Ol' blue eyes

Has anybody seen Frank?

All week, I’ve been worrying about Frank.

I haven’t seen him in a fortnight, which is unusual because he’s a stickler for routine. I imagine he’s older than he looks, and he’s always walked painfully, with a comedy villain limp, so naturally I’ve been imagining the worst. If a life is being lived on the teetering brink, then two weeks of absence can mean something.

Then again, it’s been bitterly cold these last few mornings and he might just be cozied up inside. If I were a truly good neighbour I’d knock on his front door and check that he’s okay. It would be a bit eccentric if I did that, though, because I don’t know his family. Also, Frank is a cat.

Frank! Ol’ blue eyes, named after the crooner in chief! And just like Sinatra, Frank is three parts charisma and one part Mob.

I once fell into conversation with his owner, because Frank was following us along the block. He said Frank was a rescue cat from Eastern Europe who had travelled the world with them. This made sense, because Frank is all hunches and angles - nothing like the fat tabbies or tortoiseshells sunning themselves on other fences around Karori. His pale coat is wild-looking, like it’s bristling with static. His teeth are something else. Sabre-toothed, let’s call them - his canines look the length of a finger. Frank yawned close to my face once, and I nearly had a stroke.

He’s seen things. He’s possibly done things. He may live in Karori under witness protection.

He’s dirty blonde, is Frank; and like Sinatra, seemed to me at the height of his power and personality later in life. His limp was due to a metal plate. He fell out of an apartment block in Dubai, I think the story was, but it didn’t hold him back. He went on roadies with his family and in a strangely human way, took a roadside toilet break whenever they stopped for a toilet break. He wore costumes at Halloween; he yowled in Slavic to whomever passed his gate. He often drew a small crowd - little knots of passers-by - with his unusual and lopsided behaviour. He was fascinating. You didn’t know if he was coming over to rub against your hand or to sink his fangs into your forearm and hang there.

He frightened some dogs; mine would step off the footpath and trot along the gutter whenever we passed his house, snatching nervous glances Frank’s way. Lately, he glances at the space where Frank should be.

I’m absolutely hoping for the best, imagining Frank in a full body cast; a cocktail in one paw and a Glock in the other. Still, if a character like Frank vanishes from your daily life, it leaves your street with a little less colour and familiarity. The small pleasures are still there - those delicate flowers in a retiree’s garden. The pointless tin weathervane on somebody’s garage, shaped like a galleon. The bushes that glimmer at night, looped with Christmas lights, and that one tree always heaving with tūī. But an indefinable measure of charm has gone.

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The loss of charming things is happening right now all over Karori, and probably across Wellington, every day. It’s an epidemic, and you can track its progress locally on the I Love Karori Facebook page.

Let’s get the mammals out of the way. At last count there were two lost kittens being sought in this neighbourhood, and Checkers, a missing tabby. I know for a fact a lop-eared rabbit called Thunder is possibly roaming the pines above Karori Park (I know his family, so if you see him, let me know). These are the most charming of the lost things. Mind you, last month someone reported a claw-foot Victorian bath was missing from their front garden, although strictly speaking, that was theft.

Most of still don’t realize our things are even gone. Meanwhile our personal items have been photographed and posted online, under the heading FOUND. Presently, two people in my radius have lost their spectacles and are probably angry with themselves, trying to read a novel with the book held at the furthest point of their reach. Luckily for one of them, a pair has showed up in the Karori Mall carpark and been placed thoughtfully on the sill of a nearby shop.

Then there’s this, possibly the most middle-class of all the recently found items: a rainboot for a dog.

Imagine hobbling home in just three of these

We’ve all seen the flotsam and jetsam of our lives scattered around the suburb - a baby’s hat, blown off in the crosswinds. A little striped sock (sized for a toddler). An earring, worked loose from the wearer, with the butterfly missing. A door-swipe card, because ours is still the city of public servants, although our government is doing its utmost to change that. Once I saw a leek on the road outside my house, and it stayed there for at least four days. It must have tipped out of someone’s bike basket but the idea of picking it up felt too intimate - that was supposed to be somebody’s dinner - so I left it to be pulverized by traffic.

I expect this litter of lost things is more interesting in other suburbs. Can you imagine the detritus of Cuba Street? A stiletto, snagged in a gutter? A juggling ball, one of a set? A page of poetry, torn from a book? In upscale Roseneath, a monogrammed Parker pen? It must have rolled out of the Volvo and into the buxus. In art-loving Island Bay, HAVE YOU SEEN MY UKULELE? I CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT IT.

If you come across something left forgotten on the street, you feel an impulse to be helpful. Single socks or shoes might have little value, but these are lean times, so most of us do what everybody else does: we pick up the thing and arrange it in what we hope is a prominent place, mimicking the moment of loss. Whoever mislaid this will surely retrace their steps, won’t they? Because a baby needs a hat?

And so, there are wet gloves hooked on the points of picket fences, waving weakly at passers-by; battered toys laid on low walls, weirdly aggressive to look at now they’re wholly out of context; scarves tied around power poles, and bobble hats stuffed in the crisscross of chain-link fences. The gestures are tiny and anonymous, kindly and almost pointless, but this is the whisper network of neighbourly living. I want you to find what you’ve lost.

These things emit a weak light - they pulse with something. Hope, I guess. It feels very human, very basic, to be disorganized. Continuing to lose or misplace things in this digital age of optimization, seems almost punk. Despite the gleaming new tools at our disposal (AirTags, anyone?) we choose to be messy, to be imperfect, to rely on the kindness of strangers.

And it’s important to help a stranger, especially now, when it feels like there isn’t enough of anything to go around. The simplest and smallest of kindnesses add up to something, and I believe that it’s freedom.

Without civility, there is no democracy. I see civility as the last possible institution that can be attacked and torn down, because it is imagined, and built by us in the spaces between us. We brace its walls every time we loop a scarf around a pole or pin a sock on a fence, because the person who lost that scarf or dog boot may not agree with any of your opinions. They may very well have voted differently to you (I mean, their dog wears SHOES, for Chrissakes; what could you possibly have in common?).

But in the small exchange of finding and returning, you experience a mutual act of grace. These opportunities seem fewer and fewer, in a world seemingly angrier and angrier. And it’s only a glimmer, certainly, but so shines a good deed in a naughty world, as a man in a ruff wrote once. And I invite all of us to turn towards the light.

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Speaking of kindness,

Emily Writes

linked to my Bridgerton piece last week and because of that, I’m thrilled to welcome some lovely new readers! It’s a lovely finish to a difficult week as, like so many others in Wellington, I’ve been battling a stubborn and sticky cold.

I also need to tell you that I’ve applied to join

SmallStack

, an upcoming library of tiny Substack blogs (each with less than a thousand subscribers). There’s something so delicious knowing there are people all over the world doing what I’m doing right now, which is writing in their pyjamas with their hair in a claw-grip, their coffee cup already microwaved three times, publishing to a small but cherished audience, without exactly knowing why.