Sweet Sugar

You know, I got to thinking this morning. I have been reading tales all my life about the quandary of the immortal man or woman who falls in love with a mortal. The characters vary and the stories may be funny or frightful or sad, but the central tenet remains that the immortal must watch the mortal beloved grow up, get older, and eventually sicken and die. In a way, in relationship to our little fur persons, we are like those immortals. In our lives with them, there is always that knowledge that great love will bring the consequence of great sadness, and the stronger the love, the more wrenching is the loss. But we love anyway, without stinting, to whatever degree that little creature blesses us with beauty, affection, amusement, perplexity, even vexation. All we can do is take care of them, respond to them as they respond to us, watch in awe as they give us a glimpse of what it is to be like to be other yet beloved. They make us better people, they comfort us and amuse us, and yes, they love us in return. And at the end of their lives, they teach us the value of mercy and what it means to let go, to think the unthinkable, to lose the irreplaceable. And they are irreplaceable. Each life leaves an indelible spark in memory, a spark that, eventually, will cause us to smile as we lean to stroke another of those unique, mortal, oh so brightly burning spirits.

In memory of Sugar Cooper, ruddy abyssinian, beloved of Maura and Stu

Sanctuary

I’ve been finding excuses lately. Ever notice how excuses are really easy to find? I got back to the mat this morning. Spent time out of time in the upstairs gallery where it was dusky and quiet on the padded carpet. No mat, really, and I was wearing jeans and shoes. Took off my glasses and my necklace and breathed for awhile, then engaged my inner eye as I went through a random sequence of simple poses. I ended up with this thought: My own body is all the sanctuary I need. There is such power in self-awareness. The recipe for peace is so simple, yet so hard to pay attention to. I need to grant to myself the same kindness I enable in others.

It’s odd practicing yoga after you start teaching it. There are two of you on the mat, one of them taking note of how you would lead a class through your practice, while the other is internally focused. It’s not an entirely happy partnership, but one I can accommodate because I am confident that the two will, given time and attention, integrate.

Robert, my yoga-resistant husband, has been walking along the Catawba river many mornings on the Riverwalk in Rock Hill. This is a particularly wonderful time of year to walk, when late autumn’s perpetual afternoon light shines through the bright remnant leaves even in the morning. I joined him Saturday. He loves his walk, although he remains disappointed that he has yet to see a train on the trestle at the end of the path. I see his whole demeanor improving, his energy increasing, his balance getting better, simply from a stroll in the woods. Unlike me, he treasures each encounter with the people and dogs he meets along the way, making connections and  spreading the gentle joy that is his life’s mission. We are so yin and yang, so inward and outward, so well balanced.

Attachment to Sorrow

Busy mind on the way in to work this morning. It started when I drove by the raccoon I killed with my car last night. Reliving the horror as I saw the dim shape hurtle into my front wheels, felt the solid thump. Looked into my rear view mirror and saw it still twitching. Turned around to drive back by and saw its beauty, the thick fur ready for a winter that would never arrive, the perfectly ringed tail, the slender muzzle and clever paws. And the slight motion. I knew I’d have to go back and finish the job, so I turned around and aimed for its head. Familiar now with that thump. The anguish too great for tears.

Depression seems to be an attachment to sorrow. I have been exploring the Buddhist principle of non-attachment, not becoming attached to it, but experimenting with it. Somebody suggests that, in the moment, you ask yourself, “Do you have a problem right now?”  Points out that, usually, the answer is no. This helps. Brings you back from the dingy back alleys of your mind that you continue to explore while reality is happening unnoticed. Going back over the might-have-beens and the should-haves and the could-haves is pretty much profitless. Even worse, for me, are the might-bes and what I have learned to call catastrophizing – starring myself and playing all the bit parts in intense dramas and fraught dialogues. I am trying to be ready without being expectant. As my yoga teacher Jan asked during class recently, “Are you waiting for something to happen?” The world can happen while you’re waiting. You need to pay attention to the happening, not to the waiting.

Random Inputs

Cooper was doing the Moon Walk sideways across the dining room last night, whacking a plastic bottlecap as he danced. He can’t understand why he isn’t welcome on my lap just now when this strange aluminum object is on it. Shortstop doesn’t care, he just produces random inputs. You might be reading some of those right now.

My yoga teacher, Jan Pendleton, put on a retreat this past weekend, a three-day feast of yoga, meditation, massage, energy work, silence and conversation, and the opportunity to sleep under the metal roof of the Treehouse while the rain thundered on it, dripped off the eaves, and ran down into the lake past its fellow drops dripping off the leaves onto the same pathways. Oh, and did I mention vegetarian food that included breakfasts provided by her own hens and her man-slave Jon? Well, I’m sure it was a great retreat. I’d been looking forward to it for months, had it all paid for. Got home Friday noon from a meeting with the group who are planning a museum of Fort Mill history, and simply could not gather enough energy to pack. So I set my clock and tumbled into bed. Woke up after the alarm had been ringing for 15 minutes and tried again. Failed. I was totally exhausted and freezing. I took my temperature and it was 100.6. I left a tearful message on Jan’s phone, had a tearful conversation with Robert, and went back to bed. Slept that afternoon, all night, and most of Saturday. Drank a lot, ate little. Finally felt better Sunday morning, but by then it was over. Back to work tomorrow, trying to deal with missing that which I know would have made this nearly-intolerable next two weeks manageable. At least I have class Tuesday night. Yoga is my lifeline. I think it’s the reason I didn’t break my back when I fell at my sister’s house in February, and the reason I’ve been able to work through most of the recovery period. It’s also the reason I can head off panic at the thought of having half a job, less than half really, having no health insurance, not knowing if we’ll be able to keep our house or even stay in the area.

Cooper is busy supervising the birds from inside the storm door. Tiny Shortstop is lording it over the warm cable box while Tart sleeps on top of the television, unmoved by the final ten minutes of March Madness. Of course, if Robert bellows and spews popcorn all over the living room, things will change.

Our lawn is spangled with the tiny spring blooms that betoken slothfulness on the part of the homeowners. The winter honeysuckle is in full bloom, spilling great swathes of fragrance across the driveway and around the front of the house. It’s an ugly thing, really, a great volunteer shrub that gradually clenched its stems into a fist to break out of the pot it was growing in and send up its homely children all around it. Even the flowers are unattractive, little clumps of translucent off-white clustered among the yellowing leaves of last year. But who can kill the bringer of fragrance that gladdens my arrival home every evening from the end of January to the end of March? It just grows larger and uglier and more precious every year.

Gift

My mother’s maiden name was Gift. My father teased her unmercifully about it - as he did all of us about so many things - because the definition of the German word is “poison.” Odd. I believe if you took a poll among us four siblings, you’d find she didn’t live up to her name.

There are times in life when things don’t go as you would like them to. Sometimes the sum of little annoyances gets the old fight or flight reflex popping off at inopportune times, causing you to start taking after your crabby grandmother.

Sometimes, the sum of griefs takes away sleep and sunshine and the promises of spring and of all the self-help books you’ve ever read.

In November, our elderly Maine Coon cat Kittery succumbed to kidney failure at the respectable age of fourteen and a half. We still had Tart and Danny and Hathaway and Burnaby and the three chins, but cats are no more interchangeable than people are. We cry over each one, and long afterward we see the soft ghosts disappearing around corners just beyond our reach.

We got home from a great Christmas visit with family to find one of our chinchillas, Moon, lying on the floor of his cage. It looked as though he had pulled something in through the wire and eaten way too much of it. In tears, I woke Robert at five the next morning to tell him the wee furry was gone. Not long after, I was calling 911 and following the ambulance to the hospital because Robert had chest pains. Eleven hours later, we knew that he had not had a heart attack, and that his coronary arteries were in very good shape, and that the chest pains were caused by stress-induced high blood pressure. I stayed home from work the next day and buried Moon alongside Thistle, our first chinchilla.

We had noticed in the midst of all this that Burnaby, our two-year old Norwegian Forest cat, was very thin and not his usual pouncy bouncy self. We took him to the vet and found that he had one very enlarged kidney and was dehydrated and feverish. He didn’t respond to antibiotics, so we took him to a specialist for an ultrasound. They found that he had a large cyst on his kidney, as well as fluid in his abdomen. They suspected FIP, a fatal feline viral disease, or cancer.

I have to explain Burnaby. We go to cat shows now and then. It’s a great way to learn about different kinds of cats and get to know breeders. We fell in love with Wegies in this way, and determined that one day we would have one. When Kittery’s brother Rangeley died a few years ago, I started doing some research and found a breeder not far from where we live. We got to know her, and eventually bought a brown tabby kitten. We searched baby names just like any new parents, and settled on Burnaby, Norwegian for “from the warrior’s estate.” He grew into a wild-looking young cat with huge feet, great long whiskers, a long puffy tail, and a gloriously patterned coat, lush and glossy. He had a quiet but winning personality, and the coolest pounce you ever saw on a cat. He and the two Turks played wild chase games through the house.

Burnaby had surgery to remove his kidney, and while we waited for the results of the biopsies, we had to tube feed him and give him medications for pain and nausea. He rallied for a few days, but then I noticed his breathing was gradually becoming faster and shallower. I was afraid fluid was bulding up around his lungs. He quit purring, and became less responsive to my petting. Finding out he had FIP was not much of a surprise. Now, I have to tell you, Robert was out of town. Burnaby had let me know he was ready to go. Waiting for three more days would have been a selfish serving of our own interests over his. I called my good friend Maura to tell her what was going on, and she asked, “Do you want me to come over?” I hesitated - how could you ask a friend to go through something like this? - and said yes.

She came to the vet with me, and we both stood and petted Burnaby while we waited for them to be ready for us. She stood and petted Burnaby with me as he passed peacefully into heaven, and she stood and cried with me and petted Burnaby afterward. Then she came home with me, bought groceries for me, made me meals, and stayed with me until Robert got home. Her care and friendship, and her husband’s willingness to have her stay with me during this wrenching time, are the first part of the gift.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that, a few days after we got the initial diagnosis on Burnaby, my full-time salaried job was turned into a half-time hourly job with zero benefits. So the vet bills we had just amassed added up to 5 months’ salary at my current rate. I was grieving over the job, too, because I love what I do.

I had been keeping Burnaby’s breeder apprised of his condition via email because I knew she would be interested, so of course I let her know when and why we had to have him put to sleep. She was horrified to hear what had happened. I got another email from her as I sat on the couch while Maura puttered in the kitchen. Did I mention Maura is a marvelous cook? Anyhow, it turns out Patti, the breeder, offered us a seven-month-old Norwegian Forest cat that she had just had neutered, if we would pay for the neutering. Now, we’re talking rare purebred kittens that go for $800-$1200. I hesitated because, at that time, I didn’t have even the $125. So Maura and Stu offered to pay for the kitten.

At this point, having pretty much figured that nothing good would ever happen to us again, I had what Maura poetically terms a “come-apart.” I was crying harder than I had cried at any time during those last awful weeks, and laughing at the same time. Maura and I went to see Patti that evening, and came home with Cooper, a little red and white cat with a ready purr and the biggest puffy tail you ever saw. He is named for his godmother, Maura Cooper, my Jewish mother. Her love is the gift that has brought my heart back from darkness.

Snowdrifting

The day after Christmas day the living room was edged with drifts of wrapping paper. I went outside, and the overnight rain had left drifts of snow edging every road and walk. It was a magnificent snow, deep and smooth, sparkling in sunlight, glowing at night. I have never lost the excitement of the morning after snow was predicted. Has it? Look out at the quality of light coming in around the blinds. Only snow can emit that cold glow presaging a virgin expanse. That glow contains all the excitement of snowball fights and angels and freedom from school and, now, freedom from going to work. I can hear the scrape of shovels against pavement and the whine of slipping tires, inconsequential sounds against the great hush of the world's down comforter.

I went on a bird walk with my niece Stacey. We got up at dark thirty and put on every bit of clothing we owned, waddled out to the car, and drove to a rendevous with more swaddled snow persons. We drove, and then walked, around a landfill that had been capped. Herds of deer the same color as the winter grasses grazed around the methane valves. It became a blustery day, cloudy, bringing the concept of wind chill to numbing life as we fumbled with our binoculars to identify the whizzing brown blurs Stace and her two anonymous padded friends would identify - "Oh, I make that four, no five, green-banded drift-skimmers, two females and three males. Oh, and look, there are three hawks, there by the third cedar on the left, a harrier and two red-tails." Most of the time I was still counting cedars long after the birds had disappeared. But I saw the bluebirds, a dozen or more, whose blueness slammed us all. Why were they here, all in a group on this coldest of days, and why were they so much more blue than any other bluebirds we had ever seen?

Stacey is in Guatemala now, starting her Peace Corps training, sending long emails nearly incoherent with excitement and Spanish. We are home, struggling to accept the death of one of our dear chinchillas the night we got home. And Robert's hospitalization with chest pains Monday morning, fortunately not a heart attack or blockage, but to come home from a feast of fun with family to a week of tears and anxiety hardly seems fair. I didn't really settle down until this evening following a 23-hour visit from my brother, one of the world's coolest people. I sat and drank my wine, and Robert made dinner and brought it out to me, and life was finally good.

A Rose Arose

My (current) profile photo was taken at Myrtle Beach the morning after prom night. The day was cloudy and the rose was being rolled across the sand by a damp wind. It was a poem all by itself, a metaphor, I couldn't tell if it was sad or lovely, so I took its picture.

Some of the most perfect moments in my life have taken place in or on the ocean. Standing in the surf in the sun, speckle-blinded by floating diamonds of light, pulled, oh pulled by water. Walking stung by sand into cold wind, pulled into the cloud-colored water, dancing with surf. We used to play sandpiper, advancing and retreating, digging for sand crabs then running for our lives. Ocean, mother, lover, killer, mesmerizing in all her colors and moods, a flagrant caster of riches on sand. I  pored over the sand as a child, searching for completion in shape and color - only the most perfect shell would do. The search is now the same, but the standard of perfection is not. The most beautiful are twisted and pocked by age and adversity, or polished to reveal color and grain. But the pebbles, the beach stones, they have to be perfect. Still.