Ghosty's Story

Some eleven years ago, we were at a school picnic in Golden Gate Park, having just moved back to the city from an ill-conceived attempt to relocate to the Washington, D.C. area.

Oh, the area was great, and I liked it there, but my wife was unhappy and insisted that we move back to San Francisco.

So we did, and the minute I stepped off that plane and smelled our sweet fresh air here on the west coast, I knew it was no mistake.

We would be raising our three young kids in the best city on the continent, which was fine by me, although it also meant, of course, that my career as a writer would be much further from New York than a convenient Amtrak commute.

In the park on that day, my six-year-old son heard a kitten cry.

Following his lead, he and I crawled through some dense brush to discover a small gaggle of kittens, hungry and sad, abandoned and left to die.

He carefully lifted them, one by one, out of the bushes to me.

Other families adopted some of them but we kept the one he loved the most. He named her Ghosty.

Three years later, his Mom and I broke up. She moved to a house on Bernal; I moved to a flat in the Mission.

During the relocation process, she took the kids back east, and left the cat with me. By this point, I had a girlfriend, and she loved Ghosty.

One night, Ghosty, who has always been an inside and an outside cat, went missing. As the kids were still back east, I dreaded having to tell them that Ghosty was gone, so my friend and I went out back, night after night, calling to Ghosty, hoping she would show back up.

Cats, after all, are notoriously unfaithful, much like human beings.

The kids came back learned the awful truth, and we papered our neighborhood with signs like you've often seen: "Missing Cat."

Still, she didn't come back.

Then, one night, my friend and I were out back calling to her when we heard a faint meow. "I think that's her," my friend said.

We called some more and the cat called back. Over and over we continued this call and response until, gloriously, Ghosty herself lept over my back fence straight in to my arms.

***

Recently, Ghosty was attacked by another animal on Bernal. Maybe a cat or maybe a raccoon. The tear in her skin was huge. Today, when I picked her up from the vet, she said she will be fine.

I first brought her back here, to my place, but she obviously felt disoriented, perhaps even remembering those traumatic events so long ago here, and staying in her carrier and just peaking her head out, as in the photo above.

But when I took her back to her real home, in Bernal, she started wriggling with delight.

Home. Such an enormous concept, such a concrete reality, so elusive when you are not there, and so natural when you are.

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