Red King, White Dog, Black Cat

The morning light, streaming in your kitchen window

The older I get, the more I’m aware that maybe some experience I’m having will be “the last one” of its kind. And, as time goes on, these experiences get closer and closer together until I imagine every sunrise or sunset will be almost unbearably beautiful.

Now we’ll get to that but first let me go back in time, to when I was seven, and I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It was the first book I bought with my own money. I still have it.

In it, Alice finds the Red King in the forest. He’s asleep. Her companion Tweedledee says “He’s dreaming. Can you guess what it is?” Alice says, “Nobody can guess that.”

“He’s dreaming of you! And if he ended dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

“Here, of course.”

“Haha, no. You’d be nowhere. You’d go out —BANG!— just like a candle!”

The white dog was a small Bichon puppy, who came home with us and became the third sibling in young family. She was all dog — she ran, licked, chased, was chased after…

…stole food, barked in the night, cuddled, loved and was loved.

Long ago it must be. I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you. So it goes.

Anyway, one overcast winter day, I took her for a walk after a fresh white snowfall. The sight of her leash always excited her because it meant she was finally going OUTside to smell things that were literally untouched by human hands.

Now, if you’ve ever lived in a town where it snows a lot, you know how it sounds after a heavy snowfall. It’s … quiet. The air is very still.

She strained against her red collar and pink leash, pulling me impatiently along. She ran over the snow, and through the snow, rolling and tumbling in the cold air. The silence punctuated by the squeaking snow under my footsteps.

Then, under the grey winter sky, she stopped and whirled around. Standing like an ivory totem, she looked at me, her eyes like black marbles. I looked back at her.

I knew then and she knew then (and I knew she knew) that we were experiencing the universe together. The two of us filled infinite space until there was nothing else, just we two. We were the universe.

The black cat came later. He was sleek like a panther. At dusk, he could walk under the dining room table and melt into the darkness.

But he had a tell-tale white streak on his left flank that gave him away. We called it his Harry Potter scar. One night he came home having barely survived some sort of near fatal battle with god knows what — a dog, another cat, a car, a coyote. He cashed in several of his nine lives that night and it got him home safe.

Very early most mornings, he’d jump on our bed and bite my fingers to get me going. I’d follow him down the hallway, his tail curved in the air like a question mark, me emerging into the kitchen to greet the morning’s early light streaming through the window.

Not long ago we lost him. A neighbor found his body curled up on her front lawn as though he had taken a nap. We buried him in our back yard under a flowering bush that offered him some shade.

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. So it goes.

I think a lot more now about what comes after death. But I see it as a trick question.

Not because there’s no such thing as “death,” but because there’s no such thing as “after.” Or “before.” No beginning, no end. There’s only a collection of now-moments. That’s what Einstein taught us.

The arrow of time is just a tool of our animal brain to help us interpret what we’re experiencing in the now-moment. Go home. Pick a spot there. Recall everything that ever happened there. Then you’ll know. You’ll know it’s all still happening. You’ll know that it always will be.

And so when you die, what if it’s just like any other now-moment, existing together with all the other now-moments of your life like marbles in a mason jar? What if it turned out that YOU were the dreaming Red King…

…but this time you woke up to greet the morning’s early light, streaming through your kitchen window?

(Video version)

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