Adventures with Supercat

The other night I was wakened by the sound of someone rustling around in my bedroom closet. I got up and opened the closet door and found that Kato the mystical cat had gotten stuck in the bottom of my laundry hamper, which is quite tall and was almost empty. He was scrabbling with his claws against the plastic sides of the hamper. I started to reach in and get him when suddenly he decided to use his back legs instead of his front legs – and in a single bound he leaped out of the hamper like Superman, rising in a gravity-defying arc and almost crashing into my chest. I’ve seen him do the Supercat leap twice before, once when catching a butterfly and once when catching a moth. And, of course, he is able to leap to the top of the refrigerator with a single bound.

Kato frequently wakes me up in the middle of the night with his antics. It’s hard to get mad at him, though, because he still does Reiki healing when I experience pain from Guillain-Barre Syndrome (as I wrote about back in 2003, in the article Ministers in Fur). I woke up early one morning last week with a dull achy pain in one of my lower legs. When he saw I was awake, Kato came over and laid down on the leg exactly where it was hurting. I went back to sleep and when I woke up he was still on my leg, purring rhythmically, and the pain was completely gone.