The Saga of Grey Kitty

Shortly after we adopted NASA, he started busting outdoors seven times an hour, and we finally gave in.  Feathers decided if NASA was going out, she was, too, thank-you-very-much.  And then Grey Kitty appeared.  I had the vague sense he lived somewhere to the south of us, but I didn't know for sure.  He would come round, particularly in the night.

By come round, I mean, he would spot Feathers sitting at 2 am in the window sill 12 inches above my sleeping head, and climb our porch furniture to try and get at her.  She would attempt to defend her territory from inside the window, and enormous chaos and noise would ensue.  I would be dashing out of bed and chasing him off.  

When he caught NASA by our front steps daily, they would more or less try to murder each other.  One time, NASA wound up with a badly infected wound from a tail bite after one of these skuffles, which involved a spendy trip to the emergency vet.  It also propelled Anne away from sleeping in her top bunk and back into my bed for a year.

Another time, he was jumping at Feathers in the wee hours while she was sitting in the window over my desk.  He managed to slash the screen open and Feathers fell out the window.  So there I was running outside at dark o'clock to collect her and bring her back in.

I said once to Jared that I have never disliked any cat, but I hated Grey Kitty.  Any time I saw him near our property, I chased him off. He was super inconvenient and expensive, and I was annoyed at his anonymous owners for letting him run around all night and be so difficult and expensive.

Black Bean was pretty good at putting him in his place.  All Beaner had to do if Grey Kitty came in the back yard on his watch was to sit up tall and make the merest, faintest hissing noise, and Grey Kitty would tuck tail and run.

One evening this June we were eating dinner on our back patio, when we heard the traditional sounds of Grey Kitty beating up on NASA.  So to war whoops of "Cat fight!  Cat fight!"  I went running through the gate to chase off the scoundrel.  Our neighbor across the street and one over was out and asked about the commotion.  She had many stories to tell, including the sad tale that her husband had passed away and she would be moving out of state.  I learned from her that Grey Kitty was a stray, and she had been feeding him.  (No wonder he had been hanging around!)  And that he was really sweet and loved to be petted.  And that when she left, she was thinking of trying to get him to a shelter so he could be adopted into a good home.

At the end of July, said neighbor took off for Illinois after a lot of selling, packing, and dumpster throwing; a crew of workmen showed up and began the remodeling process.  And Grey Kitty continued showing up for show downs with NASA.   We realized she hadn't found a home for him, and feeling sorry for his poor, hungry tummy and scrappy life, we started feeding him.  We fed him at night, after our cats were safely in, right out by the sidewalk, as far from the house as possible.  He started showing up on cue, though keeping out of sight.

As we felt more and more responsible toward him, we had our cat sitter feed him while we were camping on the Penninsula.  Then, we started moving his feeding location closer and closer to the house.  He started turning up at other times of day and flopping down to get petted.  As the neighbor had said, he was really sweet (when he wasn't beating up NASA.)  With closer contact it became clear he was not fixed, and he had lots of small scars and scratches on his head from fighting.  He was hypervigilant when we fed him, and he was hypervigilant about anyone walking down the street, even when their path was parallel rather than intersecting and they were many yards away.  He was clearly acquainted with the neighborhood 'Possum and gave 'Possum his passing rights.  Everything about him screamed 'stray who had made his own way for a long time', though I estimates he was young-ish - under five years.

We all, especially the kids, started getting rather attached to him, and decided we had better just adopt him.  I called the vet and scheduled an appointment for him few Fridays out. I would have the day off from work and could do what it took to capture him.  Once we got his food dish to the front porch, we brought out our largest cat carrier and started feeding him in there.  And then we would close the door for a short time. I started picking him up briefly.  The next step was to move the carrier with him in it.  We were helping him acclimate to his new home, and he made a couple of brief, supervised forays into the house when the other cats were out back.  We started heading off fights before they happened and worked to keep all the animals calm. 

Sunday at noon, Grey Kitty had come around, so I had fed him, and I was on the front porch socializing with him (he was so sweet and cuddly!), when a budget car (that's mostly the kind we see on our street) rolled up, stopped in the middle of the street, and disgorged a pajama-clad young woman.  She called to me: "Have you seen a grey cat?"  I pointed to Grey Kitty and replied, "This one?" assuming that it must be some other grey cat she was after.  She walked up to the porch, took a look at Grey Kitty, cried out "Charlie!" and scooped him up in her arms!

It turned out she was the teenage daughter of a man three houses south of us (who was the owner of two dangerous and unruly dogs.  He did not maintain his fence and repaired it with random pieces of broken plastic stuff.   The dogs were in the habit of chasing anyone who walked down the alley, so in the last many months we have avoided that part of the street.  They have terrified grown men who have come yelling down the alley with their aggressive behavior.   Long ago, another alley neighbor had tried to speak with this man about his dogs and and was told she was the one disturbing his dogs' training.  We were concerned about the situation here and had discussed who at the city to contact about the dogs and fence issue.)  The cat, Charlie, was hers, and she had gotten him three years ago before her mother died.  She had graduated from high-school this June and moved up north to start her adult life.  Her father and the younger three kids living in the house (and the dogs) had just moved to Bothell and left her cat behind. Because of those dogs, the family never closed the back door of the house, so Charlie was free time come and go at all hours.  I'm sure the girl had no idea what all her cat was up to in the middle of the night, and really didn't know he'd be better off neutered and with vaccines...  

Anyway, she thanked us for taking care of him, I called the kids out of the house for an unexpected and precipitous goodbye, the girl walked back to her car with Charlie snuggled in her embrace, and Grey Kitty disappeared from our lives forever.  I was stunned,  and I have taken it hardest of anyone in our family.  Worst enemies can easily become best friends, and it doesn't help that Jared pointed out that Grey Kitty would probably have had a nicer life if he's stayed with us.

Human Speed

 I am nearing the end of two weeks off from work, and it has been glorious.  

I have no desire to step back onto the treadmill.  I keep reading (well, listening to audio) books, written in other eras, where people were able to move at human speed.  I know there were not the innovations of modern medicine which have saved many lives and made other lives more comfortable.  I know that there has been (and is) unbelievable poverty and hunger and slavery and abuse.  And... My life seems much more titillating and dystopian than the lives of so many characters I love.

The dystopian part hit me this morning as I was juggling parcels on my daily walk and near-daily stop off in the neighborhood grocery.... So many mass produced, brightly colored, plastic packages full of foods trucked from factories all over the world, made from stuff which barely resemble the raw ingredients, screaming from the shelves: "Buy me and satisfy your cravings!" - cravings we never knew we had until the industrial psychological manipulation machine called innocuously, 'advertising,' pointed it out. Noisy and chaotic, impersonal, electronically edited music - duplicated two million times over - blaring over the thoughtlessly installed loudspeakers.  Strange beeps and pieced-together, sampled human syllables of the self-check-out machines; every warm-bodied human I pass is a stranger, but front-end employee Jessica (I have read her name tag many times and thought of the connections to Shakespeare and to Valley Girls) probably recognizes me in my mismatched and random exercise attire.  I walked out the door operated by the motion-trip, invisible, electronic butler into the radiating wrap-around parking lot - a meadow of asphalt, a lake of asphalt, an entire forest kingdom buldozed and drowned in asphalt - and covered with temporarily lifeless giants: noisy, metal transport modules, belching pollution, surprisingly fast and dangerous when activated by the small person at the interior left.  A drab metal box takes up two parking spots: industrial lock on its wheel, solar battery lifted on a sturdy tendril toward the cloud-covered sun, moronic blue flashing lights, an electronic all-seeing eye producing presumably grainy and perspective-distorted, two-dimensional camera footage; suddenly a cheerful, preprogrammed, disembodied man's voice addressed no one in particular: "Welcome to Safeway.   This unit is installed for your comfort and convenience.   No loitering allowed.  Have a nice day."

Keeping some semblance of order amongst food, clothes, possessions, caring for cats and kids, time enough for sleep and some small projects... it is enough outlay for this week.  Last week's quiet oasis: hiking in the forest and along the wild coast was deeply, mindfully, viscerally satisfying - and easier to leave than usual, knowing there was still breathing room on the other end.

But soon we add back in some small, daily bits of formal academic education for my middle child, the daily commutes for schooling for my eldest child, and the directing and tutelage of musical education (and attendant secretarial and psychology work) for close to thirty students, and one is no longer traveling at human pace...

At times I have thought myself lazy.  Unable to narrow my focus -  and feeling overwhelmed and avoidant - is a more accurate descriptor.  My life is enough for multiple people to divy up.  But my brain is, naturally,  I think,  running all the tracks and hopping rails - sometimes smoothly.

Cold Water

Throughout my childhood, I don't really have memories of being uncomfortably hot.  I must have been, on occasion,  as I grew up in Texas! However, I have lots of memories of being cold.  

I most especially take note of this looking back to seventh grade.  

I have always leaned night-owl-ish from birth.  You can ask my mom about that....  I have many diary entries from elementary school which say preposterous (but true) things like: "Here I lay down my pen at 10:23 pm."  My bedtime was squarely and regularly at 8:00.  The night-owl-ing went into hyperdrive around seventh grade.  This meant I was perpetually underslept at school.... Hyperbolically speaking, I think I had more respiratory infections that year than the CDC has cataloged, and of course in those days, we kept slogging through at school with occasional medication and a box of Kleenex unless we had one and a half feet in the grave.  The long and short of it is, this was a recipe for terrible thermoregulation.   I remember freezing all the time, unless the temperature was at least 80 or 81 F.  

My extremities were regularly icy, and this was very problematic from a violin-playing-obsession perspective.   Violinists are small-muscle athletes, and athletes need warm, flexible, active muscles.

...Cold water has always been tricky for me, at least for bathing and swimming.   After visiting the Roman baths in Bath, England,  I did some historical reenactments at home, and while I enjoyed living in that ancient era,  I did NOT enjoy the cold water.  I can wade ankle deep in the Pacific, but once cold water passes my knees, it is a fight to keep moving forward.  By cold water, I mean water less than about 80 degrees... I can't really imagine being a swimmer outside of our summer evening outdoor city pool visits in Texas when it was in the 90s F.

All those years freezing in Texas....  When I was around 24, I tried an experiment of eating ONLY plant foods, and minimally processed plants at that.  Within a few days, my constant chilly extremities and shivering was gone!  Decent thermoregulation was a surprise side-effect of the diet.  Please note that this experiment was conducted in the late Autumn/Winter in Ohio where I regularly experienced snow and uneven heating in old buildings. Yet I felt warmer, on average, than I had in decade(s).

Afterwards, I really did feel cold a lot in Rochester, New York.  But you have to know that due to the uneven heating in old buildings,  it was not uncommon for our apartment to be in the 40s in the mornings, and only get up into the low 50s with space heaters and the oven door open in Winter.  I did love the snow there.  Outdoors was a Winter dreamland.  Indoors was hell frozen over.

In Alabama I had the opposite problem.  The humid heat sucked the life force out of me, and I regularly burst into tears on my daily walk.  I was hot and uncomfortable and stickily miserable. Worse than the soggy warmth, though, was that we had left the musical spot I had loved and the North I had longed to return to since probably my toddler years, and I was afraid I was stuck...

My violin playing is happiest well into the 70s.  My outdoor weather enjoyment really hovers in the 60s to low 80s depending on barometric pressure,  shade conditions,  cloud cover, water and wind conditions.  But I can be extremely happy outoors down to 5 F (the coldest I have personally experienced) with the right clothing and activity.  Water, on the other hand: I like it hot.  I often wish for an outdoor hot tub in the dark, rainy months.  If I am feeling overwhelmed, one of my go-to solutions is to stand in a very hot shower.

Popcorn

 If you spend time at my house, or I at yours, for more than a day or two, you will discover that one of my major habits in life is to eat large quantities of air-popped popcorn.  In addition to the possibility of eating it for breakfast or lunch, dinner, snack, or dessert, it can be munched on while reading or practicing.  I am eating a bowl of it now (in addition to some carrots and fruits I sliced to help rebalance my sensations after a lot of gelato and cheese yesterday.  (Ha, can you tell my regular chef, Jared, is out of town?) I have been on this daily popcorn (and also Tiger tea) kick for over 3 years now.

I had a similar habit in my school years in Cleveland. Every afternoon, I would walk from my practice room to Vendoland, where I would put in my 75c (Quarters were for laundry, parking, and this snack break!) and take out a bag of peanut M&Ms to crunch on while practicing. I felt religious guilt about spending money on something so frivolous.  And I also knew I needed some calories and some other things about the ritual to get through the day.

I have always felt that I had sort of a slightly odd relationship with food.  My mom tells me that as a baby I would eat anything, but around the age of two I got very particular.   That part is pretty normal.  Apparently, though, the foods I really liked were not the usual beige-bland that evolutionary history seems to have saddled too adventurous toddlers with for their own protection.  It was pickles and olives and sauerkraut.

As an elementary child and older, I remember being unbelievably slow eating foods I did not like, to the point of meltdown.  At the same time I felt completely unable to listen to my body signals of satiety when I was eating something that tasted good.  My sense of taste was obviously a very strong, nearly uncontrollable driver.

Later, when I was serious about dancing, and afterward, even into college, I often did not put enough calories into my body on many occasions,  while still eating huge amounts on others.  It was never quite in eating disorder territory, but never felt regulated or something that I had agency over. Plus, there were those little niggling thoughts - the proverbs against overeating, and the medieval insistence upon gluttony as a deadly sin, and the news pieces about famine victims which carry with them a vague survivors guilt, and the memory of childhood admonitions to finish everything on one's plate because of the starving children in Africa.  Going down that line, I do care about the starving children in Africa and elsewhere, and I now realize that the whole thing is way more complex and interwoven than eating peanut M&Ms can effect, though there is some likely tangential relation.  Ethics are not so simple as I once thought, or as they were when he world was less industrial and interconnected, sometime long before I arrived on the planet.  I can't tell if I have more agency than I can ever imagine or far less than I even fear.

One interesting and helpful piece of information I lit upon in a book I borrowed from a friend in my 20s set me on a better path, though self-control is not my strong point when danger is not obviously present.  This has to do with mounting and multiplying research about the design evidence from the human organism and its evolutionary history, plus broad data about the relationship of food to the diseases of wealth - stroke, heart disease, diabetes, cancer.  It seems to be turning out that if we eat what our bodies are truly designed for - whole plants, preferably in similar ratios to what is available in nature, we are not in danger of overeating.  Of course, whole plant foods are sort of hard to come by, or to prioritize, amidst our array of commercially produced, easy-prep, pre-flavored items, designed to hook us as brand-loyal consumers.

Once I fell into the popcorn habit, I eventually recognized two things.  One is, I would not need to worry about obesity and heart disease and cancer from eating popcorn, so I would not need to attempt to limit my intake on that grounds.  The other, to use clinical terminology, is that my strong desire for plain crunch for hours on end is a sensory-seeking behavior, which my body intuitively uses to help me regulate; in many ways it is not about food at all.  It helps me focus and stay calm - two things, that despite my exterior presentation to the world, are actual challenges for me.  If I took popcorn away, I would need to fill the void left behind with something else that fits my current lifestyle and fulfills the same needs.

So I eat a lot of popcorn.  But guilt free now.