Sometimes, it’s just all too much, whether you’re an alpaca or a copywriter.
Month: April 2008
Planning For Spring While It Snows
I could dig up another unhappy quote about the weather, but let’s just assume I’m unhappy with it and move on to something more hopeful: Seeds.
Last year I had a patio garden and it did pretty well, so this year I’m getting more ambitious and will actually plant things in the ground. (In the blighted area where the landlord cut down all the trees last spring, actually.)
I have tomatoes and basil going as starts, and I bought seeds for the rest of the produce yesterday. So now I’m really impatient for nice weather.
(And because I have to take a picture of Toby every time I get out the camera, here he is. His new favorite toy? A plastic bag. I have some reservations giving my “baby” a plastic bag as a toy, but he’s supervised. And very smart, as you can see.)
Mom: Better Than Any Project
You love sickly cats best; you complain bitterly about managing students but then always make them birthday cakes; you’re redecorating and using Monet’s house as an inspiration; pruning is your therapy. Thank you for everything and happy birthday!
Love,
The Daughter
2006, on the bridge at Giverny
"Privilege O f Being"
Mr. Isbell has been out of town, and yesterday night I dreamed that instead of adopting Toby, I took him back to the shelter, realized my mistake, and went to get him again only to find out that he had been “donated” to the “University Cat Research Center”. (It was a dream, but it was very ominous.)
Of course I was so relieved to wake up and see Toby sitting on my chest, but I had to think of my friend Sean: When I told him I wanted to get a cat, he said, “That will just open up whole new ways for you to be miserable!”
I understand his point. While the dream was just a dream, there are so many ways to be afraid for something you love. People can “die young, fail at love, fail of their ambitions,” cats can get lost or sick–but you have to just accept that risk, because the happiness you get tempers the fear. (Sean disagrees, of course, but he also doesn’t care for pets.)
(Title and quotes from one of my favorite Robert Hass poems.)
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Gah! Has anyone else had the 24-hour stomach flu that’s going around? Mr. Isbell had it Sunday and I told him it had to be food poisoning, since it came and went so fast. Well, my disbelief was punished—I came down with it yesterday at lunch. I’m just glad it does move fast. I might even try to eat a cracker later.
2. I will wash my windows tomorrow, when I am recovered. No excuses. It’s getting hard for Toby to see the birds out of them.
3. From an archived interview (now online) with Ernest Hemingway on how he approached symbolism in his books: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”
A Lovely Poem For Thursday
It’s by Mary Oliver, who wrote a handbook we used in my long-lost poetry classes but whose work I didn’t really know.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
He Wasn’t Really Dancing
I mentioned Dancing Cats Feline Health Center on Friday, and at the risk of telling yet another cat story, I have to mention it again today. Toby had to go there last Wednesday for an eye infection; they were really nice; he didn’t mind being there (until they tried to take his temperature); and he got eye drops to clear things up.
But the drops weren’t clearing things up, so I left a message Saturday morning when they were closed, thinking I wouldn’t hear back from them over the weekend. But only an hour later the vet called and had me come in to get oral antibiotics, and called again yesterday to see if they were working. (Fortunately, they were, because it wasn’t fun for anyone involved to make sure Toby got eye drops and liquid medicine.)
But my point is: great vet, who remembers people by their cat’s name, who comes in on weekends to check messages, and who names her clinic Dancing Cats.
Tuesday Project Roundup: Brand New Bag
I got the feeling on Friday (get it, James Brown fans?) to ignore my dirty windows and screens and to work on a new bag instead. I’ve made purses for myself before, but have always been a little dissatisfied with how they turned out–too small, the zipper looked lumpy, the interfacing didn’t bond right, etc.
But I got so sick of carrying an old bag that I bought in the days of credit (that I probably just paid off) that I decided to try again. And it turned out well: It’s big enough to hold a bottle of wine, my minimum size requirement (putting wine in a purse happens more than you’d think); there’s a magnetic snap instead of a zipper; and the interfacing is just fine. 
Toby likes it, too. Although he prefers his grocery bag.
Dammit, Spring, Will You Get Spring-like Soon?
This is the rest of the passage from A Moveable Feast I put up a couple weeks ago:
“Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it [spring] back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life…You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the tree and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
Hear that, spring? You’re making us sad. Shape up.
Friday Unrelated Information
1. I learned an awesome word this week: jeremiad, or “a long literary work in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective.”
2. The article in which I learned this awesome word is worth reading, even if it’s depressing: “The Dumbing of America.“
3. If you maybe have the day off and are trying to decide between sewing a new bag and washing your filthy windows, you could read this article, too, while you finish your coffee and decide: “Stowaways,” about “the strange things restorers find in historic aircraft.”
4. If you have a cat and need a vet, I highly recommend Dancing Cats Feline Health Center. Not only because their name is Dancing Cats (which is fantastic), but because they’re kind, efficient, and affordable and recognized Toby as the superior cat he is.