Tawny appeared on the porch this morning after 62 hours missing. She offered no explanation or apology but did not look the worse for wear despite my dream two nights ago that she returned as a small oil-steaked chicken and only gradually resumed the look of a cat. Ellias Lonsdale provided a meditation that I used without telling anyone, as I did not want to dilute it. I had a positive sense when he spoke because the orange in a Hilma af Klimt reproduction on the wall became more brilliant than the rest of the painting, a hallucination, sigil, or whatever of a sort I don’t usually see. His meditation involved drawing on Uranus at 13 degrees Gemini in my chart. It meant switching to the cat’s frequency and no longer asking her to return on my terms. I am somewhat astrologically agnostic, but I don’t believe astrology is based on constellations influencing life on Earth; it is far deeper and more syncretic. Ru, another friend and author (Ruslana Remennikova), emailed a ritual that Lindy and I read last night but did not yet perform. Reading it could have also changed the energy field. Here it is:
Starting every ritual with gratitude and calling on your angels, allies, guardians, and protectors for support. On a sheet of paper, write a note addressing it to Tawney, requesting her to come back. Write it as fondly as you like (example: Sweet Tawney, please come home, safe and sound. Your presence is missed dearly. We will wait with open arms.) If you have incense, light it and circle the sheet 7 times clockwise and counterclockwise each, or if you have a candle that will work too. This is a meditative and vulnerable practice, be as present as you can. Leave the ritual open until the candle has burnt on its own, or the incense has dissolved and you can’t smell it anymore and put the note into the night drawer next to you.
I also sent a vibration of resonance for Tawney to come back safely too. [Tawney sic😀]
Others who participated psychically: Laura Aversano, who said, “I don’t do lost and found, but I see that either she or her soul is stuck and she is not suffering” (cats in the Bronx where she lives and elsewhere are stolen for reasons too nefarious to want to share); John Friedlander and Gloria Hemsher who kept tracking her and said that she was nearby and okay but perhaps isolating”; Brittany Atwater who reported on large dark waves passing over life on Earth; Anne-Marie Keppel who identified a sunspot cycle affecting sensitive beings the afternoon she vanished; and a number of others (Patricia Kneten, Marci Tierney, Stephanie Lahar, Mary Stark) who sent various forms of prayer and energy. Patricia and John cat-sat Tawny last month and made a deep relationship, and Marci and Dave moved in across the street and were her preferred home away from home.
I spent around 11 hours on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday searching. That let me meet many more neighbors in an ever-widening circle, as I started on Ash, Pleasant, Park, and Ledgelawn, where she was known to have been, to School, Main, Glen Mary, and Shannon. So many people were wonderful and provided insight and inspiration. A few were weird, particularly in the Bar Harbor Gothic QAnon-decorated house on School Street where they would only stare silently and not respond. Who stand out as great finds are Debby Walls, who turns out to have planted the gigantic weeping willow in our backyard 56 years ago when she was a child in our house, and the Turkish couple whose names I have already forgotten in the last house toward Park on our side of Ash who are biologists; he works at Jackson Lab studying hair follicles in ears and reminded me that they are really wild animals we kid ourselves we have domesticated (my author John Rush, who has a sacred cat book coming out from Inner Traditions, told me a version of the same insight). Sarah Scheld accompanied me on an hour of knocking on doors and looking in garages and basements yesterday and then had Lindy and me to dinner last night with other friends. The animal control officer in Bar Harbor, Scott Pinkham, also told me that wild animals rarely show up in this part of town, that many lost cats have returned (mostly having gotten locked in), and that they sometimes have an instinct to enlarge their territory.
Read further only more magical cat stories interest you.
Here are three items—separated by hundreds of pages—that I wrote about our first cat in an unpublished book. We got Frodo in the summer of 1965 when we lived together as college students in Aspen, Colorado, recovered her from Lindy’s mother when we got married in 1966, and then brought her to Ann Arbor, Mount Desert, and Portland (Maine) before losing her in 1971. In a former career, I did anthropology fieldwork on MDI, then taught for two years at what is now the University of Southern Maine. The first item is from 1971, the second from 2007, the third from 2021.
Returning from a later-afternoon faculty meeting in Portland with a pounding headache, I drop, coat and boots still on, onto the bed into drug-like sleep. Two hours pass in a tangled nether land before I feel Lindy’s hand on my back. When I rouse, she speaks gently. She tells me, “Frodo is dead.”
“No!”
She says it again, she found her body by the road.
It seems impossible that such a magnificent creature could be slain by a hit-and-run driver—a bobcat who quested heroically across Arizona, who reconnoitered Mount Desert for two weeks before lounging in straw on the ledge of a barn ten miles away. Frodo the hobbit . . . ever returning to the shire
Lindy prepared a shoebox, and we buried our cat remains beneath an apple tree.
That night I dreamed of Frodo appearing in the field behind the house. She came racing up, trying to speak in words.
Twenty-five years later, I still dreamed of Frodo, a gray body bounding across the grass, upraised tail heralding our union, guiding us to Ann Arbor, Tuba City, Maine. No subsequent cat came close in stature, intimacy, or wisdom—and there would be plenty.
Her figure emerged from bushes, basements of abandoned buildings, mine shafts, excavation sites, forests, caves—sometimes fat and healthy as though nothing had happened, sometimes gaunt and dusty, beyond death, dry sounds issuing from her throat. As the years passed, I grew wary, for she would be over thirty, far too old for a cat, more like a zombie from a cenotaph. Yet her feline manifestation stayed young, indifferent to span.
Forty-five years later, we returned to visit her gravesite and found a house built over it, a family living there, no apple trees, cars in an attached garage.
*
Our cat Frodo (1965 Aspen, Colorado – 1970 Cape Elizabeth, Maine) was a larger-than-life creature, an old soul, that no successor, from Prunella, Spindle, Quagga, and Mugpen to Pip, Poppy, and Quee, matched.
In my dreams, she continued to drop in, returning from her journey in the afterworld, coming out of a forgotten room or lying in a window box as if she never left. Sometimes she was a person in a fur suit.
She was seeking no more than a welcoming stroke plus libation and a bowl of food because she hasn’t drunk from condensed astral elements or been fed earth food for more than forty years. She wasn’t too worse for wear, considering, as she licked crumbs off the floor. She was wearing her old collar. She was wild and biting. I wept for joy.
She was almost human now, capable of speech if she chose, but she had been a shaman since we recovered her in Arizona.
“You know the cat Frodo you write about,” John Friedlander remarked one day during a phone session. “That wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a cat. That was a spirit being who came to help you and Lindy stay together.” He meant that Frodo had many dimensions, one of which was an Earth cat—others were spirits of trees and brooks and thunderstorms, on this or nether worlds. One of those spirits was our guide.
I had toyed with the notion of Frodo as a spirit even when she was alive. But I hadn’t taken it seriously. I discounted her numinous aspect. Yet what could I have done differently? I was a young man; she was a young cat.
The instant John proposed it, Frodo shifted. I realized that, in coming to my dreams, she was trying to tell me something crucial, something about her and us.
Two years after John’s remark, Miranda played the female lead in a film she wrote and directed, a quasi-homage to Somewhere in Time, called The Future. In it, a recently euthanized cat named Paw Paw addresses a young couple from outside of space and time, pleading with them to stay together. Only if they preserve their relationship will they be able to rescue her from being euthanized at the pound. They fail—both themselves and Paw Paw.
At a party after the film’s showing at the Sundance Festival in Utah, our son-in-law Mike told me, “That was Miranda’s film for you and Lindy.”
I asked Miranda if Paw Paw was our cat Frodo. She said that it wasn’t Frodo; it was her; she was the cat in her film. The year wasn’t 1965; it was 1973, the May of her conception, three years after Frodo’s death.
Our daughter embedded herself in her movie twice. Paw Paw speaks in her dubbed voice as the story’s narrator (along with Old Man Moon). But Sophie, the female of the couple, is also played by Miranda, limning a form of Lindy before she became her mother.
Everything winds around a Moebius strip. Miranda is our eternal daughter, Frodo our eternal cat. Our unborn child speaks from beyond time in the voice of an imaginary cat, which is herself grown up, trying to keep two volatile teenagers interested in each other and their own mixy process, so that she can get born nine years later and thirty-six years earlier.
A cat and a girl from the same continuum visit and guide us.
At the end of the movie, Paw Paw turns into energy, no longer cat, just light and position, spirit shifting toward omega point
It hardly matters if it is a fictive or a real cat, an animal, a person, or a spirit, someone who is us or merely talking to us. In each case, the intuition that something is there stands against the grim valuation of modernity, that there is nothing at all and never was or will be and the inferred depth of our souls is a delusion in a debris of stars.
I miss Frodo the cat as I miss the early-morning fires of Aspen, the music of the Roaring Fork, a kitten running to where we sit sat sipping coffee.
She continues to find us, as she awoke in a Rocky Mountain litter to be claimed by us and then was left for a year in Denver with Lindy’s mother. We split up after Aspen but reconnected two months later in the Smith Library—the scene that ends New Moon and begins this book.
*
After we moved back to Bar Harbor in 2020, John Friedlander offered to help summon the oversoul of Frodo (1965-1971) to “share” a new cat (I counted fifteen felines in between, none in the previous seven years). I took him seriously but not in that sense.
John had said there would be a signal. In November 2021, to my surprise I awoke in the middle of the night before we were going to go look at shelters in Trenton and Bangor with the word “Cherryfield” in my mind. We hadn’t been in that town since 1969 and back then only once. We changed our plan and drove fifty miles east into Washington County. We both saw her at the Ark: a ginger-colored two-year-old female we named Tawny. I did not consider that she shared Frodo’s oversoul until she began flipping between personae, occasionally doing about as good an imitation as I can imagine of a long-ago feline (though memory can deceive).
After being afraid to go outdoors because of a lifetime in a shelter, trying to hide under the house or car every time we tried, she suddenly burst out the door, climbed a tree and began jumping from roof to roof and roof tops to trees like Frodo once. She was gone for an hour, though we’d occasionally glimpse her down the block or on top of buildings. After that, she reverted to shyness before exploring the neighborhood, often running to us with her tail straight up.
My niece Franny asked me if I thought it was really Frodo. I said, “You’d first have to know what an oversoul is, then what a cat is, and then what reincarnation and being born are.”