Day 98 of 100

“Do you really want to stay?”

In 2016-17 I commuted to Seattle from San Francisco weekly. Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday I was in Seattle, and the rest of the week I was home. It was brutal.

As time went on, I started feeling more at home in Seattle. I would fly Into SEATAC and think about how beautiful it was and then return to SFO and think about how stale it looked.

I knew I was going to move.

At the time, I had three cats, Winston, Calin, and Max, and one dog, Taylor. When I started my first company Current Wisdom, we worked out of my house and decided to get a couple of cats to keep us company. Hence C+W, Calin and Winston.

Calin is a Calico, and Winston was a black cat. Funny but a hunter. He could catch almost anything from pigeons to rats to whatever he seemed to put his eye on. Even as he lost teeth as he got older, his hunting vibe never stopped.

When I lived in San Mateo, I lived next to a wonderful retired couple. He was a retired firefighter, and she was a writer. She would sit in her second floor writing room with the window open, and every morning Winston would climb through the window and spend time cuddling with her.

As time went on, he spent less and less time at my house, and more and more time at my neighbors.

When I finally decided to move, I knew that Winston wanted to stay. I went over to my neighbor’s house and asked them if they wanted to keep Winston.

“Funny that you ask,” they said, “we were going to ask you if it was ok if he stayed.”

Over the next few days I packed my stuff, and on the day I was ready to drive north, I put all the animals in the car, but Winston was nowhere to be seen.

As I closed the car door, I looked down and there was Winston. I petted him and he purred. I started trying to figure out if he wanted to come after all.

I looked up to the car, and then back to Winston just as he ran next door, climbed the fence and entered the writing room window.

He was home.