When you’re used to hearing purring and suddenly it’s gone, it’s hard to silence the blaring sound of sadness.
~Missy Altijd
If you’ve wintered in the heartland, you know the kind of blizzard I mean — a gale-whipped snow that burns your skin like needles. I pumped gas for three cars that night, each appearing suddenly from the whiteness like an apparition. The drivers huddled behind the wheel while I filled their tanks, paid wordlessly, and drove off, to be swallowed by the blinding storm.
Just after midnight, a longhaired, black cat appeared, his eyes glittering in the station lights as he paced outside the glass entry door. I could see he was yowling, but his voice disappeared in that pitiless wind.
I let him in. He ate a bit of my hours-old burger, washing it down with water from a paper cup. All the while, his watchful eyes never left me. His immediate needs met, he went exploring.
It didn’t take him long to find the sofa situated between the rusting soda cooler and the compressor powering the service-bay lift. The sofa wasn’t much to look at, but it was positioned under our admittedly inadequate overhead heater.
The cat didn’t mind the disgusting state of the sofa. It smelled of gasoline, engine oil and over-brewed coffee, and it was covered in a disturbing collage of stains — the origins of which it was best not to contemplate. I thought the rag bin would be a better place for him. It certainly smelled better. But would he let me pick him up?
He did. When I set him down in the rag bin, he eyed me with offended dignity before going to work pawing at the rags. He curled up in the resulting indentation, and I congratulated myself on my successful bait-and-switch. Less than an hour later, I settled down for a nap of my own on that sofa.
I slept lightly back then. So when Sinbad’s weight hit my chest, it startled me to full consciousness. He shifted around for a moment or two, eventually finding comfort with his nose less than four inches from mine.
I remember wondering if he’d had his shots as he pawed my nose gently, and then nose-butted me. After less than a minute of stroking him behind the ears, his purrs competed with the drone of the soda cooler behind my head. My new companion moved only once that night, momentarily startled by the compressor kicking in to re-pressurize the service lift.
The next morning, the station owner, Jerry, ratified the cat’s status as station mascot, dubbing him Sinbad. Jerry’s unstated plan seemed to involve underfeeding the cat so that he would keep the rodents in check. I doubt he realized I was feeding Sinbad each night when I arrived for my shift. In less than a month, Sinbad developed a fondness for venison jerky and vanilla milkshakes from the truck stop. He spent part of every night parked in the middle of my chest, purring and kneading me with his paws — occasionally with enough energy to keep me awake. And so it went through the long Plains winter.
By the time the Chinooks blew and the snow melted, Sinbad and I took each other for granted. Warmer weather had him coming and going at will, but never missing his evening snack. When I studied, he treated my open textbooks as his own. His favorites seemed to be Hansen’s History of Art and Box and Jenkins’ Statistics and Forecasting. Sinbad was not a cat to be ignored. Somewhere along the way, he had perfected the nose-butt, for use when more subtle, attention-getting techniques failed. By May, he ruled the back room and the sofa with the regal hegemony only cats can pull off.
One night when I came in for my shift, Sinbad was nowhere to be found. I asked Jerry about him, but he was as mystified as I was. A week passed, and still no Sinbad. He’s a cat, I reminded myself each time I worried about him. Cats do this. He was never yours, so get over it.
Sinbad had wandered in one night, seeking refuge. I had provided it, along with a comfortable sofa. Neither Sinbad nor the sofa we shared was mine. He had moved on when it suited him, just as I would move on when I completed the requirements for my degree. And when I moved on, my sofa would be someone else’s. That’s how it is, I told myself.
Still, I worried. Had he been snatched by coyotes, mauled by a dog, or hit by a car? Or had he just gone home, now that the snow had melted? The distractions of my senior year gave me other things to think about, gradually driving Sinbad from my thoughts — until Jerry replaced the sofa in the back room.
He was as aware as I was that the old sofa was years past its best. So when he bought a new sofa for his den at home, he brought the old one out to the station. With Midwest pragmatism, he loaded the stain-soaked sofa from the back room into the pickup and hauled it to the dump. In his mind, he was merely replacing an old thing with a newer, more comfortable thing.
But I associated the old sofa with Sinbad, who had not simply curled up with me on it, but had also curled up in my heart. I missed my chance companion and, by association, the sofa we’d shared. Somehow, the new one was never comfortable.
It’s been more than forty years since Sinbad wandered into and out of my life with the effortless grace of cats everywhere. I have been through at least half a dozen sofas of my own since then, all nicer and less aromatic than the one in the back room of Jerry’s Standard station. I have also come to know countless men and women over those years. Most, like Sinbad, have wandered into and out of my life.
Many etched memories into my story, then moved on, often with little or no explanation. I have come to accept these unexplained disappearances. But some people — and some critters — never truly leave. They hang around, like Sinbad, long after they’re gone. Remembering always leaves me with a bittersweet twist in my gut — part regret, part reluctant acceptance, but mostly deep, enduring love. Sinbad, and the people and many creatures I’ve known, have become a kind of internal clock by which I measure my life and how much of it I have left.
Occasionally, on late nights when sleep eludes me, Sinbad still rubs against my thoughts. When he does, I tell myself his disappearance was just a result of him listening to the mysterious inner wisdom that guided him to me on that bitter winter night — just as it drove him to move on when it was time. But mostly when I think of him, I hope that at some level he remembered the sofa we shared — and that it was a place of deep contentment for him, as it was for me that winter so long ago.
~Dirk B. Sayers
