Chulo

There’s this street cat in my neighborhood. I initially noticed him not quite two years ago when there were female cats around. He would come through his stomping ground, never searching for much less beg for food, but to make his claim to the female cats. He is short and broad, bulldogish in his features. The first night I encountered him he had a fresh wound across his face, straight down his left eye, as if having been slashed with a razor. He doesn’t meow. Being who he is, he comes with a distinct guttural voice, reminiscent of bullfrogs, not just to call for female felines, but also when he makes a stance for his territory.

I think he might me partially responsible for one of the cat’s death that used to live upstairs. I watched them get into a scat a couple of times, with the older indoor cat barely escaping each time. His ripe age and his tendency to toss himself off the second story balcony may have also contributed to his passing. I’ve watched Chulo chase other cats. Always rooting for the other, since I understood any claw to claw encounter with him would be nothing but lethal. He actually got into it with one of the male cats who resides with me a couple of months ago. A fight worth paying money for according to my daughter. Somehow our residential cat got away without so much as a scratch.

Last night, I picked up Jungle boy from his friend’s apartment to take him home. On the way back to our apartment, as we were crossing the yard, there was Chulo. Face to face with our residential cat, who must have slipped out the back sliding door I used to leave the apartment. I snapped and clapped and stomped and hollered to chase Chulo away. He slowly turned and sashayed off into the dusk of the ending day. Our residential cat was still frozen in his cat hump, hair standing two feet into the air, hissing. I stroked him gently, soothingly touching him, before I picked him up, gave him a quick glance over and carried him inside. He was fine.

Here’s what caught my attention, after it had sunk into my observation. Chulo had just been sitting there. He was not the aggressor this time around. He stayed put, not making a move, observing and appearing to be calculating for a getaway, rather than when to make his move to fight. When he walked off, he walked off calmly, back on his roaming route. None of that aggression hunched in his body posture that I noticed the couple times before when I broke up an encounter with him and other cats. I figured with the previous fight with my residential cat, mine was the one who won the turf war.

But more than that. I don’t know how old Chulo is. But he has had a hard street life. He is not approachable to any random stranger. He must have had countless fights and other endless encounters of having to fend for his life one way or another. And maybe he is getting tired of fending his turf. Maybe he is realizing that most fights aren’t worth the scraps one gets, if any. It reminds me of all the endless “butting heads” with people I have had in my life. I’m not aggressive, nor an aggressor. I don’t seek confrontation. But there were incidents in my life when something didn’t work [out] when I needed it to, and I would go in full attack, armored with the proverbial flail, thrashing my way to “success”. There may not have been that many, but of course in my head they were exhaustingly too many. There had to be other ways of dealing with bureaucracy, red tape, pending approvals of any sort. I would see my anger rise rather cartoonishly in my mind, knowing I would blow my top at whatever human would have to deal with me on the other end, to get the matter resolved.

I don’t “blow my top” anymore. I don’t have that anger rising anymore. It’s not to say that everything works out just how and more so when I want them to. I actually throw my head back in laughter at that fictitious scenario. No, just like Chulo, I have learned to not fight over scraps anymore. Eventually things will work out in one's favor, believe it or not. It’s a matter of perspective and reserving one's Life energy for the things that bring joy and peace.