Emu Eggs. Egg of Emu. Eggs Containing Emus.

The problem doesn’t so much as start in Portland as it does in Southern California, about eleven hundred miles away. I don’t realize it at the time, but my girlfriend and I are breaking up. One day we are together, a couple. Then suddenly, we are not.

It is early morning, and things are being done around the house. What at first appears to be simple cleaning, chores and the like, suddenly turns into all-out house moving. I don’t recognize the apartment as my own as such, but can tell that I live there with my girlfriend. Or at least yesterday, I did.

When her ex-boyfriend appears, there is also an abundance of cats. After my cup of coffee that morning, I head to the bathroom, where there is a short line of new cats, waiting patiently for their time under the hood in the litter box. This only strikes me as strange for a moment. I am in there on other urgent business.

It dawns on me in an emotion-less way that i am moving out, and my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend of old has moved back in to her life, and our former apartment. But we’re all friends, so this is more like a television show version of the same events than anything real, which is to say, painful but also remote.

He and I are talking before the two of them go about their normal day together, the first in this, their newest reunion. I am apparently going to be finishing up my move out, getting out of the apartment for good just a couple of hours later.

I am astonished again by the amount of new cats. I ask him, how did you get the cats to stay calm in the car for 1100 miles of driving? Of course, I can take for granted that he even bothered to move them too. Why wouldn’t he? His stay and their presence are united in the theme of permanence. And what about Eldridge the Younger, that little white cat I always used to see in pictures around the apartment?

Eldridge? Oh yeah. He dead, he says. Then, he tells me a story, happy to be helpful to both of us now. He says, birds and bird eggs, laughing like my favorite uncle. (This in response to my first question about the effortless transporting of cats across state lines).It’s like you’ve had a gigantic meal, he says, and you’re completely satisfied. A few minutes go by and then suddenly your host brings a few platters to the table and you see that he’s prepared your favorite meal of all. Just the smell of it calms you down. he is explaining all this to you like a high school science teacher.

So it’s the same with driving cats across state lines, he continues. Yesterday I went to this bird clinic sanctuary type deal. I held the birds. Big ones too, cockatoos and flamingos. I got their collective scent all over my hands and arms. I cradled the emu eggs with as much tenderness as I could evoke. I was trying to become bird, that was my mantra. Before we all got in the car to come up here, I fed the cats a huge meal. They were totally wiped out. Whenever they got upset in the car, all I had to do was present them with a forearm, and they’d smell my hand, and relax, cooing up to it like it was their favorite toy.

Maybe this won’t be such a bad arrangement after all. This man has already proven his worth.

(Image Via: Sri Krishna Sai Emu Farm)