A reader suggested recently that I trim the size of my Notebook to make room in the magazine for more poetry. “Does he really think strangers want to know,” she wrote, “whether he slept with his cat or his wife last night or what the weather is like outside his window?” But maybe she’d appreciate a story about someone else’s cat:
Holly, a four-year-old tortoiseshell, got lost on a family outing nearly two hundred miles from home. Two months later she found her way back to West Palm Beach, Florida, where her owners lived. She was weak, the pads on her feet were bleeding, and her weight had dropped from thirteen to seven pounds. According to The New York Times, scientists can’t explain how a cat can manage such a spectacular feat of navigation, but, as a letter writer to the newspaper observed, “Cats were not put here to be understood. They were put here to remind us there are mysteries that all the science in the world will not ever explain. This is what I learned during many years in veterinary medicine.”
