don't let that happen again." and left to lay under the house until dinner.

"I won't. I promise." I said to his retreating tail and went to unblock the washing machine of cat hair.