I thought I needed letters after my name. I hang out with cats with letters after their names.
I am trying to untangle my acronyms. If you want to feel considerably less intelligent, I can pour you some cat-disease alphabet soup. Begin with FIV, feline immunodeficiency virus. The retrovirus muffles the immune system. FIV is transmitted by deep bite wounds between tomcats with heads the size of cantaloupes. By the time I meet them, they are neutered retirees and walrus impersonators. They loll jowl-to-jowl in the cat shelter. They are mellowed mobsters who found sanctuary and new names. Many FIV+ cats will be adopted.
Others have FeLV, feline immunodeficiency virus. FeLV is a retrovirus. Infected cats are prone to complete immune collapse, unless they are not. FeLV is a leading cause of either early death or bragging rights. FeLV is as poorly understood as dark matter or Bob Dylan’s enunciation for most of the seventies. I know FeLV+ cats who have lived weeks. I know FeLV+ cats old enough to matriculate at the community college.
FIV is a fighting disease, but FeLV thrives in a circle of friends. FIV scrawls “meet me in the parking lot after school.” FeLV slides off sandpaper tongues like a sonnet. In a species where saliva is a love language, FeLV spreads like glitter. Once infected, an FeLV+ cat becomes a kind of Typhoid Tigger. Most FeLV+ cats will be euthanized. Shelters are small, and dark matter is daunting.
Which brings me to the letters after my name.
I have letters after my name, but they are profane, so I do not use them. The saints in the catacombs would rise up and declare me anathema if I did. But the transcript says what it says. I am Angela Townsend, M.Div. That’s Master of Divinity for anyone playing Blasphemy Bingo. Although they sound more appropriate for persons named Skeletor, these letters are the province of pastors and chaplains. Some such vocation was my plan.
“Plan” is the wrong word. I was infatuated with The Love Of God and inoculated against details. Academia had always been my tomato soup. I acquired languages like cat figurines. I was raised by brainy Jesus enthusiasts who endorsed my comprehensive crush on all cerebellums. My mother returned to college when I was five, and I sat at L-shaped desks slack-jawed, clasping my She-Ra Princess Of Power figurine and metabolizing the idea of ideas.
Jesus plus ideas equaled seminary. I delegated the details to the Trinity. I cried at convocation and in lectures about reconciliation. I dressed as Eusebius the Lesser for Halloween and protested torture on the Princeton Battlefield. I learned I had no interest in preaching, or in a potluck dinner diet providing 800% of my recommended daily dose of Velveeta.
I wanted to hold elderly hands and tell them about The Love Of God until they believed they were lovely. I wanted to write about what I barely knew so that someone else might barely know along with me. I wanted to marry Bonhoeffer and Nouwen and other theologians who had the bad manners to be dead. I wanted to incarnate the word “irrevocable.” I did not want to be a pastor.
So, I would get a Ph.D., and marinate in the marinara forever. I would display Ugaritic and Aramaic in my curio cabinet with Greek and Hebrew. I would lead luminaria-bearing students through the scarry world, singing Mavis Staples songs. I would publish. I would take a job among the perishing while I got my applications in order. I would miscalculate my ability to leave a sanctuary.
There is a standard-issue bleeding heart, and then there is the wet wiffle ball inside my chest. I leak in all directions. My empathy is promiscuous. I applied for eighteen jobs on The Nonprofit Connection. I accepted a public relations position at a shelter for the cats who other shelters don’t want. The founder asked why he should trust a “defrocked priest” to stick around. I told him the shelter was a parable. Also, I had never been properly frocked. He introduced me to a Maine Coon with no eyes and a ruff to rival any provost. He said the cat was called Bishop Pantaloons. I recognized this as an act of God.
The founder would not sign my offer letter until I met the double-positives, infected with both FIV and FeLV. He schooled me in the soup. The cats did not compute. Nobody in this solarium appeared to have scurvy or self-pity. A black zeppelin with extra toes established sovereignty of my lap. An entity I could only diagnose as a meteorite galloped guerrilla mirth in circles. A cat with a Tom Selleck mustache entertained the Ancient of Days by making snow angels in the grass. A sylph the shade of nougat etched infinity signs between my ankles.
I had to sit down. Were they all terminal? The founder said anyone with my degree should know the answer. He acknowledged that there is knowledge and there is knowledge. It is one thing to say the creed that anyone with bones and breath is precarious. It is another thing to know them personally, to hold them to your cheek like the pet of the Spirit, and then to have them taken where you cannot follow. Yes, they are all terminal. Yes, that is why they are here. Yes, we are fools. I asked the founder if he was a spiritual guy. He said he listened to a lot of Warren Zevon, and that’s as far as he will go.
I did not intend to spill that I would only be here for a year. Nine years later, I am still in the shelter. So is the meteorite. Others have died. Others have lived. The founder has given me an obscene wide hand to tell their stories. I noodle on resurrection in the vernacular.
I have recurring dreams of the Sugar Plum Fairy scolding me for wasting my talents and giving up on my degree. I steal her wand and use it as a toy for the chancellors and gluttons who have terminal diseases. We have three hundred volunteers, aging from twelve to ninety, and I hold their hands in the laundry room. I conscript cats into claims that everything is going to be alright. I hide in the solarium with the meteorite when I can’t see the face of God.
The founder says he still sees me as the twenty-six-year-old defrocked priest who had no intention to stay. Many planes have taken off and landed around my eyes and his since then. After the volunteers leave, he brings a smart speaker into the solarium and plays “My Ride’s Here” for the double-positives. I have seen him dance without spilling his stew.
Sometimes reporters ask me why we spend so much on animals who may not be here long. My direct appeal to Jesus or cats will not suffice. I ask if they have ever seen a hibiscus, the rhinestone brooch of the hothouse. A hibiscus is a rave in magenta. It is gaudy pride and unrepentant life. It is shaped like a teacup, if your host is the Mad Hatter and you take your oolong by the fifty-five-gallon drum.
The hibiscus flower lasts one day. One. Then it drops, a billion-dollar program cancelled after a single season. You will find its petals like desiccated slices of bologna on the ground. It is possible no one saw it bloom at all.
I tell the reporters the flower mattered. It is the novel you started to write. It is the cairn of smooth rocks you stacked at the state park. If the reporters’ eyebrows twitch, I get louder. It is the song you sit in the driveway to hear to the end. It is the grandparent you met only once. It is the purr, a complimentary hum whose frequency is the same hertz that knits broken bones. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. It is the end of control. It is irrevocable. You can write that down.
Angela Townsend writes for a cat sanctuary by day. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and seven time Best of the Net nominee, and her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, CutBank, SmokeLong Quarterly, Terrain, and West Trade Review, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet mother is her best friend.