Barbara Stoner's Blog, page 5

Grampa III

...continued

About a year later, I disappointed my grandfather in a degree proportionate to if not greater than the blow I had delivered my grandmother in the sorry episode of the doll. I was visiting my folks in Minnesota. They had retired to a house on a small lake, a suburb of Leech Lake, to be near my grandparents. It's a beautiful place with its own dock and wonderful red and white pines, cross-country ski trails and plenty of room to store both a boat and an ice fishing house near the water. It also has an old rotting log cabin. They say it was a stopover on an old trappers' line. It looks like it was built for squalid dwarves, dwarves from the other side of the tracks. The rest of the place is spotless.

It might have been summer and it might have been Christmas. I don't remember. I know my mother and grandmother were worried about Grampa. He wanted to go back to Iowa, back to Badger, back to the home place. He wanted to see his folks again He wanted to see his old friends.

"They're all dead, Louis," my grandmother would say. "Goodness gracious sakes alive, nobody's there. You don't know anybody in Badger anymore." My mother would tell him his parents were in heaven with the angels. Grampa wasn't having any of it. He wanted to go check it out.

I was sitting on the couch in the sunroom reading, trying to stay out of the way. Grandma and mom were bustling around the house and I was taking a break from house bustling. I was finishing my bachelor's Degree at the University of Wisconsin and thought I was finally going to be a professor of something or other. Thirty-five years old and I was still hiding from my family reading a book.

My grandfather came shuffling in the door. As blind and deaf as he was, I don't even know if he was absolutely sure who I was, but he shuffled over and managed to plump down on the couch next to me. He didn't bend so well anymore, either, so sitting down was a matter of backing up to something he hoped was a seat of some kind and putting his faith in blind luck sort of toppling over backwards.

I said, "Hi, Grampa, howya doin'?" I didn't know how to talk to him either, but I never corrected him. I just agreed with everything he said and replied with stupid inanities like, "That sounds like fun." He just sat there silently for awhile this time, not saying much. I had almost come to the conclusion that a companionable silence was what was called for and perhaps I could go on reading without being rude, when sudddenly:

"Do you have a car?"

"Yes," I said tentatively, wondering what I was getting myself in for.

"Well," he says, "I've got some money. Let's go."

"Go? Go where?" This was getting alarming.

"I got some money over at our place, see. Hid it from Clara. She doesn't know about it. We can just go."

"Go where, Grampa?" I was very nervous now. I knew I would not handle this well.

"To Iowa. We can go to Iowa. Back to Badger. There's some people there I want to see."

I was stumped, in a quandary, out to lunch, and all out of ideas. I wanted to go. In my hearts of hearts, I wanted nothing more than to say, "Sure. Let me get my coat."

But I didn't. I just sat there, thinking about it. He might have rambled on about Badger and the trip some more, but I didn't hear him. I was arguing with myself.

Going to Badger with Grampa seemed as if it were the absolutely correct thing to do. It sounded like a movie starring Tatum O'Neal. Grampa and I could go on an adventure. The rest of the familly would be having fits and alling out the state police, but that was okay. I could handle that. We'd just roll down the state highways and county roads, straight south from here, and cross the border into Iowa just a zig or so away from Ft. Dodge and Badger.

I was a little kid in Badger after the war, before Dad and Grampa went into business together and moved to Illinois. I went to the same two room schoolhouse that my grandmother had gone to and held the record for most books read in kindergarten. That schoolyard had the highest swings in the world. The best mulberry tree in the universe was in Badger. I used to climb to the very top and sit in the swaying spidery branches and eat all the mulberries in sight. My first best friends were in Badger. They weren't dead, but they were probably gone. There were no more piles of horror comic books in Johnny and Martha's basement. I didn't know if the train still ran through the town, past the farm co-op. I didn't know if the little kids still ran over to the tracks when the train pulled out yelling, "Blow the whistle! Blow the whistle!" like they did when I was a little kid there, and the brakeman would come out on the back platform of the red caboose and pull the train whistle for us and this all sounds like some really hokey children's story, but it's absolutely true. It happened.

But it didn't happen anymore. I couldn't even have found the farm, and I wasn't sure Grampa could either. And what does "some money" mean? Could be five bucks, for all I knew. There were so many good, practical reasons for not driving to Badger with Grampa, and I knew that when I turned him down. But those weren't the real reasons. The real reason was that I was pure chicken-shit. I didn't have the nerve, and I was almost as disgusted with myself as Grampa must have been, even if he didn't say so.

I thought weasely little things like how would I handle him? What would I do if he really went nuts? How could I face him when he found out that everyone really was dead and gone. I couldn't handle it. I just couldn't handle it. I wanted more than anything else in the world to be the kind of person who could handle it, who could grant her grandfather his last wish, who could take him where he wanted to go when no one else would. I wanted to be that special. And I wasn't. I couldn't pull it off.

I didn't know how to tell him we couldn't go. I don't remember what I said. Something smarmy and weasely and incredibly dumb, I'm sure. I didn't even have the nerve to be straight with him. I didn't tell him his family and friends were gone. I didn't tell him I didn't have the nerve to go. He knew that by the time I was done, anyway. I might have said the car wasn't running so good or that I'd promised to help mom. I squirmed out of it somehow and left him sitting there.

I avoided him after that. I felt small and embarrassed and unworthy. I was afraid he would ask me again.

...to be continued...

Grampa II

My mother didn't like my farm. She didn't like the smell. Farms always smell like barns and pig shit and chicken shit or the shit of whatever animal you have around the place. They smell like fermenting grain in the bottom of the feed barrels and old dusty hay and oat straw. There are warm animal smells and cold wet dirt smells, stews and pies and compost heaps. Last year's garden and this year's garden. They smell like old oil spots under the tractor and gasoline and horse manure. I think it smells of life. My mother didn't.

I had an old two-story white farmhouse with a big kitchen. We had oil heat, but I had a little wood stove, what the locals called a "garbage burner" in the kitchen. There was a old hole rotting into the old wood around the sink where the kitchen pump used to be. A family of mice lived in that hole from time to time. My then husband was always setting traps to kill them, trying to catch the babies to flush them down the toilet. But they didn't do much damage. My pantry wasn't ravaged and strewn with mouse turds. They didn't seem to need much. So when I saw them, I'd scare them back into the hole and when my then husband was gone to work, I'd call the kids in and we'd watch the baby mice and set breadcrusts out for them to eat.

My kitchen was a combination of farm smells too, because I cooked and baked in it. I canned tomatoes and made maple syrup and rendered lard after butchering. I cut up rabbits and singed the pinfeathers off of the geese. My cat slept in there and so did the three dogs and on the back of the kitchen door, we hung our barn clothes - the stuff we put on every morning and every evening to do chores.

We milked goats and fed pigs and rabbits and gathered eggs and cleaned out stalls. We put gas in the tractor and pulled the plow and later the harrow over 50 of the eighty acres before hooking up the planter with oats or hayseed. In August, we oiled up the baler and baled hay and in March we droved the tractor as close to the woods as we could get it in the snow, pulling a wagon full of taps and buckets and then set off on snowshoes the rest of the way to set the maple taps.

I had my own pig. A sow I named Ophelia. She wasn't a Duroc. She was a Hampshire, and she let me help her through three litters. Then we raised her kids and ate them. When we sold the farm, we ate her too. I didn't think she'd get a good home anywhere else. She was too old to throw any more litters and strangers would just butcher her anyway, so I figured we could honor her by eating her ourselves. So we did.

I loved that farm. But my mother hated it. She loved and honored her parents, but I think she must have lived her life longing to get off the farm and away from the hogs, and she did. She liked things "refined." Not like a country-club snob might. More like a good Norwegian housewife and a thoughtful Christian snob for whom cleanliness and godliness were the ultimate in housekeeping. The times they visited they always stayed in a motel in town and my mother always cleaned something. All mothers do that, I know, but she did it with her nose wrinkled up and an air of distaste that seemed to blame me for hauling her back to her roots where she didn't want to be. Or maybe that was my daughterly guilt. That's another story, anyway.

My folks brought my grandparents to visit once. We had just had a pig butchered and i was busy rendering lard in my large smelly kitchen, when my mother and grandmother walked in the house and my grandmother blew the whistle on mom. "Oh, Ellen," she said. This is a nice place. I don't see what's so terrible about it." And she bustled into an apron and got to rendering with me while my mother, all red-faced from trying to pull her own fat out of the fire, started washing something and saying things like, "Well, I never said it was terrible. It's got a lot of potential when they get it fixed up, I'm sure." Yeah, right, Mom.

My dad and my grandfather wandered around out to the barn and the chicken coop and the old log house that was falling down in my side yard and back to the orchard where it was beginning to be painfully obvious that we'd need a new septic tank sometime soon. My grandfather was about as lively as I'd seen him in the last couple of years. Except he'd say peculiar things like, "I remember when we planted those trees. Oh, golly, didn't they grow. That was right before the war, wasn't it Clara?" My grandmother, honest to the bone, "Oh, Louis, you don't know what you're talking about. This is Barbara's place You've never been here before." "No, no, I remember. Don't you remember? I thought we planted'em out the other side of the hen house, though." "We've never planted any trees here, Louis. We've never even been here. That was Iowa. We're not in Iowa, Louis."

Grampa paid no attention to these corrections. He recognized the trees and the barn and almost everything on the place. He never seemed to actually think he was back home again. He just recognized everything, like he was seeinig it in a movie or something. He didn't talk about the house as if he'd lived there. Only the farm itself was familiar, but in a topsy-turvy way. Nothing was quite in the same place as it used to be. He was confused when we drove into town, because he couldn't recall the bridge over the river. Seems it used to be farther downstream, over on the other road. It was the best visit from my folks that I'd ever had.

Grampa

My grandfather was short and round and Norwegian. He was the kind of grandfather who thought it the height of humor to make faces at the grandkids by dislodging his false teeth out over his lips and growling. And when we would all scream and laugh and run away, he'd stick them back in his mouth an giggle. My grandfather didn't laugh. He giggled, "Tee hee hee, oh, golly," in a little high-pitched wheeze, and he would slap his knee and jiggle in a short, round Norwegian way. His son Lowell, Uncle Lowell, who became a major in the air Force and flew SAC planes for a living, looked just like him and giggled too. Sticking his teeth out at us was the scariest thing my grandfather ever did, and we all loved him very much.

His name was Louis. Louis Ponsness. Most everybody called him Louie, but my grandmother always called him Louis, my mother called him Dad, and we all called him Grampa. My dad called him Louie. They went into business together sometime around 1949 or 1950 - let's say 1950, the beginning of one of the socially significant decades. I was seven years old. I had a fifties childhood. The fifties were a great decade for being kids. But I'm not talking about me or kids or growing up in the fifties. I'm not even talking about growing up with my grandfather. I don't remember that much, right off the top of my head, because I was a tomboy and I spent much of the fifties up a tree somewhere or hiding in the bathroom with a book. I couldn't stand my family and most of the time I pretended I was adopted and put long hours into pouring over a Rand-McNally Atlas planning get-away routes into uninhabited areas of Quebec. But I loved my grandfather and I kept him in the family. I adopted him.

Before he went into business with my dad, Grampa was an Iowa hog farmer. He and my grandmother ran a farm not far from the town of Badger, Iowa, up in thee northwest corner of the state about 10 miles from Ft. Dodge. They called it "the home place" to distinguish it from all the other farms and places in the neighborhood. I remember my grandmother killing chickens for dinner and once, when I was very small, hearing a bumping and thumping in the walls. "Louis, the civet cats are in the walls again," my grandmother said, and started hitting the walls with a broom. Wikipedia says that civets are native to Asia and Africa, so where my Norwegian grandmother got the term "civet cat," I'll never know now. I have pictures of me playing on the cellar door, teasing the chickens, petting a rabbit and sitting on Lady, my grandfather's work horse, . I look very happy.

It seems I can remember the Christmas my grandmother bought me my first doll, a beautiful porcelain thing in white satin or something and lace, with blonde curly hair, and how she couldn't wait to see my face when I opened it. I opened the box, threw the doll aside, and played for hours with the tissue paper. I seem to remember the room and the tree and boxes in the middle of the floor. The rest of it has been a family story told so many times, I only think I remember it. It still makes me feel bad. I loved my grandmother too, and even now the thought of her excitement and anticipation and delight in giving me that doll fills me with remorse for the cruel apathy with which I received it. It's one of the things I would have done differently. I would have been socially sensitive at two.

My grandfather isn't in this story. I don't know where he was - probably there looking on, and then out feeding the hogs before Christmas dinner. Maybe he was bringing in the cobs and coal. Whatever kind of furnace they had, it ran on corn cobs and coal. My grandfather raised the corn to feed the hogs. Red Durocs. I still seek them out at county and state fairs in honor of his first and probably his happiest profession. I'm proud to be the granddaughter of an Iowan hog farmer.

My grandfather invented stuff too.Pin Pool was a combination of pool and bowling, played on something the size of a shuffle-board table. Now, my grandfather was a non-drinking, non-smoking Norwegian Lutheran. More importantly, he was married to one. No Bible-thumper he. My grandmother wasn't a Bible-thumper either, but she knew what was right and what was wrong and Louis didn't drink or smoke. But he must have hung out with the fellas a time or two and he came up with this game. It was actually manufactured and put in a few places here and there, but it never really caught on.

His big item, though, was the Ponsness shotgun shell reloader. Louis Ponsness and his brother Lloyd Ponsness invented it. Somewhere along the way, they acquired a partner named Warren. It didn't make him rich, but it helped. The army gave them a contract for the thing, and I think you can still buy one off the shelf in gun shops. I read mysteries, and several years ago I was reading "F" is for Fugitive by Sue Grafton with a plot turn around a shotgun. And there, in the back of the book, in the solving scene, is the pivotal item. "On the closet floor, dead ahead, was a Ponsness-Warren shotgun shell reloader with a buit-in wad guide, an adjustable crimp die, and two powder reservoirs filled with rock salt." Grampa had made popular culture.

Meanwhile, as I said before, the fifties passed with me up a tree and then the sixties came along with me in Chicago working in public relations and shouting civil rights and anti-war slogans in my spare time and then the seventies came along and I married for the second time and moved to Wisconsin and entered my hippie earth mother stage living on an eighty acre farm in Door County with my then husband and two children. Life was good.

My grandfather had lived most of the rest of his life, going into business with my dad and selling out fifteen years later and inventing games and shotgun shell reloaders and finally he and my grandmother retired to northern Minnesota close to his two sisters, Myrtle and Mabel who helped run a resort on Leech Lake, way way up north where the big woods begin and run to the Arctic Circle and the Mississippi River begins and runs to the gulf of Mexico. And finally I began to get word that maybe Grampa's clock was running down. He was forgetful, my mother said. He rambled and he didn't always know where he was. She and my grandmother had to fuss at him all the time. They were very annoyed. My grandmother's husband and my mother's father had lost it, and even though they knew he couldn't help it, they acted as if he did it on purpose. Sometimes I think he did.

He was in his late eighties and almost blind and very nearly totally deaf. Unless you mentioned something that interested him. My mother and grandmother could scream at him all day (they weren't screaming women, they screamed so he could hear them better or so they thought).

"Louis, Dad, you have to put your shoes on before you go outside. It's 30 below."

At suppertime, he would space out into the ozone while mom and grandma dished up his food and cut up the meat for him, and then he would eat slowly and carefully, off in his own little world. Unless someone happened to mention fishing.

Someone was almost always sure to mention fishing. That's what you do in northern Minnesota. In summer you go out in the boat or down on the dock, and in winter you haul your little fishing hut out on the lake, saw a hole in the ice and fish through that.

"Fishing? Say, did I ever tell you about that walleye Elmer and I caught? Musta been last year, year before. Tee hee hee, oh, golly."

It was 30 or 40 years ago, and my uncle Elmer, my mother's brother-in-law, had been dead since 1960 or so. He lived in Portland, Oregon, and he loved to fly until one day he flew up a little box canyon and hit the far side of the box. He was a great guy, too, and he loved to fish.

Most of us wanted to keep our mouths shut and just hear the story, but my mother and grandmother, who unwisely valued honesty above all else, would interrupt with corrections.

"You didn't go fishing with Elmer last year, Louis. Elmer's been dead for 15 years. Don't you remember?"

"What? Elmer dead? No. No. I just talked to him the other day."

"Oh, dad, no, no you didn't talk to Elmer."

And on and on the argument would go and one of the younger kids would ask, "Who's Elmer?" and so we would have to hear the Elmer crash story again, and Grampa would space off, oblivious to news of death, old or new. It wasn't about fishing and he wasn't interested.

(to be continued sooner or later)

Home Sweet Home

Then, was the family itself and the male political structure enclosing it invented by primitive women to ensure their own survival and that of their children? Where did they see power and freedom residing? What would equality mean?

That is a note I found in a notebook from my last year at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. I was in a seminar on “seminal” thinkers (and how male-oriented can you get?) reading Mary R. Beard's On Understanding Women.

The argument that women launched civilization by nurturing human life, that the “arts of life” began in the mind of women, caught my imagination and changed my approach to the study of women’s history. Somewhere, in the same file drawer that holds this notebook, is my senior thesis, in which I argue that a history of woman as victim does us little service. I still hold to that view, although I do not negate the actual victimization of women as a whole. The questions in the opening paragraph here are questions that I still ask.

When I was relatively young, probably a teenager, I read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, that follows a Norwegian girl from maidenhood to maturity (note to self: reread these). I don’t recall much of the plot, but one thing remains with me. Kristin knows that the mistress of the house has power, and that a symbol of that power is her keyring. On that ring are the keys to the buttery, to the larder, to the laundry and the cellar and the kitchen. To the house itself. She who holds these keys is the mistress of her world.

It stuck with me, although “mistress of the house” was not an ambition of mine. What I actually wanted to do was to live alone (well, at that time I would have wanted a lover as well) to think and write, and every once in a while I would call somebody to tell them I had an idea – for which they would pay me a small sum. Yes, my fantasy world is wide and deep.

It wasn’t until much, much later – actually it was the very night when the country rejected Jimmy Carter for a second term – that I decided to withdraw from the public arena. Not that I was really in one, but I was hoping to get my graduate degree in intellectual history and eventually have a small office from which I could generate an idea or two. I can’t blame Reagan for my dropping out of graduate school, but I do remember thinking that if I couldn’t help make the world into a better place, I could do so in my own space. Wherever I lived. I could care for it and the people in it. I could hold onto the keys to my own kingdom.

And so I managed to do for a few ensuing decades, even when I had no place of my own. Even while I still fought for my own place in my world. Even though I was hurt, even though I hurt others in ways I did not intend to, even though sometimes I even wanted out of the world, still I insisted on hanging onto the keys to my own kingdom whenever I could. I had long since forgotten Kristin, but I remembered her importance. Which I have had trouble explaining to some others ever since.

When I put my first novel, The Year of the Crow, through Writers’ Cramp, my fellow critiquers criticized my heroine, Sybil, for cooking too much. For not being “kick-ass.” For trying to understand rather than insisting on having things her own way. Well, for one thing, I was writing that one very much from life, and that sort of character would not have fit my narrative at all – in fact, that sort of character would have sent the whole thing off in a direction I was purposely avoiding. A direction that might have made violence and open conflict the resolution. When one of my themes was quite otherwise.

But I was taken a little aback that they, including a couple of women, objected to Sybil and Ellie’s penchant for cooking, for making things comfortable, for keeping fights to a minimum (there were bikers involved). I always thought those things were signs of strength, not weakness. I thought I was writing both of those characters with as much strength as I could give them. I stuck to my guns, and many people have loved that book with no one complaining about the food.

At some point during the Obama administration, I heard people complaining about Michelle Obama calling herself the “Mom in Chief,” so I wrote this in defense of her. If I had unearthed my notes on Mary Beard’s theory of women as the very foundation of civilization, I could have added that to my argument at that time. Because I still believe it to be true.

But it leaves me with another problem. I recently started a short story in which I echo my own mother’s all-too-cheerful wake-up call of “Get up! Get up! There’s work to be done.” It was the bane of my girlhood. When, as I outline in “More Than,” a career as a wife and mother was nothing I ever dreamed of. The gist of the story, as it goes on, was that the young heroine, Gwendolyn, who continues to see fairies dancing on her windowsill, will come through necessity to see the value in her own mother’s role. So far, so good idea.

However, I began to ask, how do I frame this in such a way that “More Than” does not mean “Only”? It does not mean that becoming a doctor or a lawyer or even an insurance agent is, by definition, “Less Than.” And that idea will have to be gotten across without a lecture on the subject. There will have to be a realization that occurs naturally, and since I just threw Mom down the basement stairs where she dies of a cracked skull (in order to force dear Gwendolyn into the Mom role), I got a bit stuck. I think I am going to have to resurrect Mom and incapacitate her in some other way, but right now that makes everything feel a bit bogged down.

Maybe the fairies will help. If I remember correctly (don’t quote me), Kristin Lavransdatter herself left bowls of milk on the doorstep for the elves. And no one knew better how to run the civilization of home than she.

Recent realizations that the governments run by women seem to be doing a much better job in our current crisis of a global pandemic could be the solution I’m hoping for. Not for my short story, because I don’t plan for Gwendolyn to run for office, but for the extension of the civilization of home into the world at large. And as we shelter in place, perhaps more of us will want to take the love and comfort of home into the wider world as well. After all, banana bread is, indeed, one of the arts of life.

Shelter at Home

Shelter at home. Don’t leave the house. You mean do just as I please? All day long? 24/7? 365? Really? That’s all I have to do to help?

Well, blast my overalls.

Okay, well if you insist. Here’s my plan to beat the coronavirus:

1. Do dishes and straighten up the house 3 times a week. (Doesn’t do to overdo.)

2. Read all my email

3. Work the Jumble and Word Roundup puzzles

4. Scan the NYT and WaPo headlines; read occasional article

5. Take care of little bits of business if necessary

6. Read stuff from The Atlantic and The New Yorker archives

7. Read more in Brontë biography

8. Read more in bathroom book (A Very Stable Genius)

9. Work on 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle

10. Read more in Mantel novel and finish reading The Forsyte Saga

11. Oh, and (almost forgot) WRITE: website piece, short stories, etc.

Finally, time to do all of the things I love to do.

But, wait a minute here. That’s all the stuff I do anyway. All my old friends in Seattle are yelling, “Stoner! Every time we ask you to a party, your first question is, ‘Do I have to leave the house?’”

Yes, it’s true. Ever since I’ve been more or less retired, ever since I got rid of the last significant other (he’s alive and well and currently in Baton Rouge), and especially ever since I left Seattle and don’t get invited out anymore, I don’t have to leave the house. Barring weekly shopping and the occasional appointment, I can sit in my office and work on stuff I like – oh, forgot to mention the scrapbook project I’m putting together for my descendants, such as they are) – whenever I want to.

Free at last! (pardon the outburst of politically incorrect white privilege)

So it turns out that the best thing I can do to help beat the coronavirus is to keep on keeping on. But if anyone gets tired of sourdough bread, try a 1500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Or a few books. Amazon still delivers.

The Pussycats

Mamacita came to my house when my daughter promised a friend that she would take care of her (pregnant) cat. The friend had gone to New York and left, not only her cat, but a backpack of belongings in the closet in my office. Mamacita promptly shat on it. So I wasn’t too surprised when, upon the friend’s return, said friend picked up her stuff and said she’d be back for the cat. She was going to take her to the Humane Society. She didn’t even have a name.

“Uh, no,” I said. When she gave birth, I started calling her Mamacita.

Mamacita had a sweet face and an obliging disposition. She gave birth to six kittens. My daughter found homes for five of them. When I saw the last one peering out over the edge of the box, all big ears and eyes, I named him Yoda. When we took Mamacita and Yoda to be spayed, the vet called us back and suggested “fixing” Yoda. Seems she was a boy.

Yoda was a gray and white tabby; her brother, Simba, was an orange. Simba had gone to live with other friends of my daughter’s, and when they were forced to decamp (another story), Simba returned to the home of his birth. And then there were five: Razz, Elvis, Mamacita, Yoda and Simba. I signed my Christmas cards “Barbara and the Pussycats.”

We all lived happily together at the 79th Street house. Not that I was always happy, but the Pussycats made everything bearable.

Razz lay on his back with his belly of creamy soft fur an irresistible temptation, but when you gave into that temptation and plunged a hand deep into that furry nest, he closed his four paws around your hand, claws extended, and tried to nip off your fingertips. If Razz could laugh out loud, it would sound like, “Mwa hahahaha.”

Elvis made himself useful by reminding me to let the others in and out of the back door. I can still see him standing over the empty food dishes looking up at me and emitting a plaintive little “mew.” Elvis never demanded. He just made a polite enquiry.

Mamacita made herself comfortable wherever she was least likely to be disturbed. She had the leanest body of any cat I’ve ever had under my care, looking perfectly normal with her long brown with shades of gold tortoiseshell coat, but felt as brittle as a bird when petted. It was Mamacita, though, who put out the eye of my friend Kimber’s new puppy, Buckley on a day when I was puppy-sitting.

Buckley was a big rambunctious puppy and Kimber had brought over his kennel where I kept him while I was working inside. When I decided to go to the store, I thought I should let him out in the backyard for a pee or something before I left, so I let him out of the kennel and went to get his leash. Wasn’t absolutely certain he’d come back to my call, and my yard isn’t fenced. So here comes Buckley, out into the living room, a body wriggle of excitement, whereupon Mamacita, who had been napping on the couch, sprang in front of him, reared up, every strand of fur on end, and stabbed him in the eye. I don’t think it took more than one real time second, if that.

I bundled Buckley into the car and drove as fast as I could to my vet’s, who gave me the name of a dog eye doctor. The upshot from the eye doc was that the eye needed surgery and that it would cost upwards of $400. I could do it, but it would hurt. Plus I was dreading the time when Kimber came back. So I made an appointment for the surgery, and left Buckley in her care.

Kimber took it better than I could ever have imagined. He could see my distress and appreciated all I had done to try to make it better. He even said he would pay for half of it.

But when the morning came around, I got a call from the doc. Upon further examination, she saw that she would not be able to help him. Mamacita had gotten him right in the one place that she couldn’t repair. “That cat must have been fast,” she told me. “Ninja kitty we call her,” I said, thinking, “Well, now we do.” Why didn’t he blink? I asked her. Turns out dogs have to learn to blink, and they don’t do that in the first three months. So, no surgery – she didn’t even charge us for the overnight. Kimber was amazingly cool with it. He had found Buckley by the side of the road – a black lab/rottweiler mix? – to begin with, so he had already saved him once. Buckley is fine, and up until the day I left still loved to come over with Kimber and chase squirrels in my backyard.

Mamacita the Ninja Kitty, having delivered one mighty blow, never bothered him again.

Yoda pretty much prowled about minding his own business, but I do think it was he who brought in the occasional gift of mouse or nestling.

Simba, the orange kitten, grew into a medium sized short-haired orange cat with a bit of white here and there. White toes, I think. And the tip of his tail. Simba was the cat who demanded attention. He was the cat who would crawl on my lap when I was reading or working on the computer. He was the cat who whined to be picked up and held. He was the cat who knew when you were just petting him with one hand while trying to work with the other, and he didn’t like that at all. Simba was a little pest, and we loved him very much.

We lost Simba when we moved to the Blue House. Still moving in, and a window was left open. I didn’t worry so much because I knew I would get a call if he got picked up and turned in. I had had all of the cats chipped. I never got that call. Finally asked the vet – and no. All the other cats had been chipped, but Simba was the last one to come live with us and somehow I never had him done. I still slow down and look twice when I see an orange kitty with a white-tipped tail, even here in Wisconsin.

All the rest are gone now, too, so I hope that Simba is with them somewhere. Razz’s ashes are sprinkled around the magnolia tree in the back garden of the Blue House. Mamacita’s came in a nice wooden box that I never figured out how to open so it sat on the mantlepiece for a few years. She had been feeling sickly, but it wasn’t until the morning of one of Seattle’s rare snowstorms that it became evident that she should see the vet immediately. My vet was too far away, but there was one much closer, down a steep hill and up another, and I drove there very slowly through the snow holding her on my lap. She came home in that box. How didn’t I notice she was sick? Such an unassuming little cat, never demanding, most happy curled up somewhere near the fireplace in the winter or on the warm terrace pavers in the summer. Not a peep out of her.

Yoda was the last one to go. With only one cat left in the house, it was easier to keep track of him. He was also the one most likely to come to me, to insist on his fair share of attention. I remember getting on his case. “What’s with you, anyway? You’re a cat. You’re supposed to be aloof. Go be aloof somewhere.” With Yoda, I noticed when he wasn’t eating, when he seemed to lack energy, when he looked like he just didn’t feel good.

A trip to the vet concluded with a diagnosis of renal failure and dehydration. We came away with some medication, that might although probably wouldn’t help. And instructions on how to introduce moisture under his skin. That involved a needle, a hose, an enema bag, and the shower. I called it “waterboarding the cat.” Yoda hated it. I hated it. I knew he was dying anyway, and why subject him to being wrapped up in a towel and having a needle inserted under his skin while gravity feeding water to his body. Try doing that alone with an uncooperative cat. Uncooperative cat being an oxymoron of the first water. And after a few days, I gave it up. Either I was doing it wrong or it wasn’t working. Yoda certainly wasn’t getting any better. He was getting vocal about it, too. Sounds of pain. Finally, I went back to the vet and asked for painkillers. He gave me a set of three syringes. It was New Year’s Eve.

It was New Year’s Eve and my Seattle tradition was to go to St. Mark’s Cathedral to walk the labyrinth. Every NYE, this Episcopalian Cathedral moves the center pews to make room for a canvas replica of the labyrinth carved in stone on the floor of Chartres. I hated to leave Yoda alone, but I did and my walk that year was remembering him – all the pussycats, really, but especially this last one.

Yoda hung in there, and when I went to bed that night I gave him another injection, wrapped him in a soft blue blanket, and tucked him in with me. As I went to sleep I could still feel his little body moving up and down with each breath.

In the morning, he was still.

We managed to dig a hole under the magnolia tree and into that hole I placed Mamacita’s box of ashes with Yoda’s little body, still wrapped in that blue blanket, curled around her. Someone had given me a ceramic orange cat that I put there when we sprinkled Razz. Now I used it as a grave marker. I could see it from my study window and every day until I left Seattle I liked to think that they knew I was still watching out for them. I also like to think that their spirits found Simba and even Elvis, and that they all still play together in the bluebells under the magnolia.

But then, I like to think a lot of things.

Elvis the Cat

“Elvis! Elvis!” I was walking up and down the sidewalk in front of my house on N. 79th street, hoping that Elvis the cat would reappear and I could lure him back into the house. Of course, I was in tie dye, and it occurred to me that someone might be calling 911 about the crazy old lady having Elvis sightings on N. 79th, but I had to be sure he came back. I owed it to John.

My friend John was off to bicycle Baja California, and he had asked me to watch over his cat, Elvis. Elvis was a beautiful Himalayan Persian, and I felt honored to be entrusted with his care. But even though I thought I had the house escape-proof, Elvis, being a cat, had slipped by me that morning and, fearful that he would try to return to his “real” home, I was out scouring the neighborhood.

Suffice it to say, Elvis returned home – to my home – all on his own, and in due course John returned and reclaimed him. A year or so later, Elvis was back. John’s job – selling shoes for Nordstroms – had transferred him to their outlet on Guam (who knew?), and John didn’t think the tropics would suit a Himalayan cat. John was gone for a couple of years this time and yet, when he was transferred back, I fully expected him to pick up Elvis and resume life as before. Nordstrom, however, had other plans, and John was off again, this time to Denver and, not wanting to uproot Elvis once again, he asked me if I wanted to keep him. And that’s how I became Barbara and the Pussycats. Because Elvis made five.

Razz was the first of the five cats that eventually came to live at the 79th Street house. Two, three and four were Mamacita and two of her kittens, about whom more later. Someone once told me that cats scratch a sign on the back door of certain houses that reads, to passing cats, Sucker lives here. I was okay with that.

Elvis was a very kind, soft-spoken cat. He didn’t meow. He mewed. Quietly. Sweetly.

In good weather, my back door always stood open and my cats (and the occasional racoon or opossum – but those are other stories) wandered in and out at will. But when the chilly winds blew and the cold rain came, that door would be closed and I would have to let them in and out. My back porch was semi-enclosed, so they were still sheltered when I didn’t hear them, but there were times when Elvis would come into my office and mew, head for the door, turn back, mew – oh, he wants to go out, I would think – so I would get up and go open the back door. And who would I find there but Razz, Mamacita, Yoda or Simba, or a combination thereof, and when they were safely inside, Elvis would turn around and go back to his spot of the day. He had simply come to tell me to let the other cats in out of the rain. Elvis was that kind of cat.

Elvis was also a matty cat. His long, fine coat regularly formed mats on his belly and under his “arm pits.” Picture yourself with long arm pit hair tangled so much you can’t lift your arms. Ouch, huh? After trying and failing to cut them out, I finally called in a professional cat lady who would arrive with electric shavers and a loving way with cats, and between us we would “poodle” him. I like to think he was grateful, but then I like to think a lot of things.

For instance, I like to think that Elvis is still out there somewhere. You see, unlike most of the others, he wasn’t with us at the end. He had moved two houses down when I wasn’t looking. He still showed up at my house, however, so I wasn’t aware that he had adopted a new family until I went looking for him to take him to the vet. My computer had just told me it was time to renew his shots. I finally spotted him in my neighbor’s yard and went to fetch him. It was then that I learned that they thought he was their cat. He had turned up there a few weeks previously and, thinking he was a stray, they had adopted him. And had already taken him for his shots. Well, blow my buttons!

It made me sad to give him up, but I did. For one thing, this couple was elderly and were obviously very fond of Elvis. They called him something else, but I don’t remember what. For another thing, Elvis would be their only child, not one of a passle. And I wouldn’t have to pay for his shots, flea and tick prevention, or even food. In fact, since he was just two doors away and could always come for visits (as he obviously had been doing ever since they took him in), it wasn’t like giving him up at all. And if he outlived the elderly couple, he could also just come home. Win, win, win.

And then a couple of years later, we moved away.

I never knew what finally became of Elvis. But he will always remain as one of Barbara and the Pussycats. A very cool cat, the very kindest of cats indeed.

Razz

Razz, Mamacita, Yoda, Simba, and Elvis.

The last of the cats I have known and loved. The cats referenced when I signed Christmas cards from “Barbara and the Pussycats.” The Seattle cats.

I had a dog growing up, and then I had a parakeet in my Chicago apartment, but finally my second husband and I acquired a black cat we named Gimli. He got Gimli in the divorce. But before the divorce, there was a Barn Cat and two Abyssians who convinced me that the Egyptians worshipped them because they were terrifying. And much later on, in Seattle, there was the apartment complex cat I called Not My Cat, who ran down the alley to greet me when she heard the jingle of my ankle bracelets. When Not My Cat got sick, I took her to the vet who told me she had feline leukemia and was slowly dying. I wept salty tears into her fur as the vet put her quietly to sleep.

RAZZ

Not too long after that, my daughter Caroline brought home a tiny orange kitten that she named Razzmatazz. He’s gone, now, but I resurrected him a couple of years ago when I gave him to a character in my novel, A Dream of Houses, and named him Chewbacca which I realized, too late, had been his real name to begin with. I was reluctant at first to take him on, but Caroline told me he came from a bad home and it wasn’t long before he had made a claim on my heart similar to the one my children had made when they were tiny, and just like them, I continued to love him and care for him long after he turned a bit rascally.

Razz grew into a lion of a cat, with an orange-red coat, a creamy soft belly, and white tail tip and boots. He was haughty and naughty, loving nothing more than tempting human hands to bury themselves in that creamy soft belly fur only to become caught in a vice of claws holding them fast while Razz nipped away at the fingers. I used to threaten to have him made into a muff. He always knew to disappear half an hour before a vet appointment. “How did he know to duck out then?” I asked my vet. “Did he hear you make the appointment?” the vet asked. He scratched the furniture and sprayed the books on the bottom shelves (particularly those with shiny covers) and was fussy about food – there was only one brand of chicken chunks with gravy that he would eat – and could open the kitchen cupboard doors to hide when he wanted to.

We moved from the apartment to a real house with a back yard and an alley - I was a permissive parent - and ten years later to the blue house with a back garden and trees, bushes and storage sheds, and a patio of stone flags that grew warm in the afternoon sun. A cat's paradise.

A day came when he was about 15 or 16? I had an appointment to take Mamacita to the vet for her shots (ever since Not My Cat I was diligent about their shots), but noticed Razz coughing and looking distinctly unwell. So I took him, instead. He moaned a painful-sounding yowrrr all the way there – a sound I had never heard him make before – and when we got to the vets it was de ja veux all over again. Not feline leukemia, but a hard growth in his stomach – perhaps cancer? He was in pain, and I certainly couldn’t afford the fees that might or might not restore him. I called Caroline, and she came from work, and together we wept salty tears into his fur while he drifted off. His ashes are under the magnolia tree in the back yard of the blue house in Seattle.

(to be continued)

Portraits From Green Bay

December 1982

A strand of plastic Christmas green wraps itself around the wet top of the light signal like a caterpillar. The trees by the river look like powerless sticks. The streets shine wet on Three Corners in the rain. The lights change red yellow green and the cars come from 5 directions. They play country and western music over at the Banc supper club across the street.

Faculty Forum: They sit in ruminative form – feet sprawled to the fire, forehead skin drawn tightly to the center, a finger to the lips, a fist under the jaw, hands folded behind the head. The poet reads of sex and violence in marvelously literary language and there is delighted laughter. Now they fold their hands or intertwine their fingers. How would they look at the fireside of the Hellbounders? How would they react to the poetic reality of Magoo, with his finger mummifying on a string hanging from his belt? When they were passed the joint? When they were passed the bottle, stolen from the liquor store in town. How do they feel when they hear the wail of sirens? What would they do with Dann B. and Jocko?

***

Sebastian: He said his mission in life was to escape the pain of the physical body through mystic channels, and to finally escape through death, with a smile on his face and a shot glass in his hand. Sebastian had a rather sweet bent for pathos. He almost made you see it, clear through the bullshit.

JR: He never stopped moving. First he cleaned the room,straightened the newspapers and emptied the ashtrays. Then he flipped lighters and caught them – lighters, power hitters, anything he could get his hands on that would fly up into the air and consent to being caught, overhand, underhand, backhand.

Oh, JR, Sebastian demanded. What is meant by reality? And apparently the question had something intrinsically to do with the Mormon Church. In the first analysis, they all agreed, they all said the same thing. Then Sebastian nodded wisely and informed us all that Joseph Smith had died in the 1860’s and then he scratched his beard in a wise way, as if he knew much, much more he could tell us about the Mormons, if he could only recall it.

I'm Fine

Such an innocuous phrase. I use it all the time.

“Do you need help with that?”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

It’s how I was raised. Asking for help, according to my father, was being dependent. Accepting help, according to my mother, was taking advantage of other people’s good nature. As a result, I don’t need help with anything. I can do it all myself. And if I can’t, I'll find a work around or I decide it doesn’t really need doing. Anything but admit,

“Yeah. I could use a little help here.”

It was relatively late in life that I realized that asking for and/or accepting help was not or need not be an imposition on others. It was, or could be, a validation of friendship.

That insight came to me at some point when the mother of a friend died, and I was asked, along with another friend, to help sort out her mother’s house. I did not feel, as my mother had often implied others felt, imposed upon. Instead, I felt gratified, honored to be asked. It was a request that only a friend could make of another friend.

I was thinking about this recently watching another episode of my latest Netflix obsession, Supernatural. It is, on the face of it, a silly show. Two brothers born into a family of “Hunters,” people who hunt the monsters that walk among us: demons, werewolves, vampires, and the like. But it’s just my sort of story, told with occasional humor, one particular piece of eye-candy, and monsters. I am the woman who read Bram Stoker’s Dracula at age 13 and have been in love with the genre ever since.

But one thing that I, along with reviewers from A.C. Club, have had about enough of is each brother’s unwillingness to admit weakness or accept help of any kind. Not only does it make for entirely unwitty dialog, it also perpetuates the myth of the solitary hero, the cowboy, the rogue cop, the arrogant surgeon, all of whom step in at the last minute to save the day. All by themselves. Alone.

By this time (I’m 10 seasons in, having just discovered it earlier this year) the brothers have been through hell (literally) numerous times and carry both physical and psychological scars, and yet still whenever one asks the other one, “How are you?” the answer is still, inevitably, “I’m fine.”

That answer was okay in the beginning. We don’t expect characters to be wise from the get-go. Wisdom is something they must learn. But these characters never learn. And I must forgive them, because I was in my 60’s before I learned that asking for and accepting help is a gesture of love, of inclusion. It’s telling someone that you can count on them. It’s feeling counted on. Counted in.

So here is where I extend that metaphor, if metaphor it is, to the American psyche. Going it alone has become an American ideal. Remember when America piled on Obama for saying, “You didn’t build that.” I knew what he meant, but it seemed that half the country took umbrage at the idea that nobody does anything worth doing alone. And that idea – ideal, if you will – is promulgated night after night on our TV’s in shows like Supernatural. Dean Winchester has even cold-cocked his brother to make certain that nobody would be there to watch his back. It does always lead to trouble, so maybe there’s a lesson there, but not until after we’ve gotten that heroic vision of Dean marching alone into the monster’s lair thinking that he’s protecting his brother.

And I’m wondering if this has anything to do with American resistance to things like universal healthcare, its antipathy toward communal enterprises, or love affair with the good-guy-with-a-gun fantasy.

Because I still think hard before asking anyone for help, asking myself if there isn’t any way I can do it alone. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with self-reliance. But self-reliance isn’t always to be relied upon, and we should all should make room for other options.

“Need any help with that?”

“Yeah, I could use a little help here.”

Asking for help and accepting it brings us together. Builds communities. Cements friendships.

It’s at the core of civilization.