george meets george
my high school friend Nevin landed in düsseldorf yesterday along with his wife jodi and their two-year-old son George, just two days after ulrich and i’d arrived back home from pittsburgh. we were both still rubbing jetlag crumbles from our eyes but also pretty excited about their visit, as the last time we had seen Nevin was at my going-away party back in september 2018 in pittsburgh, years before george was born and shortly before nevin and jodi got married. jodi is traveling to Münster to give a talk at a blattodea conference - i.e. on cockroaches and termites, her subject of postdoc research - which i had no idea were remotely related to each other until meeting her for the first time yesterday.
back in high school Nevin and I used to spend over an hour at a time on the phone on wednesday evenings, working together on calculus and physics homework which blossomed into longer conversations about our favorite books, or Nevin regaling me with stories about his peculiar debate club opponents. eventually, nevin went on to become a theoretical astrophysicist - not surprising, given how easily he used to grasp the homework problems which i struggled with - and i went on to climb the corporate consulting ladder and write and tinker and agonize over the meaning of things, persistently questioning what i wanted to be when i grew up well into my late-thirties.
Nevin’s son George has a namesake living in our house: George, our gray tabby cat. On paper, George the boy and George the cat have few things in common: one is newly a toddler, just beginning to test out the boundaries on words and binaries (up and down, big and small are the opposites du jour); the other is a senior cat who is missing three teeth and spends most of the day napping and slinking through the apartment like a ninja. this morning i sat on the bed with George the boy as he tumbled around between his stuffed animals; George the cat leapt up to join us, settling down just out of reach of George the boy. the boy has a floppy heap of blond hair on his head which he gets from his mother although his startled facial expressions and mellow nature remind me of Nevin as a teenager. i coaxed George the boy over to meet George the cat until the former reached out a tentative, quivering hand and let his palm fall on the cat’s back, at the spot along his spine where the hair is thinning and becoming slightly matted. In response, George the cat purred, rolled over onto his back and revealed his soft belly to us, and George the boy rolled on his back and did the same, a perfect, almost-choreographed dance of feline and boy, junior and senior mimicking each other in a secret form of communication that only they will ever know.