The Pleasure of Life

Our cat, Abbott, is 17, which in cat-years is something like 900 years old. I have learned a lot from Abbott, such as how to avoid stress over a list of things to do. Abbott never seems stressed out, despite all the things he has to do, such as sleep. And sleep. And sleep some more.

But it's not as simple as it sounds. Abbott spends the first half of the morning sleeping on a chair in our computer room. Then, around 10:30 a.m., he wakes up, yawns, jumps down, stretches, then jumps up on the couch across from the chair and goes back to sleep. Later in the day I'll find him sleeping on a chair in the family room.

Abbott clearly has a checklist - a specific set of places he needs to sleep that day. And when the time comes, he moves on to the next place to sleep. But he realizes that he can't sleep in two places at once, and he doesn't try.

By the way, if you are wondering if there is a Costello to go with Abbott, there is… but he's up in Cat Heaven which, based on these two brothers' behavior, is an infinite number of chairs, couches, blankets, sunny spots and paper grocery bags to sleep on.

I've learned from Abbott (and Costello) as long as I've known him - but he could have been less smug about it all these years. Now he's going deaf, which, given his lifetime "cooler than thou" attitude, presents me with a perverse opportunity for revenge. Nowadays, I'll come around a corner in the house, and there will be Abbott, looking the other way down the hall, ears up, sure he heard something. So I'll walk real quietly (or loudly - he can't hear me) up to him, to within about an inch… then, when he happens to turn his head my way, he jumps nearly out of his skin in surprise.

Or I'll pet him in the family room, and then, if he begins ambling toward the kitchen - he's getting some hip problems so he's starting to amble side-to-side like John Wayne - I'll run around through the dining room and come into the kitchen from the other direction and get set up with the paper or whatever so it looks like I've been there a while. Then, when he finally makes it into the kitchen, he looks at me like… "Hey! Weren't you just… you were just… Are you some kind of SUPER CAT??"

My petty need for vengeance aside, it is interesting to me that, although Abbott is stone-cold deaf, we speak to him anyway. We coo, we praise, we converse, we meow, we ask questions. It's as if we need to express our feelings for him out loud, even when we know he can't hear us. We must say we love him, not for his sake but for ours. And it's all of us - kids and adults.

This apparent human need to express ourselves isn't limited to talking to deaf cats. We talk to infants who we know can't understand us. We talk to a loved one suffering from dementia who we know doesn't recognize us. We talk to a teenager who seems deaf to our words.

And we talk to God, despite the fact that only a small percentage of us hear him talk back (and some of those who do give the rest a bad name…). I do believe that there is God, and God hears us pour out our hearts to Him. But something tells me that we would pray even if we weren't sure there was Someone listening.

It is not only for our audience that we give words to our love, our fears, our dreams and our anguish. It also is for us - maybe even mainly for us.