Last Sunday, I was worried. My wife, Jane, was worried. I had been diagnosed with a retinal detachment in my left eye. We would be driving the next day to Atlanta, about a two and a half hour drive (traffic permitting, which it usually doesn’t) for a second opinion. Often for retinal detachments one is instructed not to read for a period of time, and I was thinking about what it would be like not to be able to read for any length of time. My wife was worried about me and worried about having to take care of me. For me, reading, right after eating and sleeping, has been an essential function of my life as long as I can remember, and I was thinking of how much I take for granted my ability to read, and how much I owe to the marks on a piece of paper or pixels on a screen that allow me to summon whole worlds.

So we got into our car in our parking lot at about 2 in the afternoon, preoccupied, about to run some errands. Two women (most of the people in our complex are college aged) were lying on the ground, peering upwards into the innards of an SUV. We asked what the problem was. One of the women said she had been driving around for about an hour, and she kept hearing the cry of a cat. We waited a while, and we heard it too; a high-pitched shriek, definitely a cat, the frightened meowing of a cat who somehow had gotten herself stuck in the space between the engine case and the front wheel assembly. So we started to lay on the ground too. Jane saw the cat’s eyes, but we were unable to coax her from her hiding spot. We tried plying her with catnip and cat food (we already have two cats) to no avail. We didn’t know what to do. We know the woman who owned the SUV did not want to drive it again with a cat stuck inside. Around 8 pm the women knocked on our door, with a gaggle of friends. A very tall and long limbed young man had reached into the part of the car where the cat was hiding and grabbed her. She was quite friendly, a tiny little black kitten. So what did we want to do with her?

We took over (Jane took over.) Without any discussion, the cat became ours. We called our cat sitter, who works for our vet, and brought the cat over to her. (We were going to Atlanta, early in the morning.) The cat sitter brought the cat to the vet, where she still is. She’s too young to come home with us yet, but she will soon.

So the next day we drove to Atlanta, the traffic wasn’t too bad for Atlanta, went to the ophthalmologist, waited around for a few interminable hours, a few people put some drops in my eyes and shined some very bright lights in them. The eye doctor’s verdict was that I didn’t have a detached retina, but had something else, which isn’t going away, and my retina has some wear and tear, but no surgery in the immediate future. So all in all, a better verdict than either Jane or I expected. We are relieved. And we are the owners of a new cat, which we named Fredi, after my late brother, Freddy.

So is there a connection between rescuing a cat from a car and the news about my vision? My strong feeling is that there is. I can’t explain it. The cat came into our lives when we were thinking obsessively about ourselves, and she forced us to pay attention to her. I thought of something Howard Thurman once wrote in a letter in 1943, and please excuse the gendered language. “I think there is a difference between a man’s fate and his destiny, for fate has to do with the operation of individual law, or moral law upon him in ways under which he has no control and for which there is no logical personal responsibility. A man’s destiny has to do with what he does with his fate.” What Thurman says about men, or people, can apply to cats as well. Fredi refused to accept her fate, and I think she was telling me not to accept mine. Perhaps any connection between my finding of Fredi the cat and the report from my ophthalmologist was a sheer and mere coincidence. That certainly is the most rational way of thinking about it. Just because our species has an unequalled ability to make connections between disparate events is no reason to think those connections are real. But there are times when I think I glimpse, if only for a fleeting moment, that the universe is not totally random, and not entirely indifferent to me and my little life. And that my life is not entirely contained within my body, and that what happens is more than just happenstance. That is what happened when we inherited Fredi the cat. That is as close I get to what some people call God. And in the horrible, terrible, evil times we live in, little kittens get stuck in cars because someone wants to tell us that if we cared about our fellow humans one-tenth as much we cared about helpless cats, the world would be a much better place.