I don’t need to pay cover. I came with the band. See the bracelet I’m wearing? The stamp on my hand? I can come, I can go wherever I please. I’m the favorite of all—the lead singer’s main squeeze. Don’t gauge my importance by my appearance. I’m a V.I.P. I have backstage clearance! My jeans may be ripped, but I have tons of dough. I pay my own way wherever I go. The band extols my virtues. They know I’m no skag. I may look like a groupie, but I drive a jag!!!
She was disciplined and stern, rigid, staunch and taciturn. Her back seemed starched, her mouth a line. Her clothing smelled like turpentine. Each morning she dished out our gruel, then perch herself upon a stool expecting that we’d finish it. A spoonful left? She’d have a fit!
She’d stamp her foot in consternation and deliver an oration of how hard her life had been. Abandoned at the age of ten, working in a factory not pampered like the likes of me! And so I’d spoon the gruel up, or sneak it to my hungry pup,
leave the kitchen and escape to hall or street or fire escape. Every yule time was the same when my Aunt Winona came to visit us. “She’ll soon be gone,” my mother told us. “Just play along.” And so we did, all grateful for the day that she walked out the door!
(Click on mug shots to enlarge for better identification.)
She said: Wow!!!!
Side view of felon
For theft of birdseed, theft of catfood and molestation of Annie.
He said: Bow
For breaking house rules on noise pollution levels and frequency.
Side view of felon
Oh man. Brian pooped in the sala and peed in the spare bedroom, in spite of the fact that I took him out twice last night and once this morning. Then Annie cried all morning in spite of the fact I’d given her food, water and head scratches—perhaps because Brian was in my bed with me? Put Brian out, put a cushy bed for him out on the side of the house and opened gate for Morrie to join him in the side and front yard so they could play without Diego’s interference. Morrie immediately went for the cat food in this usual cat’s domain and then for Annie, whom I had forgotten was in the front garden. Chased her behind the big planter, where she was cowering when I came out to put Morrie back in the back yard and to rescue Annie. There are not enough zones in this house! I don’t know that I have a solution to the problem. Brian is crying outside but I won’t have an animal who pees and poops inside! Help.
1/2 hour later. Good news. Brian has stopped crying.
Mexico, 2002.Annie, my second kitten adopted in Mexico, in her favorite place. She was adopted a year or so after after Talulah, whom I had found in a basket of scarves in a shop in Tonala that she had streaked into a minute before I walked in. The owner, whose daughter was allergic, begged me to adopted her and guess what?
Annie as a kitten and almost 19 years later. Seems impossible. The second two photos are of the day the kittens arrived and I found Kukla on the wall in a standoff with Annie, whose meal they were eating! Fiesty little thing. (Photos will enlarge if you click on them.)
Dream’abort’ Annie
Two A.M. and four A.M., six A.M. and eight. My nineteen-year-old cat is such a reprobate. She awakens me with yowling to be fed again or simply for a rubbing over ears and under chin.
My night’s full of awakenings, my days are somewhat muddled. I try to block the sound of her. I’m bleary and befuddled. I’m sleep-deprived, exhausted, and yet she is so old, how can I consign her to the night air and the cold?
I awake at 5 a.m. with no bleats for attention— that every-other-hour irritating cause of tension. And yet what mixed emotions this five-hour rest has brought. Finally, a full-night’s sleep, but Annie I have not!
I knock upon the closet doors, follow every lead. I mix up her favorite cat foods, but she does not heed all these invitations—the water and the calls— the peering under beds, searching the bathrooms and the halls.
I look behind each open door, behind the stereo— so many hidden spaces where a cat can go. The old cat’s turned up missing? It’s an oxymoron that nonetheless is true when applied to my gray cat.
You may find it silly, putting up with such a cat once so wild and kittenish, so active and so fat. An outside cat who never deigned to come inside, Annie chose walls and bushes as places to abide.
Every year she grew more wild and more free, making an appearance on demand for only me. Twice a day for meals, she would jump up on the wall In between, she vanished—not visible at all.
Two years ago, four kittens abandoned at my door meant that she just left for good, and I saw her no more. One month later, she returned, hip shattered, skin and bone. with stomach and liver problems, she was Annie’s ruined clone.
When the vet said nothing could be done, she came to live inside. I thought, to make her comfortable there until she died, but two years later, she rules the house and she won’t abide any other lesser cat to be found inside.
She eats small portions all day long and though she’s lean and spare, it seems she’s come into her own in my cozy lair. The problem is, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since then. For all the constant roarings that disturb the old cat’s den.
If it isn’t food she wants, it seems it is a rub, or for me to clean her litterbox that’s found inside my tub that I haven’t used for the two years she’s been here. I use the guest room shower in lieu of one that’s near.
Sure that she’s died in some dark corner that I cannot see, I move aside the furniture. I peer on bended knee beneath the beds. I search each room with a fine-toothed-comb, but no evidence of her is left within my home.
I’ve thought so often how much easier that it would be if she would slip away one night and leave her master free. What a lovely gift it would be for her to give me, for often I have thought that probably she would outlive me!
The house seems oddly empty. By her water dish, her meal left uneaten these long hours has started to congeal. Her gray hairs left upon the rug where she liked to sleep. Although I’ve loved her absence, it’s true that now I weep.
When the other cats give voice and I decide to heed them, I get an extra surprise as I go outside to feed them. When I open up the door, Annie scoots right in, dashing from the overgrown foliage where she’s been.
Thus ends her great adventure and ends my great travail. As I sit here writing, I can hear her latest wail. I guess we’re back to where we were. Annie’s on my lap, and as long as she is quiet, guess I’ll take a little nap.
“Heading out this morning, into the sun
Riding on the diamond waves, little darlin’ one
Warm wind caress her, her lover it seems
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, little ship of dreams
Oh Annie, dreamboat Annie, little ship of dreams
Going down the city sidewalk, alone in the crowd
No one knows the lonely one whose head’s in the clouds
Sad faces painted over with those magazine smiles
Heading out to somewhere, won’t be back for a while”
We’ve brought your breakfast tray for we know that you’ve been restive, but now we’d like to urge you to try to feel more festive. Will you remain forever, questioning and forlorn because you could not go downstairs on your wedding morn? You cannot stay much longer in this sealed-off room. The wedding guests are gathering. It’s time to jump the broom.
Jumping the broom is a time-honored wedding tradition in which the bride and groom jump over a broom during the ceremony. The act symbolizes a new beginning and a sweeping away of the past, and can also signify the joining of two families or offer a respectful nod to family ancestors.
“So, I reckon you’re naked under all them clothes?”
It was either the dumbest or cleverest pick-up line she had ever heard. Everyone else seemed in a state of shock over what she was wearing, and already one person had tried to oust her, but she could see no signs that actually said “Nude Beach,” so she was sticking her ground.
No one on this earth was going to tell her what she should (or in this case, shouldn’t) be wearing. Next week she intended on entering everyone’s favorite coffee shop with no shoes, no shirt. That should balance things out a bit.
My greetings on your birthday, I admit are most belated, but I hope my guilt in this can be expiated. I toiled to construct a card, wording it in rhyme, and then invoked winged Mercury to present it in time. (I’d addressed it with a flourish and signed it in gold ink. The card was of a purple hue. The envelope was pink.)
But I fear this faithful messenger shows the effects of gout which has curtailed the usual speed with which he gets about. He had to take a taxi, which developed a flat. So then he had to hitchhike to get to where you’re at. Your doorbell is defective and your neighbor wasn’t in, and by then I fear that his resolve was growing thin.
He sat upon your doorstep, but it seems you never came. So it is your own tardiness, it seems, that is to blame. As the midnight hour approached he finally gave up. He found a little pub where he thought that he would sup. He put your card upon the counter. It was there that he misplaced it along with the good wishes with which this friend had graced it.
By the time he had informed me of his failure at this task, I fear your day had ended, so what I now must ask is that you don’t feel slighted by your real card’s surrogate— the fact that it is Hallmark and the fact that it is late. This card can’t compete with the first one I created, but you share the guilt, friend, for the fact that it’s belated!!!
I‘ve always preferred to see birds feeding off natural sources in my garden: flowers, trees, plants—(please click on first photo below to enlarge the photos and to read the rest of this tale🙂
Then, my next brainstorm was that the somewhat leafless plumeria tree next to it would be a great place for a hummingbird feeder. I had one that generous housesitters had bought a few years ago but that I rarely filled, so the first step in this plan was to fill and hang the hummingbird feeder,
then to go buy bird seed for my alternate two ton bird feeder!
Morrie was the first to express interest in the project.
Something in that bag of seed interested him,
and he even offered to help me open the bag.
I scattered the seed and retreated to my desk, hoping to see the first birds descend.
Then there was Morrie,luckily, to join our family, for a few years later, Frida passed away..
First a sniff,
then a taste, during which he brushed a few sunflower seeds off onto the stones of the deck.
then found he had no problem at all reaching the seed up on its original level and soon both seemed to be grazing on bird food!!!
Side view of felon
all too soon, they had exhausted the supply of bird food
as quickly as they had scarfed down their own food fifteen minutes before.
But when I returned to the house, the scavengers returned, hoping I’d left more provender.
Morrie, a stubborn little guy, returned to his former feeding place.
I watched from inside the house as Morrie discovered a new potential source of nourishment–the hummingbird feeder! Luckily, it is just out of his reach, but I doubt any hummingbirds will investigate it too closely with him as watchman.
Not quite the feeding frenzy I had expected to watch. Definitely a new species of bird. The End.
In a nutshell: the little dog stands on his hind legs to examine the high stone slab sculpture for evidence of seeds. I’d put them out the morning before for the birds, thinking the three-foot-high stone sculpture placed 20 feet away, but directly in front of my computer table, would be perfect for observing birds. Wrong! Within ten minutes, every single seed was gone–completely eradicated by the vacuum cleaner tongues of Diego and Morrie. On to the next plan! I try again, after having fed the dogs. This is the result. (If you click on the first photo, you can see the photos in a larger form and read the entire story.)
“These Kleenex are too flagrant, they always make me sneeze,” she said as she added yet another wadded puff to the pile in the trash can beside her bed. “Why in the world would they add perfume to something people with allergies blow their noses into?”
“Yes, it’s a fragrant abuse of medical logic,” I said, but she didn’t get the joke. She was too miserable and so I just let her malapropism slide by as I had so many times in our long friendship.
The air in this season of new growth was full of pollen. We indulged our roommate by keeping the windows of our college quad closed at all times and we had long ago relegated all our perfume to bottom drawers or trash cans. In those long-ago days of “big hair” when there was no such thing as unscented anything, we took the calculated risk of using hair spray, but only by climbing out onto the fire escape, pulling the window shut behind us and waiting a good five minutes before entering the room again. And this only if our allergy-prone friend was not in the room.
Occasionally, she caught a whiff of us as we passed in the game room or dining room, but she didn’t mention it. We knew that look, though. Only vanity won out over our need not to irritate the nasal fibers of our good friend. No one would miss our perfume, but in terms of hair, no girl dared to defy the norm. Bubbly, big, smooth and helmet-solid—that was the hair-fashion decree of the sixties.
He’s so ostentatious. He turns up his nose at other folks’ houses, vehicles and clothes. He only wears Lagerfeld, Lauren or Kors. His decor is elegant, but he hates yours!
Your neighborhood barbecue starting at twilight will never be his calendar’s highlight. Picnics to him are truly the pits. He dines at Spagos. Slums it at the Ritz.
In his microcosm, he reigns as the king of all refinement. Each exquisite thing that resides in his house is an objet d’art, but, concerning your taste? Darling, don’t start.
When it comes to decor you have no idea. He buys antiques in Paris. You shop at IKEA. Of his sense of design, you know not one iota. Do you need further proof? You drive a Toyota!
Image by Clint Patterson on unsplash. Used with permission.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 