An Encounter Along a Busy Street

Weep for the world, for the people in it. Cry for the loss of innocence, and the feelings we cannot put into words.


I was walking down the grey, rainy streets the other day when I heard a short cry from a nearby pine tree. By prior life experience, I concluded that pine trees do not yelp, and thus the noise must have come from somewhere beneath the tree.

I slung my weighted backpack off my shoulders, placing it on the wet sidewalk with a soft thud. I wasn't too worried - I only had my physics lab report in it. If it got wet... well, it was a piece of crud anyways.

Kneeling down, I took a look underneath the dripping branches. I must have looked odd to any passerby. My entire body was soaked, and I was kneeling in a puddle (that I had just noticed when I put my knees in it).

As I peered under the tree boughs, I was surprised to see what appeared to be a silvery reflection of my own eyes in the shadows. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the eyes belonged to something else - in this case, a cat, who had unwittingly crawled under the prickly pine, and had somehow gotten lodged inside.

I didn't know whether it had been chasing a mouse, with such blind concentration that it had found itself wedged under a tree, or if it had crawled in to get out of the pouring rain. As I looked the cat in the eyes, it looked me back - a look of predatory instinct, a wariness few humans can fathom, one truly belonging to a lord of the animal kingdom.

I tried to coax it out, but it merely stared at me with an almost amused expression. It was dry, while I was wet, and for a moment I considered diving under the tree to join it. It seemed so content in just watching me struggle to make that connection between animal and human.

Eventually, I gave up. I waved goodbye to the small cat, hidden under the tree. To my surprise, when I had moved a few steps, it dashed out from under the pine, fast as lightning, bolting to the other side of the street. Once it had safely reached the other sidewalk, it stopped and turned to look back at me. Then it was gone.

I don't know what it was thinking. But I felt a little bit honored, as if the cat had taken some time out of its busy schedule of chasing small woodland creatures, just to consider me. For the rest of the day, I walked around with a small grin on my face.

I walked back from school today, along the same street. I kept an eye out for the cat, even stopping to check underneath the same tree. But it wasn't there. Like a ghost, it had stopped, momentarily, in my life, then vanished in the winter breeze. But the few minutes I shared with it were worth my time.

In our busy schedule, where everything seems to happen at the speed of light, when can we find time for small miracles? MSN and emoticons have replaced the spoken word and true emotion, and the advent of technology has heralded the demise of real-life interaction. If only there was a small cat for all of us.

I still check under that tree every day.