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.
Last night, verging on sleep
When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Here's an experiment: me sitting at my desk, hot water on one side (in the Advertising Age mug my mother got for me when I was twelve: JENNIFER CASEY WINS "MARKETING GENIUS" AWARD it reads), smoldering cigarette on the other. Hold on while I set it up.
OK. My ashtray is a cat food bowl. I've got the kitchen matches. My water is freshly heated. Here we go. Yes, I am smoking in the house. I tried this on Saturday (outside) and it didn't go over well. Today it's easier. But disgusting. How does the cigarette stay lit? Chemicals and tobacco technology, I guess. The trails of smoke make me think of my grandparents, the ubiquitous cigarettes in beanbag ashtrays, the stink, the smell of coffee and burning, my grandfather's hacks in the bathroom trash can.
It's the exhale that's the worst, that weird feeling of dryness in the throat. Sip of hot water, please. Ah, the light head rush. I should be outside on a gray Delaware day in January, my back against a brick wall, hanging out with the stoners by the dumpsters, the boys with their stringy hair and the girls with their poufs, some guy in a acid-washed jean jacket asking me for a "cancer stick." Am I really wearing a letter jacket? Is someone quoting from Frankie Goes to Hollywood? What decade is this, anyway?
The cigarette, half-finished, is now extinguished. The cat food bowl has burn marks on it. I have returned the pack to its hiding place behind the envelopes in my desk.
But what about the quote at the top of this post?
I've been waking up in the middle of the night again, wide-eyed in that space between the close and opening of day, trying to sort out the true from the false, the real from the unreal. One a.m., two a.m., three a.m.: these are the most desperate lonely times when thoughts refuse to be corralled. After tossing around a bit last night, I got out of bed around 2:45. I walked downstairs in the dark with my faithful feline companions, did the usual Facebook thing. I responded to my partner's Round Robin write and tackled today's prompt, which was Last night, verging on sleep ...
Last night, verging on sleep, I closed my book, The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (after taking a break from it, I've picked it up again). I was tired but my body was unsettled and I had a feeling that I would be up, would be crouched over my little screen or tapping away at the iPhone at some obscene hour. The best thing for insomnia is to stay away from screens of any sort, to grab a book or a magazine and read in some relatively low-lit place until sleep overtakes you. But the screens are too tempting sometimes.
Insomnia is boring and insomniacs are dullards, their minds fried by too little sleep, their anxieties focused on what will happen in the middle of the night, the flip flop, the ceiling stare, the wandering mind. My last knock-down, drag-out with insomnia lasted months and was a byproduct of underlying life issues. And it went away. The insomnia went away.
The bitch may be back, but I still eventually returned to bed. I wedged myself between my son and the edge. I warmed myself against him. When we woke up this morning, both of us still trying to separate the true from the false, to wipe the dreams clear with daylight, he said, "Mom, tell me about when you were a kid."
I'm glad he didn't ask at night, when all I could give him would be sad half-truths, the bad bits. Instead, I left those out. I talked of the days when my mother and I lived in Hollywood Beach and had four cats, two birds, two rabbits, a dog, and a gerbil. I talked about the hamster my grandmother gave me, Happy Easter, and how I would make him squeeze through the smallest apertures possible. I talked about the time Liz had kittens in a bureau drawer, how they were orange tabbies. "Orange? Like my favorite color?" he asked.
But the best part was telling him about the tents I used to make in the backyard, four blankets pinned to a clothesline, a quilt for a floor. I spent half my summer nights out there, alone or with friends, reading by flashlight, letting the dampness of the night cover my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to a dewy world. Inside, pancakes awaited, delivered to the table by my mother as my grandfather sat in the living room in a cloud of smoke.
The cigarettes remind me. It all feels so very long ago. The memory is washed out like an old photograph, part of it has burned away, and I choose to focus on the good, the stars above the yard, the safety in the dark, the old man in his wood shop working the lathe, a Pall Mall dangling from his thin lips, lost in the dust and the ash and the smoke, occupied for the moment. Real as anything.
Image: Still life with cancer stick.
Most of the memories I told the boy this morning come from a time that I would describe as being one of the worst in my childhood, when we moved in with my grandfather after my grandmother's death. It's refreshing to remember the good stuff, a reminder that life is all mixed up.
Some of this is from the prompt mentioned.
Illusive permanence
I keep a notebook beside the bed. This is where I record the dark thoughts, the crazy optimistic stuff, and where, sometimes, when I wake up suddenly, my sleep cut through as if by a knife, I write down what feels like a snippet of insight. I write the insight down to remember it. In the morning, the evidence of my profundity or lack thereof is there in my own writing. I can discard it if I wish.
After a Monday night of broken sleep – the two a.m. wakeup, the nattering worries, the book and the computer muffling my darkness-crazed mind – I slept in the guest room last night. The point was to keep the boy from breaking my rest with his presence (the ghostly figure by the bed, waiting for me to move) or absence (the wake up where I wait for the ghostly figure to appear). I hoped that the guest room's green walls and comforter, oceanic and rich, would submerge me in dreamland. I brought my notebook, planned to erase the day from my brain by writing about it, but my book was more compelling. Asleep by nine, I woke up at one with a conversation dogging me.
Did I say that? What was that all about? Why bring up the ex-husband? I imagined Mr. X’s hangdog face, felt guilty about the house in Takoma Park I left behind in 1998 for him to clean out, my wedding shoes waiting accusatorily in a downstairs closet. I moved out weeks earlier to an apartment in Washington, DC. Mr. X put off his purge until the weekend before the tenants moved in. He tore across four states in an empty U-Haul. The truck veiled the turnpike in shimmering exhaust, rattled past livestock trucks and greasy rest stops. What a difference from the drive he had made a little more than two years before in a friend’s borrowed pickup, Loudon the sheltie dog resting his head on the steering wheel, Sidney howling from a cat carrier while Zoe, who had already soiled her carrier, traipsed across the dashboard.
I haven’t thought about this in years, the story of my brief first marriage, my role in it as villain, the one who wanted out, who stormed and yelled and flung insults. Or at least that is how I continue to present myself: the bad guy. Perhaps Mr. X still thinks of me this way (though we have never talked about it). Does the story require a villain? Why had I been talking about that anyway? I needed to attack the narrative, get the meaning, but did I need to be doing it at one in the morning?
The worries and thoughts and feelings were cracking through the thin crust of my consciousness. I hadn’t given them enough time, enough room to exist, so they exerted their independence, their right to be, by showing up at my moment of weakness. My brain was an egg, my thoughts the tapping of an about-to-hatch chick. Or it was the discarded husk of a cicada, a slit along the back where the thoughts emerged and moved on. I was being reborn in these nightly interruptions, remade. Or destroyed.
I scrawled my image of rebirth/destruction in my notebook. I laid in the dark. I flipped one way, then another, then back again. I pressed the pillow over my head and made a breathing hole. I wiped my mind clean, cluttered it with thought, and wiped again. Eventually, I fell back asleep.
In the morning came clarity. After eight months of waiting, we will be closing on our house by the end of this week or the beginning of the next. How could I not be thinking about my former rescuer, the ex-husband who tried to buy contentment by purchasing apparent permanence, buying first one house and then another, in the face of our unhappiness? These were acts of love and blind optimism. These were also my first houses. It was a trail of purchase, paint, make curtains, and move on. We lived less together less than two years in one house and less than four months in the other.
Houses. Marriage. Permanence is an illusion. Or so I tell myself when I get too close to the flame. It will burn out, it will take me with it. After the blaze I will float on the wind, a speck of ash, transformed.
Image: The first house Mr. X and I purchased in Columbus, OH. I have no pictures of second house, where I lived for less than a year.
Here's what I should have been doing today: working on a longer personal essay for my creative nonfiction class. Of course, the personal essay is my forte and I think I'll tackle something I've written about before, the day of Kevin's death. Still, it will take some work, but here I am, blogging again, giving into my thoughts.
The blog has a new category: insomnia!
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.
Houses are a sickness
It has to be this house-buying thing, the paperwork, the memories of the life I once had. The last remaining pet that Mr. X and I shared is getting weak and thin. She'll be checking out soon, too, my final connection to youth and early love. How I could have been so sanguine about buying houses with that guy, how I could undertake such a permanent thing without a thought? And then I remember: those houses weren’t permanent at all, no matter how solid they appeared. We were in and out, removed some wallpaper, slapped up some paint, and then woosh! it was back to DC or bang! back to Ohio for him.
Houses are a sickness.
Here’s what I would like: to live in San Francisco. Or Brooklyn. Or back in the right neighborhood in DC. Or, since we’re going to be here, I’d like to move this wonderful house just a tad bit north, maybe closer to BART, closer to where the hills start to roll. Or maybe I just don’t want to grow up and be beholden to a particular space. I want it to all be permanently temporary.
Mr. X left Takoma Park within four months for Columbus and I was out of the house by the next summer. There was nothing permanent about it. So now I struggle with my ideas about the past and houses and though I know buying this house is the right thing to do on so many levels, it scares me.
I look forward to thinking -- and writing -- about something else.
From a prompt, "I paid for it." I'm still very distracted by house-thoughts and haven't been to another blog in weeks (with a few exceptions). Don't worry. I'll be back.
Top image: The back of the house.
Bottom image: Our front porch.
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
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
I can walk under ladders
My husband defended his dissertation.
I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.
The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.
My marriage is better than it ever was.
There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.
Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.
Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.
Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.
We live in a lovely house.
Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.
I am a writer.
I can transcend.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.
Thank you for being a part of it.
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.
Hanging on a curtain
But that isn't the point of this post. I want to apologize for being an absent presence in the blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software I use, every time I have a new post I must export the entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a process that take about half an hour or more. It isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have limited writing time and have to start pursuing freelance work. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that my husband is about to take the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21 furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I would also like to chip away at longer stories and to deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the blog format.
I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way or another. In the meantime, please don't take it personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be present in my own life, figuring out a way to get beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.
Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June 2009.
Crying the rodent death blues / The beast in me
Take the case of Happy.
Happy (short for Happy Easter) was a golden hamster my grandmother gave to me for Easter 1976. He came complete with a Habitrail, one of those cages with a main unit attached to smaller annexes via clear tubes. It was just like a wild hamster warren except translucent, plastic, and above ground. Watching Happy scurry through the tubes, from wheel to main cage to tiny den was amusing. He impressed me with his ability to get through tiny spaces. I would scoop him out of the cage and cup my hands around him, leaving an opening that got smaller and smaller over time. Happy was always able to make it through.
One winter morning, hamster feed in hand, I opened the Habitrail and discovered it empty. All of that time spent squeezing through my fingers had been training for Happy’s escape. His disappearance was upsetting, but even more devastating was the discovery a few days later of his tiny corpse in the basement. It was stiffened with rigor mortis, hamster toes stuck in a permanent curl. Happy’s last meal had been rat poison.
By the age of seven, I had lived through a few pet deaths, all of the feline variety. Sheba had been hit by a car, Amber was anemic, and Regis bothered his neutering stitches until infection creeped in. Each death brought tears, but with Happy it was different. For many months after the hamster’s untimely death, I rode a wave of grief. On long rides to my grandparents’ or on the walk to school, the loss would hit me.
Dinnertime was the toughest, with all that time to think under the monotony of adult conversation. My mother, her someday husband Jim and I would be sitting at the white picnic table in the kitchen and I would feel a pang. The spinach soufflé would grow cold on my fork as I stared past Mom and out the window into the backyard. Happy was buried back there, his corpse stuffed for one final time into a toilet paper tube. I imagined him in better days, pushing his way through my open-toed shoes, doing endless laps on the wheel, escaping from my fingers. I couldn’t contain my sigh, the big exhale of emotion.
“Do you know what I’m thinking about now?” Long silence, then another sigh, “I’m thinking about Happy.”
These words of grief, repeated many times over that year, were not taken seriously.
By age eleven I was ready to try rodent stewardship again, this time with a gerbil. Perhaps it is a sign of Happy’s hold on my heart that I no longer remember the gerbil’s name. He (or she) was also cut down in the prime of life, a victim of illness. He had been listless all day, sitting in a corner of his cage, not touching his food. The gerbil refused to open his mouth whenever I presented an eyedropper full of restorative honey water. I hovered over the sickbed into evening. As night came, a summer storm rolled in. The sky flashed with lightning and my gerbil took his final breaths in an echo of thunder. After it was over, I reached out and stroked his still-warm body with an index finger. And then – an indication of my future impulses? – I immediately wrote my version of the night’s events: “Death of a Gerbil.”
My mother and Jim teased me for what they interpreted as my overemotional response to almost everything. Jim also thought I was too serious and would describe the child me as being like a 42-year-old woman (as I approach the last year of my 30s, his description makes even less sense). The labels were applied with a grain of contemptuous truth to everything from my asthmatic coughing fits that led to vomiting as well as my often-expressed desire in sixth-grade to kill myself.
Over the years I’ve learned how to regulate my external emotional responses, but I still have a flair for the melodramatic that usually comes out in my writing. For example, I started this post with some ideas about the loop of deep self-doubt that occasionally runs through my mind. The initial paragraph read very differently:
I am afraid to see a psychic, for what she may tell me about what she sees in my soul. Will she feel the energy, the darkness that is eating me from within? One look in my eyes, a quick riffling through my internal dialog, and the extent of the rottenness at my core will be clear. She’ll have to make something up, be polite, get me out of there.
This is grown-up melodrama. Like my grief for Happy, when these feelings hit, they are genuine. I acknowledge that there are times when I feel rotten and hollow. This doesn’t mean I am rotten and hollow – my feelings are not objective reality, but to deny them and their origins would be denying part of myself, part of my internal life.
I fight these moments of darkness. But I am convinced they are part of being human and will never fully go away. We don’t want to acknowledge feelings of deep inadequacy, so most of us go around trying to pep-talk ourselves into feeling better. We don’t want to face the beast within.
The good in us, the light, is powerful. It can lift us above the void. But if you feel pangs of self-doubt, why not acknowledge the reality of the feeling, trace it as far back as you can, and move on? Don’t underestimate your ability to confront the beast.
The darkness within doesn’t define us. We are far more complex than that.
For readers who are now thinking of the Nick Lowe song, here it is, as sung live by Johnny Cash, a man whose life was defined in some part by his attempts to push through the darkness. Next post: blog of the month.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her in. There were stories of other dogs that had cracked after hearing the tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground, dogs that pushed their way through second story window screens, desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb and munitions tests across the river. The aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s general nervousness, but now when a thunderstorm blew through town, she was absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed her. By the time you got the pill down, the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to the local grocery store. Mom rolled the windows down a safe distance, locked the doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green beans when she heard a little girl’s voice. “Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the beans and continued to the toiletry aisle. The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced past the row of shampoos to the plate glass windows – were those thunderclaps she heard? – when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on the run from one of our favorite check-out guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger and always made friendly conversation. Louise darted for the automatic doors, heading along the sidewalk in the direction of the Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering force. She watched Louise scatter a school of carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant and made a left into the hardware store. Mom followed, pushing past customers, until she found Louise in the back of the store, trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the storm passed, then walked her back to the car and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently, the dog panicked when she heard the approaching thunder, pushed through an open car window and went looking for Mom. We were grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I came home from grad school for a visit. Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She was terrified. If no one was home, she would attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would force her way through a closed window, pictured a return home to bloodied shards of glass and no dog. If someone was home, she would scratch and pace, pant and whine. Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.