Gate Wilder Squid and the Birth of His Idea

Gate Wilder Squid as a Pixelated Baby Kitten (December 1999)
[When my children Erin and Tim were young, I made up bedtimes stories about a cat named Gate Wilder Squid, and I would tell many of them over and over again. Years later, I recorded them into a tape recorder and transcribed them, later editing the transcription. This is the opening story of the series. (Later, in 2000, we acquired our own cat, a Manx we called Gate Wilder Squid as well--Gate, for short.)]


            Now everyone was born in some certain way, and Gate Wilder Squid was no different from anyone else.  Gate Wilder Squid was born in a shoe closet. Very few cats are born in shoe closets but sometimes it happens. His mother was in the shoe closet and she gave birth to him and to his brothers and sisters right on top of the shoes in the corner of the closet. His mother licked them off and cleaned them up and that’s how his life began.            And for the rest of his life, Gate Wilder thought there was something special about that shoe closet. He would return to it and stay in the corner and rest in the cool darkness.              But once he went to the shoe closet and he noticed the mirror in the back of it. Now why there was a mirror in the shoe closet no one was really sure because it was too far back for anyone to see themselves. And it would be even more difficult for anyone to see their shoes from there. But there it was.            On this particular day, Gate Wilder thought, Well, it is pretty strange that there is a mirror there in the shoe closet. And he looked at the mirror carefully, and when he looked in the mirror very carefully, he saw a face looking back at him. Now most people would suspect that Gate Wilder was seeing his own face, that he was just seeing his reflection of himself. But as Gate Wilder moved, the reflection moved, swam through the mirror with him, always keeping up, never falling behind.             Gate Wilder also looked at this face very carefully and he didn’t think it was quite his face. For instance: everything was backwards on the other face looking at him. And he didn’t think that he looked quite like that, and he’d seen pictures of himself, so he was quite sure it was not him. The wrong ear was bent down. He was a little whiter on one side of his face and it was the wrong side. And he was sure this had nothing to do with the reflection, but that it had to do with the cat being a different cat, and the world back there being a different world.              So Gate Wilder paced back and forth, looking carefully, jumping around, sometimes seeing the cat jump around and catch up to him, sometimes missing him. But always the other cat was with him. And then Gate Wilder started swishing his paws at the mirror trying to get the other cat to do something. But the other cat swished his paw right back. And then Gate Wilder went over to the left, turned around and jumped through the mirror, chasing the other cat. And he kept chasing the cat, around and around, in and out of the mirror, from one side to the other, from one shoe closet to the other, back and forth, around, around, and duuzh! he fell tired on a heap of shoes and a pair of pink bedroom slippers. And he just said to himself, Well, there may be another cat there, but that cat never comes over to my closet unless I go over to his. And there’s never more than half of him over here when there’s half of him over there, so he shouldn’t bother me here ever again. So he said, That’s good, and I’ll just leave everything be.            Then Gate Wilder thought for a second and he looked around the shoe closet and he looked out the back of the shoe closet into the hallway where the light was shining down from the high window. And he smelled the slipper and he looked at the shoes and he wasn’t quite sure if he was in his world or if he was in the other cat’s world. He thought he was pretty sure he was in his world. He thought he had kept jumping back into his world, but he wasn’t positive. Not quite.            So for the rest of his life, Gate Wilder kept thinking, Is this really where I’m supposed to be? Is this really where I belong? And he was never quite sure because he was never quite sure if his mother was just the mother of the cat on the other side of the mirror or if his mother was his. But somehow he learned to live with it.  
ecr. l'inf.