January 8, 2020 - 117 - "Good Cats Make Good Neighbors"

   A funny thing happened the other night.  We were on the rooftop admiring the day's progress.  (Our constant preoccupation these days.)  I also was admiring how well the pots of lavender are doing on the wall by the street.  

     I saw something move on the street and looked down to see a gray cat on the sidewalk.  It seemed frightened.  He (just guessing) was darting from the sidewalk to under cars and back out again looking up at the walls of the houses.  

     I made a kissing noise.  The cat looked up and started crying.  I made sympathetic sounds and the cat got louder.  

     On impulse I went downstairs and looked out the door.  The cat was nowhere to be seen, but I figured the noise of opening the door had frightened him.  "Hey kitty, kitty...uh...gato?  gato?" 

     The cat immediately came out from under a car.  "Are you okay?" I asked.  The cat cried and tentatively crept forward.  I opened the door and the cat darted in.  I leaned down to pet him.  He was wearing a collar and had a beautiful shiny coat.  Clearly someone owned him.  I was scratching his ears and trying to check the collar for an address.  He had no time for socializing and streaked past me up the stairs.  

     I thought he'd get scared and run back into one of the rooms at the back of the second floor, but he turned purposefully, ran across the little balcony over the dining room, and out to the patio.  Without pausing, he shot across the patio to the stairs and expertly maneuvered them to the rooftop.  

     It seemed this cat had been here before, and knew exactly where he was headed.  

     Michael came up and said:  "Oh, that's Brian's cat."  (Not owners real name...it's a pretty distinctive name and I don't know him well enough to be writing about him.)

     On our last visit we got out a ladder and climbed up to check out the highest point of the casa - the rooftop bedroom's roof.  (Turns out It has incredible views.)  While up there we met our neighbor, Brian.  

Not the actual cat...but similar

     Rooftop-neighbors are a fun feature of life in San Miguel.  At our old house we knew several of the people around us and would exchange local news and neighborhood gossip over the roof walls...sometimes even hollering to neighbors across the street or up the hill.  

     Brian is a character.  One of those people who've done everything and been everywhere.  He's an artist, musician, film maker...I'm sure I'm leaving out other things.  He'd lived in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and toured most of the rest of the world.  While talking a cat wandered onto his roof and he told us it's name.  He said he had another gray cat, but we didn't see it then.

     Now it was on our roof eyeing the high wall between us and Brian's house.  The cat let me pet him for a bit but was clearly anxious to get home.  There was a chair beneath a small awning.  (That covered the dryer...before it got moved back inside to the laundry room to be in the same neighborhood as the washer.  lol) 

     The cat was getting more and more agitated.  I finally picked it up, climbed up on the chair, and lifted the cat to that awning.  He paced back and forth, scoping out ways to get up higher.  I shooed him back to an area where he could climb to a mid-level roof, from there he was able to jump up on the wall to Brian's roof.  

     Ah...home sweet home.  It's amazing how a cat will tell you what it needs you to do for it.  

     It was nice to have a cat around, even if he was just a brief visitor.  I had to look at videos of Ella purring for a while to make me miss her a little less.  

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"A cat knows how to be comfortable, how to get the people around it to serve it.  In a tranquil domestic situation the cat is a veritable manipulative genius."

-Roger A. Caras

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"Cats invented self-esteem." 

-Erma Bombeck

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Another neighborhood creature entrusted
with keeping the human population
under
control.