The Legacy of the Cat Table   I live with a man who does not read. We live in a house of books: books accumulated by the generations of his family who lived in this house before us, books left behind by prodigal fathers and gay uncles, textbooks, cookbooks, children’s books, and the moldy old Bible, in Italian, that they brought with them on the boat.               These books have seen the house through the floods, deaths, and divorces that mark its sorrows. Some days I am not sure if the books are what hold the house together or if they are what will ultimately bring it crashing down around us. Most days they loom less like literature than so many pounds of paper stacked up to the ceiling that I don’t know what to do. There is no room on the walls for my own books, which remain in boxes out on the porch. It’s okay. My books have only occasionally been on shelves. I’ve moved from coast to coast, city to city, apartment to apartment so many times they’ve barely been unpacked in years. They have grown accustomed to the cardboard, and I’ve grown accustomed to pawing through them in search of the poem, the story, the feeling I’m craving.               Our house is in the lonely valley that lies between the ghost of a mill town and the ghost of a mall town, nestled amongst slag heaps and scrap yards, but it is lush and green and peaceful if you can ignore the traffic - another crash, a moment of silence before the sirens begin and things get moving again. The house was built by my daughter’s great-great-great-grandfather, Serafino Bonomi, nearly a hundred years ago. His eight children grew up in the kitchen while he kept a shop in the front, selling gunpowder and imported cheese to the local coal miners. We found a yellowed photograph of him among the books in what used to be his store, next to a biography of Nancy Reagan. Although he is posing with his horse, his moustache dominates the picture.               I live with a man who does not read, but I can tell that he used to. The evidence is in the stack of books by Richard Brautigan, over a foot high, none of which I’ve ever seen him open. Although they rest casually enough alongside the canon of required reading for high school students, they are prized, quoted, and discussed with all of the earnestness of a young man half his age, a teenager drunk for the first time on words who has just fallen in love with his native language.               This boy sat alongside Kristofer Collins in Jeffrey Dunn’s literature class at Central Catholic High School in Oakland, where he witnessed In Watermelon Sugar read out loud and shared in the epiphanies that hearing it can bring. He discovered the mysteries of language that are revealed, but not solved, when words are liberated from the context of the written page by a human voice and flung into the air and the imagination, where they can mean anything. The man this boy became has pointed out to me many times the Starbucks in Squirrel Hill that used to be a Laundromat outside of which he and Kris once read Ginsburg’s “Kaddish” aloud together. I can picture them sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, knees jutting out from long legs that all the years since have failed to fatten.               The paths their educations were to take would diverge shortly thereafter. I guess without a curriculum to remind you it could be easier than I think to stop reading, to be so distracted by the myriad of activities that consume your time in daily life that you could maybe just forget to. Though I am myself somewhat guilty, it’s difficult to forgive.               I live with a man who does not read, but I’m hopeful that he will again. He’s starting to, anyway. He’s starting with Goodnight, Moon! and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He’ll work his way back to In Watermelon Sugar, but right now he’s starting with the alphabet. “Baby,” he says to our daughter, a name he used to reserve just for me, “Baby, this is the alphabet.” He’s showing her the mobile he made for her, which swirls all twenty-six letters above their heads and casts its shadows in italics on the wall. He explains to her with love that these letters represent all of the things she will ever say and think and feel and know, that they are the basis of language, the lens through which she will learn the whole world.               Ah, to be zero years old, grappling with sounds that are not yet words, enthralled by the sound of your own voice. “Ga-GLY-a-ga-wa-la-muh-BAH!” Each syllable a joyous surprise, unfettered from semantics, emerging from a toothless semicircle smile, punctuated in drool. Baby, what does it mean? I don’t know yet but it sounds sweet as watermelon sugar.               Ten years ago I spent eight months in the Pacific Northwest, making it there in three days on a bender. I left my high-school sweetheart there. I was twenty-two. It took a whole week to get back to Pittsburgh on the Greyhound bus, a mostly sleepless and altogether showerless week in which I contemplated the future. All the while a carnie with Tourette’s who had lost his job and his medication sat in the doorway of the tiny onboard bathroom, twisting balloon after balloon into animal shapes because he could not stop himself. Though the bus looked festive enough with an infinity of poodles and giraffes tucked into its elastic overhead luggage racks, it was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. This was the first of several times that I would find myself drawn back to Pittsburgh from someplace else for reasons I could not quite explain. I still can’t explain. I’m not even from here, I say to myself every time. But now it’s different. My daughter is from Pittsburgh. This is where I made her. This is where I can make things happen. This is home.               At some point before they moved out West, Jeff Dunn and his wife painted an old wooden table orange and hand-stenciled it with bright green cats. This Cat Table is now on our back porch with my boxes of books. Most of the little green cats appear to be leaping and meowing joyously, but one or two look mad as hell. I have never met Jeff Dunn and I have often wondered why he would customize a table this way and then leave it behind for a former student’s child to grow up contemplating. But the precious legacy he has truly left for a generation of his Pittsburgh students, and through them my daughter, is even more remarkable than the Cat Table. It was given him a generation earlier by a teacher he’s never forgotten. Richard Brautigan is merely its vehicle. It is the fundamental enchantment of language. Ellie Gumlock lives and works in Pittsburgh.