Recently a close friend suffered a failed adoption of a cat. Our friend liked the cat, but his veteran cat didn’t jibe with the youngster. My husband fell in love with the new cat while I was away at our other home in Mexico.


I started getting photos of this love affair, and pleadings for us to take the cat, at least for a trial run, so he didn’t have to go back to the Humane Society shelter. “He’s not like a cat,” my husband said. “He runs up to you for pets. He’s like a dog.”


We are not cat people. We are dog people. We’d both owned dogs before we were married, but our travels these days make the high demands of a permanent dog difficult. Instead we’ve fostered dogs for the Humane Society, and we dog-sit through the Rover app, though we’re down to just one frequent dog-sitting client, an adorable pit-lab mix from the neighborhood who we have a few days a month.


I wasn’t optimistic about taking the cat. But I hate to see any animal go back to a shelter. I agreed we could take the cat as a foster, like we do with dogs, until a suitable new owner could be found. I said we could keep the cat permanently only under a set of conditions I knew from friendships with cat owners that no cat could meet:


• The cat may not shed hair all over the house.

• The cat may not jump up on food-preparation surfaces.

• The cat may not wake us up at odd hours.

• The cat must be fastidious about using his litter box.

• The cat must scratch his scratching posts and not the furniture, or us.

• The cat must be sweet, and kind, and humble.


The cat moved in. I crossed my arms and waited for him to become a problem. For the first week he hid at undisclosed locations, for hours, to the point where we worried he might’ve slinked off and died of something, though his food kept disappearing. Once in a while he would emerge, be cute, and vanish again.


My husband still “goes to work,” but I don’t, as a writer who has retired from academics. The cat began to visit me during the day at my writing table. He seemed to understand I was the one he needed to convince. His PR campaign consisted of frequent nuzzling, leg-brushing and belly presentation. At points he would scratch his scratching post, and only his scratching post, while looking over at me as if to say, are you watching? Whatever he would leave in his litter box he would bury discreetly. Somehow he was keeping all his fur on his body.


“You can’t keep this up,” I told him.


He gave a look that said, try me.


I decided to interact with the cat; he’d earned that much. If nuzzling went on long enough I’d move from my writing table to a nearby sofa and give a whistle. He’d dutifully jump to my lap for pets, instructing me where he liked it and where he didn’t and where he liked it too much if it went on too long.


“This is enjoyable,” I told him. “But it’s not enough to sway me.”


He remained a model citizen. It became a battle of wills. He was waiting for me to accept him. I was waiting for him to turn into my idea of a cat. A friend who has owned dozens of cats across her lifetime came over, got acquainted with our lodger, and said, “Sometimes you hit the jackpot with a cat. Not to tell you what to do, but this cat is a jackpot.”


At the instant where my mind began to accept the idea of a permanent cat, the cat began to turn more cat-like. Hairs began littering the house. He stayed off the food counters but couldn’t resist being eye-to-eye at my writing table. During meditation sessions he would slink across my altar as if to mock the entire serious enterprise, going so far once as to knock my Buddha statue onto the floor with an unmeditative clunk.


I didn’t scold him. I laughed. Something was happening to me, and my husband. We were smiling and laughing more. We were in better moods.


The cat crawled into bed one night and snuggled against me to sleep. I woke up the next morning heavily congested, with a throat that felt as if someone had attacked it with sandpaper. “This is the end,” I told my husband, and the cat’s previous owner, and all our friends, as the symptoms persisted. “I’m allergic to this cat.”


Our moods turned dark, about the cat, and about a world that gives us a cat then makes the cat impossible right when we’re convinced to keep him. I meditated on it a few days. In meditation, something said, check out the allergy. See if anything can be done.


The lab drew blood and tested me for a long list of allergies. I turn out to be a rather un-allergic person, especially for someone of my early-senior-citizen age. Out of twenty-six common environmental allergies, from ragweed to mulberry to penicillin mold, I turned up highly allergic to only one, and it wasn’t cat dander. It was dust mites. Which the cat was dragging around with him like a giant feather duster. “Cat or no cat,” I was instructed, “remediate your environment of dust, and the mites that go with it.”


I ran an air purifier in the bedroom, and we invested in a seemingly nuclear-powered HEPA-filter cordless vacuum that illuminated and removed a stultifying amount of dust-plus-cat from our floors, furniture and bedding. My symptoms improved quickly to the point where I felt better in the house than before the cat arrived.


Not only had I been wrong about being allergic to the cat – the cat had, essentially, cured my lone allergy. The house was now cleaner than before he arrived. And our spirits were better too. All from a cat we feared would cause too much mess and disruption and trouble.


So we've welcomed and celebrated a new family member. His previous owner, a Grade-A Swiftie, had named the cat Taylor, gender clash aside. Our attitude toward Taylor Swift is about as neutral as it had been to cats. But the cat responds to his name, so we can’t change it. He’s decided it for us. Like everything else.


I’ve been practicing Zen for forty years. It took a cat to convince me anew about preconceptions, misconceptions and being open to what the world presents.