Fading Desert Footprints (Complete)

'Time spent with cats is never wasted.' Sigmund Freud

My dreams are like classroom chalkboards; they start the day wiped clean. Today is the  rare exception.

I lie in bed this morning staring at the ceiling, reviewing last night's images as they fade, like a student in detention.

I hadn't thought of that cat since he departed; he was like the name of someone casually introduced; forgotten as fast as it was said. So was Jynx's life; all thoughts and memories swept away as soon as he was dead, which took 15 years too long.

We used to fight daily for five minutes with a leather glove that I kept on the kitchen window sill. I would taunt him with it, and he would stalk and ambush my protected hand as if he was a lion pouncing on an antelope.

Jynx was Kelly's ward. Whenever I was caught pestering him, she would yell, intervene, and then they would both glare at me. They were like twins that way.

She would delicately pick up that sly weasel and console him. His limbs would dangle from her arms as he weakly mewed like an actor dying in a Shakespeare play. Sometimes, as she caressed his head, an eye would close like a wink.

Yet, I would frequently find my sparring partner in the kitchen, waiting for my leathered hand.

We had a truce during the last four months of his old age. I thought that I would miss our melees when we said good-bye at a hole in the backyard corner. As I covered his corpse, I buried him in my mind too.

I was the dummy who bought him for Kelly because she wanted a cat more than anything else in the world. She kept him fed, and the house never smelled like litter. As a father, I had to unconditionally accept that Kelly loved me, but the cat was the only one in the house to hear her say the words, which made me jealous.

I get out of bed and head to the kitchen downstairs. The hallway is a proper shade of light pinkish brown that Benjamin Moore calls Hathaway Peach.

The familiar 'creek' on step four and 'crick' on step three put my mind at ease.

In the kitchen, I put four tablespoons of grind and one mug of tap water into the coffee maker. It makes exactly one perfect cup. This daily routine prevents producing a mere cup of hot water, or a cup of tar.

Ritual is one of my minor faults, but it is not on my perennial New Year's Resolution list.

One fault on the list is extreme self-consciousness which is the underlying characteristic that shapes who I am. I dislike crowds, but not in an anti-social way. I worry about what people think. I agonize over the things I've said and done, how they could be interpreted, and the impressions I leave.

Google helped me isolate some phobias: Demo, Agora, and Ochlo. I settled on a self-diagnosis of Katagelophobia, which is the fear of ridicule, being put down, or embarrassment. I used to sit in the back of class so that no one can see me, and remember who I am. I stay quiet so that there are no words for anyone to remember, yet I frequently worry about the few I say.

Therefore, the top of my New Year's resolution list is always 'I won't worry about what people say and think.'

Sometimes, usually early in the year, I have a Carnegie self-help inspiration to leave the phobia behind and eat Prufrock's peach, only to regret it later in the day and lie awake restlessly all night reviewing and analyzing every word and action, like the joke in my wedding speech that no one laughed at.

My morning brew sputters to completion in the maker; I am at the kitchen table with the cat dream lingering in my mind.

To finish manufacturing my coffee, I grab a random spoon out of the drawer; it is a tablespoon. I make a 'teaspoon' estimate of sugar with it, and then precisely time a glop in milk into the elixir to create a lighter shade of black.