TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When I graduated with my MFA more than twenty years ago now, I taught at Gettysburg College. The town was full of college students, plus a constant influx of tourists and history buffs who wanted to see the Civil War battlefields. I was hired on a one-year appointment for an up-and-coming writer, which meant I had to find a place to live for that academic year. Luckily, a professor in another department was leaving for the year on a research sabbatical, and she needed someone to stay in her house and take care of her cat.

Gray was an inside-outside cat; he slept in the house at night, but he was free to roam during the day. Mornings and nights, I noticed he barely touched his food bowl. At first I thought he was a picky eater, but then I saw what was happening. He would wander to the senior living facility behind the house, where the residents fed him table scraps. Who wouldn’t prefer chicken and dumplings over dry cat food? Gray had a good thing going!

I was only a temporary part of that system, so I let it continue. Today’s poem examines the many possibilities of giving love in a temporary world.

True Story
by Camille T. Dungy

The cat wandered between two women.
In one house, kibble and clear water.
Sometimes, bits of roast chicken, even,
sometimes, translucent fish skin.
That’s the house that first called her
its own and, for all those nights until
she found the other woman, she’d purred 
there without asking for anything more.
But, I’ve already told you, she found
the other woman. Whose house held
the wondrous calm of no children. A blessing.
Wet food in the kitchen. Catnip growing
for her in the yard. The women came
to be like sister wives. Accepting, if not
companionable. Opening and offering
everything when the cat came around.
For years this continued. They lived
next door to each other, the women,
on the wooded west slope of a mountain
whose winding road runners liked to climb.
The cat lay her body down first on one bed
then on another until the arrangement settled
into a system as unremarkable as love.
One woman believed, as Issa believed,
that in all things, even the small and patient
snail, there are perceptible strings that tie
each life to all others. The other woman
was born in Chicago. There, the lake’s current
carried a Black boy past some unmarked line
and a mob on the white beach threw rocks
until the boy was no more. She didn’t
side with the mob, this woman, but she knew
where they came from. She came from 
there too. When the cat got sick, the woman
from Chicago wanted to put her down quickly.
Keep her from all this suffering, she said.
The other woman wanted not so much for her
to live forever as for her to fully live
every second of her allotted time. Meanwhile, 
winter rain threatened the shallow-rooted
eucalyptus on the hillside. Meanwhile, 
the runners still ran. The women argued
in their divided driveway about how they’d prefer
to die. Until she didn’t anymore, the cat
continued eating in both the women’s houses.

“True Story” by Camille T. Dungy from AMERICA, A LOVE STORY © 2025 Camille T. Dungy. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.