They Say Don't Give a Pet for Christmas...

...But maybe it's OK  to get one yourself.Watch this video and just SEE if it doesn't make you smile. You might even take their suggestion at the end..[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG3O6UBLGbA]

Give Those Dogs a Smoke

Below is a video of these two dogs having a meal at a busy restaurant. It’s funny because they have human hands, which they use to drum and point and cradle their chins as they wait for the food, then eat the food and finally finish the food, all with knives and forks.The crowd noise in the background is excellent -  you can hear the hostess calling out numbers when it’s time to seat the various parties – and the waitress is very believable. I just would have like to see them each pull out a cigarette and smoke it afterward but I guess that’s a silly thought. Smoking isn’t allowed in restaurants anymore, right, never mind what the animal rights people would have to say about blindly waving live coals around the furry snouts of two such trusting creatures.What I do wonder is how the two hand-providing humans have themselves are situated for this shoot. I assume they're under the sweaters the dogs are wearing but are they behind the canines and cradling them with their thighs? Are they under them somehow?That’s Amazing Thing Number One. Amazing Thing Number Two is that 4 and a half million people have watched this video in the last three months. The question I ask there is one I asked through all my childhood (a) Where are the grownups?   and (b) how can we keep them from catching us and keeping us from having all this fun?  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwlMVYqMu4]

The Tenants

Off and on all spring we’ve had these thumb-sized mice darting around the kitchen baseboards faster than the light from a laser pointer. Off and on all spring we’ve had these shiny black ants using their delicate feelers to probe all the soaps and sponges in the bathroom.What to do? Mousetraps work, sure, especially when baited with peanut butter, but how many mousetraps can you set before you start feeling like a serial killer? How many exquisitely fashioned insect bodies can you crush before you feel twinges of shame?Yet I enter the kitchen nights and see a mouse scooting so fast around the baseboards my eyes can hardly follow it. I enter the bathroom mornings and the place is a-shimmer with ant-dancing.Our problem is we’ve grown tender-hearted enough over the years that we’re much slower to spring for the executioner’s implements. (I once watched as a little spider landed on David’s nose, a tiny thing that began rappelling down toward his chin like a climber descending a cliff-face. He just unhooked that delicate rope of web, went to the door and set the whole thing down outside.)Now, to complicate things even more, a sparrow has built her nest inside the glass globe of our front porch light.  We realized it because every time we set foot on the porch we there was this great and general fluttering. It took days before we thought to look over our heads to see where she flew from.We can’t actually see inside the light’s globe – its glass is opaque - but we’re think she’s hatching a family in there.  Also, a tiny egg appeared under this light fixture one day, smashed in pieces on the porch floorboards. Poor bird! She didn’t know she lived inside an oven; never guessed how likely it was that a switch could be slipped, wildly overheating her nest. Is this what happened, and the egg was damaged, so she nudged it overboard?Last summer, a mourning dove made her nest on the sill of an upstairs window here and for six straight weeks we watched her sit her eggs and tend her babes – not one, but two separate batches of them.  It just took us outside ourselves to watch them; softened our hearts to see the way she came to trust us. We could stand within inches of her, watching through the window glass and she would only regard us calmly as she stooped to feed and nuzzle her struggling offspring.So maybe soon this sparrow will trust us too. Anyway we've taped the light switch in the 'off' position, so no one will again set her nest on Broil. The mice and ants will move out soon, we know, but our thoughts keep returning to this small tenant, who is so like us in a way: who lives and moves and has her being entirely  oblivious to the fact that eyes more powerful than she can picture or imagine are daily upon her, watching,  to keep her safe. 

L'chaim, L'chaim to Life!

I ran into my new friend Morgan today who said she saw that picture of the dead bird on my blog yesterday and wondered if I knew what kind of bird it was. I had to say that I didn’t because the snow is too deep for me to get close enough to the poor thing.  She then told me that in her yard they have a squirrel who eats a little and then lies right down in the snow – just lies on one side, chewing before eventually getting up and trotting off . She doesn’t know what the problem with him might be.I suggested so look it up on the Internet and then did so myself the second I got back home again. It’s of course hard to know just how to ask the question that will give you information about a reclining rodent but I finally Googled “signs of sickness in squirrels” and got taken to a site where I read the following. Right church wrong pew maybe but good to know nonetheless. It says:“We have encountered a few cases of blind squirrels. These have been easy to spot, as they tend to hop around in circles trying to get their bearings, and will often bump into things. A blind squirrel may even have a sore nose for this reason. In our experience blind squirrels tend not to be aggressive (in fact can be quite docile) if handled gently. Be careful obviously just in case. The cause of blindness may need some investigation by a vet  especially if the eyes (or ears) look unhealthy, but a blind squirrel can lead a long and happy life in the right hands…” - hands like the ones above presumably since it says this is the right way to hold a squirrel.So see? You really can find anything on the internet. And when I Googled “blind animals” I got this beauty of a cartoon. I know blindness isn’t funny and certainly death by one’s own hand isn’t but still: how great is this? The guy is TRYING to leave a suicide note next to the tracks while he lies down on the tracks, selfishly taking his dog with him it seems, but the dog sure had other plans. Look at that little smile!There's that life force again, God bless it. Now everybody sing, "L'chaim, L'chaim to Life!" from Fiddler on the Roof.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjEDgvNP0NU]

Which Is Better, Dogs or Cats?

This is my late dog Penny asking for a second coat of polish on her nails (that's a can of acrylic.)OK so here’s a good way to start a lively conversation: go down the path of which is better, dogs or cats. Crosby does this in an episode of “Parenthood” when he’s talking to his girl Jasmine about what she should do to make her new place homey. His recommendation? Get a dog. “Uh, I’m actually more of cat person,” says Jasmine with a look. “Grody, you’re a cat person?!" answers  Crosby. Cats suck! They’re narcissistic, they’re always licking themselves, they’re kinda OCD… ”“Hmmmm” you think hearing this. Cats are grody? because they lick themselves? Maybe we're the grody ones, putting spit on our fingers to wash the faces of People Who Are Not Us. As for narcissistic, until Jasmine and little Jabbar came into his life, Crosby's the most narcissistic person on the show. And cats are OCD? Has he never seen a dog settle down for a nap, the way it goes round and round in a million circles before finally flumping down? I say forget the generalizations, let’s look at real life:When I was five we had a kitten who kept trying to climb up on our heads like a panicky swimmer.  Now in adulthood I’ve had several cats, none of them fitting the nasty cat stereotype. The black one with the little white flame of fur at her throat used to leap INTO the Christmas tree every year. Perched there darkly, she acted more like Poe’s raven than any feline you ever heard about. And the grey one struck lots of people as mighty doglike with his blithe outgoing ways. Once he brought a live chipmunk into the house, not in his mouth but running alongside him, like a little kid arriving for a playdate. In they both burst the second I opened the door. “Hey, wanna see my ROOM?” he seemed to be saying to the wee thing.Come to think of it, my old dog Penny didn't fill the standard expectations either. She was more like a goat; she ate everything. Salad. Wood. The whole bottom of her food dish and that was made of metal. Then, when company came, she sank her long retriever’s nose into everyone’s drink. And speaking of obsessions, she was obsessed with ladies’ underwear, which she presented to all visitors every time the doorbell rang. The minute the parish priest showed up out - boom!  - out came bras, stockings, panties - all our dainty washables. Stunning to behold.So don’t talk to me about “Dogs are like this” and “Cats are like that.” For my money all such talk is dumb. Dumb leaning toward hurtful, because every animal - every person too - is unique. And dogs are great just as cats are great. Hamsters and birds too, and even that four-foot-long iguana my friend Mary has under those eerie purple lights in her upstairs hall.Remember the old Little Caesar’s Pizza ad, “I taught my dog to say I love you”? “As if dogs could talk!” is the joke. Well all I’m saying is Never underestimate what an animal can do. Because it sure does sometimes seem they’re a whole lot smarter than the two-legged fools wielding the can openers.

good old Abe in hound-dog mode

What I Learned at the Zoo

If you want to really scare yourself for Halloween, consider spending time around creatures who get blood popsicles for treats. I’m talking about the big cats at the New England Stone Zoo whose care I learned something about during a special backstage tour I got to go on last week. I was  guided by amiable Assistant Curator Pete Costello who for 23 years has worked at this small jewel of a zoo, sister to the venerable Franklin Park Zoo some ten miles to the south.“Keep in mind,” he warned us as we ducked inside to watch a bit of the jaguars’ training: “These animals are not your friends,” a point reiterated by Animal Trainer Dayle Sullivan-Taylor. “Don’t stand anywhere NEAR the bars,” was her stern warning. “We train these animals so they can bear to be touched in case we have to examine them for medical issues but make no mistake: they’re dangerous.”The young jag Chessie has been training with Dayle since she was eight weeks old and does in fact follow commands beautifully. “Open,” Dayle says and she opens her mouth. “Paw” and she extends her paw. “Over right” and she lies on her right side. Each time she obeys in this fashion, Dayle clicks her clicker, then throws meat into the cage.“All this just desensitizes them to human touch,” she explained. “Once, Chessie here got something caught between her teeth and because of this training I was able to extract it - right through the bars” – without, she did not need to add, losing her arm in the process.But the animals don’t undergo these lessons only for when they’re sick or have thorns stuck in their paws. The training entertains and stimulates them and is part of their overall enrichment program. Props of all kinds as well as sounds and smells are used to keep them interested and alert and happily curious.It's been discovered, for example, that the big cats are wild about Calvin Kline’s Obsession for Men when it is sprayed around on their environment – something about its complex pheromone-rich bouquet. Giraffes, otters, gorillas, parrots and even goats have toys and “train” as well. And last weekend on a just-for-fun return visit to the zoo I saw one of the gibbons swinging through the air holding the handle of a plastic jack o’ lantern – with her tail.Environmental enrichment of this kind gives the animals the chance to make choices and experience new things, just as they would in the wild. They like different textures, from straw to soft blankets to wood shavings. And they’re hugely compelled by certain scents, with kinds of animal urine topping the list.And then there are snacks: besides blood popsicles, the cats also like to see the occasional frozen mouse tossed onto their rocks now and then. I have a friend who had herself donated two bottles of Obsession.Accordingly, at the end of our tour I asked Pete what else they could use.He cited the big capsule-shaped toy that we had seen Chessie mounting and biting, much as she might bite the necks of her prey in the wild. “That’s called a Boomer Ball,” he said. “They come in all shapes and sizes and people can to contribute to the purchase of one by going to the website that virtually all zoos have these days.” (Theirs is http://www.zoonewengland.org )“Is there anything else I should say to people?” I asked as we shook hands at the gate.“Just tell them to visit their zoos!” he called back to me over a little distance as he began trotting back to his charges.  “Just have them come and see how much they learn!”

Frozen mice bodies also get tossed into the cage for another kind of 'popsicle'; this male jag was briefly stymied: it landed in his pool and really he's not much on swimming.

Sometimes You Eat the Bear and..

Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you. We're out in nature this weekend and the nights are mighty rackety. The sound a fox makes when it’s mating would take the skin clean off your face it’s so scary. You can hear it here. There'll be some birds first and then about ¾ of the way in you’ll hear a sound that makes you wish you were in a steel house with bars on the windows, and not out under the stars with sly little creatures slinking past all night.We keep looking for the martin reported to be living under the cabin, though we hope never to see it. They say a martin can tear your cat apart quick as thinking and leave nothing you'd even recognize as your dear little freeloader of a housepet.Sigh.This is our first year here without our two cats, both safely in Heaven now. It feels weird  having only humans in the house. Humans have such poor antennae. I know animals can’t see into the future but they sure can see in the dark. We by contrast: we’re just kids in the backward-facing sat of the old station wagon with no clue at all as to who - or what - has its eye on us for lunch.

Hard Work Dying

They say the nodule is really a mass and that’s why he’s almost stopped eating. “Have people moisten his lips," the vet said “and try to get a little food into him. Next week you’ll bring him in and we’ll figure out how to keep him comfortable.”But he runs from us; seeks quiet corners, the way soon-to-be-mama-cats do when the time comes to deliver…And oh to have watched this handsome and muscular boy shrink and flatten; to see emerging his fern-frond ribs and the innocent buttons of that long backbone: so sad. Do I bring him to the vet and slink away? Hold him ‘til the end? If I could carry home some secret elixir and set him free myself as he dreamed of mousy glories wouldn’t I do it! …..Or maybe some turn of fortunes awaits us yet.Hard work, being born; hard work dying.

Home Thoughts

I left town Tuesday morning. It rained for three days and I  slogged around suffering like everyone else and then on the fourth day I left and the second I left the sun came out. I’m 2500 miles away in the desert today and back home a soft northern spring is bringing those little green shoots up out of the earth lickety-split.I’m happy to be on vacation but I miss my real life. I miss going to the Y and seeing the odd little kid in the child care room who just had to wear his leopard costume. I miss Uncle Ed and worry that he’s lonesome without me.  He’s a great one for reading and doing the crossword and scrubbing the bathroom floors on his hands and knees though, and he was after all in the South Pacific for three-and-a-half years so he's probably OK. He is one tough, tough guy.I guess the one I really worry about is Abe, our nice grey cat born 15 years ago next month who almost died in the spring of ’08 because of a blocked urethra. In the end he had to have what remained to him of his little male parts cut off and at the time I got many humorous posts out of our joint predicament around that very pricey hospital stay but now (since I suddenly seem to be old myself) it’s not funny to me . Now I worry about him all the time and when I get up in the night to go to the bathroom I ask him if he’s all right and when he gets up he does the same. I’m not there now to check on him but people are staying in the house so I know he is probably fine.Still how funny that just yesterday someone should comment on those long-ago postings and leave this very instructive video.  Watch it and think how funny you’d find it to have your bladder so painfully distended:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlK7nF8rTj4&feature=player_embedded]

The Daily Grind

This is me at the daily grind. Ironing that is.  OK, not really. This lady's naked and I mostly stay dressed when I iron - nowadays anyway; it's not like that long ago time when we all heated  our houses to  80 and we could iron in bikini undies and a bra.  (Burned myself good doing that once. Still have this pointy little delta of a scar right next to my bellybutton.) As i say, I stay dressed while I iron now. I watch dumb TV at the same time so I kind of like the fact that no matter how many times I iron I still have a lot more ironing ahead of me in my life.This is the real me below having just ironed the tablecloths. I say tablecloths, with an 's,'  because you should always use two cloths in case the cat throws up on the table or someone has a nosebleed in the middle of the entree or something. With two you just whisk off the top cloth and you’re set (and don't try to tell me they don’t do exactly this in restaurants.)  The bow on that Christmas wreath is a hair thing from the 80s. (Remember when we all had poofed-out hair and wore all this fabric up on our heads?) That bookshelf  deserves a post all its own so I'll leave that alone for now but see that lint roller on top of the cookbooks? Again the cat. He sheds like mad and the lint roller picks up the hair . Just under that shelf and out of sight is the tube of tuna-flavored cat cream the vet made me get for old Abe. You smear it around the cat's mouth and he licks it for the nice fishy-smell, swallows some in the process and after a while - boom! - out comes a furball. Never mind that I have never once seen a  furball in 15 years of caring for him. I keep the tube around anyway for comic purposes. I try to pass it off as fancy lip balm and offer it to unsuspecting guests.

Will That Be Brunch or a Broken Neck Today?

Uh oh, mouse tracks everywhere today! Time to get out the traps, using my new method that works every time (as you can see from this photo.) It involves affixing to the trap’s mechanism a bit of string nicely smeared with peanut butter: the old Bait and Switch at its finest. Will that be a bit brunch or a broken neck today? I hate thinking about it.Time was, our two cats covered the whole Wild Kingdom beat around here and invading critters got away with nothing, not even the bats who drop down the chimney from time to time. Once, when our boy-cat Abe came down from his nap and saw a bat swooping and dipping around in the kitchen his face said “Damn!” and quick as a wink he was six rooms away. The girl-cat Charlotte had another reaction: she sauntered into the room, caught what was happening, shot one deadly mitt in the air and  - POW! - felled the thing mid-flight.Charlotte is hunting on that Far Shore now and Abe is pleading old age so it’s back to man-made contraptions for us these days. Maybe one day we can all live peaceably together like the three pals in this You Tube video but it won’t be in MY house, at least not until we can teach mice about potty-training!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuO-D4_tCoo]

Hot Metal, Right in the Old Eyeballs

Had an MRI last night at 10pm, weirdly enough.

Now for any MRI they begin by stretching you out like a corpse, then they seal you in a sort of high-tech coffin, then subject you to the fiercest racket you can imagine.

So into my coffin I went, joking around and saying I was sure I’d just find it funny just like I did the last time.... but of course it being TEN AT NIGHT I fell dead asleep in there, causing the technician to peep in a tiny electronic voice of alarm that sounded like it was a million lifetimes away, “Don’t move!” Jeez don't move!” Then they had to shoot the whole sequence again because being sound asleep I did move a little.

The racket IS pretty funny actually: First there’s this sort of syncopated knocking, like a kindergarten rhythm band just warming up, then six blasts of artillery fire, then a kind of electronic pocking like a person playing with one of those little wooden paddles that have rubbers ball attached to them by slender lengths of elastic.Then the whole capsule moves, with a sort of lame lurching motion, like a low-end amusement park ride. Then, it all starts again. Oh! And periodically too, a tiny image of the technician appears as a miniature angel in your coffin’s little mirror and asks, in a tiny electronic voice, if you're OK in there.

I just had my shoes and my bikini undies on under my double johnnie. Outside, David held my strapless bar, my yellow sundress and my wedding ring which is all I walked in with. Still they kept asking me if I had any METAL on, any metal at all? On me? In me? And also, Had anyone ever shot metal into my eyes?

All I could say was No. But some guy got mad at me today reading what I wrote about our nice cat Abe and how we let the doctors cut his penis off and he called me "freak" and other mean things AND HE SURE ISN'T THE FIRST TO DO SO so really all I can say about my eyes is, Not yet (and by the way here they are):

AWAY FROM HER & THE CAT SHAMPOOS

I’m away from her now, home again in Boston, and my big sister Nan is still in Florida; still in that Boy-in-a-Bubble world that this MRSA infection has put her in, where she can’t even take shower on account of the crucial porthole the hospital opened up in her arm. Since her week-long stay there in mid-June she's only been allowed to have little kitty-baths  - and this in a household where the real cat showers daily.

Nan and Chuck designed their bathroom in such a way that instead of a curtain the shower has two walls made of chunky glass tiles, which the cat scaled one day to oversee Chuck in his ablutions. Now Chuck is crazy about this animal and so “asked” him if wanted a little spray to the face and what do you think, the cat loved it. He now BEGS for out-and-out shampoos, complete with an Irish Spring lather-up to the head and ears. It must be like getting massage for us humans, or even massage with the special dessert thrown in for the folks who go in for that sort of thing because this cat just adores Chuck now, and follows him all over the house thanking him and licking him and sleeping in his truck when he can't get at his lap.

Nan named the cat when he first wandered into their yard as a homeless kitten. Duke she dubbed him, like they called John Wayne because little as he was he had that certain leadin'-with-ma-big-wide-shoulders-style swagger - or anyway he had it before a kitty stroke a couple of springs ago rearranged his posture some. Now he wears his head in this permanent cocked angle so now Nan calls him Two O’Clock. “Hey, Two O’Clock!” she’ll call out when he slinks by. The cat pays her no mind though; he’s too busy following Chuck, hoping for more shampoo and lap-dancing.

If you read the post underneath this you know that I went down to Florida to help Nan and Chuck as they weather this summer of Nan's sickness. This past Monday she let me go with her to the clinic that houses the Hyperbaric Chamber she must lie in for two hours every day because its oxygen-rich environment promotes healing in her foot, the site of this grievous infection. The thing looks like a big Tylenol capsule and she eases into it after the handsome tech Brian takes her vitals. On Monday he closed the cover and there she stayed, for a little over two hours before the doctor undid the dressing and looked at her poor foot, which even inside the bone is infected with this highly resistant staph infection capable of claiming your toes, your feet, your limbs and even your life.

I meanwhile sat stunned in the waiting room. I looked at the big live oak tree outside the window, wearing its Spanish moss like the torn lingerie the young Elizabeth Taylor wore in all those movies where she was for sure SEXUALLY AVAILABLE but strictly in that violet eyed upper-class British accent way.

I looked at the other clients waiting their turn, the woman who gave birth ten days ago and is one big open wound in the C-section area and so has to come have that seen to, poor dear, falling asleep in her chair.

And I brooded over the thought of what it costs to come here: a whopping $4500 per session and even with Nan's insurance she still has to pay $150 per. That will have been five days a week times ten weeks and well, you do the math.

And yet still she smiles and makes her funny remarks. She introduced Brian to me as "the Crypt Keeper" for example. He didn't mind. He gets her. He just smiled his nice smile and undid the blood pressure cuff around her little arm. "Wave to your sister," he said and she did that and he closed the lid and the session began.

Disgruntled Would-Be Memoirist Bitten on Fanny

Hey who wouldn’t want to write a disgruntled memoir about all the shady stuff they we're forced to live with? Back when it was Howdy Doody Time for all us early Boomers how frequently did I myself want to set down in black and white the abuses I suffered as a toddler when mothers would routinely shut their wee ones up in the ingenious Gitmo-style restraint knows as the "Snuggle Ducky,” a sort of zippered cotton envelope which prevented a person from sucking on his fingers or toes, forced him to lie as if crucified, unable even to scratch his nose - I choke back old tears writing this - able only to do what my three-year-old self bravely, gamely, spoke of as ‘making cookies ‘ which meant using the only thing I had, my little rosebud of a baby mouth to suck little circles of moisture onto the cloth as the only source of sleepytime fun. ~ SOB! ~

Plus, I was also given enemas, right in front of three, sometimes four wildly smiling older women. (What was it with the enema and the woman of former times, can somebody tell me?) Also, my sister and I were taken out on leashes, in public! Also tied to the maple tree out front so we wouldn’t wander off.

In other words I can totally identify with this Scott McClellan dude and his exposé of life in the White House. And the only thing that stops me from taking pen in hand and writing up my own book of Humphs and Grievance is the sad fact that I myself live in fear now: of my very own cats of all things who I can just tell in the twilight of their careers have totally forgotten the meaning of loyalty and are poised to start talking to the media. And I know what they’ll cite: The tuna-flavored lip balm designed to bring up hairballs; the odd thermometer addressed to their nether parts when such a thing proved needful; the cry of genital mutilation from our boycat, just because he got his pee-pee cut off this spring BUT NONE OF THESE WERE MY IDEA, they were the vet’s, and the vet is my superior and nothing is my fault ever and all right so I won’t write my memoirs but continue instead to hold my tongue and lick my wounds poor me, poor sainted, sainted me.

Feline Insubordination

We have two cats, who have gone over the years from being little Slinkies of fur descending the stairs to cheerful adult loungers on the sunny sidewalks of our neighborhood to old cats, if 13 even IS old age for a cat. I actually think they’re about where we are in life, crimped up a bit with the Arthur-itis and heaving themselves out of bed mornings to crookedly make their way to the bathroom same as us.

Anyway I’m supposed to take the one named Abraham back to the veterinary referral hospital today so that the internist can make sure the wound from his sex-change operation is healing up nicely. (It was a guy problem, as with older human males and the slowed-down pee-stream: he got blocked. His bladder swelled and he couldn’t empty it and of course he didn’t SAY anything and the toxins built up and built up and he crept off to hide and die right here in the house and would have succeeded too if my friend Mary and her girl Rachel hadn’t come and used their Psychic Powers to find him in a dark tucked-away corner of a third floor bedroom. One catheterization, then another, repeated IV’s, five days in the hospital and a blood transfusion: all these were assembled like baguettes around a diamond, around the central centerpiece drama of the surgery that removed that last little length of the garden hose as the doctor called it where the urethra curls in a funky enough way to make trouble down the line. (It has something to do with crystals in the urine but don’t ask me what. I just write the check.))

So here I am this morning trying to get Abe to the vet, and he can’t KNOW that, right? I hadn’t even taken the cat carrier out or done anything except look at him in a “Don’t go far, pal” way when he came inside an hour ago! He’s usually right between my feet wherever I go. He follows me from room to room, speaking that kind of cat language that has a lot of r’s in it, maybe it’s Spanish I don’t know. He helps me write every day, even sitting on my printer which is convenient as ALL hell as you might imagine.

So I’m calling him for a good 30 minutes here. I’ve opened a fresh tin can of cat food, making loud spoon-on-the edge-of-the-can noises. I’ve whistled the special whistle which he can’t EVER not answer, conditioned as he is to respond to it since his kittenhood. His sister Charlotte pays absolutely NO attention to my calls OR my whistles but she was just here a second ago, lounging on the kitchen love seat. She looked up as if to say “He’s an idiot; we know this.”

But that darn Abe won’t show himself and I’m starting to have a thought here: Charlotte has problems of her own to the extent that our regular vet said “when you can line up six windows of time spaced at five-day intervals bring her for a series of injections that will mitigate her pain.” Because she hurts; she fell out of a tree once they think and her X-rays show that on either side the big knuckly ball of bone at the top of the hip scraping dryly, grating against the hollowed-out portion of the pelvis in which it’s meant to pivot easily.)

I looked at the cat carrier and I looked at Charlotte. She’s bigger than Abe with the kind of hang-down tummy a lady-cat gets. She looks like a big old hot-water bottle, only really kind of beautiful too, like a jet-black jacket of sheared mink draped in a luxurious tumble of folds over the arm of a chair.

I got under her gently and eased her into Abe’s carrier, yelled “Tough on you old grey Abe! I’m taking Charlotte out to get her high!” and OUT that door I went.

Koko For President

The Writer at Work

Koko is the gorilla who came as a baby to this special lab in California and now gets by pretty well by signing to make herself understood. I wrote about her in my syndicated newspaper column which anyone at all can see by going here or Googling my name with, say, the phrase “Brad Pitt recently spotted driving around Toontown in Roger Rabbit’s car.” (Never doubt that I am a serious person!)

Stanford-based Dr. Francine “Penny” Paterson is the one who’s done all the heavy lifting to make this happen. She wanted to see if she could be made to understand simple signing and all these years later it looks like the answer is yes.

All I know is I could look at pictures of this gorilla all day long, as of course you can also do by visiting her home page. But I think my favorite place to go is the link where you can read the talk she once had online where an audience writes in questions which Penny then puts then to Koko. Koko signed back and somebody types Penny’s description of what she is saying.

In this interview somebody asks her if she'd like to have a baby. “Pink!” she replies. “They’d been talking about colors earlier;” Penny starts to say but then Koko signs “Listen Koko loves eat.” In other words never mind some baby that isn’t even around yet. Somebody then asks what her favorite food is and she says “I like Drinks” (Smart girl!) Somebody asks what the name of her cat is and she says “Foot.” Penny says “Foot isn’t the name of your kitty” and we already know that because we know that “Foot” is what she calls all male humans. She calls female human “Lips,” which I find really cute. “Hey lips honey! Get that foot-slave over there to bring us some drinks!”

Somebody asks her if she likes people and she says “Fine Nipple,” which Penny tried to gloss over by saying that the word “people” sounds a lot like “nipple” but the truth is she was brought up on sexual harassment charges some time ago. Seems she was always trying to touch the female lab worker’s breasts and get them to show her their nipples. (Doubt me do you? Go to her page on Wikipedia and see for yourself.

“She wants a little refreshment. She just gave a little vocalization,” Penny then says and Koko says “Lips hurry good give me.” She’s got a toy alligator. “She’s playing with her alligator and her lady doll” Penny says, again narrating the action, but then “Oh My!” she exclaims, “She may be doing a little acting out here!“ Then Koko picks up a scrunchie and puts it on her head. “Fake hat that,” she signs.

Someone asks her how she feels about a worker named Michael and she says “Foot foot good.” The she says “Nipple!” again, then she somebody asks her about her ape pal Ndume and she says “Toilet!” “That’s her word for bad,” Penny explains. She is evidently mad at her pal today. “He did something that was obnoxious but I didn’t see what happened,” Penny explains.

There’s a little talk about the 70-acre preserve in Maui that the Foundation hopes to establish for Koko and Ndume and then Koko says “Fake!” again, which Penny says means it’s not happening now; it’s hypothetical; pie in the sky in other words. Then Koko has her alligator bite the lady doll and the whole thing fades to black.

I love her. And I note she’s pushing 40 now and I’m going to try to get invited to the party. Because I believe ALL us older gals ought to hang out more, just for the fun of the drinks, and the trashing of the men, and the Fake-Hat-That wigs alone.

Whadda Day

ABE AMONG THE FLOWERS

Is it OK to whine in a blog? I swore off whining in my diaries out of pity for my poor kids who’ll have to go through them all some day and who wants to find out their mother was so petty, writing down how misunderstood she felt all the time or else primly recorded every time her husband looked at her cross-eyed?

No I’ll not burden them. I’ll burden you instead.

On Monday our nice crazy cat Abe disappeared - just vanished into thin air. I noticed it at suppertime when he didn’t come downstairs talking his little black gums off. (He’s one of those really chatty animals.) I asked his sister Charlotte where he was but she wasn’t talkin’. David went out to play tennis and drink Scotch with his pals so I made a fire in living room fireplace thinking “this is the center of the house; if Abe is anywhere in here I will hear him.”

I didn’t though and when David came home and heard he was gone we searched the whole house twice; then he went back outside with a flashlight and looked and listened, even drove around hoping Abe would pop out of the bushes since he loves nothing so much as a ride in your car so long as you’re just going around the block.

No luck though. “He’s in the house,” I told David. “I can feel him; so for the third time that night we searched all three floors and even the cellar. Nada. We slept with our bedroom door open for the first time in 20 years the way we used to do when the kids were babies. “What’s this about?” I asked Dave when he swung it wide. “So he can find us if he comes looking.”

He didn’t though. So the NEXT day I looked for him all over the town and every old newspaper, every piece of tree-limb looked to me like a little grey cat huddled in the gutter, killed by some ruthless fool in a car.

Finally I called my pal Mary, school nurse, veteran of the Oncology Department and the AIDS ward at Mass General Hospital. She’s the one who helped me through my last cat crisis which, when I made it into a column, brought in more letters than any other thing I have written in 27 years. (You can see it - hell you can HEAR me tell it in my own voice but you have to buy my $30 audio-plus-read-it book first ha ha.) Mary said she’d come after supper that night and help me look. She brought her lovely 13-year old Rachel and not eight minutes after they got here we found him - in the skinniest little space behind the door of my son’s third floor bedroom, empty now with Michael off in New York subsisting on a diet of beer and Ramen noodles.

He just stared at us, listless. Mary touched him, studied his face and said “renal failure?” We went right to the all-night animal ER, this gorgeous well-lighted temple of wellness and they operated on him within the hour.

All this was yesterday and I felt OK; I felt as if we were making progress. Because he wasn’t lost anymore, see. I felt as good as you do when you HAVE the baby and then the nurses suggest you let them take it down the hall to the nursery so you can rest and you say yes sure because you’re no fool you know it’s gonna be a LONG 20 years.

So yesterday I was happy. But today when the vet called at 6am she said he was no better really. His bladder didn’t burst and kill him but the catheter in his little neutered pee-pee set up some inflammation and his bloodwork looked iffy and he just couldn’t go home today forget about it and we’re now heading past the $2000 mark billwise but that was OK, right?

So at 6:30am I made my way down to the kitchen and opened up the cabinet with the flower vases, thinking to bring a bouquet to Mary and Rachel and out fell the one thing I have from my mother’s wedding day: a low chunky water glass saved as a souvenir. She used to keep one of the napkins in it from the reception hall. “Longwood Towers” it says in blue embroidery. The napkin was fine but the glass smashed in a million pieces.

Then, not six hours later I was thinking about the 20 Shakespeare enthusiasts who are coming here Tuesday night so we can all read Henry VIII aloud in my living room . I went to the dining room and was vaguely pawing some nice china service pieces when Smash! there went the fine china platter from my mother’s wedding in 1903 and you wouldn’t mind but this poor lady died at age 31 and what kind of a thing was THAT to do to her memory?

So I felt like hell all day and began thinking what were they doing to my baby down the hall in that nursery? I want him back! So I went to visit him. He has his leg in a sort of cast to support his IV tube and he seems to have dandruff or something all of a sudden and at first he tried to say some things about how sore his pee-pee was but in the end settled for purring like mad while I held him.

And now I’m home again and the column is due tomorrow and still has a zillion mistakes in it. But Dave’s got his bridge pals over and they’re drinking MORE Scotch and watching the Celtics so that’s good. That means I can iron and watch my new DVD of Eastern Promises, way too scary a move for David to even see a single scene of. I didn’t eat any dinner so maybe I’ll take that up with me too, then when I’m done put my sorry self to bed, asking forgivingness of my mum and her poor young mum and pulling up the covers to hide my head just like Abe did when we brought him in to the Catheter Cathedral.