Tag Archives: Cat

Sakura Hazy

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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lehan Godz

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Well he died, my cat, just the other day. I heard about it from my student who heard about it from the woman who lives nearby.

My cat was supposed to be living with my student but he ran away on about the second day and wasn’t seen for quite some time after that. Finally he surfaced and it turned out that he was living at the house of a woman who had several cats.

My student took him home for the winter when it was very cold and then he took off again when it got warmer. He says that the woman told him some stories and he will send them to me soon.

I was running a school there, in my house, maybe you all remember that. I had decided I would make the educational program, the curriculum that I believed in. I used to go out and take my dogs for a walk, and some of the cats would come too.

We met these boys with their grandmother, they were about 12, twins, and they were walking with the dog. They were funny kids, they asked if they could visit with their friend and that was also nice. One day those three kids stole a heap of money from me; a heap, and I had been saving up for a wood stove.

When I realized I thought a lot about what to do, and then I went to the Police Box to talk about it with the local policeman. He said it had nothing to do with him, I argued a lot about that, and then I went to the City Hall and argued a lot with them too. I thought it had a lot to do with them, I thought they should really take some interest. We argued a lot, me and the Police, and me and the City Hall, but we generally didn’t get mean.

I thought they were kind of funny even when they didn’t respond like the Police and the City Hall people always responded on the Television. But they didn’t take an interest and anyway one of those kids came round and kind of confessed.

They were such funny kids, even when I had them lined up in a row and was interrogating them in the most severe way possible I couldn’t help but think how funny they were. Really really sweet, and then at the same time total ratbags. We thought you must be rich, they said.

Anyway they had already spent the money trying to make friends, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Eventually I had a visit from the grandmother, she wanted to know if I’d noticed anything stolen from my house. So I told her about the wood stove money. She was a really nice woman. She was going once a month to study about a kind of pastoral education, in Tokyo. She gave me the money back and enrolled the kids in my school.

I asked my student to teach them, because I thought he was a good teacher for them. He told her: it might take a while for their grades to improve, because I’m trying to help them in more things. And I would listen to him teaching the kids, because I usually didn’t have students at that time, and was usually painting a picture or something, and it sounded good. But after a couple of months she came round and took them out of the school. She decided to put them in cram school so their grades would improve.

That was about the time I left.

Centipede

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Centipede

Centipede

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

One thing that I remember so well from my early days with my cat. I used to notice how much he loved to climb the fly-screens over the windows, one day I realized that what he was actually doing was jumping on them and climbing to the level of my head, and that the reason he was doing that was that I would absentmindedly get up and pay him some attention. Generally in the manner of pouring out some cat food for him, or at least wandering over to the window to shoo him down.

I suppose it was at that time that I became aware of him as something more than a cat.

Later on, finding someone to live in my house with him while I went away for an extended period of time, I returned to find him living in an old apartment block, and upon seeing me he returned to live in my house. I went away for ten months, and when I returned he welcomed me, he clearly knew me, I think he may have loved me.

So it’s really my own deception to say that he was just a cat; he was not. He was my cat.

Table

22 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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lehan table

Table

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

When I first moved to Hokkaido I tried to keep my cat inside the house, it was very cold, he was very upset to be moved. But he got out of the house and I couldn’t find him, I looked for two days and called him. On the afternoon of the second day I heard him crying, and I found him up in the machinery of a big truck parked across the road, next to the rice vending machine.

The truck had been gone all the day before, it had returned from its work that afternoon. My cat had crawled up into that truck and it appeared that he had stayed in that truck while it drove all the way to the middle of Hokkaido and back. Did he really do that? Or did he crawl in later when it was warm and he was cold. I don’t know, but I always thought that he travelled all the way to Hokkaido and back in that truck, that’s what I like to believe.

Anyway, he was in his later days a staunchly unidiosynchratic cat who woke me up almost every night we spent together and who would occasionally vomit in the bed at three am, which in the winter was particularly unwelcome.

But he was also measurable in years of days of ordinary life. There were many of them, ordinary days of being, together. He was a cat, and I was not, and I would not be surprised, nor blame him, if he found me uninteresting and if indeed he considered me at all. I think I would be lucky if he did. That was his privilege, as a cat.

He was a cat, and one of the blessed thing about cats is that they are fine company. He was a bit ornery and cranky too, and in wanting to believe that I could manage – to carry him through my own travails – I lived a life way beyond my capabilities. And maybe that was good too, I’m sure even a cat likes a bit of independence sometimes. He found his own patch of sunshine, much more efficiently than I did.

The Cat

01 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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The Cat

The Cat

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

This is a little story about moving.

I moved to a town for the third time. And for the third time I did not bring a cat with me, though the second time I took one. I thought I would go back for him, but now he is in another place that I left him, and he is dying.

He has cat cancer. I should have gone for him a long time ago but I didn’t have the resources to do that. I got an email asking me to go to him, but I didn’t have the resources to do that either.

It was a long time that I knew him; he is maybe nineteen years old now. This is the town that he was born. Did he want to be here when he died? Would he have preferred to be with me when he died? I don’t think that he would have cared.

Somebody picked him and his brother up off the river bank, down south in the town, when they were very small. If you go down to that particular part of the river bank you’ll find cats that look just like him. If I were free to behave in the way I would like to behave, then I would be going down to that part of the river bank looking for another kitten, or possibly two more kittens, to bring home, that’s what I think the moment of him dying means. But I am no more free to do that than I was to jump on a plane and fly to his deathbed.

There is an orphanage in Vietnam, that I visited once, that I made a promise to; to try to come up with a solution to a problem they had. It is a promise I haven’t been able to keep as yet because I haven’t figured out what the solution could be and I don’t want to give them a solution that doesn’t work.

And there are one or possibly two kittens on a riverbank just south of the centre of this town to whom I feel I have an obligation.

These are my most important obligations, at the moment, though I may never manage to fulfil them. They are not important for any particular reason. I think that I should have much more significant obligations as my main obligations, if I am going to have any. But I don’t. One is a promise that I thought was important, and the other is my grief, which I have suspended temporarily.

The Disappointment of a Cat

07 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by in Lehan Winifred Ramsay

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Palette knife cat

Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

George is disappointed again. The big black dog has caught him and put his jaws around his neck and shaken him, and George is lying on the ground waiting for him to stop. Some pieces of black fur have been caught up by the wind and are flying away. George has unblinking eyes and a limp body. He is not injured, just a tiny bit, but he is very disappointed. I have never seen a cat express such disappointment as George.

He wasn’t much bigger than George when he arrived, this dog. Now he is ten times bigger. George started the play but now it hurts him and the dog doesn’t understand that. The dog likes George. He thinks that’s what you do with cats you like. George likes the dog. That’s not why he lies there though.

When the dogs eat their breakfast George goes to the back door and prepares for the walk. He watches out the window and considers which direction we will be walking in. If he is confident he goes to the left or the right and waits there. He is not always right. George wanders along with us, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind and if a car comes he lingers in their path so they have to stop, and when he is happy with the way things have gone he moves to the side of the road. Every day during the walk I scold him, and every day after the walk I thank him for being still alive.

I made my first painting with a palette knife. It is not a picture of George. Actually I think it is a picture of me. It looks much more like me than it does a cat. Hunched up, claws out, frowning in concentration.

I really don’t want George to look disappointed. I don’t want his neck to be broken by the dog, or for him to die under a car. But it’s not my ability to change what might happen. All I can do is remember to look into George’s unblinking eyes every day and say thankyou.