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.

Tags: Death, Pets, cats, Zoe, Sidney, cremation, burial, Cemeteries, graves, burying a cat

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.

Tags: Pets, cats, Death, euthanasia, Sidney, Zoe, Zo-bo-bo, Kitten, Kittle, loss of a pet, Zo-zo, Zo-bo-bo-head

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?

Tags: dreams, what my son will talk about in therapy someday, think it's time to finally find a therapist again, dress-me monkey, storytelling, cats, Pets, guilt, grief, meals, the family table

Frank the cat stares out the kitchen window, 1977.

He was a great cat.

Tags: Frank, cats, Pets, cats who go on walks with you

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.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, cats, Death

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.

Tags: Pets, Nick, Pet adoption, outdoor cats, cat rescue, cats, Island Cat Rescue Association

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.

Tags: Nora, cats, blogging break, writing prompt, Round Robin, xylitol and dogs, flash fiction

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.

Tags: writing prompt, Domestic violence, cats, friendship

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!

Tags: Memes, Music, job, Dead Kennedys, Punk, Viva Las Vegas, VT, driving, cats