My Writing Companion

My writing companion is an 18-year-old black cat. She's our philosopher cat (we also have a military cat who defends us and keeps us in order, but that's my son's cat -- another story).

I never meant to have a black cat, but about when I finally accepted that I seemed to be a sad and lonely spinster and that I might as well get a cat, I decided I should go to the humane society.

But I procrastinated. Instead of going to the humane society that day, I walked up a hill in the town where I lived at the time and down the hill were coming Ashley, Leanna, and Ashley, and they were carrying this wee black kitten, the last of her litter, and they sorrowfully told me if they couldn't give this little cat named Zipper away, their parents were going to force them to take her to the humane society.

So then I had a cat. No collar or litter or cat knowledge or anything but I took her home and the first thing she ever napped on was a stack of manuscripts. (All three of the novels I was too timid to send out, now self-published -- they're decent dime-store novels!). Of course that stole my heart right away.

And then she taught me how to meditate. Not that I knew that was what she was doing at the time, but she could take away my sadness and loneliness and all the thoughts of failure and the constant trying-to-succeed that were filling up my mind at the time and just replace them with... peace. I remember that, even as a kitten, she just filled my heart up with love and with peace.

And nobody else in the past 18 years has filled me up with Zen and peace and ommm like my philosopher cat.

She never seemed like a Zipper to me. I had decided to name her Ala after Ashley, Leanna, and Ashley, and then I thought how funny I had changed it to an A name when the girls had given her a Z name, so I decided to put the Z back in and name her Alazha. I was not sure at the time (pre-first-vet-visit) if she was a boy or a girl, so if she'd been a boy, she would have been Alazhar.

But she's a girl and my best friend. And she still loves to sit on paper of any kind, but most especially manuscripts and math homework (I'm also sometimes a math teacher/tutor/writer/editor).

Christa

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