just follow the cat

Part 4 - The Charity of Catharine Huntington

How can someone so large become so small?

You might think this question should be listed among life's great mysteries, but (in fact) there are few, if any, actual mysteries in life. That's mostly because MaryCherry Blueberry has solved almost all of the truly important ones. Though you may not know her, MaryCherry Blueberry is the 6th smartest girl in the world. She is so smart that she has solved all the mysteries on Earth except one. As hard as she has tried, she has never been able to figure out how someone so large could become so small?

Well, to be completely accurate, there was one other great mystery that MaryCherry Blueberry couldn't solve. She also never knew what happened to her cat when she was six. That was both a mystery and a tragedy.

As you've probably learned during your life, there are far more tragic stories than mysterious ones. But of all the tragedies that ever crushed a soul, the only meaningful tragedy is being too insignificant to be forgotten – to never be the subject of a sentence that begins "who was the person who ____?"

This kind of tragedy doesn't happen all at once. Over time (for many of us), our names and the memories of our actions gradually shrink in size. Eventually, we become so small that we are less than a rounding error and no more than a series of tightly connected dashes. An absolute zero, if you will. And like so many other things on Earth, it was MaryCherry Blueberry who actually discovered the real meaning of Absolute Zero. In fact, she lived it every day under a name that assumed nothing and received even less. Her real name was Catharine Huntington.

0° K

today, 1:00AM, July 12

S.G. Wilson Stadium Garage

overlooking Baltimore Harbor

it is 10 degrees above absolute zero

For several months, Catharine Huntington had been living in a brown car in a brown corner of an S.G. Wilson parking garage. It was an ordinary garage. Six levels. Sharp turns. Fewer cars as you climb toward the sky. Though you may not know it, there are Wilson garages all over the country. If you've never parked there before, it's good to know that the rates aren't all that high. That's especially true if you're the 6th smartest girl in the world and you've figured out how to make your parking ticket always look like it expires 24 hours into the future.

Catharine's brown corner of the S. G. Wilson Stadium Garage happened to be in Baltimore which gleefully proclaims itself to be the charmingest big city in America. On many days, Catharine would spend her time at the baseball stadium two blocks south of the garage and then she'd spend her nights talking to MaryCherry Blueberry. And to her cat!! The same one that disappeared when she was six.

To support her extravagant lifestyle, Catharine sold nachos at the stadium and looked like she had eaten more than a few herself. As a result, Catharine Huntington was wide enough to block the sun, but she was also kind enough to make the sun want to rise each day just to greet her.

Her kindnesses were legendary even if they were only noticed by the sun and every planet in the solar system. At work, she would look each customer in the eye and say "You're Welcome" even if their eyes were pointed in another direction. Few people ever said thank you in return. Fewer still could imagine that building a Nacho Supremo Mountain on a plastic plate would require any skill whatsoever. But Catharine imagined their disappointment if the chips were soggy or if the display was somehow out of balance. So, she folded all the ingredients above and below the hidden nacho valleys. In the end, the finished plate truly deserved the name Supremo. But her greatest kindness of all (her greatest act of charity) was to hide herself from everyone who might see her. Over time, her expertise at finding ways to put trees, counters, tabletops, and vats of gooey nacho cheese between herself and her customers' line of sight was remarkable. Except, of course, that no person ever made a remark about her charity.