Having a Mitty moment with the cat

I am sitting at my desk on a day after the rain, dueling with the muse who wants me to write when, instead, I am in a mood to dillydally, as my mother used to say. I am thus drifting when I sense a presence to my right.

It is an L-shaped desk that allows me to either work or to gaze out the window at the emerald leaves of a storm-dampened tree, while ignoring the pile of notes, letters, press releases, column ideas, doodles and do-lists in scattered piles, just out of sight.

I concentrate hard even when I’m dillydallying, lost in a stream of daydreams that takes me to wondrous places of the heart, where people like Walter Mitty dwell.

I understand Mitty’s world, and have ever since James Thurber created him, when I was a dreamy-eyed kid. I’d stare out of a classroom window and visualize moments of glory so intense they would bring tears to my eyes. When Mitty, facing a firing squad, said, “To hell with the blindfold,” I said it too.

But I’m wandering again. What I started to say was that I am sitting at my desk when I suddenly feel a presence to my right. I turn abruptly and gaze into the shiny green eyes of Ernie the cat.

He sits among the flotsam of my workaday world in a stately Egyptian icon pose, the kind you see on ancient hieroglyphics, and stares at me as though I might be a giant mouse about to dash from the room, through the kitchen and out a hole in the rear wall.

Ernie is midnight-black except for an almost invisible spot of white under his chin. He’s a street cat that my daughter took in and then handed off to us because she already had enough cats and Ernie was terrorizing them, even though he was just a kitten at the time, backing them into a corner, huddled together, tense with fear.

That was a tip-off to his personality, which he demonstrated by biting my daughter so severely she needed medical treatment, and by biting others, although less severely, including my wife, the otherwise tolerant Cinelli.

“Just what we need,” she said one day after Ernie had attacked her toe, “another angry male in the house.”

“I’ve never bitten your toe,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you have,” she said.

I’m not sure what she meant by that, because I don’t recall ever biting her toe, but she has a better memory than mine, so maybe I did.

On the other hand, as I have mentioned before, Ernie has done in mice, rats and lizards that have invaded our canyon home, which is a facet of him that Cinelli appreciates. He kills and flips them into the air in a kind of victory gesture, the way football players used to toss a ball into the stands after a touchdown.

I was coming down from the bedroom one morning when a mouse flew by. I thought it was a soaring rodent from the bowels of hell until Ernie meowed loudly and I knew it was his kill.

At this moment, Ernie is sharing coffee with me. He is dipping a paw into the cup and tasting it. He turns to look at me with the impenetrable expression that cats get and dips again.

“You’re drinking with a cat?” Cinelli says, glancing into the room.

“I’ve drunk with worse,” I say.

“I’m sure,” she says.

There is a magical quality to a cat, especially this one. He appears and disappears soundlessly, leading one to believe he has the power of invisibility, transported on the secret winds of particle reconstitution, like the space sailors on “Star Trek’s” USS Enterprise who beamed themselves about.

“I don’t trust him,” Cinelli says, when Ernie appears suddenly on our bed near her toe, just before we turn out the lights. It was at such a time that he bit her, through comforter, blankets and sheets. “Do that again,” she warned him, “and you’re outta here!”

Fortunately, we sometimes know when he’s around because he yowls loudly in different tones for different reasons, which betrays his otherwise soundless footfalls. It is a kind of warning, like the burst of a policeman’s siren when he wants you to pull over to be ticketed. Or pull over to be bitten.

Cinelli wants to have Ernie neutered but, being a male, I’m not sure that’s a great idea. What’s a man without his cojones? “We’ll just keep him in the house,” I say, “and eventually he’ll calm down.”

“It didn’t work with you,” she says.

Meanwhile, Ernie has leaped up on a shelf by my window and is looking out longingly. I think he is dream-dancing with Aphrodite in a rite of spring as old as sunrise. When my own gaze takes me drifting past reality, it is into a dimension of clashing swords, booming cannons and great deeds. I am the hero of my Homeric fantasies.

I’m there right now, as you can surely tell, in the kingdom of Make Believe, where they are pushing me against a wall to face a firing squad. It is a moment of decision. I say, “OK to the blindfold, but can you bring me a martini first?” Straight up, olives on the side.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.