Kitty Ultra Sound

CRRRUNCH. Crunch.

The saying "quiet as a church mouse" must refer to a living church mouse, because a church mouse being consumed as a snack is quite loud.

Yes, I am speaking from experience. No, don't worry. I didn't eat it, Clark did. And the mouse wasn't alive at the time. Clark had killed him, swiftly.

We were out for our weekly outing. I saw Clark chasing something as I sat in the churchyard chatting with cousin half a world away. Usually he doesn't catch anything. "Oh, he's hunting, but – he — he may have actually caught something," I said to my cousin, casually at first, then with rising concern as I bent down to see him under the church yard bench, and something clearly in his mouth. "Oh no – I think he has a mouse!" She let me go to deal with it… but by the time I hung up the phone and got down on my hands and knees, he'd dropped the mouse, and the mouse was clearly deceased.

I reached under the bench to try to get him away from the mouse, and he growled softly. He gets very irritated when I take his mice away from him, which I've done about a half dozen times. This time, since the mouse was clearly a goner, I thought, "Oh I'll let him toss it around for a minute, since I can't get it from him now – he'll get tired of it in a bit and I'll grab and discard it."

He must have read my mind. He looked right at me, picked the mouse up by the tail, and began to suck it into his mouth – tail gone then body gone then feet sucked in — it all happened so quickly! As the mouse disappeared into his furry mouth, there was a surprising CRUNCH of the little mouse bones in just a few quick mastications, and it was over. The mouse was gone.

I was in shock.

Clark wandered off, clearly satisfied with his snack. Somehow I managed to get up off the concrete. Behind me, on the other side of the garden in he church, there was a mass in progress. Quietly, I called back my cousin, who undoubtedly wasn't expecting this return call about my "Circle of LIfe" moment.. She helped calm me down with the story of a spider and a bee, which had a similar sad but predictable ending.

I let her go, and next call was to the vet – as there are rat poison stations in this garden, and I was concerned the mouse might be poisoned or diseased.

The after hours vet answered the phone, and though he seemed surprised by the call, said Clark would have to eat about 100 poisoned mice to get sick from it, and there was little to worry about in immediate moment, and no, it is not an emergency, although he might "vomit a bit" and feel ill, he reassured me, "Cats do eat mice all the time, and while we don't recommend it as a diet, just keep an eye on him and bring him in if he shows any symptoms."

So, OK. I started to calm down – then looked around – and Clark was gone! I started searching through all the hedges and bushes – no sign of him. I started to panic – then heard the neighboring crows screaming. They had raised a ruckus earlier in the spring, during nesting season, and Clark hadn't been able to visit the churchyard at all for months. Now, they had spotted him and were giving him the what for. I guess this is what a murder of crows sounds like….

I followed the sound out the gate, and found him in the small back garden by the parking lot, looking for another snack. I scooped him up – no admonishments, just took the furry hunter home.

So, now I have a killer in the house. And for the moment, he is as quiet as….

Sunday May 14, 2017
Mother’s Day

The second mother’s day without your mother, etiquette says you’re supposed to keep it to yourself. I was reminded yesterday that I was lucky to have my mother still alive for my 50th year. That’s true. But somehow, you know. It’s a wee bit hard to feel grateful for something you no longer have and which you miss quite a lot….

I’m typing and can’t avoid the fact that my hands look old. A series of tiny little cuts had been opening overnight on my hands and lower arms. After a series of visits to doctor and dermatologists over the last year, and the cat having been blamed by several (he isn’t the culprit), one dermatologist – who is probably 20 years younger than I – basically told me that my skin is pre-pre-cancerous – she said it’s like a field of sun damaged cells – and that sometimes it will spontaneously crack open. Wait – I’m leaking through my own skin? and it’s because of sun damage?. I avoided the sun my whole life, except for a couple of summers when I was 13 – 14, trying to get a tan and realizing after laying out for weeks, that it would never happen. Sun damage after decades of avoiding the sun.That’s like hearing you have second hand smoke damage when you never smoked and didn’t even live with a smoker except for that one year in college…

Also on this Mother’s day, I am sure I am developing quite the cataract. Something anyway making it a pain to see. I suppose I could wear my glasses when I type – but … I have allergies which bother one eye, so wearing contacts doesn’t work when it acts up, and my computer glasses are in the trunk.

I’m sitting here writing in a car, looking over grassy field, trees, bay, and the sounds of traffic like a constant ocean wave. All day long I drove around aimlessly with the cat in his case next to me, stopping several places where he could wander around, sit in the sun, smell and taste the grass. Now he’s napping in his soft carrier on the seat next to me. I had to force myself to get the laptop out and just write something down.

It’s been years since I really wrote anything other than a Facebook post. I had been writing daily, having gotten in the habit of doing “morning pages” (from Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way.”) But after the assault, I couldn’t face my own thoughts, because those thoughts were almost all jumbled trauma flashbacks and there was no way to sit with them long enough to string sentences together. It was the beginning of a series of major losses, not the least of which was the loss of perspective.

Being submerged under a sea of intrusive thoughts and images for years, one loses buoyancy… and then one day out of nowhere you exhale and go shooting up to the surface, and find all the lifeboats left long ago.

So you dive back under, closer to the glittering interface of sea and sky, but looking up from below… Now the thoughts that glide around me are mostly of my mother. Her face, her voice, the way she could still thread a needle when she needed to despite terribly arthritic hands. She was determined and stoic, although she wouldn’t turn down a sympathetic comment, she didn’t seek them out. Somewhere in her center she was pure steel, or maybe diamond – the pressures of life had made her inwardly strong, even as her body began to give way when she was in her 40s…

I have vague memories of her having some mysterious illness, and a woman who came in to watch us from time to time, cautioning us to be quiet so she could rest…. I believe it was a long time before they figured out she had a thyroid disorder. Back in the late 60s/early 70s, when I was a tot, thyroid disorders were difficult to diagnose…. It wasn’t much later before she complained of arthritis. I remember one night, she’d been shopping, somewhere, and had trudged back in zero degree weather from the bus stop some blocks away. She’d gotten mild frostbite on her knees, which gave them a sort of whitish crusty complexion.

She did all this trudging and hauling for us, in the years when she didn’t have a driver’s license. She’d let hers lapse when she was living in NYC as a young woman, after having been in some kind of accident which put her off driving. So when she decided she really needed to drive again, she had a house full of children. I remember the driving school car would come to the house to pick her up, and we’d all tease her. But she did it anyway, got her license, so that she could drive to the store, do errands, and — for one special summer, she got us into a country club. The one we could afford, and fit into, was over the river. I forget the name of it, since we only went that one summer. But she wanted us to have that experience, once, while growing up. A club with a pool open every day, a snack bar, tennis courts, a gym (untouched by us) and a sauna, which we all enjoyed.

And most days that summer, she’d load us into the car, with towels and tennis racquets and a cooler filled with sandwiches and snacks and off we’d go in the red Volkswagen square back that had belonged to her father, and we’d go to the Woodlawn club (I think). I remember she was convinced I was anorexic because I was concerned about my tummy (even as a skinny young girl, I never was slim-waisted) and wanted a more hourglass shape, so I eschewed salty snacks. I remember her in her bathing suit with a long sleeve shirt over it, tied at the waist, and an old tennis visor, holding down our little area on the grass above the pool.

On weekends, my Dad would sometimes come with us, a vision in bad late 1970s Dad-wear: an orange plaid fishing type hat, blue-ish striped office-type short sleeve shirt, red and black swim trunks, an unsightly combination topped off by blacks socks and his black office shoes (it was years before he spent the money on getting himself some sneakers, and that only because of late onset diabetes). The black shoes and socks were high contrast against his super ultra white legs, that only saw the sun 6 days a year; his legs only avoided blinding passers-by because of the thick black hair peppering the white limbs.   It was not a good look, more suited to the public beach at Lake George than a slightly upper crust country club, and he truly stuck out like a sore thumb. I often wonder if she tried to outfit him in something more suitable, or just had given up on that by then.

… to be continued….

Typical San Francisco day, sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe on the cable car line, with an acquaintance from Los Angeles. We’re shooting the shit about life in San Francisco, the first dot com boom, whether life is “tactile” anymore, why the SF Ballet resembles a fortress (I posit that it is to protect a dying art form from the vagaries of tech bus riders), whether anyone under 30 knows they are supposed to surrender seats on busses for the elderly – without being asked.

At one point, he asks if I have a blog.

Not really, no.

“You should. You seem like a person who should have a blog.”

He’s a writer, so I guess he should know…

So. Does this count?

A new coffee shop called “Saint Frank” opened up in my neighborhood. I ventured in while waiting for my bus to work.

The coffee bags were insanely expensive. $17.00 for a HALF pound of ground coffee! That’s more than twice what you’d pay for, say, Starbucks brand, and even more than Blue Bottle brand.

As I browsed the brown bagged beans on the wall, the young man behind the counter kindly offered to answer any questions I may have.

“Ok,” I said. “I have a question. Why is your coffee so incredibly expensive?”

He did not blink or flinch at this very direct question – undoubtedly has been trained how to answer.

“Well,” he started, filling up a espresso maker portafilter with ground coffee, “Our coffee is sourced from a variety of growers, and they use the best methods to make the best coffee, which can sometimes take longer and is more costly.”

I interrupted him – “Such as, what kind of methods?”

He seemed momentarily stumped, as he leveled off the coffee grounds in the portafilter with a special leveler. “Well, it depends on the type of coffee. Sometimes it is organic farming. Sometimes it may be a special drying process. It really depends.”

I decided to let this slide. He continued. “So, we feel that those people who are doing the work deserve to be paid fairly for their work.”

I interrupt again. The story may be true, or have a version of the truth in it, but my inner cynic was already waving red flags and she took over the conversation…. “Oh. So – to pay them fairly for the extra work, you mark up the coffee well above any other coffee out there, so that you can retain the same amount of profit as other coffee companies while passing on a little more money to growers whom you’ve asked to do extra work on the product. But you aren’t really sharing the profit, you’re just charging more to the consumer and keeping the same percentage of profit as every other coffee selling company.”

He stared at me. The espresso machine spouted steam.

It wasn’t fair, I suppose, to cast it that way to the guy behind the counter just doing his job. Why shouldn’t they make the same profit as everyone else, and pay farmers a bit more, if there are wealthy San Franciscans willing to pay $17.00 for a half a pound of coffee? And who knows – maybe they really are a kinder, better paying coffee company. But my cynic was not longer interested in hearing any more justifications for the insanely expensive coffee. All she saw through the cynic-filter was a company profiting off those coffee farmers twice – once, to make a profit selling their coffee — and again, to make a BIGGER profit by overpricing the coffee and selling the “we are more fair to the farmers” story to the consumer. Truth or fiction? No way to know in the moment.

I decided to make a quick exit. I smiled and thanked him for the explanation and left.

But, ask a stupid question – get a stupid answer.

“Why is your coffee so expensive?”

 “Because we charge more.” 

End of story.

Tonight when I arrived home after a choir rehearsal, with a side trip to see two old friends perform at a local lounge, I was musically saturated.  My little apartment was piping hot, so I opened all the doors and windows, and sat in a little chair just outside my front door, and enjoyed the slightly chilled air in the lobby.

My senior cat came out to join me, and stopped a few feet away to sit in perfect Cat-ness on the cool linoleum floor, her calico patches smooth under the dim full-spectrum 25 watt bulb above her.

To get a little air flow, I’d propped the building door open, so the slight breeze came through the outer iron gate (still locked) and through the second open doorway, and brushed her white whiskers. She stared at nothing for a few minutes, as a cat is wont to do; then took three turns around my ankles and demanded a midnight snack. I was happy to comply. So glad this gorgeous senior Calico Gal is chomping away at meals again.

After dinner, she lounged on her brand new, Double-Wide Trader Joe’s Cat Scratcher, complete with fresh catnip sprinkled in all the cardboard crevices.

Heaven, in June, with catnip.

The cat has finally forgiven me for my terrible “faux paw” this morning.

I had taken the viola out of its dusty case and played a few scratchy scales. The cat stared at me first in disbelief, then pain, then horror, then anger, as her pupils widened and she slunk away to the furthest corner of the room. I put the instrument away, which did not assuage her fury.

Upon inquiry, she declared that I had assaulted her delicate triangular ears with this monstrosity, and would not speak to me further for two hours.

She relented after a nap and is now nestled on my lap.