Cats and Books

Kaboodle the Feral Fox cat was spayed, not without incident but at least no one was bitten or scratched, and she was tested and found to be healthy and free of diseases. The day before the appointment she torpedoed out of the crate and I spent nine hours chasing her around the garage. This is how I learned she can leap nine and ten feet straight up in the air. I finally caught her but we were both utterly traumatized.

Now, post operatively, she seems to have no idea what downtime or rest and recuperation mean so she is chomping to get out of the crate. I have snagged her brother Tiger from the yard and put him in the crate with her to keep her company and give her some extra warmth. She is eating and purring and bright-eyed so I am happy. Soon this will all be behind her.

Outside the day is frigid and bright. Yesterday I watched the Canada geese peck at the ducks and then grab the ducks by their wings and hurl them around. Such unpleasant behaviour. Canada geese are one of the only animals I don’t feel madly in love with. I don’t hate them, but I might be a tiny bit prejudiced against them. Perhaps I have simply watched too much of their bad behaviour over time. They are however excellent parents and raise beautiful babies. And sometimes they sing very hauntingly.

The baby possum got up from its winter nap and tottered about the yard looking for a snack. I wonder what is milk and cookies to a possum?

My head makes me feel like staying home so I have been finding the spot of sunshine on the sofa and curling up in it with a book. Do you have a book that you are enjoying?

Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project was as interesting for me to read as staring at a potato chip. I like happiness a lot but in truth I am more interested in meaning and depth. Rubin seems well intentioned but too surrounded by formulas, charts, and spreadsheets. Her happiness did not seem like my cup of tea. On the other hand, I imagine she is unfailingly polite and is raising polite and helpful children and as result we will have a better world. I would like to meet her on a plane or in a public setting. She seems conscientious about how she takes up space and is probably a helpful stranger. But I just could not read her book. By page 20 her truisms like “if you can’t find something, clean up" and “over the counter medicines are very effective” lost me entirely. But I am a 10 on the 1-10 pain scale. So I am cynical.

Meanwhile Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing cheered me enormously and made me want to eat a carcinogenic pancake with her. She muses easily on random topics, from losing her memory to needing to pitch her Teflon pans. She writes, “On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?”

After I read and didn’t read those books I read Gloria Vanderbilt’s A Mother’s Story, a very different sort of tale and very interesting and sad. She is a sensitive and introspective person who watched her son leap to his death in front of her. (And she is the CNN newscaster Anderson Cooper’s mother. Something I did not know, which is neither here nor there.) She describes herself as feeling as if she were always closed off in a glass bubble and writes of lessons learned in childhood, “One of the things I learned very early on was that if you cry you go into the bathroom and shut the door. And when you come out you keep silent and pretend it never happened.”

I moved on to The Day The Voices Stopped: A Memoir of Madness and Hope by Ken Steele, a man afflicted by schizophrenia at the age of 14. Voices instructed him to murder himself and he spent his next three decades in and out of mental hospitals. Finally in 1995 the antipsychotic medication Risperdal becomes available. He tries it and for the first time since he was a teenager the voices disappear. He begins a new life and becomes an advocate for others with mental illness. This book is a remarkably intimate look into his life and made me wonder what things my father suffered that we never knew about. My father too was helped by Risperdal but it became available so late in his life, at a time when whatever had plagued his mind was then trumped by epilepsy and severe short term memory loss.

Next up~Lost Boy, Lost Girl: Escaping Civil War in Sudan. You know the story of the Lost Children of Sudan, I am sure, when during the Sudanese Civil War of the 1980’s and 1990’s tens of thousands of children were orphaned. Apparently many of the young boys survived only because they were not in the villages when they were attacked but were off tending to herds of their cattle. They made epic journeys over land to refugee camps in neighboring countries. A few thousand were ultimately brought to the US. It is said about 17,000 are still in refugee camps in Africa. (And of course there is ongoing war in Darfur.)When I first saw a documentary about their story about ten years ago, I had wished my life would allow me to adopt an entire house full of Lost Boys of Sudan, many of whom were now adults in age. There is still so much to be done, of course. So much need.

And this my friends, is the weird and diverse and random, wonderful, terrible, world we live in, some of it brought to me by my visits to the library.

Until we meet again, here is Ephron’s recipe for the last ricotta pancake she is going to make before she pitches her Teflon pans:

Beat one egg, add one-third cup fresh whole milk ricotta, and whisk together. Heat up a Teflon pan until carcinogenic gas is released into the air. Spoon tablespoons of batter into the frying pan and cook about two minutes on one side, until brown. Carefully flip. Cook for another minute to brown the other side. Eat with jam, if you don’t care about carbs, or just eat unadorned. Serves one.