The Bull, The Cat, and What Matters Most

At eighty-two, I've learned that wisdom arrives in unexpected packages. Today, it came wrapped in a zombie movie marathon with my grandson Leo.

"Grandpa, you're not watching!" Leo elbowed me from his perch on the sofa. On screen, creatures shuffled mindlessly, searching for something they'd forgotten how to want.

I smiled, thinking of my father. Stubborn as a bull, that man. He used to say, 'Boy, don't go through life like a sleepwalker. Whatever you do, do it on purpose.' I'd been sixteen, head full of dreams, thinking he didn't understand me. Now, watching these fictional monsters—zombies, Leo called them—I realized Dad had been warning me against this very thing. Wandering through life without purpose, without intention.

Marmalade, my orange tabby of seventeen years, jumped onto my lap. She purred loudly, vibrating against my chest like a small engine. This cat had outlived two marriages, a career, and most of her nine lives. She remembered things I'd forgotten—where I kept the good scissors, which neighbor always snuck her treats, the sound of my late wife's laughter.

"You know what Dad would say about zombies?" I asked Leo.

He paused the movie. "What?"

"He'd say the real tragedy isn't the dead coming back. It's the living who never truly woke up in the first place."

Leo considered this, his young face serious in the amber light of sunset streaming through my window. Orange light filled the room, the same color that had filled my farmhouse kitchen sixty years ago when my mother stood at the stove, making memories alongside supper.

"You're weird, Grandpa." But Leo smiled, leaning into my shoulder.

Marmalade stirred, settled deeper into my lap, and I understood what the bull, the zombie, the cat, and the orange sunset were trying to teach me. Life isn't measured in years but in presence. In showing up. In loving stubbornly. In living deliberately, even when it's hard, even when you're tired, even when you're eighty-two and the world moves too fast.

I scratched Marmalade's chin and restarted the movie. Some lessons come slowly. That's alright. We have time.