Cat's Life

The cat leaves the house through the cat door, stays out for hours, comes back soaking wet, meowing loudly, as if to tell me about his adventures outside during the hours that I sat in front of the screen or read another book recommended to me by a newspaper critic, wondering what he (the critic, not the cat!) had seen in it that I still don't after 300 pages.  All this on a rainy day and night of the rainy season that has just been declared a draught by the government that constantly weighs and measures such things to make our lives better, it tells us, because what else is the government for, except to weigh, measure and dictate.  The cat leads a more interesting life  getting wet down there a few inches off the ground than I five feet higher all warm and dry.  If we could only communicate better.

And so, driven by some invisible, unexplainable force, I plug in her name, a name that I can barely remember how to spell, plug it into the Internet search engine, for the first time in I don't know how many years, or maybe for the first time ever, and find nothing about her, but much about her namesakes in various places around the world, because her full name is not unique, a doctor in Hollywood,  somebody in New Jersey,  Netherlands, a grave some place unspecified, the buried person eerily the same age as she would have been today.   On the other hand, I am with my unique name, all over the Internet,  I couldn't lie about my age, address or history without you finding out the truth using the same search engine, but she and others my age are nowhere to be found.

Personal computers have been around for 30 years, Internet for 20, and we, alive today,  not too old to be computer phobic, can still be totally absent from the online world.  And yet.  Maybe she's passed away, or lives as an anthropologist with the natives in some jungle.  Whoever wants to find me, can find me, and yet no one of my contemporaries does.  That's all right, I don't look for them either.

One of the few advantages of growing old away from the place where you grew up is that you avoid seeing those you grew up around pass away, become forgotten as if they never existed.