Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

  The undergrowth and woodland trails around our house were Roadcat’s beat. He was a hunter, but not a killer. Now and then smaller creatures died from fright or the initial pounce when he caught them, yet I never saw him intentionally kill anything. Not even the night crawlers he brought to me after heavy rains. He plopped them down on a small throw rug, flipped it over to hamper their escape, and seemed pleased with himself.

  The chipmunk was very much alive in the summer of 1986 when Roadie strolled through the front door and dropped it. The little guy hit the carpet running, dashed through a pile of old magazines, and disappeared in the general vicinity of the fireplace.

  Judging that the chipper would not eat much, I was content to let him stay. The rest of the family, as usual, thought I was deranged. So, after four days of moving furniture, we flushed the poor fellow. The male dog nailed him to the floor in one of those wild scenes that seem to occur only at our house in the woods. Roadcat watched the entire battle with detached interest. Revenge for the cat-show humiliation finally was his.

  In his habits he was careful, in his ways he was gentle. He found our dogs inelegant to the point of being despicable, but he liked the little female kitty that came along some years after he joined the craziness that is ours. He smiled tolerantly when she tried to nurse him and, through the years, gently washed her with a pink and tireless tongue.

  Roadcat asked for little other than consideration and respect. He ate what was offered and left our food alone, except for my lunchtime glass of milk resting unattended on the table. He could not resist that. Turning around, I would find him sitting by the glass, licking a milk-covered paw.

  That was his only sin, and I reached a compromise with him on the matter by providing him occasionally with a little milk in an old jelly glass decorated with etchings of Fred Flinstone. I think Fred reminded him of earlier times, before humans developed the technology of killing to a high and ludicrous art, when his saber-toothed cousins left no doubt about the equality of things. When he thought of that delicious state of affairs, it made the milk taste even better, and he lingered over it, humming to himself about woodlands and cliffs and open meadows turning yellow in the light of a younger sun.

  The early bronchitis had taken most of his voice. So when he wanted attention, he would lie on my computer printer while I typed, purr loudly, and look directly into my face. If that failed, he escalated his tactics by jumping into the box holding the printer paper and tearing it off the machine. Finally, if I was so insensitive as to further ignore his requirements, he would race around the house, across my desk, along the balcony railing, and, eventually, onto my lap. He seldom failed in these efforts.

  I watched him turn a little more gray here and there, but I suppressed melancholy thoughts of the inevitable. Roadcat maintained a youngness of spirit and, even in his latter days, could race thirty feet up a tree on any crisp spring morning when he felt like doing so. Yet, as we read Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China together in the last months of his life, I could almost sense something as he purred his way through the pages. I would lift my eyes from the book, smile at him, and softly stroke his head, which he always acknowledged by a slight increase in the intensity of his purring.

  In late September of 1987,1 caught a slight hesitation in his leap to the basement table where I placed his food, safe from the growling hunger of the dogs. If I had not shared that breakfast time with him all those hundreds of mornings, I would not have noticed anything. But it was there—a slight, ever-so-slight, hesitation, as if he had to gather himself physically for what should have been an easy leap.

  Simultaneously, he seemed to be eating a little less than was normal for him. The usual pattern was that he would eat about one-third of the can of food on the first serving. Then the female cat, who deferred to his seniority, took her turn. Later, Roadcat would come by and finish whatever was left.

  But the rhythm faltered. There always was something in the dish at the end of the day. And sometimes he ate nothing after I ladled out the food. His face was thinning a bit, and his coat lost a little of its sheen.

  I was about to make an appointment at the veterinarian’s when one morning he did not appear for his dawn excursion. It was his custom to come lie near my pillow at first light and wait for me to rise and let him out. The routine was invariant, and the morning it was broken I felt an unpleasant twinge in my stomach.

  I searched the house and found him lying in a chair in the back bedroom upstairs. I knelt down beside him, spoke softly, and ran my hand over his fur. He purred quietly, but something was not right.

  While waiting for the vet’s office to open, I remembered the previous evening. He had seemed strangely restless. He would get on my lap, then down again, then return for another cycle of the same thing. He did that five times, and I remarked to my wife that it was something of a record. The last time he walked up my chest and rubbed his cheek against mine. Though he was always pleasantly affectionate, such a gesture was a little out of the ordinary. He was trying to tell me that something was amiss, that it was almost over.

  The initial diagnosis was a kidney problem, which is not unusual in older animals. After a few days, we brought him home. He was terribly weak and could scarcely walk. I laid him on a wool poncho, where he stayed the entire night.

  In the morning, I carried him to his litter box in the basement and set him down by it. He seemed disoriented and stumbled. I noticed his right leg was limp and curled underneath him when he sat.

  Back to the doctor. An X-ray disclosed a large tumor around his heart, which had resulted in a stroke the previous night that paralyzed his right side and left him blind. Wayne Endres is a kind and patient man, but I could see he was working at the edge of his technology.

  The following day, a Wednesday, Wayne called with his report. If it had only been a stroke, we might have worked our way out of it, even though cats don’t recover from such things easily. But clearly, the tumor was large and growing, and there was little to be done. It was up to me, of course. But Wayne’s quiet voice carried the overtones of despair when he said, “Roadcat is not doing well.” He refused to offer hope. There wasn’t any, and Wayne Endres is an honest man.

  Here, at this point, the thunder starts, and civilizations that are normally parallel begin to intersect and become confused. Roadie and I shared a common language of trust, respect, and love, made visible by touching and aural by our private mutterings to one another. But, as it should be, the language of caring is a language of imprecision and is not designed for hard and profound choices.

  I had no set of alternatives rich enough to evade the issue and none available that could even ameliorate it. And how could I understand what decision rules lay beating softly in the imprints of Roadcat’s genetic spirals? For all I knew, they might be superior to mine, probably were, but I could not tell.

  I know how I want to be treated under those dire conditions. But what right did I have to assume that so ancient a civilization as Roadcat’s bears the same values as mine? How could I presume to judge when the standards are someone else’s and I had not been told?

  Surely, though, notions of dignity and suffering must be common to all that lives, whether it be rivers or butterflies or those who laugh and hold your hand and lie with you in autumn grass. So, gathering myself as best I could, I drove slowly through a red and yellow sunset toward Wayne Endres’s clinic.

  Someone once defined sentimentality as too much feeling for too small an event. But events are seldom small when you’ve dealing with civilizations. And they are never small when you’ve dealing with true companions.

  My friend and colleague from all the years and gentle moments lay on a table with white cloth-like paper under him. I sat down, and at the sound and smell of me, he raised his head, straight up came his ears, and his nose wrinkled. Though the room was brightly lit, his brain kept sending a false message of darkness, and the pupils of his green eyes dilated to the maximum as he str
ained for the light.

  He had lost half his body weight. I touched him along the neck, and there was a slight sound. He was trying to purr, but fluid in his throat would not allow it. Still, he wriggled his nose and tried to send all the old signals he knew I would recognize.

  I nodded to Wayne and put my face next to that of my friend, trying somehow to convey the anguish I suffered for him and for myself, for my ignorance of right and wrong, and for my inability to know what he might want in these circumstances. I spoke softly to him, struggling with desperate intensity to reach far and across the boundaries of another nation, seeking either affirmation or forgiveness. When all that is linear failed me, I called down the old language of the forest and the plains to tell him, once and finally, of my gratitude for his simply having been.

  And I wondered, as did S. H. Hay, “How could this small body hold/So immense a thing as death?”

  Eventually, his head lowered, and it was done. Georgia and I carried him home in a blanket and buried him in the woods along one of the trails where he earned his living.

  For some days after, I swore I would never go through that again. If it came to euthanasia, I would refuse to be present. I have changed my mind. You owe that much to good companions who have asked for little and who have traveled far and faithfully by your side.

  Roadcat didn’t just live with us. He was a spirited participant in the affairs of our place. He was kind to us, and we to him. I remember, when I came home in the evenings, how he would move down the woodland path toward me, grinning, riding along on his little stiff-legged trot, tail held high with a slight curl at the tip. I’d hunker down, and we would talk for a moment while he rolled over on his back and looked at me, blinking.

  Georgia and I put the shovel away, walked back into the darkness, and stood by the little grave. By way of a farewell, she said, “He was a good guy.” Unable to speak, I nodded and thought she had said it perfectly. He was, indeed, a good guy. And a true friend and colleague who rode the great arrow with me for a time, helping me turn the pages in some old book while the wood stove quietly crackled its way through the winter afternoons of Iowa.

  Romance

  MR. PRESIDENT

  MEMBERS OF THE PLATFORM PARTY

  CANDIDATES FOR GRADUATION

  FACULTY MEMBERS

  PARENTS

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

  ______________________________________

  It seems more than just a bit strange to be standing here today. It was in this very building, this room, that I received my B.A. degree in 1962. Prior to that event, however, I had spent an ungodly number of hours here in my wildly misspent youth. You see, I played basketball for what was then Iowa State Teachers College. For three years I ran all over this room in short pants, dribbling and shooting. I can still hear the voice of my late father as he sat along the sidelines over there and shouted words of encouragement as we battled the University of North Dakota or South Dakota State. He used to drive down from Rockford, Iowa, on cold winter nights and add his voice to the 4,000 students who invariably packed this place as we ran and jumped our way through season after season. My father always thought books could make you happier than basketballs. He was right. But that’s another story for another time.

  The point is, this place is filled with memories, and memories play an important part in what I want to talk about today. Since I am dean of the School of Business, I am absolutely sure a number of you turned out expecting to get some hot tips on microcomputer stocks or the latest news on money supply fluctuations. Sorry. Nor am I going to lecture you on (1) how well educated you are, (2) what wonderful opportunities you have before you, or (3) the importance of making great and lasting changes out there.

  What I want to talk about is something a little different, something that makes all the living and doing you are so anxious to get on with worthwhile. More than that, it makes the living and doing better—better in terms of quality and quantity. I am going to talk about romance.

  I looked up the definition of romance in several dictionaries. As I guessed, reading definitions of romance is about the most unromantic thing you can do. So I will not define romance, at least not directly. Rather, you will pick up a sense of what romance is by what I am going to say about it.

  I am a musician and a writer of songs. One of my songs, which I call “High Plains Afternoon,” starts like this:

  I see you now, as you were then,

  on a high plains afternoon.

  (Don’t you remember the flowers,

  don’t you remember the wind?)

  As naked you danced through the

  late autumn dust,

  while a threat of hard winter rode the cobalt horizon.

  (Don’t you remember those who were free?

  We drove them out of our lives.)

  As I sing the song, it carries a sense that I am singing about a woman. Ostensibly I am. But it is also a song about the idea of romance, as she (pardon the gender) dances before us and then out of our lives, if we do not treat her right. Romance, you see, is something you have to take care of—romance needs food and water and care, of a kind all her own. You can destroy romance, or at least drive her away, almost without knowing that you are doing it. Let me give you an example.

  A while back, a professor on this campus was finishing her doctorate, As part of her dissertation, she was conducting interviews with married folks about the subject of, well, marriage. When she asked Georgia Ann and me to participate, we thought it over. Then we politely said “no.” Now, we have been married for almost twenty-two years, and a high level of zest remains in our relationship, so probably we have some useful things to say about marriage. Why did we decide not to? Because we have agreed that too much analysis of certain things removes the romance from them. Our relationship is one of those things.

  Romance dances just beyond the firelight, in the corner of your eye. She does not like you to look at her directly; she flees from the cold light of logic and data collection when it is turned toward her. If you persist in trying to study her, however, she first disintegrates, then dissolves into nothing at all.

  E. B. White once said a similar thing about humor, which “can be dissected, as a frog, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” You can’t get at romance, then, by good old Western reductionism.

  Understand, I am not just talking about romance in the sense of love between two people. You can’t really have a romance with someone else unless you are, first of all, a romantic yourself. Most people I know are not very romantic. They were once, or had the chance to be, but romance got lost along the way, drowned in the roar of our times, beat out by overly analytic teachers, drummed out by those who scoff at romantics as foolish and weak. In those people, romance looked around and said, “Pm not living here; too cold.”

  What do romantics look like? You can’t really generalize. Besides, to make a list of characteristics would be to commit the sin of breaking romance down into small pieces, which I cautioned about before. The best way to tell a romantic is to just be around one. You’ll know. There is a sense of passion about them, a sense of living just a bit too far out at the edge emotionally, sometimes; a caring for what seem to be dumb things—an old chair you sat in during your graduate student days and in the early times of your career, a knife that lies on the desk year after year, a simple wooden box. You can tell a romantic by the voice—it dances because the mind is dancing.

  And I can tell you this for sure: All romantics like dogs and cats, and maybe some other creatures, preferably animals that come in off the road for a little sustenance and decide to stay around and participate in the craziness they sense in this place of food and laughter. Animals like romantics, for they know’ they will never be let down by them.

  It’s important to note here that you do not have to be a poet or a painter or a musician to be a romantic. In fact, I know quite a few folks in these areas of endeavor who
are downright unromantic. On the other hand, Andrew Carnegie was a romantic. So was Joseph Smith when he led the Mormons westward. And I have seen more than one insurance salesman, in the bars where I have played, grin outwardly and inwardly when I launched into a song about the wind and the flowers and the highways that run forever.

  Robert Pirsig puts it well, in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when he says, “The Buddha… resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.”

  In a sense, romance is practical. It fuels your life and propels your work with a sense of vision, hope, and caring. Because you are working for others, not just for yourself, your work takes on a certain quality that it will not otherwise have. I suppose you can say romance puts meat on the table, though, as I say that, I feel more than just a slight drain on my system as romance prepares to leave.

  Let me turn now to the matter of getting and keeping romance. Romance is hard to get, hard to keep, and fairly easy to drive away. If you are really intent on getting rid of romance, though, here are a few brief suggestions:

  Become obsessive about neatness, particularly in the way your desk looks.

  Install expensive shag carpet in your house, so that when the dog throws up or one of your friends spills a beer, all hell breaks loose.

  Don’t listen to any good music. Ignore Bach, Mozart, Pete Seeger, and the Paul Winter Consort. Instead, listen only to top-40 radio. This is a first-rate approach to giving romance a shove out of your life, for she likes subtlety and low decibel counts.

  Excessive focus on detail and procedure at the expense of vision, of dreams, of reflection, is another good way to get rid of romance. We in the academic world have mastered this approach.

  Buy birthday cards, anniversary cards, and the like instead of making up your own. All of us are poets; some have just lost their voices for a while. As Ray Bradbury once said, about people in general, “And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.”