Have a Good Day - A Journey

A good day is composed of many footsteps. Katty Pulsar for Daydream Misfit

A lived life is composed of good days. A good day is composed of many footsteps. The journey is accomplished by strides which lead you to your destination.

There was a young man of the village whose mother sent him on a long journey. "This cat catches no mice. You must take the animal to my sister, who lives at the base of the mountain. She knows herbs which will coax the cat to accept its own nature as a hunter. Only a stupid son would bring home a cat that doesn't know how to be a cat."

"Yes, mother," the son replied, because he was loyal and also not quite stupid enough to question her.

The young man pocketed a pair of cooked potatoes, filled his gourd flask with water, and searched out the cat. He found it lying on its side, stretched out in the sun. "You are a very lazy cat," he said. "But in truth, I envy you. I would like to spend my days lying in the sun, dreaming and writing poems."

He lifted the cat, which hung limp like a piece of string, and placed it in a bamboo cage. The animal was now agitated and uncomfortable, but after a few minutes, it gave up and resigned itself to its new situation. The angry gleam in its eye, however, sustained.

"You don't have it so bad. You sleep, and then someone carries you around." The cat glared.

The man started on the long journey to his aunt's house at the base of the mountain. It was a cold morning, and the path ahead was covered with newly fallen snow. The trail was lined with trees which had thin leaves which splintered the pale beams of the sun.

Before long, the young man came upon a hermit, sitting on a log beside the trail with a blanket over his lap. The hermit was thin with matted hair and smelled like a goat.

"Are you having a good day?" the young man asked.

"What is even that, then?" the hermit replied.

"A good day is composed of many footsteps."

"Your destination is the place where you arrive. But you are never arriving."

"What do you mean?" The young man was often puzzled.

"If the journey were complete, why does the path continue?"

The young man scratched his head. The cat was mewling and hungry. A cold wind whipped at the folds in the young man's garment.

"Because night is inevitable?"

The hermit lifted his weight up on his hands and the blanket fell to the ground. The young man could see now that the hermit had no legs. The crazed-looking wretch looked him directly in the eye. "Footsteps. Hmmm."

"I must be on my way." The young man tossed a chunk of potato to the hermit, which he caught and looked at quizzically. The cat winced. "Have a good day."

After an hour of walking, the young man stopped to rest on a ridge. He set down the cage containing the cat and sat down on a boulder. As he studied the view of the valley below, his eyes became heavy and he began to sigh. "If I sleep, it will only be for a moment, and then I will be refreshed and ready to continue my journey."

He made himself as comfortable as he could on the flat of the large rock. Birds sang in the trees, the wind tickled the limbs of the trees, and within moments, he was asleep.

In a dream, he was flying through the clouds above a great imperial city. He was wearing his mother's clothes. A pink cloud transformed somehow into his friend from childhood and asked to borrow money. He was embarrassed because he had none.

He awoke suddenly to find that the cat was gone. He realized that when he had set the cage down, he must have jostled the locking mechanism, for the door of the cage stood open, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. "Where are you, cat?" he asked.

He nervously looked behind the boulder. He stood on top of the boulder and searched in every direction. He entered a stand of trees and peered around with his head and neck stretched. He called out to the cat. "Cat?"

The sun was still high in the sky, but the distance ahead was great and there was not much time to waste. The man decided to climb to the top of a tall tree to survey the ground below. If the cat were anywhere near, it could be seen from high above.

He had not climbed a tree since he was a child, but he located a sturdy cedar and leaped to grab the lowest limb. The bark was slick with moss, and it was difficult to get a handhold. With great effort, he pulled his body up to the next limb, then rested. Many times, he felt that he might fall to his death, and he resisted looking down out of fear. Finally, after many minutes, he had climbed as far as he felt the tree would support his weight.

"Climbing was more difficult than I expected," he said to himself as he caught his breath and rested, "but if the cat is anywhere nearby, I will be able to see it from here."

He looked down and saw that at that moment, the cat had reappeared directly below him at the base of the tree. The animal marched gingerly through the snow toward the boulder. When it arrived at the cage, it looked around for the man, and, not sensing him, stepped through the door into the cage and curled up, comfortably.

Climbing back down the tree was even more treacherous for the man since the limbs were slick and gravity was aiding his descent. After great exertion, the man arrived back on the ground and trudged back to the boulder, the cage, and the cat. He drank down half the water in his gourd flask.

"We must eat now, weird cat," he said. "We have a great distance to travel before the sun sets. We cannot be caught on the mountainside at night or we will surely perish in the cold."

The man dug in his pockets and pulled out the cooked potatoes. He looked at the bulbous, fleshy meat of them and his stomach gurgled. He looked down at the cat. "Oh no," he said.

The cat looked up at him as if to say, "Potatoes are poisonous to my kind. What are you even thinking with this? Didn't you bring any fish?"

But the man had not brought any fish. "I am a stupid, stupid son," he lamented. "I forgot to bring food for you. We will have to travel back to our village. Maybe I can retrieve salted sweetfish for you without being noticed by anyone. Especially mother. Then we will hide in the storehouse until tomorrow morning, when we will sneak out before sunrise to begin the journey again."

The young man closed and locked the door of the cage with the cat inside, took a deep breath, picked up his burdens, and began the long trek back down the trail to the village. His calves ached. As the bamboo cage rocked back and forth with each step, the cat's face maintained its venomous expression.

The wind through the trees was a low moaning in the afternoon as he walked. It whispered his thoughts back at him.

The hermit was nowhere to be seen. In the spot where the two had talked earlier, the man saw the chunk of potato he had shared, lying in the dirt, uneaten. "Am I the only one who likes potatoes?" he wondered aloud. He picked up the discarded food and hurled it off the side of the pleasant hill they were on, where it rolled and bounced satisfyingly down into tall grasses below.

As they approached the village, the man was nervous, deciding which approach through the buildings and trees would best conceal his return. But his mother, who was out carrying armfuls of kindling, spotted him immediately as he came into sight far down the road. She set down the bundles of twigs and waited for him to arrive.

His shoulders drooped in defeat. The cat mewed, meanly hungry.

"So! You are back so soon!" she said, without a trace of accusation in her tone. Instead, her face radiated pride and approval. "You are a stupid son. But you are very fast. My sister was good?" Before he could speak, she went on, "And the stupid cat? Now you will be a true hunter."

She wagged a finger at the cat, and the finger slipped between the bars of the cage. The cat lunged at the outstretched digit with its sharp fangs. But the old woman was also quick and withdrew without being harmed.

"Better!" she exclaimed. "And you? You are probably starving," she said, addressing her son. "You are lucky, for there are many potatoes simmering on the fire. Get home and fill your stomach. To have made that long journey and back in only two days..." She beamed, then forgot who he was for a moment, stepped back as if threatened, then remembered herself. "And carry this kindling with your free arm."

"Yes, mother," he said.

When he arrived inside their home, the young man unlocked the cage, and the cat bounded from it with a mighty leap out an open window, never to be seen again. "Goodbye, cat. I will see you soon."

With no particular emotion animating him, he spent the rest of the day lying in the sun, working on a poem comparing the night to soy sauce.

In the end, he thought the poem not worth writing down and forgot it by the next day.

Sometimes the journey takes us where the journey takes us.

---

Neil Oldman for the Daydream Misfit blog

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