I don’t know what the word would be for it, but I’m feeling all small towny since coming home from work. Picture this scene, if you will: I have a teeny condo within the urban grit of the low-rent side of town. The mean streets. The hood. Alright, it’s not really East L.A., it’s East Cambridge, but it’s still a city. I live alone, so I lock my doors and windows and have a telephone in my bedroom (‘cuz, you know, home invasions).

I also have a small backyard and small deck with a small French door with small windows opening out to said deck. Because it’s my backyard and the street I live on is one-way and quiet, and my apartment is tomb-like in it’s lack of direct light, which is blocked out by the neighboring buildings and a huge tree, I usually keep the French doors undarkened and curtain-free.

So, I’m sitting here watching “Law and Order” and checking some news and whatever on this here ‘puter, and I hear tapping at the glass of my backdoor. I tense, urban ready, threatened, hair on the back of your neck alert. What the fuck? Immediately, I assume it’s Jimmy, my former neighbor and casual crack sampler, discovering that you can walk around my property and peak in my place. I’m freaked and frightened, because I can’t see out. The darkness outside is a reflection back on my well-lit room, therefore I know whoever is out there can see me, while I am squinting and can see nothing. I tentatively approach the class, checking that my cell phone is in my pocket as I approach the mystery danger. I have to cup my hand over my eyes and press my face to the glass. While I’m doing so, I prepare my Jimmy speech in my head — “Get the fuck off my porch and leave me the fuck alone. I’m calling the cops right now Really, Jimmy, leave me the fuck alone and never, fucking never come back into this yard again. Seriously, the police, Jimmy.”

It’s not Jimmy. It’s a middle-aged woman. She’s very tentative, as tentative at me. She had just tapped the glass, but she’s already on the steps back down the porch in that half-turned, unsure, I shouldn’t have knocked pose. Like when you’re a kid who really doesn’t want to try to sell magazine subscriptions and pray no one actually answers the door. I fumble to grab the key on the bookshelf next to the door, so that I can open it. For about a second I thought maybe still I was in danger. Really, she had weight on me, but I have relative youth and speed, and middle-aged women aren’t usually implicated in home invasions that I’ve read or heard about on the news.

Turns out her poor, little one-eyed kitty was stuck on the deck above mine, and she had been knocking on my upstairs neighbor’s door, and he’s not home. In an accent I don’t recognize she explained how at 11 a.m. this morning her cat had climbed the big tree in our back yard and jumped on the deck and then couldn’t get down. Now 12 hours later, I think after trying all day to think of ways of getting the cat down, she was very worried and in desperation was knocking on my door. But, the deck is a good 10 feet up from mine, and I am short and have no appropriate ladder or scaffolding. All I could really do was listen, which is how I know the cat has one eye, It got in a fight with another cat, she thinks, maybe, she doesn’t know, but it came home and the eye got infected and she had to lose it (the cat not the woman). It cost her (the woman, not the cat) a lot of money. I shrugged my shoulders and expressed concern and reassured her that Dave would be home. When she left, I put a Post-it note on Dave’s door, letting him know about the stranded kitty.

I relaxed again. Laughed at my own city fears. Then, another series of taps. Her son, he works and he has a big ladder, but he left at the job he has at another house, but maybe tomorrow he could bring it home. But, it’s been all day, and with the one eye her cat gets nervous. Do I think the man upstairs is home, yet? Her son, he also said maybe rain tonight and now that makes her more nervous, because the cat is afraid of water. She saw my note. Could she maybe ask me to leave anther note with her phone number, she’s not going to sleep, not with the cat and the rain and the one eye. Tell him, he can call even if it’s late. I get my pad and pen. She writes down a wonderfully fluid, foreign girl’s name. Henriqueta, and her number.

I hear my upstairs neighbors feet walking around. I bet the kitty is safe and sound now. Back with his “mom,” happy and calm and eating.

I’ll have to remember to tell my brother’s kitties the story the next time he puts them on the phone to say “Hi” to their aunt.