Long before Teddy Roosevelt, nineteenth-century men were concerned about the effeminizing effects of the urban environment. Some of these intrepid worriers were moved to act. They slipped free from censorious congregationalist ministers, battalions of teetotaling aunts, and torpid afternoons in the drawing room. These real men seized the spirit of real manhood and struck out into the glorious west, where, so far as I can tell, they mostly scribbled in journals about their feelings.
I’ve read a lot of these journals. I had to. For my dissertation. I learned that there were lots of trees, that drinking in taverns was awesome, and about my cat.
Yes. My cat. My only male (if unfortunately eunuch) cat, Binks. How else but through the lens of the western adventurer am I to understand his recent habit of darting between my legs when I let the dogs out to pee, making a run for the gate while I shout, “Damnit, Binks, NO!”, slipping under the fence and striking out into the glorious half-swamp by the wastewater treatment plant behind my house.
Surely the feminine reign of Carla and Kitten has stifled his tomish natural instincts. Surely he heard the call of the manly wild and had to be free!
He freed himself yesterday morning. Again. I muttered “Damnit, Binks, no,” but then let it go. The fight had gone out of me. I went upstairs to make some coffee and then somehow…forgot. Instead of going down in half an hour to let the dummy back in, I went to church.
Somewhere between the opening prayer and the reading of the gospel, my phone began to buzz. I ignored it. This was holy ground, after all, and no place for importunate electronics. It buzzed some more. Had someone died? Was Angola on fire? I snuck a peek.
Oh. Binks. A while ago, I mounted a surveillance camera on my front porch to alert me every time a leaf blows across it. I’m not sure what I was thinking. But now it’s too much work to take it down, and besides, it was telling me, in the middle of the Lords’ Prayer that Binks the Adventurer was in distress. He paced. He meowed. He looked about himself in what seemed to be a vague panic and then disappeared out of frame. He reappeared almost continually through the sermon and communion and the chili cook-off in the fellowship hall after the service. Then, the feed went dark.
Driving home, I worried a little. Had he perished from cold and the cold weight of abandonment? Had he succumbed, finally, to the temptation of the wild — had he — ?
He had not.
He was waiting for me in the driveway. He smelled like swamp. I tried to pet him, but he was having none of it. He laid himself in the middle of the white carpet and began an hours’-long grooming regimen worthy of the most fastidious of Victorian ladies.
This morning, I flung the door wide and offered him the great sweep of wilderness. He stepped gingerly out onto the patio. Sniffed the air.
“You can journal about your feelings instead,” I offered. “If you want. No pressure.”
Binks the Bold has, at the time of this writing, retired to his study to consider his first treatise. Yes, his eyes are closed. What of it? He’s thinking! Don’t disturb a genius at work.
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