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My Accomplished Cat
We keep hearing about how Covid has constrained our lives. Well, that is not the experience of my cat, Van Gogh.
Van Gogh has significantly expanded his social and intellectual life during the pandemic. His world keeps getting bigger.
In the photo above, you will see the cat participating in a barre class I take via Zoom. Since I don’t actually own a ballet barre, I use a kitchen chair for the class. The photo is a screen shot taken by my beloved exercise instructor, Paulette. I look pretty miserable — we’ve probably just finished curtsy squats, which are a killer. But the cat is full of beans, batting at my fingers while getting in a good stretch.
Van Gogh enjoys barre, and he also attends my virtual stability class, but his real love is yoga. I’ve done more than one pose with the cat on my back, or under my downward dog. Oddly, he’s not a big fan of the “cat-cow” stretch, but enjoys joining me in the sphinx pose.
But Van Gogh doesn’t only attend exercise class. He also comes to virtual therapy with me. He rarely misses an online session. If he isn’t content to cross back and forth on my lap and refusing to settle down, in a kind of obsessive-compulsive — not to mention distracting — way, he hangs out and eats the plant in my office. The plant is in view of my therapist, so she points out when he’s chomping on the leaves.
