D1 chapter One

**Chapter 1**  

**The First Cut**

David Dobbins was born on the 17th of May, 1960. By the time he was ten years old he already understood that the world did not come with guarantees.

His mother, Winette Therese Dobbins, left the way some people leave—suddenly and without the courtesy of an explanation a child could use. He would not learn the full truth of her suicide until he was sixteen. Until then it sat in the house like a piece of furniture no one moved. The adults spoke around it. The boy learned to walk around it too.

What remained was his father, Lawrence Norman Dobbins, born 1940, a man who loved his son in the only ways he knew how and punished him in the only ways he knew how. The love and the violence lived in the same pair of hands. David carried both.

There was a stepmother. She arrived with rules, with religion, with the quiet certainty that three children who were not hers could be reshaped into something more convenient. She failed with the oldest. David was already too far along the road of his own making. When she finally offered the ultimatum—leave or I will—he chose the road. He was sixteen. It was 1976. He did not look back.

He had already begun the long practice of cutting ties cleanly. It would become one of the few skills he never had to relearn.

The years that followed were not empty. They were simply unshared. Military service came next—Fort Knox, then Germany with the 2nd of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. He drove the commander’s track. He listened to cassette tapes wired into the lighting circuit. He smoked what he wanted and answered to almost no one. A drill sergeant once looked at him after basic and said, “We usually change people who come through this program. You haven’t changed a bit.” David took it as the highest compliment he had received in years.

Marriage arrived, more than once. Five times in total, if the counting is done without sentiment. Children came into his life the same way—foster, step, temporary, then gone. He cut the umbilical cord of one of them, named her Amanda Jean, and years later signed his name off the birth certificate when asked. He had a vasectomy in 1990 after a miscarriage that was not his to claim and a life he refused to pass on.

Germany held him longer than most places. He built machines for Volkswagen, Mercedes, ZF. He learned the language of precision and the quieter language of distance. When the last marriage there ended, he stayed another year simply to prove he could be silent. Then he left that too.

By the time he returned to the United States in 2022 he had already practiced the art of starting over so many times that the motion itself felt familiar. Homelessness for two and a half years. The Kern County mission. Graduation from the discipleship program in July of 2023. A one-bedroom in Bakersfield on Goodman Street. Month-to-month. No illusions of permanence.

And then the cats.

It began the way most permanent things begin—without announcement. A feral queen crossing the porch with a kitten. A decision made in the space between one breath and the next: they would not eat from dumpsters while he was watching. That was the first one. Being. The rest followed the way water finds a low place.

He did not set out to become a cat dad. He simply refused to look away. In that refusal the colony gathered itself around him, and the old pattern of leaving softened into something else. For the first time in a long life of clean cuts, he stayed.

The kittens would grow. Most of them would leave. That was the plan. Raise them young, give them the basics—shelter, food, the knowledge of a human hand that did not flinch—and then turn them loose on someone else’s life, the same way life had once turned him loose on his own.

But for now they were here. Under the chair. By the fountain. Tasting pâté for the first time. Learning that familiarity could be a place as well as a person.

David sat among them and, for the first time in decades, did not calculate the exit.

The next chapters will be as replies to this...thank you for reading this far, like if you found it ok. Thank you

David d1

**Chapter 2**  

**Germany and the Long Silence**

The Army sent him to Germany in the late 1970s, still a teenager with a black beret and a tank under his hands. H Company, then Fox Troop, 2nd of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, out of Bad Kissingen. He drove the commander’s track—the sixth vehicle in the column. On the autobahn the formation stretched and compressed like an accordion. Fifty meters. Then twenty. Then fifty again. The gunner in the cupola kept telling him how to drive. On the third correction David pulled the CVC helmet cord free, stood up on the moving tank, and asked the man if he wanted to drive the fucking thing himself. The gunner went quiet. After that they had no more problems.

He wired a cassette player into the lighting rheostat so the music rode with them on maneuvers. When the captain keyed the radio the songs bled into the command net. No one ever made him take it out.

Germany became more than a posting. It became the first place that did not demand he explain himself. He stayed after the Army. He learned the language of the factory floor—Volkswagen, Mercedes, ZF. He built automation that moved with the same precise indifference he had practiced since childhood. The machines did not ask about his mother. They did not ask about the stepmother or the cabin in Minnesota at twenty below. They simply worked or they did not.

Marriage came again. And again. Each one followed the same quiet arithmetic: proximity, then distance, then the clean cut. He was never the one who begged to stay. When the last German marriage ended he remained in the country another full year, living proof that he could be silent when silence was the only answer left. He offered her a divorce with the paperwork already prepared. She refused to speak of it. He had a lawyer send a letter that kept her one hundred fifty meters away from him and anyone connected to him. Then he fired the lawyer and went to Spain for a week. The stone was already cold.

He returned to the United States on the 5th of May, 2022—Cinco de Mayo. Four years of Bakersfield waited for him like an unpaid debt. Two and a half of those years he spent without a fixed address. The Kern County mission took him in. He graduated the discipleship program in July of 2023 with certificates in electronics, electrical work, machine operation, and robotics. The skills were real. The market for them was not yet ready.

He rented the place on Goodman Street. Month-to-month. Nine hundred twenty-five dollars that became a thousand. The property management company in Pismo Beach spoke to him only by telephone and by letter. He asked once for a longer lease so he could plant something that might last. They gave him thirty days at a time.

It was enough.

The porch faced a lemon tree full of thorns. The first time he saw the small gray cat dragging a kitten across that porch he did not think of permanence. He thought only that the kitten would not eat from a dumpster while he was watching. He named the mother Being. The decision was made before he finished the thought.

The rest of the colony arrived the way weather arrives—without asking permission. Dad Cat. Mom Cat. The black feral who kept her distance. Litters that lived and litters that did not. He learned the difference between a cat that would survive and a cat that was already leaving. He learned to clean the herpes crust from tiny noses with a flea comb. He learned the weight of a three-day-old kitten in the palm of his hand. He learned that familiarity was the only currency that mattered to them.

He had spent a lifetime practicing the art of leaving. Now he was practicing the opposite, one quiet morning at a time.

Monster would come later—the tabby that looked like the male version of the Being he had lost a year before. Echo would come to his voice before the others. The small ones would taste pâté on their mother’s nipples and walk through it without apology. The portable enclosure would sit outside under the chair, bed and fountain and food bowls ready, the first piece of home he intended to take with him when the scenery changed again.

But that was still ahead.

For now there was only the porch, the lemon tree, and the decision that had already been made.

**Chapter 3 (Revised)**  

**The Doorstep**

It began with a mother cat carrying a week-old kitten across the doorstep.

David had just been fired from the high-paying job. The days sat heavy and directionless. Then MomCat appeared, thin and determined, a tiny gray female kitten dangling from her mouth. She set the kitten down as if the porch already belonged to it. Two siblings had been born with her: Sisi, a boy who would later be stolen, and the runt MomCat had already discarded in the alley. The remaining kittens became the first quiet trade of the colony—David could take them at will; in return MomCat received food that did not come from dumpsters.

He named the little female Being.

There was no grand decision. There was only the refusal to watch something that small eat garbage while he was present. Familiarity did the rest. Food at the same hours. The same hands. The same voice that did not rise without reason. Being grew up on that porch the way some children grow up in a single room—knowing every smell, every shadow, every reliable presence.

The rest of the colony gathered around the same simple contract. Dad Cat arrived as a large, intact shadow who fathered litters and then returned to his own rounds. The black feral kept greater distance but eventually began leaving her surviving kittens near the food bowls, as if the porch had proven safer than the places she could reach alone. David accepted each deposit without ceremony and began handling the wilder ones early so that future spay and neuter would not become a battle.

Herpes moved through the litters like weather. Crusted eyes. Open-mouth breathing. Weights that stalled. He learned the flea comb, the warm cloth, the patience of cleaning the same tiny face three times a day. Some lived. Some did not. He recorded both without turning away.

Beta, the tom in training, showed a different nature from the beginning. He groomed the smaller ones. He played without true meanness. He never developed a single symptom of the virus that touched nearly every other cat on the property. David left him intact for reasons that were practical and for other reasons he did not yet speak aloud.

Monster came later—the serious tabby who wore the same face Being had worn as a kitten, the male version of the first love that had been stolen a year before. David gave him private time on purpose: the lap, the hand, the quiet minutes away from the pile so the bond would set deep.

Echo was the one who answered to voice first.

The portable enclosure became the outside center of their world. Soft walls, a bed, a moving water fountain, bowls that never changed place. David set it under the chair so the newest kittens could watch Being eat, could take the first taste of pâté from a fingertip or from the thin coating he smoothed onto her nipples. One of them walked straight through the food without apology. That, too, was part of the lesson.

He never planned to keep them all. The intention was older than the colony: raise them while they were young, give them shelter, food, and the knowledge of a human hand that did not punish curiosity, then turn them loose on someone else’s life. Most would leave. Being and Beta would remain. The others would carry the familiarity he had built into whatever rooms accepted them next.

It was the same motion he had made at sixteen, only reversed. Then he had left so he could begin. Now he was preparing them to leave so they could begin.

The property management company in Pismo Beach saw only numbers and ordinances. They sent letters and lists and the maintenance man. David cleaned what needed cleaning, kept the front orderly, and answered when he chose. The fundamental disagreement never changed: they saw a problem. He saw a responsibility he had already accepted the day MomCat set a week-old kitten on his doorstep.

At night, when the kittens slept in a single pile and Being took the quiet hours for herself, David sat with the knowledge that everything remained temporary—month-to-month lease, fixed income, a body that no longer obeyed every command. The cats did not care about temporary. They cared about the hand that arrived at the same hour and the voice that stayed level. Familiarity was the only promise they required, and it was the only one he still knew how to keep without fail.

He had come a long distance from the boy who pulled fire alarms and the sixteen-year-old who walked away from the last blood ties. The distance was not measured in miles. It was measured in the daily decision to remain.

The colony grew around that decision the way vines grow around a fence—because the fence was still standing.

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**Chapter 4**  

**Weights and Water**

The notebook lived on the table by the door. Every few days the numbers changed.

On the first of August the six newest kittens were twenty-five days old. Four hundred sixty grams. Four hundred sixty-four. Four hundred. Three hundred seventy-eight. Three hundred sixty. Two hundred sixty-seven. Most were climbing. The smallest—Tiny—had gained only seven grams. David marked it without comment and adjusted the plan. The larger ones would meet real food soon so Being’s milk could stretch further for the ones who still needed it most.

He introduced them to water and temperature with a single ice cube melting on the concrete. They were unprepared the first day. He repeated it the next day and the day after that. Slow was the only speed that worked.

Monster received the private hours. Echo came when called. The two surviving kittens from the black mother’s litter learned the feel of hands early, firm pressure on the back until the feet settled and the struggling quieted. Dad Cat came once to watch and then left again. The lesson was recorded on both sides.

Outside, under the chair, the portable enclosure stood ready—bed, fountain, bowls. Being ate where the kittens could see her. A fingertip of pâté touched each small nose. A thin smear coated her nipples. One kitten walked through the food as if it were simply another surface. David watched and did not interfere.

He had been on the same path himself once—cut loose from the family that remained, forced to master shelter and food in a new landscape. The cats simply moved through the transition faster. Humans took longer. The pattern was identical.

The notebook waited for the next set of numbers. The enclosure waited for the next hour of sun. The colony, as always, waited for the familiar sound of the door.

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Chapter 5 is ready when you want it.

**Chapter 5**  

**The Long Practice of Staying**

The days settled into a rhythm older than language.

Morning weight checks when the notebook called for them. Pâté softened with a little warm water. The fountain cleaned and refilled. Being’s nipples checked and, when the newest litter needed the lesson, lightly coated so the kittens would taste what waited beyond milk. The larger ones began to show interest in the solid food. Tiny still needed every advantage.

Monster claimed the lap in the late mornings, stretching full length, paws kneading, eyes half-closed in the particular trust that only comes when a cat has decided a human is safe. Echo appeared at the sound of his name. The two from the black mother learned that hands could be firm without being cruel. Beta moved among the smaller ones like a young uncle who had nowhere more important to be.

David watched it all with the same attention he once gave to machine tolerances and tank columns. The difference was that nothing here required correction for the sake of production. It required only presence.

He had practiced leaving for most of his life. At sixteen the leaving had been sharp and final. The years in Germany had taught him how to remain in a place without belonging to it. The marriages had taught him how to close a door without slamming it. Homelessness had taught him how little a man actually needs once the decision to continue has been made. The mission had given him structure and certificates and the quiet knowledge that he could still finish something he started.

The cats asked for none of those stories. They asked only that the hand and the voice and the food arrive in the same ways they had arrived the day before. Familiarity was the entire contract. He kept it.

The property management company continued to send its paper concerns. Aesthetics. Numbers of animals. City ordinances. David answered the ones that required answering and ignored the tone that treated living creatures as inventory violations. He had already done the arithmetic that mattered: the cost of food and medicine over a year and a half was real, the responsibility was real, and the cats had been on the property longer than he had. The rest was noise.

At night he sometimes sat with the knowledge that the lease was month-to-month and the body was no longer twenty-five. The shoulder reminded him. The fixed income reminded him. The quiet calculation of what could be carried in a car and what would have to be left behind reminded him. Yet when Monster climbed into his lap or Being stretched out in the favorite spot in front of the television, the calculations loosened their hold.

He had not planned to become the center of a colony. He had simply refused to look away from a week-old kitten on a doorstep at a moment when looking away would have been easy. Everything else had grown from that refusal the way a vine grows from a single root.

The portable enclosure stood ready. The notebook waited for the next column of numbers. The kittens slept in their pile, stomachs full, the future still unwritten.

David remained where he was.

For the first time in a long life of practiced exits, the act of staying felt like the most natural motion of all.

**Chapter 7**  

**The Forward Edge**

The mania had a name and a date.

August 1985. Werneck. H2. Dr. Cremer. Extreme mania. The diagnosis sat in the record like a stone placed on a grave—acknowledged, not worshipped. David had carried it for more than forty years without allowing it to become the author of his days. It flared. It pushed. It sometimes threatened to write the ending early. It never succeeded.

He knew its voice better than most men know their own. Since childhood the first option that rose in moments of pressure had been the final one. He had loaded a .44 at fourteen and set it down again. He had walked through decades of marriages, countries, jobs, and empty rooms with the same quiet knowledge: the door was always there, and he had not yet chosen it. Survival was not optimism. It was simply the unbroken habit of continuing.

Now the same current moved through smaller, more precise channels. The notebook of weights. The daily cleaning of eyes and noses. The careful introduction of pâté. The portable enclosure that would travel when he traveled. The refusal to let the property management company’s paper storms dictate his internal weather. The mania still lived in him, but it had learned the shape of a man who built rather than burned.

He projected the next stretch of road without romance.

Most of the current litter would leave. That part was already decided. He would raise them until they were solid—able to think before they cried out, able to accept a human hand, able to carry their own instincts into someone else’s rooms. Being and Beta would remain. The others would go, carrying the familiarity he had given them. The sacred ground in front of the apartment would stay behind, holding what it held. He would not dig them up. He would not pretend the losses had been smaller than they were.

The lease would end when he chose to end it. Month-to-month was a door that swung both ways. He had already begun the quiet arithmetic of what could fit in a car: the two cats that were staying, the enclosure, the essential tools, the notebooks, the few things that still carried memory without weighing too much. The rest could be sold or given away. He had practiced leaving with almost nothing before. He could do it again.

There would be pressure. There always was. The mania would rise when the scenery changed, when the new place was not yet familiar, when the first night without the old porch settled over him. He would meet it the same way he had met it for decades—by staying inside the day he was actually living, by keeping the hands busy with what needed doing, by refusing to rehearse disasters that had not yet arrived. Faith was not a feeling. It was the decision to keep the feet on the path that was under them and let the next mile reveal itself.

He did not expect peace to be permanent. He expected it to be repeated—earned again each morning in the small acts of feeding, cleaning, weighing, and remaining. The cats had taught him that much. Familiarity was not a destination. It was a practice.

In the late light he stood once more near the concrete markers and the single dark stone. The living colony moved around his feet. Monster would eventually claim the lap. Being would take her quiet hours. The newest kittens would grow until they were ready to leave. The mania would flicker and push and subside, as it always had.

David remained where he was, already preparing the next departure, already refusing to be ruled by it.

The future was not a promise.  

It was simply the next familiar hour, waiting to be kept.

Grumpen's grave, I'd managed to catch Grumpen as it shot from Being before it hit the floor still dangling the umbilical cord and I held her as the final convulsion took her breath its final time, wrapped in my Polo t shirt. We cannot look back, Lott once said to wife, we must move forward.

**Chapter 8**  

**The Options Menu**

The thoughts arrived without invitation.

They always had. Since childhood they had appeared in the options menu the way ordinary choices appear for other people—eat, sleep, walk, stay. For him the list included one more item, unbidden and persistent: end it. Anxiety was the door they used. If he let the anxiety run unchecked it stopped being mental and became physical pain, a tightness that lived in the body and demanded answer. He had learned the difference early. He knew the voice the way a man knows the sound of his own name spoken in another room.

Mastery was not the absence of the thoughts. Mastery was the refusal to treat them as commands. He recognized them, named them, and continued with the next necessary act—feeding the colony, cleaning a face, writing a weight in the notebook, standing on the sacred ground without kneeling to it. The thoughts remained available. He simply did not select them.

Discernment had grown sharper with the decades. He called it the ability to tell sheep from goats. The blade was two-edged and cut clean through marrow and bone straight to the heart of whatever stood in front of him. People, situations, motives, his own rising weather—he saw them with a clarity that did not require permission. It was not always comfortable. It was always accurate.

The mania diagnosed in Werneck in 1985 had never left. It still flared. It still pushed energy through him in amounts that could have destroyed a different man. In him it had been apprenticed to survival. The same force that once threatened to write a final chapter now drove the daily precision of care: the exact gram, the exact timing of food, the exact pressure of a hand on a frightened feral kitten until the struggling stopped. Extreme had become exact.

He did not romanticize any of it. The suicidal option still appeared. Anxiety still tried to turn itself into pain. The blade of discernment still cut whatever he turned it toward, including himself. None of these things made him special. They simply made him informed. He walked through his days with the full inventory visible and chose, again and again, the living items on the list.

The cats knew none of this language. They knew only that the man who opened the door remained the same man who had opened it the day before. Familiarity was their entire theology. He kept it for them and, in keeping it, kept it for himself.

In the quiet hours he could feel the old menu hovering at the edge of thought. He acknowledged it the way he acknowledged the graves in the earth—present, real, and not in charge. Then he returned to the work that was actually in his hands.

The colony breathed around him.  

The notebook waited.  

The next hour remained available.

He stayed inside it.

**Chapter 9**  

**Two Years**

He had already made the decision.

He would remain until the mark of two full years had been reached. Not because the property management company deserved it. Not because the apartment itself was irreplaceable. He would stay because of what the completion of two years would do to him. The effect would travel with him wherever he went next. It would sit in the record of his own life as proof that he could choose duration on purpose, not only survival by necessity.

The question of comfort hovered the way the old options sometimes hovered. Would he once again be stripped of every comfort? The honest answer was that he might. He had been stripped before—of houses, of marriages, of countries, of the illusion that any arrangement was permanent. Each time the emptiness had arrived, he had eventually filled it with the next necessary things. He did not expect the pattern to reverse simply because he was older. He expected only that he now understood the pattern well enough not to be surprised by it.

The difference this time was the two-year line he had drawn for himself. Reaching it would mean he had stayed through the full cycle of seasons, through the rise and fall of litters, through the letters and the pressure and the quiet graves in the earth. It would mean the colony had been given the longest continuous stretch of familiarity he had ever offered any living thing. That fact would remain true even if the next chapter opened with almost nothing in his hands.

Being and Beta would go with him. That much was already settled. The portable enclosure would go. The notebooks would go. The rest would be decided when the time to decide arrived. He did not rehearse the losses in advance. He had learned that anxiety turned into physical pain when given too much future to chew on. He kept the future in its proper place—one day past the edge of the present—and returned his attention to the work that was actually in front of him.

The kittens continued to grow. Some would leave before the two-year mark. Some might still be with him when it arrived. The sacred ground would stay behind, holding what it held. He would not ask it for permission to go, and it would not ask him to remain. They already understood each other.

In the late afternoons he still stood near the concrete markers for a few quiet minutes. The living cats moved around his feet. The decision to complete the two years sat in him without drama. It was simply another form of the same practice he had been keeping since the morning MomCat set a week-old kitten on the doorstep: remain until the remaining is finished.

Whether the next place would be full of comforts or empty of them was not the point.  

The point was that he would arrive there having kept a promise to the stretch of time he was still inside.

He could live with that.

**Chapter 10**  

**The Shape of Remaining**

The two-year mark became a quiet north star.

David did not announce it. He did not write it on the calendar or speak it aloud to the cats. He simply oriented himself toward it the way a man orients himself toward a distant tree on a long walk—checking its position now and then, adjusting his steps without drama. Each completed week was a small confirmation that the decision still held.

The colony continued its ordinary work. The newest kittens gained weight in uneven but mostly upward lines. Tiny remained the smallest and received the extra attention without being turned into a project. Monster claimed the lap with increasing confidence. Echo still answered the voice first. Beta moved through the group with the steady, unforced care that had marked him from the beginning. Being took her hours of solitude when she needed them and returned when she chose.

David matched their rhythm. He kept the fountain clean. He kept the notebook current. He kept the portable enclosure in its place under the chair so the lesson of familiarity could continue in the open air. When the property management company sent another letter he read it, answered what required answering, and returned to the living inventory in front of him. Their urgency did not have to become his.

The old options menu still appeared on difficult days. Anxiety still tried to convert itself into physical pain if he gave it too much room. He met both the same way he had for decades—by recognition, not by argument. He knew the voice. He knew the difference between a passing weather system and a true command. He selected the living items on the list and let the other one remain unchosen. Mastery was not a single victory. It was the repeated decision to stay inside the day he was actually inhabiting.

He began the slow, practical sorting that always preceded a departure. What would fit in the car. What could be sold or given away without regret. What carried enough memory to justify its weight. The sacred ground would stay. The concrete markers and the single dark stone would remain exactly where he had set them. He would not dig them up to take with him. Some things belonged to the place that had held them.

Being and Beta would travel. That part required no further debate. The enclosure would travel. The notebooks would travel. The rest would reveal itself when the two-year line was reached and the next motion became clear.

He did not pretend the leaving would be painless. He had left too many places not to know the particular ache that comes when a familiar arrangement ends. He also knew the ache was survivable. He had survived it before with far less in his hands than he would carry this time.

In the evenings he sometimes sat near the graves with a cigarette and the last of the coffee. The living cats came and went. The decision to complete the two years sat quietly in him, neither heavy nor light—simply true. He had chosen duration on purpose. Whatever came after would have to build on that fact.

The future remained unwritten.  

The present remained available.

He kept both in their proper places and continued.

To be continued....August 3 2026

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