Finding meanings

I’ll admit that I always see deeper meanings in things. For example, my son Joe found two cats in the woods. They were too young to be left without a mother and so they became ours. Joe fed them with cat formula using an eyedropper. They were going to be named Jake and Elwood, after the Blues Brothers.

But, somehow Elwood stuck but Jake became “Red,” partly because he was more red in color than Elwood but also because we found him on the curb. When our oldest son, Dan acquires anything from the curb, he says that he got it from “Red’s garage sale.” Names are complicated, suffice it to say.

Back to Elwood. We had the cats for seven years, Joe had gone off to college and one evening, Pete (my partner) came home from work to watch Elwood have what seemed to be a heart attack. It was very dramatic. He was trying to eat, then it seemed he couldn’t breathe. He did a somersault and died.

I was telling my friend, Shannon the story a couple days later. I was telling her that the two cats were so much like the two sides to Joe’s personalities. It scared me with him being away at school. I started to say, “Perhaps that means that part of Joe’s personality is dying as he matures,” but she interrupted me and said, “Not everything means something.” I was caught off guard. I said, “of course everything means something.”