Temporalization and "forward-looking"

The cat - or, as I say, my daughter's cat - had not come back.  In the drizzle it would not go far, so I had opened the door and had a moment's peace.

But the sun came out without my noticing, a few drops fell from the new spring leaves, and the evening was filled with a bright warmth which the day had lacked.

The distant sound of freeway traffic was pierced by blackbirds calling - the meow of the little cat was not to be heard.  There is no silence on the rural edge of the city with its ring roads and bisecting highways.

The cat should live to see me an old man gone white, should we both be so lucky.  But now it could not be found and my daughter would return from her evening with friends to the absence of the cat.

The neighbors and strangers out walking must have thought me strange.  Why should they need to know the cat's name? (She comes when called - less often for me, always for my daughter or her mother.)

The search for a cat is a search along edges and under bushes - you walk watching for a slinking tabby in the shadows.  Few cars comes down our quiet streets but each is too loud, too fast, each driver too distracted.

Each time I retrace my steps it seems surer that the cat has gone into the marsh land with is coyotes, racoons and feral cats.  Two large dogs are not on a leash.  A rabbit crouches under a pine.

Delphy has never left the yard before, never been seen to cross a street, but there are streets between this row of houses and those birds - the birds in the cedars north, the birds in the pines south, the birds scattered to the west.  And east there are there are so many squirrels.

She has a current tag for the town on her collar, but the distant din of the highway crossing - unseen and hundreds of meters away - but too loud for any tinkling collar to be heard.

Not having a cat will be a relief - she is so demanding, such frightful claws, and as dense as she is also the smartest of cats.  Her hind legs are jet black velvet. Black tuffs crown her ears.  She is the most beautiful of small cats.

And now I know she is gone, and the embedded chip is no consolation, and now I am watchign the pavements north, south, west and listening for brakes screeching.  Each car that rounds any corner is going too fast.  Why could I not have been more patient? I always sit with her outside.

And there she is, over on the next avenue, sitting at the front door of a pale yellow bungalow - a ranch-style house - not at all like home.

A very long half-hour or so is over.

The reason S u. Z is not psychological-anthropology might been seen this way: the search for the lost child is not a formative experience in a typical life - but consideration of the search for a lost child might be the occasion for adumbrating some feature essential to illumined human existence.  In Heidegger, unlike Marcel, the child is merely absent.

For the loving parent, the loss of a child is trully unthinkable, unimaginable - an unlivable outcome - a future history which we refuse to project.  This is not biology, though it has its biological basis.  This is not mere bonding and imprinting.  It is not necessary for the good parent to ever even entertain such a loss in any but the most abstract, detached mode.