Agatha

Oh lordy, here I go again.

The mewing started late on Memorial Day — Monday; a sound exactly like my melodious Mr. Ferguson, except that it seemed to be coming from down by the cellar windows, where he emphatically was not, being shut upstairs at the time.

Torvald, he of the fluffy thundercloud-colored coat and rumbustious disposition, was on top of a bookcase, gazing with alacrity out of the cellar windows. I went outside to look at what he was looking at and found this winsome, thick-tailed creature rolling in the grass.

She was still there the next morning. And the next evening. A note circulated to the local mailing list elicited some genius admonitions not to feed “stray cats” and one lost cat notice from about three weeks back, which moved me to go out, snatch the little creature and bring her inside. But I found that the lost cat of the notice had come home.

By now she was already named Agatha, because her tortie coat reminds me of an agate and because the celebrated Agatha Christie once went walkabout in the course of a marital upheaval. I don’t know about marital, exactly, but Agatha’s sustained writhing on the ground (or carpet) and plaintive yowling suggested an attack of early puberty. She seemed convinced my two neutered boys had the stuff for what ailed her, judging from passionate gazes through window glass and porch doors; at the very least, I figured, I was preventing a teenage pregnancy by keeping her in my sun porch.

Thursday morning, as I was about to leave to have her checked at the vet, a call came in from “Angelica,” who spoke the halting Spanish-accented English that is the brow-knuckling, pencil-snapping, napkin-twisting bane of my existence in these parts. I had put out posters with Agatha’s picture and my phone number, and Angelica saw one, and would come right over to get her, it was only across the street… my heart sinks at moments like this. I had to steal, in the end, my immortal bad boy Taffy the Terrible from next-door neighbors who were immigrants from Salvador and seemed to think of cats as warm furniture who needed nothing more than a dish of cheap kibble, water and to be let out to pee. Neutering? Too much trouble and money! We don’t let the gringos tell us to take our cat’s balls off! Bring him in at midnight when it’s twelve degrees out? We’re going to bed! The Abduction Of Taffy, when we finally moved, was a James Bond story for another time. And here I was again with Agatha, and Angelica.

Angelica showed up with about a three year old kid in tow — to be fair, he wasn’t too bratty — and, while she spoke competent simple English, really didn’t want to consider my idea of coming along with me to see the vet. I have to call my husband. (Because god forbid you should make a decision without calling some goddam man.) What will it cost. (Never mind that I said I’d help, or that her story of getting the cat from an uncle whose unspayed female had overrun his house with kittens was a glaring object lesson. These people don’t bother to control their own reproduction, never mind their pets’.) In the end, short of refusing to relinquish the cat, I had no option but to donate a cheap carrier and offer some quickly printed Web pages from the local shelter and the nearest vet. Keep her inside, I said, she wants a boy friend and if she gets out she’ll be right back over here meowing for love.

It only took thirty-six hours. She’s on the porch now.

Did I mention we have a tornado watch and a flash flood warning tonight?

So, do I take her back over in the morning and give them one more chance to do it right, or say Fuck It and bugger off to the vet’s at the first opportunity? Torvald is perishing for a buddy, and unlike my home team, Agatha seems to like him.

Over The Hill

I know I’m old now, in a sense, because actors who played bit parts in beloved dramas of my younger days are now iconic, their most famous roles etched on the public mind even when their names require a look-up.

The Cute Engineer, who was about seven when the BBC aired its tour de force series based on Robert Graves’ Claudius novels, had heard me rattle on enough about the programs and surprised me by springing for a 35th anniversary edition of the series. Every other episode tossed up a familiar face. I had warned him about Patrick Stewart‘s performance as the corrupt prefect Aelius Sejanus,  whose plays for power during the reign of Tiberius ended — at least in Graves’ version — with execution at the order of his competing prefect Macro. I’d forgotten about the actor playing Macro himself; he looked familiar, and the name John Rhys-Davies scrolled by in the credits.

A couple of nights later, as we got toward the end, I recognized Bernard Hill as well. Of all the characters in the filmed Lord of the Rings, King Theoden was to me the most perfectly realized, the man I would have wanted for a king, a father, a general. Hill blew the role out of the ball park and possibly into the next galaxy. It was a bit jolting, I said, to see a much younger Theoden pulling Derek Jacobi’s tremulous Claudius out from behind a curtain and declaring him Emperor of all Rome (here, at about 5:30).

“Not as weird as seeing Captain Picard done in by Gimli,” said the Engineer.

We’re still debating it.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Memorial Day is just not my favorite holiday. (I’m not sure there is one I really like, but that aside.) Sale circulars arrive by snail and e-mail, beer is bought in truckloads, cars take off for the beach, and people stage obnoxious parties, like the one that ended around 1 a.m. this Sunday with my calling the cops over the matter of two returning corybants down my street engaging in an outbreak of obscenity-laced partner violence on my neighbors’ lawn.

Then people make some very solemn speeches about how our military keep us free, and the phrase “ultimate sacrifice” is used a lot. People choke up, feel noble, and go home.

Wilfrid Owen, who was a British officer in the First World War and a poet, didn’t come home. He had this to say about it:

     Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
     Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
     Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
     And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
     Men marched asleep.  Many had lost their boots,
     But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame, all blind;
     Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
     Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

     Gas!  GAS!  Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
     Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
     But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
     And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
     Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
     As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

     In all my dreams before my helpless sight
     He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

     If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
     Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
     And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
     His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
     If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
     Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
     Bitter as the cud
     Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
     My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
     To children ardent for some desperate glory,
     The old Lie:  Dulce et decorum est
     Pro patria mori.

Owen was not a conscientious objector nor a draft-dodger. He was invalided home in 1917, and returned to the front “in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.” He died leading his men across the Sambre Canal a few days before the Armistice.

In the Great War it was gas and shell-shock. These days it’s IED’s and brain damage: there’s always a weapon that no one is prepared for and a generation that has to deal with it, and no one wants to hear about the aftereffects.

I really don’t think all the little flags help much with this, do you?

The Cat Prayer

Several posts back I conversed with Richard about the Cat Prayer.

Today I read this.

Mountain lion killed in downtown Santa Monica

By GREG RISLING | Associated Press

• 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police shot and killed a mountain lion that somehow made its way through an urban landscape before it was found early Tuesday in a downtown Santa Monica office building courtyard near an outdoor mall and a bluff-top park that offers tourists views of the ocean and the city’s famed pier.

God bless all pussycats and keep them safe and warm
Especially those who are in heaven.
Give them a safe path to the Rainbow Bridge
And if they had no human friend, help them to find one.
And today especially bless the young mountain kitty
Who needed no human to be his friend
In any way other than to share the planet with him.

Let him have a place where he can roam and live
As wild kitties were meant to do,
Tawny in the daylight,
Silent and soft-pawed in the night,

Free to play and hunt in woodlands where there are no guns,
Amen.

La Figlia Che Piange

The damndest things stick in your mind like a bur and make the past seem like a chasm or ravine down which you could tumble, weeping or laughing as the case demanded.

I was friends in high school (and beyond) with a very complicated lad who was raised as a Scientologist, godalmighty help us, and whose almost-too-loyal friendship was sabotaged by his fixation on Hubbardian truth. In the end I really couldn’t take it any more; the disconnect between behavior and assertion of “Total Freedom” (soi-disant) was just too much.

But he was both bright and crudely funny, and I can’t remember who it was that we remarked ought to feature in a play called “Death Of An Asshole” (we all know someone), and he struck a pose,  as if bending to survey a corpse in situ, and said in a light French accent that invoked Hercule Poirot or perhaps Maigret: “He was smothered in Nupercainal.”

I laughed till I cried them — beer probably helped — and when I think of it I still do.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Splinter

When I got Splinter he was, well, a splinter, a nearly leafless two-foot specimen of, so said his label, American Black Cherry in a battered plastic pot at the end of the garden center sale table. He was nine-ninety-nine, plus tax. It is dangerous to walk past that sale lineup; it’s like an animal rescue. You feel sorry for something, and take it home.

“I don’t know if it’ll live,” said my gardener David, who can’t do anything without talking me to death first. I have learned to turn him into white noise and go about my mental business, and in due time he got Splinter into the earth; it was mid-October of 2002.

After three years he put out some tentative blooms. Two years ago he fruited. He turned out to be, not a black cherry tree, but a Prince Rainier. You see them in the market sometimes, six or seven dollars a punnet, blushing over yellow flesh. This is the first year they have been plump enough for anyone but the birds to eat.

I have been running around the earth having all sorts of alarums and excursions in those ten years, getting dumped, dabbling in politics, finding a new gentleman friend, writing crap mystery novels, but I sometimes wonder if I have made anything like as good use of the time as Splinter has.

The Hanged Man

Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

I was driving an atypical route from the gym to the hardware store when I passed — at the top of a curve on a thirty-mile-an-hour road; no stopping for snapshots — a pedestrian crossing-sign that had been riveted to a phone pole, pretty much exactly like this:

Except that, inexplicably, Little Walking Man had blown a rivet, so that what I now saw was this:

I felt twitchy until I could get home, pull down Eliot’s Waste Land (whose Tarot references are utterly potted, but never mind),  and jog my memory about whether, after the blaze of free-associations that followed that lightning glimpse, I did or didn’t need to fear death by water. It’s rained a bit lately, though nothing that astonishing, but after last year’s floods you never know.

I’m not sure exactly what he is telling me, but I think I’m safe. Maybe it is just time to practice hanging upside down by only one foot, something I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to do for a while now. I’m up to half a minute with two.