The cold cold ground
We took Zoe to the vet yesterday and sat with her while the drugs did their work. Then we brought her home and buried her in the backyard. Later, we will get a marker, maybe plant a tree. When I woke up this morning, I thought: now we can never leave this place. Because she is here.
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.