The cat lady is a global phenomenon. In every nation, in every era, there she’ll be, communing with her feline companions in tongues long lost to man.
I encountered my first cat lady when my family moved to our house on 2nd Street. Kitty corner from the concrete patch we call our backyard lives Joan, whose own yard resembles the love child of a theme park and a superfund, and whose doors remain perpetually open to a mangy gang of twenty-odd feral felines from the alleys and abandoned brownstones of Park Slope.
Getting up for a 3am glass of water, or coming home from a 3am party, I’d often hear Joan shrieking from her window: “Honey Bear! Get down from there!”
“Mister Mittens, no! How many times do I have to tell you?”
Joan was my introduction to the cat lady archetype, but I first recognized the universality of the paradigm in Singapore, when my friend Joel pointed out the cat queen of his HDB flat, a gnarly old crone who used to chase him, flailing her arms and spouting nonsense.
Fortunately, Noa, our houseboat captain here on the ArkNoa, seems neither loud nor violent, but rather the spiritual, artistic sort of cat lady. When we finally got to her boat (the directions she scribbled required us to cross a “Moon Bridge” that didn’t actually exist), she introduced us to her elephant art and her cat: “This is Johann.”
“I thought your website said you had two cats?” asked Luke. Luke has great affinity for felines, and may well end up a cat man himself, if such a thing is possible.
“There are!” Noa cried. “But Fons went away a year and seven months ago. I contacted a voyaunt who told me Fons had a heart attack the day he left.”
“Oh dear. I’m so sorry!”
That night, I sat on the windowsill, dangling my legs over the canal and watching the water catch the lights from the nearby Han Lammersbrug, which translates not to Moon Bridge, but Han Lammers Bridge.
I turned to Luke: “Do you think her real name is Noa?”
“I doubt it.”
“My guess is she awoke to her spirit name as the owner of a boat with two of one kind of animal.”
Last night I dreamed of cats.
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