Those venerable among us have long since passed away, so we’ll make do with newer friends on this Christmas day. We will light our candles and cook the spiral ham. Eat the sugar cookies filled with nuts and jam. We’ll enjoy the babble around the Christmas table and squeeze another helping of pie in if we’re able. The sounds and tastes of Christmas are fraught with memories— with bubble lights upon the tree and packages to squeeze, but the nice thing about memories is that we keep on making them, for supplementing memories does not mean we’re forsaking them!
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!!!
All around the town and all around the parish,
folks put up decorations wherein they laud and cherish
the Christ child and his mother and his holy birth
then put up lights and tinsel to show the joy and mirth
with which they remember all he represents,
and then they go a-caroling, these ladies and these gents,
overlooking other pilgrims in their present.
Dealing with such immigrants in real time is not pleasant.
They’d slam the door and relegate them to their horrid fate,
for generosity and charity is not the mode of late.
Religion is much easier when practiced from afar,
so those in need of shelter will not find our doors ajar.
The back door came unhinged in the hovel she lived in. so when she got back home from wherever she had been, there had been a kind intruder who sparkled up the place. Tidied up the dishes and polished up its face. Brightened up the house by cleaning all the glass— giving the mirrors and windows more than just a pass. Plumped up all the sofa cushions, scrubbed down all the floors. Polished all the bathroom fixtures, fixed all of the doors. Grime and dust and smudges that had grown over the years were abolished in one massive cleaning in arrears. Who the house fairy might have been, she never quite determined, but her house was clean and glowing, its corners all de-vermined. At first she was in shock and astonished at the brass of the home invasion, but then it came to pass that she kind of liked the order, the cleanliness and polish. She wondered who it was who might have come in to abolish all of her disorder, her smudginess and mess, replacing it with all this pristine loveliness. She never found the answer, but to encourage even more, for the whole rest of her life, she never locked the door!!!
As she awakened from her afternoon nap, she could see the glow of the lit-up dial of the alarm clock even through her closed eyelids. Everything on her body was thinning out. Her hair hung so limply that all she could do was to push it behind her ears and smooth it back from where it formed fuzzy little swirls on her forehead. Her arms sprouted an archipelago of purplish dry torn bruises—new ones every time she knocked up against a door frame or pruned the thunbergia vines. No one ever mentioned these bruises, although her children were perceptive and must have noticed them on those occasions when they stopped by on their way home from work to bring her groceries or to open the damper in the chimney and check that the gas lines had not clogged up over the summer.
Today it was her son who rang her doorbell to check up on her and accept a fast cup of coffee. It was going to be a cold winter, he lectured, so she needed a fire. Did she want him to light it for her? No, she wasn’t cold, but she would do it herself later, she insisted. For the hundredth time, he lectured her on being careful to make sure the pilot was working every time, then feigned interest in what sparse news she had to impart. She feared her subscription to life had expired along with most of her friends. What new did she have to say about this week’s installment of Mrs. Maisel or even the weather, now that it had turned gray and unchangeable––much like her life?
After ten minutes, he was off to children and wife and supper, and she was glad for this. She kissed him good-bye. A good boy. She had been fortunate in her life. She moved over to the fireplace. It was cold already, she thought, as she bent over to close the damper and blow out the standing pilot light on the fireplace, then turned on the gas.
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!
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 often wash our minds clean here on memory lane, so what was a dark portrait is illumined once again.
Daily random memories wash up on the shore while sadder associations stand waiting by the door.
I do not choose remembering the dark spots in our past. It is the brighter moments that I prefer to last.
The heart I formed from copper, the heart you carved of wood. All the broken contracts healed by all the good.
Love stories come in fits and starts and so it was with ours— we must choose our final endings by our selective powers
to decide what we will sift from memory’s fine sand, and though the bitter moments haven’t been fully banned,
I daily choose the moments that I will remember— that March day when our love was young, not your final September.
When I met Bob, he was teaching art in Canyon Country, California. One day he brought me this pouch necklace he had made of leather in class. Inside was a wooden heart with his initial on one side and my initial on the other. Yes. I had to marry the man. Later, with his encouragement, I became a metalsmith and formed this heart out of copper for him. The pouch now also contains a lock of his hair, a lock of mine, a miniature bar of chocolate–his favorite food on earth–and a tiny dinosaur carved by one of his small sons in the studio where he worked with his dad. When I admired it, he gave it to me, just as Bob gave to me the family he brought with him when we married.
Image by Clint Patterson on unsplash. Used with permission.
Mixed Media Retablo “Macho” by Judy Dykstra-Brown
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 