THE BOY WHO DREW CATS
A Japanese story tells about a boy who drew cats — all the time, everywhere. It was a compulsion, an obsession. It bugged his family so much that they eventually made him leave. Before he went, his grandmother took him aside and gave him some advice. “Seek small places,” she said. “You are safer in small places.”
And so the boy went off down the path. After a while he noticed that the land was not doing well. Crops were not planted nor gathered and houses were not maintained. As usual in that country, there was a temple on a nearby hill but it seemed empty. There were no people going around doing their business.
Nevertheless, he would need some shelter when night came, so he went into the temple and began to draw cats on every surface. Big ones, little ones, all colors, sleeping and running, he filled the building with cats. Finally, he found a small door and crept into the space behind it to sleep.
In the night there was an awful squalling and thumping and screaming. The boy was glad to be hidden in his small space with a sturdy door. In the morning when he came warily out to the sunshine, in the middle of the floor was a huge rat-demon — DEAD. Torn to bits. All the cats he had drawn the night before were still in place, but they all had bloody mouths.
When the people realized that the rat-demon was dead, they came back and began to set things to rights. They were so grateful to the boy that they dedicated the temple to him and supplied him with infinite sheets of paper to draw cats on.
This is a good parable for our times right now as well as reminding us that people repeatedly pass through these dangerous times due to rat-demons. In fact, as a little child coming to consciousness during WWII and watching newsreels of combat and consequences, I have probably too much consciousness of the necessity of hiding. I am not alone.
When I taught briefly in 2003, a boy challenged me on the first day. We were in a classroom that was an add-on with high windows, because the wing was half-sunken in the ground. “If a shooter comes here and threatens to kill us, could you protect us, get us out of here?” There was one narrow staircase up from the hallway for the classroom cluster.
I thought about it and finally showed him that we could climb up on four-drawer filing cabinets, break out the glass of the windows, and escape that way. But I also realized that it was almost automatic for me to think that way, to always sit facing the door, to be aware of hiding places and escape routes. When I’ve taught in places with high rates of alcoholism and frustration, I’ve been aware of kids who had to hide in the night, who dragged pillow and covers under the bed where it was safer.
On story that impressed me was a girl who loved her dog. A brutal neighbor shot it for no reason. This was a country girl who could act. She took a rifle over and shot all the neighbor’s dogs. Then she took a bedroll into the hills above the ranch and stayed until it was safe. But mostly the kids just hid.
I’ve never been as close to danger as AOC was on 1/6, but I’ve seen films and read books that were real to me. Nothing that has happened me has given me PTSD, but rather something like an inflammation as compared to a wound. Many narrow escapes in vehicles or with big animals, confrontations with angry people, situations that exceeded my ability to cope. Hardships and shortages. Sometimes people reached out to help, other times no one was there or the people couldn’t grasp the situation. Often I was the one who took blame.
This is not the sort of thing one usually tells people about, and I was the one who chose to do dangerous things, even to be around dangerous people. But recently I read an article about the consequences of many small injuries. The idea was that it taught a person never to accept help.
You can’t count on anyone. You don’t want to get close to them because they will not understand and they will rat you out, take advantage, so it’s best to remain a bit of a mystery. Don’t accept gifts — they might just be bait for a trap. Always keep some part of yourself hidden, just private, a small place inside. Accept being alone. The safest kind of love is unrequited, because they won’t cling and demand allegiance.
This can be objectively true. But it is a life-attitude that separates a person from what would have been a protective cohort. Some of my closest friends over my lifetime have been people who felt like that themselves. We were porcupines, carefully relating, easily wounded. I was determined not to have children. It was almost a relief to be divorced and certainly a relief to leave the ministry.
Writing can take advantage of all this and it works during a pandemic lockdown. It also explains why I go into a frenzy when the Baptists keep sawing limbs off my big protective cottonwood. Why I’m jumpy about other neighbors. My best neighbors across the street have sold their family house and retreated to a trailer like the communities of people responding to economic and climate uncertainty, making themselves safer by being moving targets. I’m not sure it works but they say it does.
I didn’t draw the cats in this house, which is hardly a temple, and I don’t know that they would defeat a rat-demon. They do seek cardboard boxes that just fit them, but mostly they seek warm places like on top of me. And they are alert. When I hear them hiss and growl, I go the window they’re looking out and spot — government employees measuring my house or maybe the very rare event of a stray dog. It could very possibly be a grizzly — or someone high on amphetamines.
Some people keep a gun or a baseball bat. I don’t, but my landline telephone never has a dead battery and I have removed all natural gas lines from under my house.
