Old Songs in a New Cafe Read Online Free PDF

from years of living around animals, and said I was taking him to the
     veterinarian’s office.
    The examination was lengthy, He had worms, ear mites, fleas, and a serious case of bronchitis. I asked the vet, “Is this a
     road cat?” The doctor smiled, “This is your genuine road cat.”
    We drove home together, he and I and, of course, four kinds of medicine in a brown paper bag. He sat on the car seat, small
     and uncomplaining, watching me, bright face hopeful The nursery opened. Roadcat had come to stay.
    And it is here, before going on, that I must deal with the issue of sentimentality. If I do not come to grips with that, you
     might dismiss the rest of what I have to say as mawkish and lacking sound perspective.
    Humans have an arrogant manner of ranking life, as if some squat, three-level hierarchy of existence were fact instead of
     intellectual artifice. God by various names is way up there, of course, in the first position. A little further down, just
     a little, lies humankind. Below that, and far below, according to common belief, rests a great squishy level of everything
     else. Here, we find plants and animals. Maybe even rivers and mountains.
    All right, let’s admit that some transcending presence roams above us. Some call it God, some call it science. Others of us
     see it as a design so perfect, a great swirling form of truth and beauty and justice and balance, that cosmic ecology might
     be our term.
    That leaves us and the rest. And if you’re going to attempt rankings, you better have some criteria, some standards of measurement,
     to use in making your judgments. The problem is that we humans generate the criteria by which the rankings are made. That’s
     letting the fox in with the chickens, or the cat in with the canary, or us in with beauty. Take your choice.
    I read the philosophers sometimes. They have criteria, such as consciousness and the ability to use technology, for determining
     who and what get to belong to various communities. But I do not trust their judgments, for the reason just mentioned. I prefer
     to think of civilizations that are, well, just different—separate, but parallel and equal.
    And I don’t spend much time trying to create workable taxonomies either. Others do that sorting rather competently. But taxonomies
     always end up looking like hierarchies, and things eventually get a little too classified for my taste.
    So I just coast along with the notion of parallel civilizations. It works pretty well for me. Bears and butterflies, trees
     and rivers. I try to live alongside rather than above them. Our world is fashioned to make this difficult, but I try.
    Those of you who see things differently, as a matter of “better than” or “on a higher plane than,” are to be pitied. I’m sorry
     to be so blunt, but I know your view is only one way, and that is down. As such, you miss the grand vistas, the shuddering
     sense of wonderment that comes from looking out across all the civilizations riding along together on Eddington’s great arrow
     of time.
    And so it was with my friend Roadcat. Riding along on the arrow, we turned the days and marked the pages together. We grinned
     at each other over sunny afternoons on the deck, and, while he rested in the crook of my folded arm, we tilted our furry heads
     and stared high and hard at the lights of space just before dawn. Green eyes looking. Blue eyes looking. Wondering about ourselves
     and the others out there looking back.
    We did that for twelve years plus a month or so. And we came to care, and care deeply, one for the other. He clearly saw,
     as I eventually did, that power and exploitation were not part of the reflections from each other’s eyes. We came to a position
     of trust, and, in his wisdom and elegance, that was all he asked.
    I violated that trust only once. I must take time to tell you about it, for the event contains the thread of a hard lesson.
    Roadcat represented all the classic definitions of