All Twitty

I’m beginning to feel what my mother must have meant when she said, towards the end of her life, that things were all twitty. Because today, I find myself absolutely unable to do anything—write, print labels, find anything to write about.

It may be the cat that got me into this mood. We’ve had Kitty for 16 years, ever since I heard him yowling on the top of a wheel on a parked car outside. OK—moral proximity: if a cat needs help outside your house, what can you do? So there we were, lying on our stomachs on the sidewalk, peering under the car. And there Kitty was, wisely deciding to retreat deep into the chassis of the car. After all, did he know who we were?

The solution was tuna fish, we realized, and it became clear: we were only going to get one chance; this was one smart cat. Fortunately, we lured him into the cage, and spirited him up to the apartment, where we put him into the one room that actually has a door, the guest bathroom.

The kitten at this point fit comfortably in Mr. Fernández’s hand—it was at that stage where the ears were seemingly bigger than the head. And speaking of the ears, there was a huge oil smear on the right ear; Mr. Fernández got to work on that the next day.

Which I found then, when I came upon Fernández sitting on the toilet, alternately drying and kissing Kitty. “I like this cat,” he crooned, and that was it. True, he was / is an orange cat, and none too beautiful. But that wasn’t the point; probably because of the vitamins we shoveled down him, he’s a truly intelligent cat.

(Sorry to disabuse you here, but most cats? Stupid as posts, despite their appearance….)

Smart enough, in fact, to break out of the guest bathroom after a few days. And how did he do it, since the door was still closed? By climbing up and then down an 8-foot louvered door—it was the only way.

So there he was, casually casing the place, completely unfazed be the three other adult cats who were tailing him. 

Over the years, it became obvious—this was Raf’s cat, not mine. Kitty sleeps by Raf at night, and stays sleeping on his pillow during the day. And at one point, Raf had a dream in which Kitty was talking to him.

“Kitty, you can talk!” exclaimed Raf.

“Of course I can talk,” said Kitty irritably. It was sort of an Alice and Wonderland moment….

Which last Monday was not. That’s when I took Kitty in to the vet, since he hadn’t been eating, and was looking lethargic. He knew, of course, what was coming the moment his saw the red carrying case; characteristically, he offered no complaint.

I knew, too, what was going to happen. I knew it the moment I saw the vet palpating Kitty’s lower abdomen.

“It’s always the kidneys in older cats,” said Jeanne over the weekend. At that point, Kitty had just come home from five days in the hospital, getting IV fluids, and enduring the constant barking of the neighboring dogs. And yes, he had cost us just under a thousand bucks.

We had to spend it, of course. But I can tell you now—we might as well have taken a vacation, instead. Despite Raf’s optimism—based on the statement by the vet that Kitty might last another two years—I don’t think this cat’s gonna be around long.

So he’s in the back bedroom now—isolated so we can see if he urinates and give him the diet he needs. And I puzzled this morning when I was feeding him, how strange life worked. I had a job, I had an office, I had a place to be on Monday mornings. And now? I was alone with an old, feeble cat—a cat we will one day put in the red carrying case, and head weeping—as I am now—for the vet…

…one last time. 

Desperately Seeking Harry

It was a day when the news was so bad I had to read about George Michael.

Right—I better explain. Yesterday had been fiendishly hot. I had come home, written a post—hey, and gotten my first comment! Thanks, Anonymous!—and sent it to Harry. I had a brainstorm—Los Choferes Unidos de Ponce! Surely the united drivers of Ponce could—singularly or collectively—find a way to get me from the biggest city in Puerto Rico to the second biggest city. I mean, come on!

I sent Harry the post, and also the news about the UDOP (United etc.). “At precisely 8AM I will be in my car, driving to San Juan,” responded the good Harry. He apparently thinks less of UDOP than I.

Great! Woke up at seven, had my coffee, looked outside, and saw the cold front move in.

Cold I can use….

Rain is another story. Because very quickly, we were in a chubasco.

It’s a word I love, and was curious about. Why did I think it was Puerto Rican slang? So I looked it up, or was about to when…

Drip drip drip drip drip drip…..

You get the picture. Or rather, you don’t.

OK, a chubasco is a strong, sudden, heavy rain. Not a problem—we need rain (actually, apparently everybody except—who else?—the British needs rain).

What I didn’t need was a stream of water pouring into the apartment. I raced to get the two buckets and two pots necessary to collect the water. Also the mop…

…passing Loquito, who was busy pissing on the floor of the living room.

Snarled at him, grabbed the buckets / pots, positioned them and then my cell phone went off.

Harry, informing me that it was precisely 8AM, and he was on the expressway. I did the only thing I could think off.

Held the phone to the rim of the metal pot.

What to do? Rather, how to do it? How can I cancel a SECOND time on my dear friend, who spent all last week in bed in agony (gory details omitted), and now was jumping up to drive 65 miles to get me?

OK—check out the weather situation. Shout at Raf, who is nowhere to be found. The radio alarm, however, is on—as it has been since 6:30. Great, so Raf should know something about the weather, right? I mean, they do talk about the weather on morning radio.

Mr. Fernández, however, had been sleeping soundly in the preceding hour and a half.

Great—a chubasco situation. Pissing cat, sleeping husband, half of Niagara Falls flowing through the apartment.

OK, flip on the computer, check El Nuevo Día. It’s the local rag, though how it can be—electronically—is a mystery.

Chubascos, said The New…and increasingly terrible…Day. 

Thanks, New Day! But I must be fair. The New Day did tell me that Harry was heading for disaster—a truck had jackknifed on the expressway.

I call Harry and tell him all this. Of course he understands.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving my house if it were leaking like that,” he says.

Spend ten minutes deciding whether to kill the cat….

And decide to check out the news.

Something I rarely do. I mean look, does it make sense to take anti-depressants AND read the news? That’s pretty much like combining Antabuse with vodka. 

With pretty much the same results….

Well, it’s not pretty, our world. The guy who predicted the 2008 meltdown thinks it’s gonna happen again, just worse. Watched that for ninety seconds. Bank of America reported second quarter profits. Great—nobody has a job, but the banks are making money! Greece says it can’t make the austerity cuts that the European Union is demanding.

The situation in Syria is unspeakable.

Think it can’t get worse?

Think again, because in a world besieged with every imaginable problem, George Michael comes up with a new one!

Well, new to me, at least.

ForeignAccent Syndrome.

Well, God knows, I should know about this. Number one, I have one (a foreign accent, that is). Two, I’m an English teacher—thus working every day with accents.

Well, here’s the deal. George was singing away on a tour last year, and then fell sick.  Pneumonia. Bad pneumonia. Progressing to a coma. The he woke up.

Speaking with a foreign accent.

Here’s AP news:

Michael said that as he opened his eyes, doctors asked him if he knew who he was—to which he replied, "King of the world?" in the distinctive West Country burr.

It was almost the last straw. The goat that calms the cup (la gota que—oh, forget it). But those seven sturdy years of unrelenting optimism gave me the tools I need.

Another problem?

NO!

An opportunity. So here’s what I’m gonna do. People got a problem with my accent? I’m really Puerto Rican!

I woke up from MY coma sounding like a gringo!
 _________________

Etymological note—chubasco is from the Portuguese chuva, rain.
Meteorological note—been sunny all day!

Little Deaths

It seems disrespectful, diminishing to call it this way, but that’s how it occurred to me, this morning.

It’s a little death.

I am thinking of Taí, my sister, who wrote to tell us that she had put her treasured cat—Sajo—to sleep. We scrambled to find her number, Raf called Charisse, then Taí called.

Suffering, of course. She’s a woman who loves animals, and is very, very good with them. When she is here, the food bowls get put in various places, and Taí assumes the role of lunchroom monitor—Loquito has to eat out of everyone’s dish. And he will attack Herrick—not seriously, but certainly not amiably.

Herrick, of course, weighs twice as much as Loquito. He could easily send Loquito flying—and in fact has. I’ve seen it, and cheered Herrick on. Doña Taí, however, puts up with no nonsense from the cat world. “Oh, gosh,” she will say, and fly out of her chair in the dining room to investigate suspicious feline sounds. 

And she is of the belief that yes, cats can be trained. 

My take?

Errr…no.

But who knows? What I do know is that there is something peculiarly bad about a little death. The big deaths—a parent, a spouse, a child—those are agonizing. The death of a pet?

Also agonizing.

As I write this, Loquito is ten feet away. I am writing, he is snoozing—very much what cats do. And the moment I get up?

He’ll fly into action. He’ll follow me wherever I go. I, of course, will be scolding him.

“Don’t wag your tail! Wagging your tail is prohibited! Strictly prohibited! Ridiculous!”

Why do I tell him this?

Because he pays absolutely no attention. In fact, his whole body language is screaming…

…fuck you!

Which amuses me. I was a nervous, inward child—the nerd who never misbehaved, never even whispered, when the teacher left the room. Loquito? The kid who jumped up and started writing obscenities on the blackboard.

Loquito is also my creator spirit. The person who writes, who plays the cello?

Loquito.

Irrepressible, intractable, fearless, silly—whatever I do creatively is felinized (can’t be personified, can it?) by Loquito. And so in those months when I was struggling, it was Loquito who got me through, showed me the way.

Taí—of course, was worrying in Tobago. I felt her love coming through. Raf was frantic but working in Hato Rey.  He was, and is, the constant in my life. But Loquito?

He was making me laugh. I’d watch him under Raf’s computer table, playing with cables. He’d be knocking the clumps of kitty litter out of the scooper as I cleaned the pans. He’d be crouching behind a picture resting against the wall—waiting for something, anything, to pounce on.

And he would ALWAYS be there. 

That, I think, is what makes the little deaths so hard. Yes, I loved my mother. It was definitely a big death. But she lived and died three thousand miles away. I called her every morning and most afternoons, those last years. The moment a vexing grammatical point presented itself, I thought to ask her, and could not.

But she wasn’t woven into the warp and weft of my life—as Loquito is.

As animals are.

“Cloudy!” called John once, when I visited him in New York. He was calling my mother’s cat, now a New Yorker. “Mr. New is going to work, honey! He’ll be back! Mr. New will be back at seven, honey!”

Mr. New?

“He does this every morning,” reported Jeanne.

John shot me a nervous look as he walked out the door. Mr. New was wearing a three-piece suit and carrying an elegant leather briefcase. He’ll make his calls and write his emails and scream at other people’s attorneys—if he has to—and then come home. 

Home to a cat who—trust me—has not missed him. The work clothes will be shed, dinner started, the TV turned on. Cloudy will jump into his lap, be stroked, patted, caressed, addressed. She will be a cat.

Why do I think it’s our animals that make us human?      

Three Failures and a Chair in a Tree

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I was saying on my morning walk, as I peered at the ocean roiling below El Morro. But I could equally have said…

“…what is the correct understanding?”

For I had completely bombed in my classes yesterday, after an interesting day of failure on Sunday.

OK, I now drop the ironic tone of previous posts. Anything—until further notice—comes from the gut, not the mind.

I have never wanted to be a teacher—I’ve told you that, right?—and I have never taken it much seriously. I do show up on time. I am as groomed as I get. But beyond that, I don’t do much. I observe the students, just as I observe the iguanas.

But on Sunday—that would be the day before yesterday—I had written a post about failure. And had had a successful day studying it. Then, it was time to work.

OK—the worst task first. I attacked the kitty litter boxes, and thought while doing so that the wash was next. But there’s a rule —self-imposed, but still a rule—in the house that one cannot proceed from one room to another without carrying something (generally, dirty ashtrays or coffee cups). It’s a big house; it’s the only way….

In this case, it was not a dirty ashtray but a dirty sex toy. NO, not my sex toy but the cat’s. Yes I provide them, although I do not GIVE them. I quite properly deposit my dirty underpants in the laundry basket. Smith, the cat, retrieves them (it?) and moves to the most public area of the house, always on a rug. There he proceeds to….

….I’ll not say. But I can only say that he makes a quite distinctive sound as he goes about it, and that, of course, prompts me to shout…

“FOR GOD’S SAKES! YOU ARE SICK AND DISGUSTING! PUT THAT FILTHY SEX TOY AWAY, OR AT LEAST DO IT IN PRIVATE!”

Words, I realized a week ago, that my new neighbor must have heard, as she was smoking a cigarette on her balcony. (It’s Old San Juan, remember? All the doors are open here….) She gave me, well, a special look hours later on the street….

Still thinking somewhat about the wash, I then went to address a few words (why bother? guess it’s just habit) to the cat.

Right. He was in the bedroom where, well, the bed was unmade.

OK, did that, and then saw—you’re not forgetting the wash, are you?—a book on the floor. Well, that’s not right, I thought, as I frequently do. I picked it up and headed to…

You get my drift?

I did eventually do the laundry, some hours later. But observing as I was the trifling failures in my most proximate agenda, I had quite a successful day. Things got done—they often don’t.

Buoyed by all this, I got right down to work, the next day, writing an assignment for the students. It’s something I never do. Worse, is was on conditionals, something I like, and which can be fun. And should be—I generally sing “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner!” Unbelievably, everybody in Puerto Rico knows it, though of course in Spanish. So we sing it (in both languages) and go on from there….

In this I am bested by former co-worker, a Spanish teacher who taught the gringos to sing ojalá que llueva café, café AND made them dance to it. Alas, it was in the days before YouTube—she’d be famous, or at least viral, by now.

But no—I had to prepare. All for my students….

The look on their faces still pains me. They didn’t understand.

What were they doing wrong? How could they fail me, their teacher?

I did the only thing possible.

“Would you please,” I said in my most teacherly tone (and yes, computer, teacherly is a word—stop with that damn squiggle) “do exactly what I do?” I then held the accursed assignment high in the air, turned it face down…

…and slammed it on the table.

“I think I’ll not charge for this class,” I said, “although in fact there is something to be learned here….”

We went on to discuss failure—how it teaches you so much more than success, and how prevalent and necessary it is in nature.

They thought I was nuts, of course….

Well they’re probably right.

And it reminded me of my two other failures, as a teacher. The first, years ago, in my earliest attempt at teaching. Three teenage boys, three books on the table. A nervous and novice teacher.

Fatally, the books were…

… Jane Eyre

For boys? For Puerto Rican boys? Look, it was a setup, I now see, but I only made it worse. Now, I might possibly be able to do something with it. (“OK, it’s crap—we all know that….”)

Second failure—in my first week teaching at Wal-Mart. I was hardly inexperienced, and they certainly knew me, and how I taught. Was it the life size portraits there in the building of Sam Walton, staring down—looking so much like Jack, on his most dispirited day?

And now a third failure.

OK, so now we’re at today. I get up, I take my walk, I touch the portal of El Morro (and no, I don’t know why, I just have to), I turn back and see…

…a white plastic chair stuck firmly in an almond tree. (Yes, we have almond trees in Puerto Rico—they’re just not the same. Get it?)

The image stays with me for the rest of the walk—two Beethoven quartets long (my current metric, as we said in Wal-Mart). It’s with me now. Nor do I know why….

Perhaps because it was an amazement, an undoubted success. No one, I hope, had a work order to put a white resin chair in an almond tree (which, speaking of colors, turn an amazing russet at this time of year). Nor—no offense intended, my Puerto Rican audience—would it ever have been executed . Or so well, at least.

And no, no one had cared—not the tree, not the chair. Certainly not the municipal government. Perhaps it was the wind that blew the chair into the tree. More likely, it was the students from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas nearby who had, on a whim, placed it there. Maybe—ah, that’s it!—it was art. But nobody had cared.

Or they had, in a careless way. And so….

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I think. And then wonder…

…Is that the correct understanding?