just follow the cat

Factor 2 - Baltimuddle

Buddy's 6th year

26 years before the funeral

"Did you hear that?"

Did you?

When Buddy was five or six, she began calling Baltimore – Baltimuddle. In a way, it became a happy accident. Instead of the usual bombardment of teasing that she might have endured, her older sisters all laughed at the mistake and they (too) began to call the city by its new name.

"Hi, I'm Flora and I'm from Baltimuddle." Or "Hi I'm Alba..." Or "Hi I'm Jolie..." Her sisters even took credit for the ingenious name because it seemed to perfectly capture the essence of a city that was too big to be small and too small to be noticed.

"Did you hear that?"

Did you?

Centuries ago, the streams that crisscross Baltimore were the lifeblood of the city. People, whether they were good or bad or clever or earnest, could travel throughout an area that ultimately became Baltimuddle without ever encountering another traveler. In those days, it was as if the city was a living organism kept alive and healthy by the twice daily influx of fresh water from the Chesapeake Bay.

But that was then.

These days, many of those streams have been buried underground and the waterways have been replaced by streets. But not normal streets. The streets of Baltimuddle are sparkling rivers of light and sound. You see, sometime after the good war, a bit later than the forgotten war, and smack in the middle of the war that everyone hated, Baltimore repaved its streets. By some marvelous serendipity of timing, an engineer had the brilliant idea of sweeping up all the broken shards of green, blue, red, and crystal-clear glass and grinding them into the mess they used to pave the streets. The multi-colored fragments created a spectacular light show every night. That's true now, even though the streets have been paved over many times since. And those same shimmering streets also serve as alleyways that funnel sounds throughout the city – sounds that hover on rivers of light. Distant sounds from distant places and distant times.

"Did you hear that?"

Did you?

Buddy's sisters heard those words so often that they found them easier to ignore than all the other forgettable things that their youngest sister would say.

"Listen. It sounds like a cat. Don't you hear it?"

And she was right. It did sound like a cat. Or maybe the distant echo of a cat's cry.

After months of insisting that she wasn't making it up, Buddy decided to prove her point. One morning, she left the house well before dawn determined to find the cat and catch it if she could. She was determined to prove that the most insignificant child of the most insignificant family in all of Baltimuddle could actually do something special.

Outside her house, she waited in the dark until she heard a low, slow, lonely cat's meow coming from the west. Or maybe it was from the north. But regardless of where it was, it sounded so close that the shoeless, six-year-old wandered through the neighborhood for hours never really getting any closer to the sound.

At first, her search was slow and deliberate but as every dark corner proved to be filled with only more darkness and the faint echoes of the missing cat, Buddy's breath and pace quickened. She walked at first. Then, she ran. Then, she ran faster and she made it as far as Lockhart Road (three blocks away) before stopping. She stopped because she couldn't believe that any street could be so beautiful. At night, the tiny green, blue, red, and crystal-clear shards of glass were shimmering as far as she could see – as far as the North and South Poles she thought.