The Night I Discuss Jupiter With Kitten the Cat

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I walk around the outside of my house at 9 pm to dump the kitchen trash in the trash can. It’s breezy and the remainder of the leaves are wiggling about. It’s chilly, but I sit down on a low stone wall that lines a planting bed. My cat, Kitten, follows and we sit there, one of us petting the other and I don’t need to say who.

The sky is so clear and dark, the heavenly bodies obvious and crisp, I feel melancholy that something so special can disperse my sense of self by its nonchalance. It is thunderously perfect, and it knows not that I am here. But my cat really knows I’m here.

And excuse me, there’s Orion!

The first night of every year that I see the constellation Orion is a personal party for me, a tradition of glee. There he is! I wave hello and smile at my old sky pal — when I say old, I mean old. I’ve written about Orion several times now, so maybe I need to branch out. There are other options.

Like Jupiter.

Tonight, Jupiter is on fire — not literally. It’s larger than anything I’ve seen up there, barring the moon, which is silly to compare. The moon is a monster donut and Jupiter is a pebble of frosting. But it depends on your sweet-treat frame of reference. In truth, Jupiter is 44 times the size of our moon, but not to my eyes. As far as I can tell, it’s the other way around. Things aren’t always what I can tell.

The moon was in my neighborhood earlier tonight, but it left. It’s a waxing crescent these days — tonight at 36%. I took my binoculars out to spy on it, and I could see its shadowed side because of how bright it was and how clear the sky.

I feel like a snoop when I look at the moon with binoculars. It can never spy on me. It’s a one-way voyeurism. Unlike the stars, the moon knows I’m here. We’re neighbors. We sit next to each other in Creative Writing class. I compose stories about the moon, but the only thing it does is wax and wane. I told it to stop shapeshifting and start writing — just the first sentence, just start. It looked down on me with a smirk. “You do you, Steph.”

So, I do. I make the moon my muse.

Tonight, Kitten is my muse, too. She’s an old lady but I still think she’s a baby. It’s that face. She worms around my lap and legs, pokes around the planting bed, and eventually strolls over to the concrete walkway where she rolls on her back and scratches like it’s the end of days.

“Look at Jupiter, Kitten. It’s huge!”

Despite comparisons to the moon, this is true. Compared to the tinier stars littered all around it, and even to Mercury and Venus the old standbys, Jupiter is a healthy-sized dot tonight.

Kitten rolls violently on her backside, scratching and grinding off what you’d think was an army of menace. She glances over.

“Meow.”

Jupiter is a shock to the system, she says. I think that’s a stretch.

What’s a stretch is how long it takes Jupiter to orbit the sun — 4331 Earth days. But since Jupiter spins nearly twice as fast as we do — 10 hours for one rotation — it has a whopping 10,476 days in its year.

Imagine that kind of circadian rhythm. In just ten hours you’ve gone through a day on Jupiter. We need an eight-hour night’s sleep to freshen our brains. Jupiter’s night is shrimpy. We’re made for Earth. We derive from its specifics, so we’re suited to it.

I look at Kitten. She didn’t start out suited to me. She was born on the streets to her mom, Mama. The two of them were born at a random moment in some unknown place but made their way to a foster cat lady who put an ad on Craig’s List, and the rest is cat history. We’ve developed shared specifics and now we’re suited to each other.

But that’s how life is, isn’t it? We’re born into this earthly rhythm in a moment of chaos, then gradually we get the hang of it. We learn the specifics of this place and find the things we’re suited to — even if that means strategies for how to manage the things we aren’t — then we settle into a groove.

If we don’t, we spin like frenetic Jupiters. If we do, we lounge like my cat at my feet right now. Over the lifespan, we’ll do both. The earth ensures that.

At first, my cats lived outside in an ever-changing kittie apartment complex that I was ever-renovating, but once Mama died, Kitten moved inside. Now she can sit partially on my right arm as I type out my stories. This is not how the computer mouse was meant to be used — with a cat on your arm.

But this doesn’t matter when you’ve found your groove and you’ve found a suitable system for yourself. The small glitches might increase your spin, whirling you around as if the day was only ten hours, but then you know to settle back into your rhythm. Once you’ve seen how this works, you know relative serenity awaits you the next time life hands you a glitch. It’s hard to say no to this despite how difficult it is to achieve it sometimes.

If we only knew that we could be more like Earth and less like Jupiter — that we could take less effort to orbit our lives and with much less spin. What would it be like?

It’d be quite the rhythm.

Tonight, I’m with Kitten, the queen of fine earthly grooves. When I’m with her I slow down, offer my right arm as a lounge chair, and tune into her vibrational purr. That purr is probably why humans love domesticated cats. It’s sublime. It’s the ultimate teacher of how to be more like the rise and fall of our breath, rather than the rise and spin of frenzied energy.

Jupiter, with its whirly ways, seems innocuous from afar, but in truth, it’s more than we can handle. Our moon, suited to us, has gotten to be old news, an overlooked goal, but we’re in a perfect groove and that’s no little thing. I don’t want to take that for granted.

I look down at my cat, with her eyes slowly drooping shut.

“Are we in a groove right now, Kitten?”

She looks up at me from my feet like the iconic, sprawling, Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra cat that she is, and simply says in a low gravel whisper, “Meow.”

Yes, she says, we are.

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