Pent-up heart
Last night before going to sleep, I wrote a bit in my journal (so much to say, so little ability to say it clearly right now) and then listed the things I wasn’t going to let myself be woken up by, but maybe I would let enter my sleeping mind because my waking mind is all pent up. OK, self, I wrote, you can have the dreams about loss and guilt and invisibility and other long-term themes. One of us has to confront this stuff, and if it has to be you, my sleeping mind, my subconscious, so be it. If the dreams are important, you may wake us up, but not if you don’t have to. (Write interrupted at minute eight by the boy coming downstairs to tell me he threw up [a common occurrence during his illnesses – apparently he drank some water too quickly; as I type this I hear one of the cats throwing up … another common occurrence], getting him situated on his sick couch, talking with the groggy husband. Now to begin again.)
3:30 a.m. I was up. I was trying to go back to sleep. On with the meditation track, the slow climb of relaxation up my body from toes to scalp (thank you for the CD recommendation, Betsy). Not quite asleep, not quite asleep, and then in came the boy, not as feverish, still a little whispery with whatever imaginary scenario was playing in his head. Somehow we both fell asleep and then my dreams were of driving. He was driving, I was coaching, until I realized that the maneuverings of the car were too complicated for him. So I took over, tried to get out of the parking lot, but was blocked at both exits, so I drove back and forth between them, until the semi moved or the pick-up drove off, and I was going up the ramp too fast and then I woke up again.
The boy had fallen asleep with one of his arms around my back. The soon-to-be toothless cat Nick was howling his angst to the ceiling, and I had dream hangovers, this bereft image of sitting alone in my high school cafeteria, followed by the slight rush of the dream me at the wheel, parenting, taking over. I want to choose the last dream as the one to stay with me, but it’s the other dreams that are more representative of my internal state. I am invisible to myself at the moment.
My heart is compressed. My eyes are dry.
But sometimes my heart opens up. Yesterday early afternoon, I felt it, the blossoming, the sudden access, a reaching out that I can’t explain. I felt the connection, I was in the moment, I enjoyed it while it lasted, this portal to another. The day covered it over, but I know my heart is in there, waiting for me to let down the gates again. I just need a good cry first.
From the prompt "What a loser."
Image by naosuke ii.
Down the dungeon path
I spent almost two years in a ratty college apartment with a roommate who was my best friend, my partner in crime. What I remember: the feel of the sparse carpeting on my feet, the constant hangover. Early on, before she moved in (having come back from a stint in eating disorder rehab followed by a few months spent at her father’s place), I would walk home from work through the Eastern Shore shimmer of humidity to cook my lunch, a BLT on a poppy seed roll that I purchased especially for the task. Mayonnaise. Bacon hot and crisp from the pan. Iceberg lettuce and hothouse tomato (this was the 80s, before the food resurgence, and this was also rural America). I had a half an hour for lunch and, having no kitchen table or even much furniture, I ate the sandwich over the stove, leaned over so that the juice and grease would fall back into the pan, before I rushed back to my job at the basement college bookstore.
Gin and tonics. Vodka. Beer. The night Peter threw rocks at my window until I woke up and we went on a tandem bike ride down to a small beach. The night my boyfriend, worried about me, knowing we were about to end, drove from Chesapeake City to Chestertown only to find Peter hiding under my covers. TC, tall, dark, handsome and forbidden. J., my next big (doomed) love. Tequila-fueled dancing on the edge of the roof. Learning how to really cook. Falling out of friendship, almost permanently.
On the 25th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, my roommate and I parked in front of her small TV and watched the coverage of an event we weren’t old enough to have witnessed in real time. We sat on sagging couches whose holes were masked by batik fabrics, our drinks in plastic cups on plastic tables. The sixties still felt close enough to touch and we were impossibly young and sad, both of us on our own way too early, both of us struggling with who we were and who we were going to be.
All the lights were out. We sat in the glow of black and white. Her family would be driving up from Virginia in a couple of days for Thanksgiving and I was headed to my boyfriend's magical family's house, with the amazing food and all the people and the unlimited supply of Grolsch. We sat in silence, mourned for a time of pill-box hats, of simplicity. And the drinks were too cold and I can't remember where Frank the cat was in all of this, curled up somewhere next to me? Up in my attic room?
The theme
I can't remember where Frank was. I remember a time of no responsibility, of ever-flowing alcohol, the games of hide and seek I played with love. But I barely remember the cat, my childhood friend, the one I neglected in his final years.
We build our lives out of our actions, the choices we make. We choose wrong and we try to do better. We make excuses, we dodge responsibility or we look at it too baldly, right in the face. Frank was there. He even followed me to DC the following year, where he eventually died of kidney failure. I don't know why my flow of thoughts took me here, from the anniversary of a president's assassination to a time of personal turmoil to my youthful shirking of responsibility. It's the lack of sleep perhaps. It's my own continental drift.
The question is: where was the joy? When I look back at that time, where do I see the joy? And where is the joy now? It comes in dribs and drabs, in the moments when I can be present. It happens when I am totally absorbed in something like writing or reading. It's there, it is, I'm just too damn tired to feel that way and I've let my brain lead me down the dungeon path again. In the therapist's office yesterday, there was much talk of my sleep, how little of it I get, how getting more needs to be a priority. The therapist said that it appears as if I feel like I have to be ever-vigilant, that my anxiety (though I don't feel it as "anxiety") is a sentry, the thing that keeps me thinking of all the things I need to do, that if I don't take care of, no one will. It's a time of hyper-responsibility, of over-responsibility, and even with the sentry I feel like I'm doing a lousy job of it.
The solution
So, add "relax already!!" to the list. Or visualize a scene, go to a place with no past or future, a sunny day on the Bohemia River, the wind pushing the sailboat along. My skin is warm, my hair bleached blonde by summer. The sun glints off the river's calm surface. Or be here at the moment, sunlight angling through the picture window, one cat next to me, the other behind, the dog catching a patch of light on the rug. There's the buzz, always the buzz, the sign that I am alive, that my blood flows.
There are the moments between sadness, when all that is necessary is to be present, to be there.
There is the hope that some night I will slip, slip, slip into darkness, not stirring until the light of day gently nudges me awake.
And there's the writing, the reminder that my brain is here, intact, still plugging away, trying to find a pattern in my circuitous thoughts.
From the prompt "It's raining."
Image of the old place in Chestertown. Our apartment was on the top two floors.
Harmless ghosts
She was so skinny that I couldn't pet her without wincing, her spine and ribs an insult under dull fur. I pointed her out to my companions – my mother? my son? – and then saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her food. She was starving herself to death, too old and confused to remember where her food was, but when I pointed the bowls out to her, she ran to them with her characteristic trill and attempted to crush the pieces with her weak old teeth. It was a losing game.
The dream was real, too real, Zoe and the guilt. It was tangible. Until I woke up within it and told myself: enough! Zoe is dead. This is not Zoe. You don’t have to dream about Zoe like this. You are no longer responsible. You loved her. Her life was generally good.
Did it work? Did she disappear from the dream, or, even better, fatten up in front of me, become the cat she was for many, many years before her decline? I don’t remember, but I hope if she visits again she will be healthy and happy. I hope she comes with the rest of them, the animals I’ve loved. I want to see them again, to run my fingers along their warm coats and scratch them under their chins. We lived together once. We loved each other. They can help me forgive myself, take away the irrational responsibility I sometimes feel for killing them by not doing enough.
Because I should be able to cheat death, to keep the ones I love from feeling pain. I am the shield between them and the world and myself and the world and the responsibility is egomaniacal, it’s ridiculous, and what a relief to let it go.
Last night, Zoe tottered on too-thin legs. There were ghosts in the stairwell (“Did you see the humanoid figure on the landing?” I asked my mother after a dream-within-a-dream night of haunted sleep. She confirmed its presence, that thing we ignored and avoided.) and somehow I was losing my grip on the boy and when I woke up it was in night panic, in the acknowledgement of all the anxiety about the future that I keep packed up in order to keep on moving.
My mother had bad dreams about a bad man for a very long time, someone who had hurt her physically and emotionally. He stalked her in the night, showed up unannounced, drunk and full of vengence. Until the night she pulled a dream gun on him and told him to get out. He hasn't been back.
I soothe myself with the thought that these dreams have meaning, they are my self-conscious tugging at me, a reminder, and that I have control, that my reactions show how I am changing. The old me is gone. Zoe is dead. I call out to the ghosts and they can't hurt me.
From the prompt "Gone."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and it ends soon, thank goodness). Minor editing for clarity and to make it just a teensy bit better. And then edited it again later in the day for flow.
Image of cat sculpture at the Eastern State Penitentiary by e_monk.
The fallacy, the push-pull, the conflict
Here’s what I can tell you: I still struggle with mattering, with being heard, with feeling invisible. I shadow box with copies of life from days long dead. The film projector gets caught, we run it backwards (remember how funny that used to be? The belt returning from the ground to the Easter coat, snaking around my waist, proprietary, the pile of leaves reassembling itself as my friend flew backwards onto the porch steps? I laughed until I almost peed my pants watching those things, at the way living life backwards makes a backwards sort of sense, but is impossible. You can’t make life the way it was before. The leaves will never be the same and the belt doesn’t care where it lands.) I point a finger, just like a toddler, the point of recognition, but there is nothing to point at but faded images from almost forty years ago. The moment of imprint. Let’s set the film aflame, shall we? But destruction of the images is useless. They are written on me.
We’re having a heat wave. The tomatoes blossoms are turning into fruit, not dropping off in the fogchill of a Berkeley summer. The ground out back is parched and cracked and the boy finds baby praying mantises hopping from leaf to leaf in the front and back yards, newborns from the egg cases we bought at the garden store. Nick the cat wants to be part of it, wants to lie in the dust, to sleep in the bamboo patch, to kill mice. He got out while we were away last weekend, an escape that whetted his appetite for freedom, and now he howls at all hours to let him out please let him out.
It is cruel to keep this animal trapped and we keep on talking about ways to make it work, some sort of personal cat door, a set of protective inoculations against outside disease, the acceptance of the risks of an outdoor cat (injury, disappearance, early death). This morning he and Asher were growling and meowing at the back door at a puffy-faced lanky grey kitty who was taunting them on the other side of the glass. I remembered the dangers of outside life, of others, of cat fights and attacks in the dark. What do you do when you feel stuck and then you force another living creature to be stuck, too, for their protection? It’s for our own good, Nick, better that no one opens the door so that we can dart into the dark corners, hide in the vines, get ourselves in trouble and have the family cry over our bloodied bodies.
Still. The two of us could slip out in the middle of the night, me in dark formfitting clothes, Nick dapper as usual in black and white. We would part on the sidewalk and I'd shamble toward University, walk on to the water. In the moonlit fantasy of a clear summer night, the wind at a standstill, my short sleeves mysteriously comfortable, I would stare at the glowing apparition of San Francisco across the water, the Bay Bridge lit up like the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. I'd imagine a life where I am not me, where everything within shines like gold, the gold that can always stay, I am a goddess, untouchable without a need for touch, pure, good, inhuman.
I am a sucker for the fallacy of independence, of not needing, but even Nick craves human touch, wants to curl up on my lap. He purrs in my presence, drinks the fresh water I provide. This isn't a zero-sum game he reminds me as he brushes against my ankles. He can be free and I can, too, free and connected, the tiger in the grass one moment, contented homebody the next.
So teach me how to do it because I have no idea how to get beyond my emotional perimeter. I'm tired of feeling it, of writing about it, of pressing my face against the glass. Or tell me that I am getting there, that the glass is cracking, that you will be there with a hand outstretched when I emerge, or that I am perfectly capable of doing it on my own, that I need to embrace the fallacy of independence before I reject it. Tell me it will be ok more sooner than later, that this transition is only months and not years to the finish. Lie to me. Smile sincerely. But please don't reject me for who I am. That keeps me in the box.
I need you. I can't remake the past without you. Or maybe I can. So go ahead and turn your back. Let me prove to myself how strong I am. But don't walk away. Or go ahead.
I don't know what I need.
Image of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from Berkeley hills by ianan.
The thrill came slowly like a boom
* Walking the dog at dusk, our street empty, the horizon a heady mix of pinks, oranges, and frosty blues, fogless, Venus (or is it Mars?) a pinpoint of light. Sometimes the fog is low. It's like we're walking in a cloud. Sometimes it muffles the tops of the hills while leaving the flats clear. No matter the actual month, it almost always feels like late October, the wind blowing damp and cold, me in jeans and wool socks and a heavy sweater, bulked up against misty gusts. The grey twilight thrills in a melancholy way, my heart aches. The clear evenings remind me of a time when anything could happen in the dark.
*Cleaning alone on a sun-streamed Saturday, Led Zeppelin blaring loud enough for me to hear it over the vacuum cleaner. I swipe and toss and straighten until the chaos -- in the house, in my head -- is dusted and contained. Sure, my nightly task of kitchen cleanup, scrubbing off smeared plates, encrusted pans, and constellations of counter crumbs, feels good, too. It's like shelving books in alphabetical order by author or returning my grocery cart neatly to the stack. The real thrill, however, is in loud rock-n-roll, sunlight, and solitariness, the air saturated with furniture polish, my hand on the vacuum cleaner hose.
*Reaching an understanding with an animal: the tender glance of a cat, his paw gently touching my hand, the look Nora dog gives me when she wants to take the walk in a different direction. It’s the gulp of recognition that these animals are sentient, emotional and independent beings, with their own thoughts and preferences, choosing to be with me even when I don't have food in my hand.
*Being in the moment with my son, playing a game, cuddling, reading, walking hand in hand and making jokes. This isn't as easy as it sounds, quieting my worries about my parenting and how he is doing, leaving my household tasks -- dinner prep, laundry, cleaning, gardening, taking care of the animals -- unattended. I am not a perfect mother. I am easily distracted and often quick to anger. I yell, sometimes unreasonably. On occasion, I am scary.
Our moments of connection redeem me, the game where he is a fierce monster or a dragon, growling centimeters from my face, gnashing his terrible teeth and rolling his terrible eyes. He may pause to ask, “Did that scare you?” or say “I’m pretty scary, aren’t I?” He can be a little scary, perhaps like I am when I am angry. He growls until he collapses in my arms. If I am especially lucky, he tells me that he loves me. A small thrill, at the game, at our mutual trust.
*My husband making a joke or saying something funny thing right before I was going to say the same thing. We're goofy. Sometimes our jokes are scatological. We laugh a lot and we often think the same way. It's connecting, it keeps us going, and I am grateful for it and for those moments when I recognize it and feel the thrill.
Perhaps I am boring. I feel nothing but fear when the car accelerates past 65. Heights make me nervous. I have no desire to take on real danger. But give me twilight and a brisk breeze, a sunny Saturday against chaos, a true moment with an animal or my son, or a laugh with my husband, and my heart beats faster.
Image: A Santa Rosa sunset by bipoloarbear. The tree reminds me of some that we see on our twilight dog walks.
Title from a poem by Emily Dickinson.
The cold cold ground
When Kevin announced that he wanted to be buried, it seemed bizarre. In the ground? Smothered under dirt and grass and rock? In the end, we did it. Half of Kevin's ashes were buried in an urn in a cemetery in Chestertown, the same cemetery that my friends and I used to cut through freshman year in college to go to 25-cent draft night at Newt’s. My mother spent the first two years after Kevin's death driving every weekend from the Washington, DC suburbs to his grave, bringing Woody the dog along until Woody got lymphoma and died. Gradually she visited less and less until her trips tapered to one or two a year.
The tapering was bound to happen. Time changes grief, makes it less of a physical ache than an emotional one. Talking to the air can be as satisfying as a graveside monologue. Kevin wanted his little plot of land and he got it, with a stone that my mother dragged out of the woods and a beat-up concrete angel propped next to it. When we want to visit, he’s there. Except, of course, he’s not.
My husband dug the hole yesterday morning. He dug it deep, struggled to cut through cloying clay. We looked at Zoe one last time, touched her soft fur, and told her we loved her before rewrapping her body and lowering it into the grave. I tossed in the first shovelful of earth. It's a strange sensation to cover a body with dirt. It feels wrong or maybe stark, a jarring acknowledgement of death. The towel still contained her warmth. She was alive an hour before we buried her. Surely this was a mistake.
Eventually what is left of Zoe return to the earth. She will live on in our memories and in our stories. The cats we have now will grow old with us. Their time will come. I'll be dust myself some day, my ashes tossed to the wind or scattered into the water, or perhaps sitting in an urn on a mantel or a closet shelf, waiting to be forgotten.
A tribue to Zoe-cat
My first husband and I were newly married and had just bought a house. The realtor’s partner’s daughter had found this malnourished, Giardia-ridden kitten in a German Village alleyway. Once the kitten was done with her medications, would we like to take her in? We already had a cat, Sidney, and a sheltie dog, Loudon. But our new house was big and Mr. X and I had both grown up with animals and we were reveling in domesticity. So a month after we moved in, Zoe moved in too.
Her first night with us was not auspicious. She hid in the litterbox, growling and crying while Sidney lurked silently outside. Eventually she came out and showed her true assertive nature, but those first days of intimidation marked their relationship. She preferred the laps of humans to feline company.
Zoe has remained kitten-sized. In her early and middle years, she was actually somewhat zaftig. Rubenesque. In the past year and half or so, she has gotten heartbreakingly skinny. Her fur goes unwashed and she spends much of her time asleep. Her kidneys are failing. Her mind wanders. She is not the cat she used to be.
So here’s to Zoe, the cat who used to trill every time she leapt, the kitty who convinced us that she couldn’t jump up to her food bowl but who later scaled our 8-foot fence, not once, but twice, the tiny powerhouse who had to be subdued at the vet’s office for any procedure. Zoe who confidently crawled around the cab of the pick-up truck while Mr. X drove from Ohio to Washington, DC and Sidney mewled in terror from his carrier. Zoe who braved the long flight from DC to San Francisco. Zoe, the cat who used to perch herself up to bat at my dental floss every night.
It is time to let her go.
Tomorrow morning she will join the others, among them cats Regis, Sheba, Frank, Liz, Ming, Nicky and Sidney, and dogs Greta, Buttons, Barney, Samantha, Louise, Augie, Woody, and Loudon. I’ll ask myself again why we do this, why we take in animals who will be with us for such a short time.
It’s about love. Love comes with the threat, the almost-guarantee, of loss and we take it on anyway, hoping that the sadness won't outweigh the joy.
Image: Top, Zoe in her rounder days. Bottom, Zoe in her kitten days.
A tale of necessary sadness, in two acts
Act I
Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."
The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.
"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.
“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.
So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.
I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.
Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.
The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.
Act II
It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.
My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.
One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.
But at least I was feeling something.
Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.
Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?
Cat from the past
Away from here
We kept on digging that night, pushed through soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we used our hands, took off our gloves and did the dirty work directly.
Nobody had told the little one about what had really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell him what was happening, what would happen. He hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't, not until I was old and sinewy, not until Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had seen enough of loss myself by age eight, learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other people. My boy, he could remain untouched.
There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at the spine but swollen around the belly, carried him off into the back yard. I tossed him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish rack. The boy, always his father's shadow, made for the door, but I knelt down and blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little privacy, that's all. It's like at the doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got through two stories when Joe finally came back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid," Joe told him. I sent the two of them out there alone.
Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide in, where all you could see in the thick stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes, maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had professed his love while the cat panted, glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he came back into the house, Joe had shaped him into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb gently against each eye to close it.
He told the boy that it looked like Tristan was taking a little rest now, sleeping off his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good boy.”
That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops, it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't seem to notice, came in dancing and told me Tris was better, was sleeping.
That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog had blotted out the moon and the damp had sunk into my bones, made me drop the flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama raccoon and her kits peered at us out from the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest. Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git! Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They shambled off in the direction of the creek, looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all the fur with none of the grace.
A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of the box. I hadn't looked at him since the collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in the flashlight and take a final look, could stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.
The next morning we told the boy that Tristan must have taken off, shimmied through a hole in the fence, or through some miracle of will had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off for a better place. He put his little hand in mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine, perfect, whole.
Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now, eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw into the cold water as he searches for fish. Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving grass, tail quietly twitching before the final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there, away from here.
This was from a writing prompt last summer: write about something you don't want to write about. I didn't want to write about our cat's death, at least not directly, so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit the theme around here these days. It was originally three paragraphs with very little spelled out, but as I expanded it the details it became more gruesome. Not sure what I think of it, but here it is.
Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down. This one's slower than usual at least!
Image: Strawberry Creek, by Edwin Deakin, from Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.
New blood
Nick’s existential angst or blood lust, take your pick, has taken the form of 2:00 a.m. howling. He’s the loudest cat I’ve ever known, full of throaty confidence and the ability to project, the kind of cat depicted in old-time cartoons, sitting on the fence yowling as neighbors hurl shoes. He’s an opera singer belting out a sad little tune, “Let me out!” or “I must kill!”
It must seem like a cruel joke when we get out the cat fishing line, the feathers attached to a stick. As I whip them around the bedroom, the feathers turn and beat through the air as though they were birds' wings. Like all cats, Nick has an active imagination and allows himself to be taken in for a few minutes. He hustles and jumps, takes a very strong cat arm and pins the fluorescent feathers to the carpet in one swipe. The feathers crunch and crumble as Nick snaps his jaws against them, tries to carry his prize downstairs.
I am actually tempted to let him out – it feels cruel to keep him from something he loves and clearly knows well. My other cats have all been indoor-only from the beginning so they didn’t know what they were missing. But I know that it isn’t a safe world out there and we signed a contract saying that his paws would never touch dirt or concrete sidewalks again.
Perhaps it’s time to take in a budgie or two, a little something to make life more interesting for our 2:00 a.m. howler.
A crumb
But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school until after Labor Day and we've had a series of pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them: potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for those of you who are still reading this blog, from the prompt I remember.
I remember that her fingers were thickened by arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier than looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and realize that time is written on our hands the fastest of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other. Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a tower, applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and slush of January. They were suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over granite, life and work written on the body.
Image: The kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have any good pictures of our actual cats being actual cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.
Writing prompt: The visitors
Image from promotional materials for 2005 animated film, Kontrol Eskape.
Daniel came with a backpack full of canned cat food and Max, a fluffy grey tabby artfully splotched with patches of orange, on a leash. As he kissed my cheek, his toothbrush nudged me in the chest. It was tucked into his front shirt pocket alongside a container of floss and a ballpoint pen. He had a change of clothes in the car and had packed a tent, too, just in case.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” was the first thing out of his mouth. Max, unleashed, threaded my legs and dashed into the living room. Later we found a small disc of cat urine on the floor by the ficus, Max’s lament, his only accident.
I made a crimini mushroom omelet with muenster cheese and served it with a side of crisp potatoes roasted with whole shallots and rosemary sprigs. When Dan emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, he opened a bottle of Pinot. We sat in eating in silence until the second glass, when he rolled up his left sleeve and showed me the marks, a neat imprint of fingers wrapped around bicep.
“Eric’s at it again.”
His boyfriend was a brute, a nasty sort who was attractive if you didn’t know his back story, didn’t know he was a sweet manipulator that could turn maniacal. Daniel turned and lifted his shirt, revealing an archipelago of bruises on his lower back, a long bloodied scratch across his spine. He never had a mark above the clavicle or below the groin: Eric was strictly covert.
“I forgot to take out the recycling.”
Suppressing a sigh, I reached for his hand, tamping down my guilty urge to blame the victim, give him a hard time for sticking around with beautiful Eric, the work acquaintance I’d set him up with. Eric of the deceivingly kind brown eyes and silken hands, of the long fingers of bendable steel and the high-pitched staccato laugh, a machine-gun guffaw that was as hairtrigger as his rage. I didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to provide sympathetic catharsis.
“I forgot to take out the recycling, so he dragged me to the bin.”
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
A story of kicks by wingtip, recycling carefully sorted and dutifully delivered to the curb, Daniel’s attempts to keep his expression flat and his apologies genuine – Eric wanted simple obedience and sincere contrition, not a melodramatic man-beating scene. Last time it was about dry cleaning, though neither of us can remember whether the issue was overstarching (Eric has very sensitive skin) or Daniel’s forgetfulness, the shirts that weren’t picked up in time for the conference.
“He’s so . . . quiet about it, have I told you that? He doesn’t yell or scream. But his face is terrifying, Janine. It looks like it’s going to collapse on itself. Someday his brow will fold into his mouth and he will reveal himself to be the alien I know he is. Max always runs under the guest bed before anything happens. He’s my early warning system.”
Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I knew tonight wasn’t going to be the beginning of his redemption story, just another painful, repetitive chapter, the time before the revelation. He would be back there maybe even tonight. The reunions were the best part of this, weren’t they? Max would stay with me this time and I would stay out of it.
I leaned back and grabbed another bottle of wine from the rack.
What haven't I told you?
I let the first U.S. punk compilation slip out of my hands. Album cover from Rate Your Music.
Jean of Jean’s Musings – a lovely blog that I recommend highly – has passed a meme my way, a request to list five things that you might not know about me. Given how much I’ve revealed here, that’s a tall order, but I think I can dredge up some obscure facts.
*I once had a Secret security clearance. The think tank I worked for did a lot of work for the defense department and the library was responsible for the classified document collection. Getting the clearance was nerve-wracking, as was the proximity to potential national secrets. It was a relief to leave it behind.
*Although we do have a television, I don't watch it (this despite the fact that we've had mysterious cable access in our last two houses).
*Punk music was the soundtrack of my life for a long time. I knew my now-husband was a good match after we watched a movie that included the song Viva Las Vegas. As we were leaving the theater I told him “Every time I hear that song I …” He finished the sentence, “think of the Dead Kennedys version?” That’s right. Ahh, love.
*I got my license at 25 (or was that 26?), but I don’t drive. You wouldn’t want me to. Trust me.
*Despite a lifelong allergy to cats, I have never lived without at least one kitty, except for a brief pet-free period in college and graduate school. They are worth the asthma, the itchy eyes, the mounds of tissues.
An extra fact: I’ve got some recipes in the Nov/Dec issue of Vegetarian Times, along with a short profile in the contributers column. Go to your newsstand or local library and take a look. I'll be putting up more information on the Food Writing section eventually.
If you have your own five facts, I'd love to read them.
And for your listening pleasure, Viva Las Vegas!