A Friend Indeed - Houston Texas 1987

I hurtled out the door of the residential neighborhood home I was a guest in full of restlessness and grief. My hosts were uncomfortable with my presence but felt duty bound to put me up. Phone conversations with loved ones thousands of miles away at home was insufficient to the task of grounding me and helping me find a way back to them. My calls were scaring them out of their wits. With heavy heart and chaotic thoughts full of distress my eyes roamed the homes and yards I walked past. It was an older part of Houston, close to the downtown core but off the beaten path. In the middle of the day all the residents were either behind their tightly curtained and air conditioned windows or at work, there was little to no traffic.

It had been a waking nightmare since receiving the call that sent me flying across North America from Hope B.C. to Houston Texas. During the flight, I had sat seemingly quiet and in control of myself while a battle raged within questioning the validity of every thing I believed about God and man. I was angry as I had never been and in the process of chewing my god out, found myself engaged in a time warp experience that further tested my sanity. So be it, I was completely off my rocker and never getting on again.

Shock had pushed the parameters of my world and produced an ability in me that wouldn’t have otherwise surfaced. I was like the individual who, in a life and death situation finds they can lift a hereto for impossible weight. A bullet wound through the head and blinded for life were so beyond my comprehension as to splinter my perception of reality with the added recognition of time as an illusion. What else could explain being able to feel myself going through this same horrendous scenario over and over in times and places and ways, but always the same players repeating the same lines. Re-incarnation had been an intellectual concept to toy with, now it also became an emotional reality to deal with.

It was true, true, true. This time though, I had asked my god a vital question from the heart of my rage. The booming awful perfect one word answer came with a vision of all the times and ways that I had refused to forgive. I forgave nobody for nothing and lifetimes of resentment had festered and corrupted. A son, a father and a mother. There were support characters in the drama, family, friends, neighbors, and doctors, strangers all to me the skeleton flown out of the closet. My presence as the birth mother put a lurid quality in the faces of the strangers, showed me their prejudices and assumptions. Madness stacked upon madness, living in all time at the same time, seeing through the masks, feeling the real motives; the rank smell of fear assaulted me non stop. If I don’t forgive we all go round again.

When my insides are in turmoil it is natural to turn outside looking for relief. Ordinarily watching a bird in a tree, or a long walk in the woods could bring solace, but in a setting like Houston there is no such luxury for me. Between the unreal people and the unreal place my feeling of having crash landed from another planet grew to intolerable proportions. As I walked, talked, ate, slept, even as I found macabre reason to laugh, tears streamed constantly down my face. I know I am in shock for all the good the knowing does me.

Good thing there was no traffic, I was a sight. Everything about me reeked of being from somewhere else; if anyone bothered to look closer the tears on my face confirmed the feeling of uneasiness the sight of me invoked in people, even at a distance. After these three days and meeting tens of people I had had real conversation with two people, and those both short and curtailed by circumstances. When I spotted a cat on a lawn across the street I automatically wondered if the cats were as unreal as everything else. As the cat and I made eye contact I heard the cat remarking how unreal it was to hear a human talking to her.

Forgetting myself, I knelt and invited the cat over for a scratch and a chat. To my great delight she accepted and strolled and stretched her way over to me. She was a non descript grey tabby, her coat long and not quite up to the kind of high cat standards my cats kept. As my fingers searched the scruff of her neck behind her ears to scratch that perfect spot, she happily pushed herself into my hand. I told her I was from far away and shared a picture in my mind of my home, children and two cats. She was fascinated to be sharing a telepathic conversation with me, telling me that there was only one human who sort of talked with her at her house. She wondered if everybody could talk cat where I came from. I told her the truth, no.

As I stroked, petted and scratched my way through her coat she started drooling and purring completely indulging in the unusual treat. Though she had plenty to eat as I could see by her substantial size, she told me she was rarely treated with affection and even less respect as her person lived with dog people who let them both feel every day they were useless. If you didn’t feel that way, you were made to feel that way. We, cat and human commiserated with each other about the difficulties of being treated as if our existences didn’t count.

There was comfort in knowing that the cat and I both felt the eyes full of disapproval at the same time. I didn’t have to explain or apologize to Grey cat as I stood up and stretched my back, stepping away from her so that the person who had peeked out from behind their curtains to accuse me of wanting to steal the cat could see that I hadn’t picked her up. Grey cat and I wished each other well as I headed down the road. For those moments the tears had stopped.

You might wonder why I would bother with this part of a much longer story full of people. I write not to convince myself or a reader of the verity of the experience but to express long overdue eternal love and thanks to a friend for the company, counsel and love in my time of great need. A friend indeed, amen.


This picture of Holy Toledo of the Long Tail called out to accompany this story. He will probably upstage me again as a good friend can...and so be it.