Afterimage

I found him to be notoriously difficult to photograph... and in the end equally dificult to sketch. If the light wasn't just right, he simply came out as a black shadow, none of the details of his coat would show. He was a long haired cat, whose shoulder fur was short. His tail waved above his back like a plume of ... smoke. His neck sported long lighter fur that hung about his shoulders like an Elizabethan collar. In the sun, his fur took on a brown hue, where is was normally black and gray. The slightest breeze would ruffle the tips of the guard hairs. He'd always turn his nose to the wind. He was declawed before we got him, and he stood splay-footed, something I always wondered if it was because of the loss of his toes.

In the last days of his life I told myself several times I wasn't going to take any more picutres of him. That I had enough and many good ones from his younger days, before his fur dulled and separated and his whiskers turned white. I didn't stick to that. Twice more I was able to capture him, once in the days before he lost his sight peering out the front window, and once after his sight was gone, on the porch listening for the sounds that were now more distant then near.

As with some of the cats, the inspiration to sketch didn't strike until the last day. And even then it almost didn't take. For me, to sit an sketch something is to really look at it. There was nothing more I wanted to do that day then watch him, and wish that we had more time. To wish also that he could rest, because he couldn't sit still that day. So for him, like the others, I got out my pad and pencil, and watched my friend pace, hoping to fix his image once and for all in my mind, and perhaps on paper for others to see.

He settled only once during the morning, and I got a quick outline, but he was sitting under the end table, and like all the photos I'd tried, the light wasn't right and he was hard to see. A little later, silhouette followed, and another sketch as he rested on the porch. In the past, the patterns of color in the cat's fur always made my job somewhat easier. Light and dark played with the texture and length of their fur. Not with Smoke. He was all black, and long haired to boot. You couldn't capture his face with a dark smudge here and an absence of line there. The detail of his shape was lost and found in the pattern of his fur, you couldn't just draw an outline, or so I thought. Midafternoon, he settled at the foot of one of the office chairs. He sat there resting between pacing, and from the paper emerged an outline that required no fill. For once I had captured the long haired black cat in a few simple strokes. My mind's eye filled in the rest. I didn't try to draw all of him, I didn't need to, and in that final sketch, that final picture, I saw the young cat that had come to us so long ago. Here, very simply, was Smoke, reaching out and resting, at peace and at home.

We buried Smoke with the others in the back yard, under the bird bath. Five friends rest there now. Seven statues of cats grace the surrounding garden. One for each buried there, and two for those who are missing from the garden, but not forgotten.

My computer's screen saver lets me choose pictures to scroll across the screen, panning back and forth across the images. For now, and a little while longer, those are all pictures of Smoke. All images that captured a friend in motion, memories to remind me of one who is gone. Those images are freeze frames of a life that was always on the go. Now, the pictures have stopped moving and the life is gone. But the soul remains and the love will go on forever.

I miss you, Sir Cat...