Saturday at Home

This is O'Ryan, the cat we got as a kitten some years ago. Like most folks' pets, he seems to us more human than feline, smarter than your average puss. He's demanding in the way of cats. At turns sweet and annoying, endearing and spiteful. I like to give him the voice of South Park's Eric Cartman. Also like many pets, he could serve as an alarm clock. In the morning, at the first sign of stirring from our bed, he begins to talk talk talk until we get out of bed to feed him.

This morning was the first opportunity to sleep in that I've had in awhile. I went to bed last night thinking that I might get up and go to Cherokee UMC's men's breakfast, but when morning broke, I stayed abed, even through O'Ryan's crying about his poor empty belly until my wife fed him. So, I skipped breakfast and lounged around the house until the gym opened at 10:00. Then I put my mp3 player on and walked four miles, following that with a few rounds of weights.

Okay, so I haven't been home the entire day. After the gym, I made a brief stop by the office and then went to the Buc's Deli drive-thru for a hamburger combo. Then I came home, determined to stay here until suppertime at least!

On days like this, I often think of my ancestors or the people I study in my academic work. I'm talking mostly about folks from the 19th century and earlier. Think about it: in my "day at home" just described above, I probably traveled more and further than many in the old days would travel in a month. What's more, I left my cell phone at home when I went out, and I felt slightly uneasy the entire time I was gone.

Although computers and the Internet and Dish Network and cell phones and heat pumps have been in my life for only ten years or so (well, that's probably not true of heat pumps), I find it difficult to imagine life without them. Not that I like them all that much, really, but they seem to have become such essential tools that they've moved beyond being tools to giving meaning to our lives.

I think of myself just out of high school and attending Mars Hill College in, say, 1979. I can picture my life then, a life without all these gadgets, but I find it difficult to think about living that life again.

I sometimes sit at the redlight and try to picture all the cars gone and all the people just floating in that silly sitting position that we all settle into when we're driving. I think most of us think about our automobiles in much the same way we think about our homes; we might even think of them as somehow alive. But they are really just machines that we close ourselves inside and sit in while the wheels turn and we go places. Do we really have to go all these places that we go? I could have walked around the house and neighborhood instead of going to the gym. I could have eaten something from our refrigerator instead of going out of my way to buy this hamburger with too many onions on it.

Think again of the redlight in town. Imagine all the fuel being burned at that single redlight. Then imagine all the fuel being burned at all the redlights in town, at all the redlights in Tennessee, at all the redlights in the United States. How in the world do we even have any fuel left?

"Simplify, simplify, simplify"--that's what Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. I doubt if that's possible for us, even in the face of a world winding down.

O'Ryan is a housecat. Except when he escapes and makes a run for it--and even when he does he never goes more than a few feet--he's here at home. I don't think I could live that life no matter how much I might want to sometimes.