An Introduction by An Abbyssinian


I've been asked to write an introduction for this book, and, scratch, scratch, feh, feh, feh, sorry, where was I, oh yes, although the current thinking in some publication circles is that animals don't talk, think, read, or answer email, here I am. I'm an eight year old male Abyssinian. That's a cat. The people I live with named me Harley Hopkins. But she calls me Hoppy, or Bunny Boy, or The Prince of Nofral. Murph. Really I'd rather be outside getting one of those giant green grasshoppers or dissecting that disagreeable mockingbird, but no, here I am inside on a sunny afternoon pounding the keys for the introduction for this book. Itchy back, itchy back. There, now where was I?

Cynthia Wands, or Bug Eyed Owner as I secretly call her, has written this book about animals. Golden Retrievers. Cats. Hummingbirds. A few unfortunate episodes with deer. Go figure.

She's a weird one, this woman that serves me. She used to be a theater actress, and she has bookshelves with lots of dog eared scripts and books, and yawn. Anyway, where was I - is that a bug? No, well, let's see. Her book is about - animals. Cats are featured predominately in the work, which amuses me. You see, she's not too picky about the cats that she writes about: Russian Blues, Maine Coon Cats, Manx, Tabbies, the mixed breeds, and then of course the Abyssinians. And ducks, she writes about ducks. Can't'�get'�this toenail '�'�there, got it.

She also writes about dogs. Dogs. Pugh. There's a dog up the street that was eaten by the coyotes - and I'm not surprised. A two year old beagle named Elvis. Tragic really. But I went after him one day when I found him flirting with her IN MY OWN DRIVEWAY. Yes, I taught that little tail tagger a thing or two. My sister, Puma, who bothers me to no end and I just ignore her completely, was with me when we saw this travesty occur on our homeland property. Bug Eyed Owner was bending over him, cooing to this wiggling mess of a puppy. We actually heard her say: "What a sweet puppy." "How is the baby puppy?" So we went after him like veloceraptors and he yelped. Actually he jumped, right up into the arms of his owner, this big fellow with a growly voice who was a soldier in the Russian army. Well let's just say that Elvis never forgot what Abyssinians can do when they're annoyed. Hairball, hairball. No, I guess that was just some grass I ate. Sorry.

So where was I. Oh yes, the book. So she wrote this book on animals, and their life and meaning and their capacity to love and - was that a can opener? No, guess not. Too early. And I can tell you right now that's she's entirely too attached to me. The things she does to me, it's so humiliating, but what can I do, she feeds me. And then I take her out for a walk every day. It took a while to train her - but she's pretty bright, given her short attention span. We take a walk in the morning, with Puma straggling behind just to look pathetic, and I have to show her the impending modifications in the neighborhood - things that she just can't seem to recognize and register - that's how out of touch she is. It took weeks to teach her that a brown rabbit is now living in the bushes across the street from the Russians. I tried to herd it over to our driveway one morning, but the damn thing just kept hopping away from me. My biggest problem is the ongoing construction and remodeling going on in the area: the landscaping and the bags of cement and sand that I have to pee on - I just can't keep up with it all.

So I try and keep her informed, but it's a challenge. She tends to tune out on the walks: she doesn't seem interested in any smells, and she completely misses the animal carcasses lying in the grass. I really don't know how she supports herself. Flea bite, flea bite - no, wait, I guess that's just ..my fur. So, that's about all I can say about Cynthia's writing. Oh, I do like to sit on top of the computer while she's typing. I can keep an eye out for the dogs or gophers or any brown rabbits that might accidentally wander into the office.

It's a good life.
Hopkins







A Black Cat From Boston


I know I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life: people, freeway directions, omens, the right wine to drink with the right meal. And in one of my reoccurring dreams there's a large, gilded gate, almost twenty feet high, that keeps blowing open in this black wind. I know it's a bad sign. I know I'm not wrong about this. In my dreams that gate means that the wolves and the dark things creeping in the corners can get out. This is the gate that seals the kingdom of the past and ensures that you won't look back, you won't call, and most important, you won't miss a part of the world that you used to belong in.

I used to belong to a very different world, one that had children and a dog named Sam, and a house designed by my architect husband. Of course the children weren't mine, as much as we pretended that we belonged to one another, and the dog really belonged to one of them; and the architect husband apparently was never mine to begin with. And the house, well, my sister called that house a wooden trailer with architectural delusions. I know all that now, but I didn't then. I was 19 years old, what did I know. The problem was, I thought I knew what was real, and I was wrong.

The girls - the little girls that this husband and his ex-wife shared - were a handful. There were only two, but oh did they have issues. And rightly so, they'd been handed a poker game with some really important cards missing, and a couple of jokers for parents. This was back in the seventies when parenting wasn't the religion that it is now. This was when joint custody meant the ex-husband paid $170 a month for child support, and he complained about it, even though he was an architect, and architects were supposed to be well off. But he had two beautiful little girls, and for six years I got to pretend that I was related to them.

We had birthday parties, Christmas Eve stockings, Easter eggs in the grass. We had cats, and the dog named Sam, which really lived at the ex-wife's house, and dinner with the families. We had gymnastic lessons, and drama class, and track meets. We had a lot time together, good and bad. Now we're apart, for many years and no longer connected.

These little girls are now women with children of their own. We've exchanged a few letters, and cards. And there was one awkward visit that told me that they really don't want to see me in the present tense, however kind my intentions might be. So I refrain from insinuating myself in a world where I don't belong anymore. I know that's the right thing to do. I know that gate should be closed.

But I think about them, as little girls, and remember the giggles at bed time, the tears about school, or the sighs and dark faces about their parents divorce. They went through a lot, these girls. And then, there was the strange story about Miss Berg, the cat. It's a true story, but even now when I think about, it's a strange story.

We were living in Boston. Actually, we were living in the married student housing at MIT, me, the architect, and his oldest daughter, Lisa. He was getting another degree in architectural engineering at MIT. It was ironic that we were even able to live in the married student housing, because at the time, we weren't married. That was later. We had simply supplied a copy of his marriage certificate to his ex-wife, and they had assumed I was that wife. He was 32. I was 19. Lisa was 12.

We had recently acquired a small black kitten, under strange and sinister circumstances. We'd been invited to a Halloween costume party, at a loft in Beacon Hill, by some artist types we didn't know very well. We arrived at the party and didn't know anyone, and while we're standing around holding these little paper cups of orange soda, there are the thumping sounds of a very noisy orgy go in on in the back room. Music is blaring and there are screams and people yelling "YES! YES! YES!" So we're talking with the sad looking hostess, who was this rather large woman dressed as a Salem witch, complete with a black pointy hat and plastic moles on her chin, and she's trying to talk us into adopting one of these little black kittens that are running around in the kitchen. The noises got louder and louder from the back room, and, well, let's just say that's how we ended up taking one of the little black kittens home with us. Just so we could leave a party where an orgy was going on. But I did wonder if that was just a taped recording of an orgy going on in the back room, and they used it as a form of blackmail to get people to take one of their kittens home with them. "Get a kitten now or join the orgy." "It's a kitten or an orgy, take your pick." "No kitten, okay, you're next - join the orgy!"

Anyway, we had this small black kitten without a name and Lisa had just come to live with us. Lisa was delighted to have a small animal to boss around. "You Booger! Stop climbing on my hair!" "Booger! Stop that" "Booger, get out of the sink!"

Faced with the idea that I would have to live with a cat named Booger, we supposedly agreed to name the cat, "Miss Berg". She still called the cat Booger, and I called the cat Miss Berg.

And on the one summer weekend we drove to Upstate New York to see my grandparents, rather than leave the cat alone in the apartment, we took the cat with us. We had a nice visit with my grandparents and their three large dogs. And while we might have had a very nice time, Miss Berg did not. She had never seen dogs before and had spent the entire time sulking in a closet. So after three days, we said goodbye, loaded the car with suitcases and the cat, and started the drive back to Boston. For some reason, halfway home we pulled off the highway, and stopped at a river's edge, near a stone bridge. We opened the car door and that's when the cat bolted from Lisa's lap and disappeared into the tall grass. It was a nightmare. We called her and begged her to come back. But she was mad. Mad about the car, mad about the dogs, mad about the closet, mad about leaving MIT. She was mad and she was not coming back. We spent hours calling her. So it was nearly dusk, and that's when Lisa's father announced that he wasn't looking for the cat anymore, and that we were going to leave her there and go home.

Lisa cried, I did my best, oh come on now honey negotiating, and nothing worked. But it was dark now and he had made up his mind. It was a very quiet ride back to Cambridge without the little black cat in the car. I knew this was wrong. But there was a lot going on for all of us at the time: I was working at the MIT Psychology library, he was working on his thesis for MIT, and Lisa was struggling to fit into the new school. For several days we lived without our little black cat.

It was about a week later we had a terrible lightning and thunder storm in the middle of the night. You could see the lightning through your closed eyes, and the thunder rattled all the glass jars on the kitchen shelves.

That's when I had the dream. And even now, it seems so real to remember I'm not sure it was a dream. I could see the stone bridge by the lake where we had lost Miss Berg. And just beyond the curve in the road, I could see a large culvert, and the raining is beating down, and the lightning and thunder is filling the air. And in a moment of quiet, I can hear Miss Berg crying, and there in the flash of lightning - I see her. She's in the culvert, wet and shivering, and she's crying out, wondering - where are we and how can she get home.

In the dark I sat straight up in bed, and I knew that it was true. I woke him up and told him about my dream, and he harrumped, and turned over.

In the morning I told the story to Lisa. Her little face turned white and scared. I told her "I'm going to call in sick today because I'm going to drive up there and see if I can find Miss Berg." I asked her if she wanted to skip school and go with me. I could see him in the kitchen, annoyed and shaking his head, exasperated by my story, and I pretend not to notice. In her very small little girl voice she said "Okay."

So we go. It's still raining a bit, and it takes us nearly two hours to get to the turn off from the highway. But we find the stone bridge. And we get out of the car in the drizzling rain and start looking for a culvert, and we can't find it. We're getting soaked. So Lisa starts calling in her high clear little girl voice "Here Booger, Here Booger, Here Booger, Booger, Booger!"

And then we heard it. It was about 50 yards down the road. There was the culvert I had seen in my dream, and there was this little black kitten mewing for us.

Lisa shrieks and starts to run through the rain slicked grass towards the kitten, and she slips and falls down, and the kitten leaps out of the culvert and starts running towards Lisa. The next thing I know Lisa is holding her kitten, nearly crushing it with her tears, and she's crying and I'm crying and the cat is crying.

We get in the car, and that little black cat is so happy to see us, she's licking our faces, and butting her head against our hands, and she's mewing and mewing and mewing. The kitten is soaking wet, and she looks really skinny. My hands are shaking as I start up the car.

We found a McDonalds and bought three Fishwiches. That cat is so hungry she's growling and purring while she's wolfing down the bites of the Fishwiches that Lisa is feeding her. It's raining hard now, and we have the heat and the windshield wipers cranked up on high as I find the highway onramp, and we head home.

An hour later, Lisa and the kitten have fallen asleep in the passenger seat. Lisa is holding the kitten like a baby and the cat has wrapped her paws around Lisa's neck and is holding on for dear life. They both look exhausted and damp and dirty, but for a while they are both sleeping such a sweet sleep in the warm cocoon of the car.

Miss Berg the Booger Cat, lived with us for five more years, until she died from cancer. But oh was she loved in those five years. And she was needed, too, by a young girl who had a really lonely and difficult adolescence.

I wonder if Lisa remembers the cat she called "Booger' that slept on her pillow at night. And I wonder if she remembers who I was in the story of her life, and what she meant to me.

I know I've been wrong about a lot of things in my life. But I know that the dream I had about a little black cat lost in a thunder storm, led me to do the right thing for a little girl I loved.


The Russian Blues


There are some kinds of cats, like people, that stay with you even after they've gone. That's how it's been with the Russian Blue cats, a kind of silvery blue furred cat that I've been blessed to know.

The first Russian Blue, Ted, was a prince of a guy. Tedder, we used to call him. He loved everybody, and everybody loved him.

We were renovating an old house in Spokane, Washington and trying to get it fixed up before the end of September. That's when we had to be back in California, and we had to reroof, repaint and repair the old house before we could sell it.

One day while the roofers were banging away on the roof shingles, a beautiful young Russian Blue cat appeared on the roof with them. The roofers were a crew of five or six manly men, not really your cat fanciers, but they took to Ted right away. He would sit on their laps if they were resting or eating lunch, or he would scrabble around for any loose nails if some got away, and then he rub up against someone if they started singing. He became one of the guys.

Ted also loved the two little girls who lived in the house, Amy and Lisa. He would purr very loudly when they bent down to scratch his ears, and he knew how to flop next to them in the bed, close enough so they could see his blinks at them, but far enough away so they couldn't really pat him.

And then, he was very politic with Miss Berg The Booger Cat. He recognized that this little black cat from Boston was tough as nails and he gave her all due respect, especially at meals, and she could hiss at him all she wanted, but he never retaliated to her growlings or arched his back at her.

Everyone was getting very attached to him, the children, the husband, the roofers, so I figured out I'd better find out where he came from. He had no collar, no tag, and there were times when he would disappear for a few hours at time, but he always came back for meals, and he was always very hungry. One of our neighbors told me that the young woman who lived next door had owned him at one time, but she had gone back to school, and the cat seemed to belong to the neighborhood. I figured we would have to leave Ted behind when the time came to move back to California. I just didn't count on Ted resorting to such drastic measures.

We were just wrapping up the last days of construction - the house was finally getting to put on the market. But things were tense, there were problems with the renovation, the little girls were acting out and there were unspoken problems beneath the surface of the marriage. We were fixing dinner in the kitchen, Amy and Lisa sitting at the kitchen table, fighting about something, and the cats were hungry. The phone rang and their father went off to take the phone call, and I opened up a can of cat food for the cats.

As I was spooning out the cat food, Miss Berg pushed herself in front of Ted, and for the first time, he hissed at her. Impatient at the cats, and annoyed by the children squabbling in the background, I very lightly swatted Ted on the forehead and said "Bad cat, no."

That's when it happened. I swear I just barely patted Ted on the forehead. But I had swatted him just where an enormous abscess had hidden itself, and when I hit the cat with my fingers, I broke the surface of his skin. Suddenly there was this rancid, horrible bloody gash which bloomed open like a gun shot wound on Ted's head. The smell filled the kitchen, and Miss Berg ran hissing up the back stairs. The girls shrieked and made gagging noises as they stumbled to the living room. I was left holding this poor cat, now mewing at me, while he tried to get away from the smell coming from the hole in his head.

"Ted. Tedder, baby, I'm so sorry'�"

The cat turned his head and looked at me, with an expression of pity and exasperation, as if to say, I'm sorry for you too baby, but you're the one who's going to have to fix this.

And I did. I took him to a emergency animal clinic, and he was shaved, and medicated, and bandaged up by a very kind vet, who kept remarking on what a sweetheart Ted was. Poor Tedder. He looked like he was injured in a battle, with this enormous white Band-Aid on him, and a cone head strapped on him to make sure he didn't take it off.

That night Ted slept in my bed, and he leaned back against my pillow and sighed when I patted him. Even though he was wearing a cone head, he licked my hand, and purred. I knew he would do just fine in California.

So Ted came to live with us in California, and his mellow movie star ways made everyone love him. Neighbors, school kids, the mailman. Ted just had that kind of personality. He loved fresh fish, hamburgers with swiss cheese and my cashmere sweater. It was the only cashmere sweater I've ever had in my life, a coral peach color with a silky fur that seemed to melt when you wore it. It came from Filenes Basement in Boston, back when Filenes Basement was a bargain secret that only the Beacon Hill blue hairs knew about. This was my one luxury item, I'd wear it for holiday dinners or going out to some place we couldn't really afford. Ted used to love to sit on me when I wore that sweater, he'd purr and knead and drool, and end up sprawled over my lap, trying to get as much cashmere exposure as he could.

When Ted came down with cancer, the vet volunteered the experimental chemotherapy to try and save him. It was a valiant struggle, but in the end, he just couldn't survive the combination of the cancer and the drugs. The vet had grown very attached to Ted, and had put him to sleep for us. We went to pick up his little body, and I covered him with my cashmere sweater.

On the way back from the vet, Ted's body was limp and small, and helpless in my lap, and he felt almost warm in that delicate cashmere. I nuzzled his still beautiful Russian Blue fur, and patted him during the long ride home.

We buried Ted wrapped in his cashmere sweater, in the hills of Atascadero, carefully covered with the rocky dirt of California. Miss Berg spent several days looking for Ted, and four months later, when she also died from cancer, we buried her next to Ted. Somehow the little black cat from Boston and blue furred cat from Spokane ended their days with one another, and they rest quietly under the enormous arms of a very old oak tree that is filled with quail, and doves, and squirrels.

Every once in a while I'll be looking through the closet and wonder, where is that damn cashmere sweater. But then I'll remember - that's right - Ted's wearing it.




The Other Russian Blues

My other story about the Russian Blue cats started in Hollywood some ten years ago. Eric and I were living in an old apartment called Whitley Heights. In the years that we lived there we witnessed our neighbors lives: the drug overdoses, bomb threats, suicides, nervous breakdowns, abusive relationships, you know, the usual Hollywood backstory.

The people who lived here were aspiring actors and singers, film makers, heavy metal musicians, sulky screenwriters, and some drug dealers. Because of the low rent and bad building condition, people were constantly moving in and out of the building. Every Saturday there would be a van or a truck or a small car in the parking garage unloading furniture, boxes and chaos into another apartment.

We lived on the second floor in a small one bedroom apartment crammed with books, furniture and props, and we had two cats in our lives - Thaitu, the Abyssinian and Ralph Waldo Emerson, her consort.

One day a young couple moved into the apartment directly across the courtyard from us on the second floor. They looked like they were in trouble - he was a Viking, ape-like man, (he told us he played in a punk band) and she was anorexic-thin with a breathy baby voice, and hair that had been fried blonde. From the day they moved in there was a constant stream of shouting and fighting and rage from their apartment. The evenings were the worst of it - the music and fighting would start around midnight, and the cops would be called, and sometimes the banging noise would stop and sometimes it wouldn't.

The day times were quiet - and one day while I was washing dishes, I looked up from the kitchen window and saw two small kittens watching me from their apartment. These neighbors kept their drapes closed all the time and we'd never seen the inside of their apartment, but the kittens had pushed the blinds aside and there they were. They were these beautiful young Russian Blue kittens, sitting side by side on the kitchen windowsill, and they were just sitting there, watching me with their big eyes. I wondered how they lived with all that noise and anger in their apartment. I wondered if they were like Ted.

A week later, I was in the apartment by myself in the afternoon, and I heard a heavy thumping noise. Then I heard it again. I went to the window, not really sure what or where I was hearing this noise. When it happened again the noise made the walls in our apartment shake. The heavy thumping noises were coming from their apartment. That's when I heard him talking, in an even normal voice.

"You bitch you say that to me one more time and I'll kill you - you get it, bitch, I'll kill you."

I stood frozen for a moment, and then I realized that the heavy noises were the sounds of the ape-man throwing the baby voiced woman against a wall.

Without thinking, or pausing, or even wondering if this was a good thing to do, I ran out of the apartment, slammed the door behind me and ran across the courtyard and up the stairs to their apartment.

I had so much adrenaline pumping that I started beating both my hands on their front door before my eyes focused to the dark hallway.

"HEY! Hello! Is anyone there! Open up or I'm calling the cops! Open up!"

There was a moment of quiet, and then the door flew open. There he was, completely naked, his wild blonde hair flying around his face. He had no pupils - he must have been on some sort of drugs because this man had no pupils in his eyes. I stared at him and realized he had a giant snake tattoo that wrapped around his body from his neck to his stomach- and he was entirely erect. I didn't know where to look for a moment, and then I heard this horrible moaning sound. I looked over against the wall in the apartment and there was the woman, also naked, and she was crumpled up on the floor and bleeding from her head. The entire apartment was knee deep in trash, newspapers, boxes, clothing and broken furniture. The cats were nowhere to be seen.

I looked back at the man animal standing in the doorway, and he laughed.

"You animal." I could barely get the words out. "I'm calling the police!"

"Yeah, you do that." He laughed again and started to close the door, and I heard her call out in that whispery baby voice, "Please don't try to help me."

The door closed, and it was quiet in the hallway. I could feel my heartbeat thumping in my ears.

Please don't try and help me - please don't.

Try and help me.

Her words burned in my ears as I ran back to my apartment and I called the police. It took them 45 minutes to respond to my call. I found out later if I had said he had a gun and there were shots fired they could have been there in ten minutes.

But because I said a naked man was beating a naked woman, it took the police forty-five minutes to get there.

When the police did arrive, the man and woman had already left the apartment. Later, one of the neighbors told me he had seen them leave together, fully dressed, and even though the woman looked bloodied and battered, they were hugging and kissing like teenagers in the elevator. There was blood on the trash and the carpet and the hallway, and the cats were hiding in the bathtub. I sat down on the bathtub edge and they both jumped up in my lap and picked at my clothes, purring. The male kitten was very forward, and kept pawing my face to look at him. The smaller female just wanted to curl up in my lap and close her eyes. The police took a full report and said there were already several charges against this guy. The apartment manager said he had started the eviction process against them for nonpayment of rent. But then when I tried to leave with the kittens, I was told I couldn't take them, because they were considered personal property. Leaving those kittens behind in that trash filled apartment was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

I couldn't believe it when the woman moved out the next day and she left the kittens behind in that apartment. We heard that there was a warrant out for the guys arrest, and for two nights there was no noise, no music, no fighting. I could see the kittens sitting in the apartment window for hours at a time, and they would mew a silent mew to me.

I can't help you, I would think as I watched them. I can't break into his apartment and rescue you. I can't. He might be there. I might get caught. I might get hurt. I might be a coward.

Two nights later all hell broke loose.

He came back to that apartment with two other men, and there were screams and shouting and a gunshot, and the sound of breaking glass. The police arrived and had to break down the door, and there was a flood of gunfire, and someone was shot and an ambulance was called. We read in the paper the next day that these guys had robbed a jewelry store that day and shot and killed a nineteen year old clerk.

The next morning, I looked out at the apartment, and there in the windowsill, were the two kittens, now calling to me. I ran up the stairs over to the apartment and it had the yellow police tape crisscrossing over the door. The door was locked, and I could hear the kittens crying in the kitchen. I ran into the courtyard and dragged a patio table just underneath the broken living room window and climbed on top of it. I pulled myself into the apartment - it looked like the wreckage from a tornado - broken furniture and trash was everywhere. The two kittens called from the kitchen sink counter. I tried to talk calmly to them as I picked my way through the trash filled room, broken glass was crunching under my feet. When I got to the counter, the male kitten threw himself at me, and pawed my face and mewed constantly as I tried to pet him. The female kitten cowered, and shook violently when I picked her up. They both looked at me with their eyes frantic, asking me, telling me, that they were in terrible trouble.

"It's okay." I walked out of that hellhole apartment holding the kittens under my shirt. "I'm here, and you are going to be okay."

We kept them in our apartment for a few days, but Thaitu and Emerson freaked out at the high strung kittens that ran around, crying constantly. The kittens were starving and ate everything, food, dirt, paper. The male kitten sprayed on everything and the female kitten hid underneath the towels in the bathroom, shaking violently if anyone picked her up.

My good friend Joan took the kittens for a few days. They shredded her beautiful Hollywood Home, crying frantically, until her mother in Orange County offered to take them. Momma Mara loved the kittens too, but their crying and high strung ways made her have to reconsider her offer as well.

And then dear friends came to the rescue: Candy and Math, and their adorable daughter Rachel, adopted these high strung Russian Blue kittens and they went to live with them in their home in Long Beach.

The male cat was called Nicky, the female was named Perlita. Perlita became the princess of the house, sleeping in Rachel's bed, Rachel's doll carriage, Rachel's clothing.

Nicky has never really overcome his Hollywood past - he's become the terror of the Long Beach neighborhood, picking fights with other cats, challenging cars to come and hit him, hissing and fighting and carrying on. And then he developed food issues; he'll hiss and bite anyone who tries to feed him. And then too, he'll go missing for three or four days and then appear again, one ear cut up, or a giant scratch on his forehead. But Nicky loves the man of the house, Math, and follows him around, crying and calling to get his attention. And when he can, he'll settle in Math's lap, teeth gleaming, eyes closed as he gets his tummy rubbed.

Perlita and Nicky remain very bonded, they snuggle together in the morning and they still groom one another like kittens. Every once in a while they'll chase each other through the back yard and into the house and back again, knocking over glasses and furniture as they play their frantic hunt me game. They have lived a happy life for ten years with this family, having the run of their house and home.

The last time I was in Long Beach to visit Candy and Math, Nicky was sitting on a large upholstered chair outside on their patio. He looked up as he saw me walk towards him, and I swear, I saw a cloud of recognition in his eyes.

I sat down next to him, and he jumped up and plunked himself on my lap, claws out and picking at my clothes. He purred, and drooled, and shook as he kneaded himself into a sitting position, and then he looked up at me, his yellow eyes fully dilated.

For a moment it looked as if he had no pupils in his eyes. But then he looked away and I realized it was just the way the sun had caught him in the light.



Victoria & Albert

Victoria ' Queen Victoria. And then there was the cat: Victoria. Some names stay with you because of their history with your life and your family.

Victoria was my sister's cat that lived with various members of my family for almost 23 years ' a long time for a tabby cat. And too long really. She actually looked like Queen Victoria at the end of her years when she finally passed away ' spending her days plumped out on the bed pillows, snapping at the dogs and making sure she got the best care that psychotic royalty demanded.

Victoria started out as a little Tabby kitten that my sister Susan and her husband Richard adopted when they lived in a small apartment in Seattle. Her looks were deceiving: she appeared as a cute, friendly yet demanding kitten that just needed a lot of attention. Maybe Queen Victoria started out the same way, a young girl, petite and dark eyed, with an innocence that belied her eventual tyranny.

When Victoria starting whining for company, Susan and Richard got her a companion: Albert. He was a very small, black kitten with white whiskers. The story was that she hated him, hissed, and swatted him and that they had made a dreadful mistake. Then they came home one day and found no kitten in the apartment, only Victoria sitting on the couch, and found out that she was, in fact, sitting on the kitten, and that the fateful bond had been forged. He was hers. And for the rest of his life he had this oversized grumpy cat that dictated how they were feeling ' and he loved her.

Albert was a mellow, gentleman of a cat ' courteous, kind, with a vacant sort of thoughtfulness. I once took a photograph of Albert sitting in rose petals, and he had the wistful reverie of a philosopher contemplating some blissful subject. He loved being held and being sung 'Happy Birthday To You'�. He was the perfect consort to Victoria, who was wild in her emotions and needs. She had rules, and they would be followed. He followed her until the end of his days.

Victoria and Albert came to live with us for a few months, while Susan and Richard went on a tour, performing in a production of 'The Taming of A Shrew'�. We were living in Berkeley at the time, in a jumbled up Victorian we were renting on Haste Street.

Victoria and Albert were indoor cats, and for the most part, they seemed to enjoy staying with us, and behaved like normal domesticated cats.

Then there was the day that Albert got outside.

We had a problem Doberman in the neighborhood; a rogue dog that was allowed to roam off a leash and that had attacked the cats next door. We had never seen the owner, but our neighbors had threatened to kill the dog if they saw it their yard again.

I was carrying a large trash can to the dumpster in the alley in back of the house, when I looked up and realized that I had left the back door open, and there was Albert.

He was rolling around in the dirt in the alley, paws up in the air, enjoying the sunshine on his black, dusty fur.

Before I could set the trashcan down, I heard an ominous jingle of dog tags in the alley. I looked up and saw the Doberman, standing in the back of the alley and he had just spotted Albert.

I screamed at Albert, and he rolled around and looked at me, and then he saw the Doberman coming towards him. He flattened out, and froze on the ground, not moving, all of his fur fluffed out.

Before I could move towards him, I saw a streak go by him; it was Victoria and she was trotting up the alley towards the Doberman.

I saw the expression on her face: there's a Doberman bothering my cat, I'll go kill the Doberman. Not running, not fluffed up, just trotting up towards the Doberman to kill it, her tail straight up in the air like a flag proclaiming her intent to commit homicide.

The Doberman was charging down the alley towards the black cat hunched up in the sunshine, and then it wheeled to a stop. The dog saw this fat tabby cat walking briskly towards him, and whatever it was that he saw in the cat's expression, made him back up, turn around and run yelping out into the street.

Victoria continued trotting to the end of the alley and watched the Doberman run away. She stood there for a moment and then turned back, and walked slowly over to Albert who was still cowering in the dirt.

She sniffed him once, just to make sure he was okay, and then reached out and swatted him with a big smack behind the ears.

Then she grandly marched back into the house, with her tail straight up in the air, and disappeared up the steps.

I scooped up Albert, trembling with fear and remorse, and we went back in the house in Berkley. We never did see the Doberman again.

Victoria and Albert moved with Susan and Richard to New York City, where they lived in Manhattan Plaza for several years. They lived in this concrete warren of apartments set up in the middle of Manhattan's chaos ' the cats had a lovely balcony where they spent the days sunning themselves, watching the pigeons flutter on the railing.

These were the happy years for Susan and Richard, and they ended badly. Richard had passed away, Albert had died, and Susan had been living in some closet in Manhattan. Our mother came to the rescue, and volunteered to have Victoria come live with her, and Victoria was flown to Spokane, Washington, where her next chapter began.

My mother was now alone in the family house, on the other side of her divorce from our father, and all the children had grown up and gone away. She had never been much of a cat person, and there was some question where this was really a good idea. It turned out to be a destined relationship.

Victoria became our mother's second bossy husband. She had to have an entire bedroom devoted to her various dishes set up for water, dry food and wet food. Victoria was hungry all the time, and ended up weighing over twenty pounds. She looked like a cat that had been blown up with a bicycle pump. There were now blankets strewn on the furniture, so Victoria wouldn't be too cold. Pillows were left on the floor next to the bed so Victoria could hop her enormous bulk from pillow to pillow until she could climb up to the bed. The radio was left on during the day while our mother went to work, so Victoria could listen to voices and music and not feel lonely.

Then there was the question of Victoria's voice. Suddenly our mother began quoting Victoria's thoughts and needs in a reedy baby voice, sounding like some asthmatic two-year-old monologue.

'She doesn't like the blankey 'does she now? She wants a better blankey. Yes, she does, she knows, that old lady better get her a better blankey. Get with it old lady.'�

We would get letters from mom with quotes from Victoria, informing us of our mother's incompetence in the care and feeding of cats. It was a little goofy, and we all smiled weakly and shook our heads, and admitted it was a love none of us quite anticipated. And then our mother got cancer again. This time it was the killer, the battle that took everything out of Margaret Joell Wands until she died on May 11, 1996.

For those months before she died, mom had this enormously overfed cat that followed her every footstep, slept next to her pillow on the bed, and meowed constantly for adjustments in fine living. Victoria was part of every day that mom did her chemo, lost her hair, lost her appetite, and struggled with the blind chess game called cancer.

I spent time with my mother in November, and did my best to help her, although we quarreled, and even now I regret how impatient and exasperated I was by her behavior. Mom was now relegated to living on an oxygen tube, and she wouldn't always wear the tubing, as it bothered her, and she would become weak and dizzy without it. Part of our conflict is that she wouldn't ask for help when she needed it, and that was the reason I was there. One night I found her in the hallway, half naked, soaked and shivering. She had terrible night sweats from her chemotherapy and had soaked her bed and her clothes, and she was trying to find the bedding to change her sheets.

I tried to help her towel off and change her pajamas. When I cam into the bedroom there was Victoria, growling and hissing at me from the pillows on the bed. When I picked up the cat so I could change the sheets, she clawed at me, and I dropped her on the floor, yelling 'Victoria, you bad cat!'�

My mother went ballistic. She charged into that room like a mother bear after her cub.

'You leave that cat alone! She's doing the best she can do and you leave her alone! Did that woman hurt you? Where's my girl? Where's my old girl? Come here, now Victoria, come here! Come here, dammit, you bad cat, now come here! Victoria, I said COME HERE!'�

It was almost hysterical, my mother trying to protect her cat from me, and then there she was yelling at her cat. My mother had merged herself with this fur baby, and couldn't tell the difference between her hurts and the cat hurts.

When I left my mother's home for the last time she was alive, I spent several moments patting Victoria, kissing up to her, and thanking her for all the care and belonging she gave to my mother. My mother wasn't talking to me, as I had tried to convince her into home nursing care, and she was furious at me for trying to bring in help. She was tired of people in her house. She wanted to be left alone. She did not want to discus her decision. She was so angry with me, that she wouldn't look at me or talk to me the last day we were together. So I left her, after a futile attempt to hug her, with a weak smile and 'Bye, Mom, I'll talk to you later.'�

But as I walked out the door and saw Victoria in the hallway, I saw the slitty eyed smile of her cat, who was glad to see me go.

My mother died in May, after a valiant stumble into the end stages of her cancer. We gathered in her home the day after she died, all of her children: Me, Susan, Curt, Kathy and Barbara. The radio was on, left on for the last three days to keep Victoria company while my mother had been in the hospital. Our footsteps sounded loud and empty as we walked around the house. We had to pick out clothes for my mother to wear at her funeral ' and so we went through her closets trying to pick out the dress and scarf and jewelry that we thought she would have wanted to wear. Kathy picked out a coat of my mothers, and found some Kleenex tissues in the pocket, and we cried, seeing one of the last reminders of the little things your mother lived with and touched.

Victoria was hiding in the basement ' she knew something bad had happened ' and she wasn't coming out to find out what it was. We had left her there because we were waiting for a miracle. The miracle was called Brenda and Bill Phillips. They had been my mother's best friends forever, and only because they were my mothers best friends and they knew what Victoria had been to my mother, they had volunteered to adopt this 20 year old obese cat with the personality of a hellhound, to quote Susan. There was a honk outside and the miracle had arrived. They were waiting in their car to take Victoria to come live with them and their three dogs and horses on their farm. We all knew this was Victoria's only option, as no one else could take the cat to live with them.

Susan found a cat cage in the basement, and we began the hunt to heard Victoria into the cage. After several awful moments of chasing the old, wheezing cat up and down the stairs, we cornered her in mom's bedroom.

Victoria was hunched up in the corner, hissing and spitting and yowling at us. I was holding the door of the cat cage open, and Susan got on her knees and made sure that the old cat that was once her kitten could see her face.

'Victoria.'� Susan spoke very quietly. 'Victoria, this is your last chance. You have to go live with Bill and Brenda, or we're going to have to take you the pound. Okay? This is your last chance.'�

And for whatever reason, Victoria paused for just a moment, and then slunk into the open cat cage. I closed the door and locked it. Susan looked like she was going to collapse, but she rallied, and took the cat cage from me, and carried it to car waiting outside. Victoria had found her last chapter.

She lived with Bill and Brenda Phillips and ruled their lives with her brand of psychotic royalty. The three big dogs were banished from their bedroom, as she now slept on the bed, in between husband and wife. Bill referred to her dryly as their Marital Aide. She was given special tummy rubs and baby talk, and Bill fed her cheetos under the table. She followed him around like a harpy and yelled at him if he left the house for more than a few hours. She lived with them for three more years.

Truth be told we were nervous about this story: two of Victoria's owners had died of cancer, my mother and Susan's husband Richard. We were worried when Bill and Brenda drove away with Victoria that afternoon, worried that one of them would come down with some cancer., and that we had sent this messenger of death to go live with them. But no, actually, that wasn't the story. Instead an old fat cat lived to be a very old fat cat, and she was loved and spoiled to the end of her days.

Victoria. Some names inherit a lot of history.


Manhattan Cats


They have lived in too many places, these two cats. Luke and Leia, brother and sister, black cat and gray cat, they have followed the careers and fortunes of their owner, and the map of their lives have followed their history.

They were adopted by Robert when he was a very young actor living in Los Angeles, and their very first home was a house that hugged the hills of Laurel Canyon. They had a deck, and a scrubby woods to play in, and they had a normal domesticated cat life.

They didn't know that Robert would become a brilliant actor; maybe they thought he would become a waiter or a real estate agent, or a web designer. But for that brief time in Los Angeles, they lived a quiet life. It didn't last long.

Robert did a play in San Diego that would change his life, and not in ways that anyone could have anticipated. It was a new version of a Moliere, translation by Richard Wilbur, and he played the romantic young man, and he was beautiful and well spoken and very intense. That's when he met Susan. She was an actress from New York, and after their lives connected, he moved to New York to live with her.

Sixteen years later the cats have followed him and Susan on a roller coaster ride of geography, success, hurts, extended runs and sublets. They've followed them to regional runs in Denver and Hartford and Chicago and Alabama. They've lived in beautiful condos overlooking vistas of lake sunsets and fireworks. They've lived in dodgy apartments with concrete steps and tiny balconies. But mostly they've lived in a street level apartment in Manhattan.

And there have been the separations. When Susan and Robert married in Chicago. And then the tour that Robert had with the Royal Shakespeare Company meant that the cats had substitute owners for a few months, and there were some abandonment issues to work out on their return. And then there was the run with Judi Dench in the West End that lasted more than six months and created real problems.

They went to go live with a woman out in the New York suburbs, who seemed kind and loving. She had recently lost her own black cat, and it seemed like a good idea. But several weeks into the arrangement, she changed her mind and wanted the cats removed from her house.

Susan and Robert were living in London and through a nightmare of phone calls and emails and upset, their good friend Christina came to the rescue, and the cats came to live with her for the remainder of the run. There was some question on what exactly had happened to the cats when they lived in the suburbs, had they escaped, been mistreated, acted badly? No one was really sure what had happened there ' but the cats seemed traumatized when they went to live with Christina. Even after Susan and Robert returned, it took a while for the cats to trust their surroundings and the rhythm of living with their owners again.

Their last relocation was a return to Chicago, where they lived in a beautiful high-rise condo overlooking Lake Michigan. They had to listen to Robert sing 'my hat, the hat, hat'�, as he was playing George in 'Sunday In The Park With George'�, but they happily settled down to their routine of snacks, and naps, and special tents made for them with the blankets on the bed.

But then they seemed to come down with a strange flu-like illness. Robert took them to a vet who diagnosed them both with cat AIDS. Susan and Robert were shocked and angry and confused. These cats hadn't been outdoor cats for years ' since they lived in Los Angeles. How had they been exposed to the virus by other cats? They've never been able to figure that out ' was it while they were in the suburbs? Some bizarre transmission in New York?

But now it means that the cats are fragile, but very loved and spoiled, and their symptoms are closely monitored: are they eating? Are they fatigued? Would Leia like to have the shower on so she can drink the shower drops on the tub floor? There are rituals that need to be followed or they'll act out. Luke needs a tent made up for him in the bed during the day so he can hide in the safety of this big pyramid. Leia likes to have the window seat cleared so she can view the public as they walk by her window in the morning, and she can greet the neighbors.

And they both like to jockey for the heating pad in the bedroom window seat. They like to look over their kingdom on West 71st street, watching the Manhattan dogs and strollers and minions walk by.

On my last visit to see Susan and Robert, we stayed with them in their 400 square foot apartment, celebrating Robert's opening night in a musical on Broadway. The cats had endured several weeks of rehearsal and previews, and now they were in the home stretch of nervous excitement.

Leia, who was usually very sweet and friendly to me when I came to visit, now stared at me with a faintly hostile manner. She brushed by Eric, hooking his leg with her tail as if to say, 'See you later big boy'�, and then she disappeared into their bedroom. Luke mostly remained in the bedroom for the three days that we were there, looking mournfully at us as if we were a reminder of some bad smell in his past.

Occasionally Luke would come out and sniff at the luggage lying on the floor in the living room, but mostly he would make loud retching sounds in the kitchen and then throw up his food in protest at the squatters who were in his home.

On the morning of the opening, both cats sat together on the bed, watching us with big saucer eyes as we scurried around the apartment, loading up the clothes and champagne, and suitcases. Susan was coughing a deep hacking cough, and the next day her doctor would pronounce that she was 'two days away from pneumonia'�. But now she was pale and nervous, darting from room to room, trying to remember to bring everything to the Times Square hotel for our overnight stay.

We assembled a pile of luggage in the living room, and gathered, dressed in our coats and hats and gloves to brave the chill outside. Susan and Robert both went in separately, discreetly rewarding the cats with treats, smoothing their fur with firm pats, and soft baby talk.

And so we left them, guarding their Manhattan bedroom, wary and uncertain, but knowing that this electric nervousness meant some kind of change.

In the taxi on the way over to the hotel I thought of all the words these cats have heard in their life with Robert and Susan: Shakespeare, and Tennessee Williams, and Moliere, O'Neill, and Sondheim and television scripts and comedy sketches. These cats have heard Romeo, and Blanche, Hamlet, Troilus, and Portia, Achilles and Captain Bob the psychotic airplane pilot.

They've heard wild laughter at late night parties, and intense script consultations, and video editing, and tears and sorrows and the cursing from a backed up toilet. They've listened to elegant dinners with noisy, shy, hilarious, brooding, short tempered, loud-mouthed actors. They've negotiated the theatrical costumes, and daggers and crowns and skulls and goblets that have littered the apartment.

But now they heard quiet, as Susan closed the door behind us and we left them to go to this wild ride opening night on Broadway.

At 2:00 in the morning, Susan and Robert left the opening night party and went to their hotel room to get some sleep. Robert had booked a voice over job for 10:00 in the morning the next day. When Susan started her deep, hacking cough that night, they both knew that they were for in sleepless night. So at 4:00 in the morning, Robert and Susan decided that Robert would need to get some sleep, so he took a taxi to go back to their apartment.

Both cats were cold and cranky when Robert came in the dark apartment, a kitchen window had accidentally been left open. And so for the next few hours, both cats squeezed next to Robert in the bed, claiming his attention on the night that he opened on Broadway. Leia had to sleep under Robert's arm, her chin resting on his wrist. And Luke had to thump up against Robert, and Robert gently pulled his tail just the way he liked it, until the old black cat began to snore. Both cats were firmly pressed up against the exhausted young man, who was lying asleep in his bed, dreaming of his opening night on Broadway.

I did wonder if they didn't somehow cast a bronchitis spell on Susan so they could have Robert return to them in the apartment that night, so they could have him all to themselves on his opening night on Broadway.

But that would be crazy talk.




Saying Goodbye To Emerson


This has been the year of saying goodbye to Emerson. Other things have happened too, the war in Iraq started, Eric's mother died, I crashed my car into a freeway callbox and the twenty-three year old washing machine that came with the house died after a long and noisy illness.

But for much of this past year, we're living in the day to day of saying good bye to Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a Brown Mackerel Tabby, which is a rather grand way of saying that he is common house cat. Emerson was adopted eighteen years ago from Pet Pride, a cat halfway house in West Los Angeles. We originally brought Emerson to live with us as a companion to our new cat, Thaitu, who was given to us as a kind of present. We didn't realize what kind of present a female Abyssinian is until Thaitu had lived with us in our Hollywood apartment for almost three months. Granted, Thaitu had issues. She was found wandering the streets of Beverly Hills, no ID, bloody paws, and a raspy cry that would make St Francis roll his eyes. She was rescued by a woman who owned three large dogs and a big fuzzy gray cat. Abyssinians don't like large animals groups, and after Thaitu managed to intimidate all the other animals away from the owners bedroom,. she came to live with us. After three months of listening to her raspy cry that sounded like a ninety year old man in heat: "Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!", we decided that we had to get her another cat to keep her company.

Emerson was found in a large room of cats at Pet Pride, lounging in the sun, his whiskers quivering with his half opened eyes, purring. He looked like a very mellow cat, and when we leaned over to get a better look at him, he reached out and hooked his claws into Eric's sweater, thereby claiming his place in our lives. We took him home with us, and although there were the initial hissings growlings, Emerson fell in love with Thaitu from the beginning. She couldn't stand him. But he loved her dearly, and put up with all her fussiness for the next eleven years. More importantly, we never heard that ninety year old raspy cry again. They ate every meal together, curled up next to each other for naps, and occasionally, Thaitu would allow for a game of Chase The Abyssinian.

But he loved her. More than he should have, but than, that's the way it is sometimes. When our fortunes changed and we moved to a little house out in Woodland Hills, Thaitu died five weeks later. Emerson didn't understand this at all- he looked everywhere in the new house for his cat, he opened drawers and dug underneath the mattress and howled and howled, looking for his cat Thaitu.

When he stopped eating, and we brought Emerson to the vet, he told us that, simply put, the cat was dying of grief. "Failure To Thrive" was what he called it. There were a couple of remedies: we could put Emerson on Prozac, we could get him some shots that might stimulate his appetite or we could get him another cat.

We bought him two nine week old Abyssinian kittens. When we came in the door with these tiny honey colored cats, Emerson put his ears back, screeched out a horrible cry "My cat died and now they bring home rats!" and fled to hide under the bed. An hour later, he was grooming both kittens with the gusto of a surrogate mother. Not understanding the gender bias, both kittens nursed on Emerson for the next eight months. They nursed on Emerson until his nipples bled, but he loved it. Go figure.

For the last seven years, the kittens and Emerson have had the run of our lives. The kittens go outside, and Emerson sits on his pillows and heating pad in the sun room, and supervises their comings and goings. As Emerson has become afflicted with Arthritis, he rarely goes outside with the kittens any more, and so the kittens have taken to bring him things from outside as a kind of homage to his infirmity. Although Emerson hates dead things, this doesn't seem to deter the kittens as they bring him dead squirrels, dead rats, dead grasshoppers, dead mockingbirds, dead field mice and an occasional live snake. They pile up their game on the floor in front of him, so he can whine and close his eyes until we show up to clean up the bloody mess. But it's their way of honoring the old guy, here, old cat, you can't get out there and kill something - so we'll do it and bring it back to you.

Emerson also has irritable bowel disease, which makes him crap all over the place in the house every once in a while. Not all the time, mind you, just every once in a while we'll come home and find runny cat crap every where. I always thought that irritable bowel disease was something that afflicted bulimic super models who live in The Four Seasons Hotel Penthouse suites, so now I have this idea that their hotel rooms smell like runny cat crap. It's probably not accurate, but that's what happens when you let your mind wander over your cats infirmity. You see that's the problem when it's a cat - it's not a child, or even a dog, or a ferret, or an endangered species so you can't talk about taking extreme measures for a cat in his final days. I mean you can, but everyone will know you're crazy to refinance the house so the cat can have blood transfusions, or acupuncture twice a week, or polarity massage or any of the things that you think about doing when your old cat is dying. You have to keep asking yourself, how much are you willing to do here? And how much are you supposed to do? I mean, after all he's just a cat, right?

Every morning Eric feeds Emerson his pills, and they both have this routine down so that Eric holds Emerson just so and Emerson swallows just so, and it never ceases to amaze me that they both agree to do this every morning. Emerson is now so skinny and shaky that he has a hard time walking - but he manages to scoot down the hallway if he hears one of his kittens eating dinner in the back room.

All this living with Emerson in his last days has been strangely instructive. It's not the happy instructions I would prefer, like the new car smell, or the look at the beautiful sunset on a winter evening epiphany, but then that seems to be the cost of getting to live with an animal you love for a long time.

Our vet says we'll know when it's time to put Emerson down. I wonder how he knows that. I know that my friend Michelle had a seventeen year old Scottish Deerhound, Hallie, that she loved entirely too much, and she had a hard time putting Hallie to sleep. Hallie was the kind of dog who stood about three feet tall on all fours, and she loved to greet you by running up to you and putting her long nose between your legs. Michelle said that Hallie had a great sense of humor. When Hallie had problems walking, and her fur started to look bad, we all knew it was time for Hallie to go, it's just that Michelle experienced it differently. "She doesn't want to go yet." Michelle would insist. "She wants to stay."

So every day we get to say another goodbye to Emerson, we give him lots of pats, lots of treats, lots of affection. He purrs, he shows his tummy, he blinks his thanks to us. At night the kittens jump up next to him to touch noses, and then snuggle together for a brief nap together. They know he smells funny and can't groom them the way he used to, and they're okay with that.

This daily goodbye is a strange blessing in a world where we may or may not go to war, children will start the fourth grade or start the next Harry Potter book, or develop asthma; friends may die or move or change or come back after a long absence. Cars will crash into callboxes, appliances will outlive their warranties, and interest rates will go back up.

But in the mean time, we're watching our old cat Emerson. And learning how to say goodbye. Every day.


The Bruja


I'm called a "Bruja" in my neighborhood -which makes me smile This comes from the guys who have been building the big ugly house down the street. Mostly they're men from Central America, working construction in the nether wold of "undocumented workers". "Bruja" means "witch" in their language. It really means: "The Woman Who Walks With The Abyssinians". They also call my two cats, the Abyssinians, "Brujitos" - or little witches. Mostly because the cats like to come over and watch them while they work, which makes them nervous. They know if they turn around for a moment, somehow something will disappear. We'll come home in the evening and find things on the kitchen floor: a dusty baseball cap or an old dirty work glove or a red crumpled handkerchief, all presents to us from our little furry kleptomaniacs. And then we'll have to sneak over to the work site, leaving what ever it is on the front step, hoping that we don't get caught.

When I go on my morning walks with the cats, I see the guys pause as they work, and they watch us walk by. I smile, I wave, I try to look friendly to them. They shake their heads and weakly wave back, muttering things in their language that it's probably best that I don't understand. A woman walking her cats. In their culture, there couldn't be a bigger waste of time. No children, no horses, not even dogs, that woman walks her two cats every morning. I didn't mean to end up this way - I love dogs, am only slightly afraid of horses, and I think I meant to have children. Things just didn't turn out that way. I believe in adopting animals from shelters, given the abandoned pet population in the United States, and have had several adopted cats live long and happy lives with me.

But then one day a woman gave me an Abyssinian. They look like the Egyptian Temple cats with the big ears. If only I had known what an Abyssinian was, I might have said "No thanks, I'm sticking with the tabbies." We called her "Thaitu", who was once an ancient queen of Abyssinia, married to a King Minok. She ruled over our lives with an iron paw. She was funny, smart, affectionate, and had the temperament of a movie star. She loved parties, black truffle pate, and would sit on anybody's lap, mostly to steal the appetizers from their hands if they didn't have a good grip on their food, and cried piteously when people left. When Thaitu died, a lot of our friends said "I loved that cat, and I don't like cats."

You might think that cats are cats. And you'd be right, except there's a reason why the vet warns you not to have arguments with your spouse in front of the Abyssinian and why Abyssinians are called the dogs of the cat world. And why Abyssinians are very expensive. I can only compare these cats to cars. I used to have a 1976 Audi. That's like the Tabby Cats I've had - functional, runs good, some minor repairs, don't look for a lot of excelleration. The Abyssinians I've had are like a 1996 Jaguar convertible. Expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, a lot of fun, and the replacement parts are hell.

The two Abyssinians we have now are a brother and sister, Hopkins the male, and Puma, the female. They get to go outside during the day, but they have to come in at night. Mostly that schedule works, although there has been the occasional dark night when I'm out there trying to coax one of them to please leave the gopher alone and please come home. Actually - I hate admitting this - I have spent many dark hours negotiating with the Abyssinians to come back inside, hoping that a coyote doesn't recognize the sound of plea bargaining with cats. And I can tell you from personal experience how annoying it is to see a cat smile in the dark when you know it is baiting you.

They bring us lots of trophies, live lizards, live baby birds, snakes, grandfather rats from the palm trees, field mice, and the occasional construction accessory from next door. For a while Hopkins was bringing us squirrel tails - not the whole squirrel - just the tail. We'd hear him make his triumphant "Look what I found" mew, and he'd appear, head held high with this enormous fuzzy tail clamped in his mouth. He must have brought us five or six of these squirrel tails. We wondered if we should post them on the refrigerator door, like some kid's spelling test, to make him stop dragging them home. But then he just stopped. We never did find out where he was getting these. And then one night I came home, Hopkins was prancing around and mewing that warning call, and I flicked on the hall light, and for a moment, I swore I saw an enormous frying pan on the hall floor. My mouth dropped open when I realized what it was: some poor squirrel had been run over by a truck, and flattened out with the tire tread embedded in the fur. The squirrel's tail stuck out like a pan handle, and the entire corpse was so old and dried out, it was like cardboard. I still can't figure out how Hopkins got it through the cat door.

When we go on our walks in the morning, I'll carry a cup of very strong coffee, and the cats will have just had breakfast, and we'll saunter up the road together, Puma on my heels and Hopkins following her. They walk with their tails straight up in the air, and they will occasionally break rank and chase each other up a tree, or around the rosemary bushes. But mostly, they like to follow me in a straight line and we walk up to the hill where they can look out over their neighborhood. Hopkins likes me to pick him up so he can look out and survey his street, Nofral Road; and Puma rolls around in the soft grass like a young horse flopping around in the corral. I give them silly names for our walks together: Hopkins is the Prince of Nofral, and Puma is the Porcupine Princess. Silly names like you would give your kid. Or your dog. Or your horse.

And me. I'm the Bruja of Dumetz Road.



My Hummingbird.


Even writing the words make me smile. You can't own a hummingbird, it's a wild thing born of air and flight and feathers. I know that. But I had a hummingbird, for a while, and I was very careful not to name it. The problem with not naming it, is that it became My Hummingbird.

It started last summer. We first saw a small white nest being built in the rafters of the pergola that Eric had erected several summers ago. Grape vines and roses snake over the beams, and in the summer it's a shaggy green house that shades us from the hot sun. We've seen possums and raccoons, and squirrels dance on top of it during the summer evenings, as a kind of jungle gym.

And we'd seen a couple of mockingbird nests, and an occasional butterfly cocoon in the vines. But this was our first hummingbird nest. We watched over the next few weeks as a mother hummingbird carefully built this delicate white balloon of a nest - it looked as if it were made out of fairy wings and handmade paper.

If we came down and sat underneath the pergola, she would appear, buzzing us if we lingered too near the nest. Then we started hearing the peeps, and could barely make out three tiny beaks poking out of the top hole of the hanging nest. Over the next week the peeps got louder and louder.

And then tragedy struck. One morning I came outside and saw two little dead baby hummingbirds scattered on the patio. I ran down the stone steps and looked up and saw that the nest had been torn apart, and hanging desperately to the shreds of the nest was the last little baby hummingbird.

Then I did everything you're not supposed to do with a baby bird. I picked it up, and I brought it inside. I made a little fabric nest for it and placed it in a little tiny basket. It sat in the nest and blinked at me. Over the next few hours it got very still, and I picked it up and it was cold. I carefully blew my warm breath over it, and suddenly it peeped. I blew again and it peeped some more. The baby hummingbird was cold. So I cradled it in my hands and blew on it, and it started peep peeping peeping. Now it was looking at me, opening its mouth so it looked like it would split open. It was hungry and wanted to be fed. Great. What do you feed a baby hummingbird? I knew from other baby birds that it's easy to drown them if you try and force feed them liquids, and they can also die from dehydration if they don't eventually get fed. I tried to imagine what could replicate the long snakey tongue of a mother hummingbird. I tried damp paper towels dipped in sugar water, and wet q-tips soaked in honey and nothing worked.

Another couple hours went by, and the peeps from the baby hummingbird were getting fainter. I was pacing up and down in the kitchen, when I happened to look up and see an old coffee cup sitting on a window sill that holds several of our watercolor brushes. I don't know what made me do it, but I dipped a watercolor brush with long wispy hairs into the sugar water and then carefully presented it to the baby bird. Suddenly this long tiny tongue comes whipping out of it's beak and it's lustily grabbing onto the watercolor brush, getting every drop of sugar water. Peep Peep Peep. We repeat this. The baby hummingbird is now fluffing its feathers and demanding more sugar water.

This was a Saturday. By Sunday night, we had the routine down. Every twenty minutes or so, I would hear a Peep Peep Peep, and I would rush over and present the watercolor brush to the baby bird, who would drink more and more with each feeding. We had a bit of set back on Monday morning, when I woke up and found that the baby bird was cold and sluggish. We repeated the warm breath, followed by some vigorous feeding. I realized I had to call in sick to work - someone had to stay home and feed the baby bird.

I spent a long Monday feeding the baby bird. By Tuesday, we were able to go an hour or so between feedings. By Wednesday, I went back to work, with a tiny baby hummingbird in my shirt pocket. I set up the jar of sugar water and the watercolor brush on my desk. I put a miniature tea cup that the baby bird sat in on top of my computer, which was nice and warm. The bird would watch me work, occasionally getting sleepy eyed and dropping off to a quick bird nap, only to wake up an hour later, with loud peeps wanting the next meal. But the peeps were loud enough that people came to my desk and discovered me feeding a bird with a paint brush. When they asked me what the bird's name was, I could only reply: It's just My Hummingbird.

By Friday My Hummingbird was very bonded to me. It wanted to sit in my hands all the time. It cheeped, and peeped, and opened it's baby beak at me anytime it wanted to be fed, which was all the time. It started to have big strong poops all over the desk.

Then the unfortunate incident happened. One of the big bosses in my department, we'll call him Bill, came by my desk to ask about some project. I had carefully hidden the baby hummingbird in my hands which were folded in my lap while Bill was talking, and we were just finishing up, when there was a very loud "PEEEP".

"What's that?" Bill asked.

"Um, what?" I tried to look puzzled.

"That'�what was that?" Bill looked around.

PEEP, PEEP, CHIRP.

The gig was up. I showed Bill the tiny baby hummingbird that was fluffing its feathers in my hands. Then the unexpected happened.

"Is that a baby bird? What is that? Why that's a hummingbird? Isn't that sweet?"

And suddenly Bill was cooing and making kissing noises to the baby hummingbird. That's when My Hummingbird turned around and squirted a good strong green stream of bird poop on Bill's white starched shirt.

"What, what's that? What's that on my shirt?" Bill nearly shrieked as he looked at the green stain running down the front of this shirt.

"Oh dear." I stammered, and carefully hid the baby hummingbird back in it's little tea cup. "I think it's a form of '�."

"What! Is this bird crap? Is there bird crap on my shirt?" Bill was bug eyed by now.

"Actually, I think it's more a case of projectile pooping than bird crap." I stood up and carefully picked up the tea cup, and walked around Bill. "I'll be right back."

But instead, I grabbed my purse, got in the car and drove home. I knew we had reached an impasse. I couldn't keep my job and My Hummingbird at the same time. So I flipped open the phone book and found a bird rescue group that specialized in hummingbirds.

I drove over there that afternoon with My Hummingbird sitting on my shoulder. I could feel it trying out its wings, it would flap them so a buzzing sound/sensation would flutter from its wings, then it would stop. It was hard work learning how to fly.


When I pulled up in the parking lot I held My Hummingbird in my hands and blew on it carefully, so it would know that I loved it and wanted it to be warm and cared for. Then I got out of the car and walked into the office with the bird in my pocket.

The staff at the bird rescue center were very excited to have such a strong little hummingbird. They were very interested in my watercolor brush technique, as sometimes the eyedroppers didn't always work with the very young babies. They told me a lot of interesting facts about these birds.

A lot of baby hummingbirds are killed when they fall out of the nest, or a cat or another animal gets to the newly hatched eggs. They can live on sugar water, but they really need a protein supplement, to take the place of the mother's nectar. The baby birds need to eat all the time. They would nurse my hummingbird with a protein/sugar solution for three to four weeks, until it was strong enough to fly and defend itself, and then they would release it. They currently had eight other baby hummingbirds that they were nursing. That would be twenty five dollars please.

I paid the twenty five dollars. I got in my car and drove home.

I have never had babies, although I've had lots of attachments to children, and I've never breast fed anything, short of a lover, but I tell you, the pain in my heart when I got in that car and drove home felt as if I was leaving a part of me behind that only I knew was alive.

It hurt. I didn't think you could love a hummingbird. I thought if you didn't name it you wouldn't get attached. I didn't think you could feel such emotion for such a tiny thing, the size of a pink eraser.

Even now I'll remember how that very tiny creature would fluff it's feathers, blink its signal to me, and then split it's mouth open so it's miniature tongue could reach out and drink the sugar water from my watercolor brush. I remember how it would watch me from the tea cup on top of the computer, eyes growing sleepy, trusting that I was still there. I was there, until I had to give him to someone who could take better care of him.

My Hummingbird. You wouldn't think it would hurt to tell this story, but it does.



Richard's Hummingbird


I'd never seen a hummingbird before I moved to California. I was a new transplant, having moved from Boston to San Luis Obispo, and I was sitting in someone's back yard completely disoriented by the tropical hedges of hibiscus and jasmine and oleander. It was like a set for a jungle movie. I was trying to appear articulate and artistic at this theatre company party, but I kept hearing this squeaky wheel sound in the air. It sounded like some sort of bad bicycle wheel. Or a bad car problem squeak. Or a bad hearing aid sound. Only I didn't wear a hearing aid and there were no bikes or cars around. And I had heard that random sounds and smells were the first signs of insanity. Sounds and smells. Then someone pointed out a blur streaking across the yard, and said to me, there's a hummingbird. I heard this zipping thrumming noise whip past my face. What hummingbird, I asked, where?

For the next few months I would hear the hummingbird noise, and people would say, look, look at the hummingbird, but I never actually saw one. I wondered if they were like shooting stars - oh look at the shooting star - where, where - but you never actually saw one.

Then I saw one. I was living in a house on Fixilini Street in San Luis Obispo, out in the flower filled back yard, trying to memorize lines. I was performing as an actress with a small theater company, and we were about to open at Friar Tuck's Restaurant with this rather morbid Irish tragedy, "Riders to the Sea", by William Synge. It was hard to reconcile the dark, oppressed language of the script with the surreal blue California sky, and the tropical flowers blooming scents of orange, lavender, and rose. I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the dark, cold Irish sea drowning my brother, wondering how well this would go over in a restaurant theatre.

Then I heard the squeaky wheel sound and opened my eyes. Fluttering in front of me was a beautiful ruby throated hummingbird. It was smaller than I expected: the garnet colored feathers glittered on its chest and throat, and the wings fanned into a buzzing whir of flight. It just hung in the air, watching me, it's little eyes bright and inquisitive as it bobbed up and down.
"Well, hello there." I blinked for a moment and it was gone. I didn't even see where it went. Now that I knew what to look for, I kept an eye open to see them when I was outside. I began to see them in the flowers, dancing from flower to flower as they seemed to kiss the blossoms. I watched them dart around, their sideways accelerations didn't seem like flying as much as a kind of horizontal transport. Sometimes I would see them sitting on tree branches, or on telephone lines, but they were so tiny and flitty, that it was hard to keep track of them. That was my introduction to hummingbirds. They've been a strange visitor in my life and I've often wondered if they are a kind of reincarnated court jester, the way they swoop in and out of the landscape.

This other hummingbird story is one of my strange stories. My twin sister was married to a man named Richard, who was a brilliant, shy, proud, despairing actor, who was a dear man. My husband Eric loved him like a brother, and my grandparents thought the world of him, which is high praise in my family. Susan and Richard had recently moved to Ashland, Oregon where they were performing with the Shakespeare Festival. That summer was the best year of their life together. Susan discovered that there were hummingbirds in the neighborhood, and Richard bought her a hummingbird feeder so she could feed them. There was an afternoon when we were all together in their side yard in the late afternoon; Eric and Richard were drinking red wine, Susan and I were making chocolate chip cookies. Susan had brought out a very large plate of warm chocolate chip cookies, and as she set it on the table outside, a hummingbird buzzed over to the plate, and chirped it's bicycle noise at us and then zipped away.

Richard made the strange comment that he would come back as a hummingbird.

We laughed, and then we forgot about it. Difficult years were to come, Richard seemed to behave very badly, and then he and Susan separated and went in different directions. Shortly afterwards Richard was diagnosed with brain cancer and died. We scattered his ashes from a huge oak tree overlooking the bay in Seattle. He died at the age of 42, and it's still hard to believe that he's gone.

Some time after Richard had passed away, we made a journey to visit our grandparents at their home in Upstate New York. Susan had recently remarried, and her new husband, Robert, another wonderful man, had rented a great big car so all four of us could drive up together. It had been a long time since I had been home to Bonnie Brae, and I still hadn't adjusted to how the barns were falling down, or how my grandfather was suffering. It was a mild spring day, and my grandfather was sitting outside in a wheel chair, crippled by a stroke, his eyes closed in the weak sunshine.

Susan and I pulled up some chairs and chattered softly to him, yammering on about our lives in New York and California. My grandfather couldn't talk very well, and his attempts to communicate were mostly nods and "hmmms". There was a bit of quiet, and Susan and I had a rare moment of panic as we tried to figure out what to talk about next.

Suddenly an enormous hummingbird appeared in front of us, it's wings buzzing, bright eyes blazing in the afternoon light. It had a beautiful jade green color splashed across it's throat and wings, and it dipped in front of my grandfather, suspended in the air. Then it turned like a slap to me, and fluttered close enough to me so I could feel the air brushed by it's thrumming wings. After just a moment - it then flew right in front of Susan's face, and gave out a long, squeaky monologue that went on for several moments. It paused, bowed, and then zipped away straight up into the sky and disappeared.

"How about that." My grandfather said, after a moment, strong and clear.

Susan and I tried not to choke up. Those were some of the last words we heard him say.



Martel Street Birds


Until the lesson of living with a hummingbird, I'd never really been fond of or interested in birds as a kind of family pet. The beaks, the noise, the runny poops. And then I'd had an unfortunate experience with a budgie that I found in the street.

Several years ago, I was headed out to my car parked out on Whitley Heights, and I was in a hurry. I saw some fluttery movement on the street, and saw a beautiful little bird, later identified as a "budgie" that was hopping along the curb.

He looked up at me and cheeped, just once. I'd never had a bird cheep at me before, and it seemed that this bird was asking for help. So I scooped him up and brought him inside. He was very friendly, and very hungry. We locked the cats up in the bathroom, and Eric ran out and bought a birdcage, while I fed him lettuce and grapes, and nuts, and cereal. He ate it all. He was hungry. And along with being very hungry, he pooped a lot, little green poops, not big ones. But enough that they needed to be cleaned up. I had no idea that birds could poop so often. That should have warned me.

When Eric returned with the cage, we began a three day war of cat and bird maneuvering. The cats couldn't believe that there was a bird fluttering in a cage in the kitchen. The bird would make calling songs, and wait until the cats were just under the cage, and then he would begin shoveling out the seeds, and food, and poop, showering the cats with all the debris from his cage. The cats would hiss and run away and curl up on the sofa to glare at the bird, until their next attempt to surprise the bird.

Then too, I thought that I could keep a clean bird cage in the kitchen. I would look over and see that the bird had soiled the newspapers lining the bottom of the cage. So I would take the food and water bowls out, and clean up the seeds and poop and discarded items, and then change the newspaper and put everything back in order in the cage. Ten minutes later I would look over, and the bird had completely soiled the newspaper, and I would grimace and do it all over again. By the second day, I was losing my temper every time the bird pooped, which turned out to be very frequently. And on the third day, I called a girl friend who knew birds, and she very happily adopted the bird, and named him Lady Macbeth for reasons that remain unclear.

So that's been my sum experience of living with birds. My friend Bob has a story that many years ago, when he was an actor in England in the 1940's, occasionally he would be invited to an estate belonging to Stanley Hall, an owner of Wig Creations, which did the wigs for the British Royal Family, and the London stage productions. He and his partner Robert would go down to Shropshire for the weekend, and there would be twenty guests having meals together, drinking a lot, and sharing a lot of personal and professional history. Bob's story was that for breakfast in the morning, the host would free all his birds, parrots and canaries and budgies, and they would all descend on the morning breakfast table, and the guests would fight for the pieces of toast or marmalade or fruit bits with the various birds, who would flutter around the food on the table and take it out of your hand if you didn't move fast enough. This was the same weekend house that had a couple of domesticated sheep that would roam the hallways, groomed as they were to resemble poodles, having been sheared with poms poms on their feet and on their neck and tail.

But my friend Michelle has birds, and they live in a beautiful craftsman house on Martel Street in Hollywood. There was a time when they suffered terribly because someone fell into near madness, but with some love and time, they've found a quieter life together.

Almost five years ago the birds were purchased by Michelle's partner at the time, a young woman with long beautiful, blonde hair and a manic and chaotic personality. No one knew that she was bi-polar, or veering into madness - it just seemed that she was "high energy" or "overwhelmed by all her projects". The house was filled to bursting with boxes of art supplies and stacks of equipment and materials for her projects, and the chaos seemed to spill over into the lives of everyone in the house. The young woman worked on set designs and residential projects, and stage productions and television pilots, and the debris she created in the house filled it with a kind of despair.

Michelle had dogs and a Maine Coon Cat named Remington, and the house was full of the daily chores of feeding and walks and minor squirmishes between the two species.

Then the birds arrived. The young woman bought some very expensive -human bonding birds: an African Timman, a Jardin, and a kind of parrot. They had a glassed-in room all to themselves, and the perches and giant cages filled the room along with their toys and bowls and chews.

The birds squawked and cried and sang in loud shrill voices, and they fluttered wildly in the room, playing with one another. The young woman would open the doors of the room and shriek and sing to the birds and they would hop on her shoulders and bob up and down in excitement. She would then take the birds, holding them down like some bad toy, and squeezed them very firmly into submission so they would quiet down, out of respect she said. But it always looked like an awful game of dominance or a weird form of not so playful cruelty.

Then the madness caught hold. The young woman began to loose the ability to sleep or work, or come home. She disappeared for a while, and eventually decided after the medicine and the doctors and family counsels, that she would leave and go live with her parents, and she would leave the birds behind with Michelle. She has gone and never come back to the house on Martel Street.

The birds only understood that the person who acted like their parent was now gone. Michelle was now left with three needy, noisy and lonesome birds.

Month passed and I wondered how Michelle and the birds were doing. They had a new housemate, Fred, and the dogs and the cat seemed to have settled down with a quieter and calmer routine.

Last week, Michelle mentioned that Lorraine, her closest friend of more than twenty years, would be coming over that afternoon for their daily cappuccinos. She mentioned that the birds had now claimed their own share of cappuccinos, and it was quite a show.

I showed up on Friday at Michelle's house, with a mind full of dread - it had been a horrible week and I had taken the day off from work. My boss was demoted for "bad behavior" and I had watched her run the gauntlet of bully to victim in a few months time. She was now being "re-assigned" -which is corporate-ese for "ruined", and I had watched it happen. I had tried to object, tried to get her to behave better, had even called her crazy, and said that I couldn't work for her anymore, and now her fabulous career was shredded by her own impulses, which she continued to deny, favoring instead conspiracy theories and "bad corporate policies".

So it was a bad week at work, and I was driving into Hollywood to have cappuccinos with Michelle and Lorraine, in an attempt to get the bad movie out of my head. When I walked up the walkway and knocked on the front door, the two big goofy full-sized black poodles, Mackey and Eli, ran barking up to greet me.

Michelle had her tan coat on, and a worried expression, as she got the dogs to calm down. Lorraine hadn't arrived yet, and Michelle had to run out to pick up Remmy, the cat, who had his teeth cleaned, and could I stay until she came back with the cat.

So I sat down in the beautiful large living room, with the big dogs leaning on either side of me, making me a poodle sandwich. I heard the birds in their glassed in atrium whistling and making their cheeping noises. I'd only been in Michelle's house for a rehearsal, or a party or a dinner, and I had never been inside during a quiet afternoon, with the light streaming in the windows. The house felt alive with a kind of humming and anticipation - almost like a faint drum beat in the background.

Suddenly the birds started to whoop it up, making shrill calling sounds, and a weird kind of clucking sound, like champagne corks being pulled. Then I saw Lorraine at the front door, and got up, with the two dogs bounding at my side to let her in. She looked beautiful, but tense, wearing eyeliner and eye shadow and a beautiful black sculpted outfit that showed off her lean figure.

We hugged and chattered as we ambled into Michelle's kitchen - Lorraine had a film screening she had to go to in Santa Ana that night. A film that she had helped to write, and had also acted in, had been selected for a film festival there, and she would have to jump in the car in the next hour or so and make the drive over to the screening with Greg, her partner.

Michelle came in with Remmy and the cat was not happy. I helped to pull him out of the cat carrying box, and he whined and moaned as we petted him. Michelle started to set up her elaborate cappuccino machine, which covers most of a kitchen counter, and Lorraine changed her clothes so she could get the birds. Lorraine put on a loose smock, and a torn gray jacket, and removed her earrings, as the birds would distress anything that she was wearing. I watched her insert large earplugs in her ears, and she explained that the birds got so excited when she came to get them for their "Cappuccino Hour" that she had to wear the plugs to protect her hearing from their calls. She emptied several bowls and filled them with seeds and fruit and nuts, and worked with the efficiency of a nurse in a baby's nursery.

I watched as Lorraine opened the door to the glassed in room to get the birds, who were now fluttering their wings and calling to her as she came to them. Zeke, the gray bird, and Petunia, the emerald green and blue bird, hopped up on Lorraine's shoulders and began calling and bobbing their heads up and down. Lorraine had to present a club like stick to Eddie, the third bird, who was bright green with some yellow tail feathers, and he hopped up on the stick and yelled "You're Sweet!" as she carried all the birds into the kitchen.

She placed Eddie on a freestanding tray that had a perch filled with bird toys - and Eddie hopped around grabbing ropes and bells and seeds. Then Lorraine started hand feeding grapes and nuts to the other birds who were bobbing up and down on her shoulders. They got very excited when they heard the foaming wand foam the milk for the cappuccinos. They called out a strange burring noise, imitating the coffee beans being ground, along with some breathless commentary of "Pet the Zekey Head" and "Uh-huh!" and more of "You're sweet!"

Michelle handed out the cappuccinos, topped with foam that was as dense and white as a snow drift, and we sat around the kitchen table and talked while the dogs paced, the cat whined, and the birds called out their happiness as they drank their own cups of foamy milk.

Lorraine talked about her times with the birds, and how she saw their need to be bonded to someone, and yet needed to be given a separate identity so they wouldn't suffer in the bonds of affection. Zeke would rub his head against her neck and close his eyes, as if he were a love sick school boy in the presence of a beloved teacher. Petunia was very busy eating a progression of grapes, and watched the people talk with a glassy eyed kind of contentment.

Michelle was quiet at her end of the table, and watched Lorraine play and cuddle and feed the birds. We were three women who had never had children and we were in a house with animals that were loved and spoiled and given the attention that any child might ask for. At one point Eddie sat on my shoulder, and then started to root around in my hair, pulling it out of the loose bun that I had wrapped on top of my head. He started to get more and more excited about building a nest with this dry hair, and so Lorraine put him in her lap and he backed up to cuddle next to her, hiding in the folds of her jacket.

Michelle talked a little bit about her flying lessons, and her work on her other college degree, and Lorraine talked about the movie and it's reception from her friends. The coffee was hot and slightly bitter and dense, like drinking wood or tobacco or port - it had a smokey dark taste to it. The foam was a bit of air in the coffee, and I had some fun sloshing the foam and the coffee together in the cup.

It grew late, and Lorraine had to run, so she put the birds back in their glass room, now strewn with bowls filled with their food. Lorraine changed her clothes, and clipped her earrings back on, and I grabbed my purse. I told Michelle I would see her in writing class on Tuesday. I hugged Michelle, and Lorraine and I walked out together, she in her direction, and me in mine.

I thought about the birds, and the poodles and the cat with the $200 dentistry bill all the way home. Traffic was bad, so I had a lot of time to think. Mostly I thought how very lucky those animals are to have such loving spirits to take care of them. And that was a good way to end such a difficult week.



A Lesson In Feeding Ducks


Another day in pursuit of the authentic voice. Another day which started with an authentic migraine, complete with vomiting and distorted vision. What a hell to wake up to. And because it was too late to take the medication, I just had to ride the waves of pain until they faded away. This is when I understand the bit about being a heroin addict. Unfortunately I had to drive to a conference while still under the effects of the migraine, but Eric gave me a plastic bag to set on the front seat, in case I threw up again while I was driving. So at seven o'clock in the morning I'm driving north on the 101, trying to cope with the overload of sounds, smells and light that overwhelm you when you're on the tail end of a migraine. At the risk of not sounding authentic - it's like being in a blender with broken glass and a skunk's testicles. Or something like that.

But forty minutes later the headache was gone - I felt shaky and faint - wondering if anyone at the conference could tell I had been sick earlier. No one seemed to notice, if fact no one really seems to see me at these things. I guess it's an elective invisibility.

So I went outside during a break in the conference talk - and heard a big squawk at my feet. I looked down and there was a nice brown duck, blinking it's beady eyes at me. The conference room is located at a hotel by a lake, and I'd seen the ducks and swans and geese paddling around on the water earlier, I just hadn't seen any close up.

"What a nice duck." I bent down to take a better look at it's beady eyes. "Aren't you a pretty quacker?"

Squawk, quack, squawk. Message received. Feed me lady and no one gets hurt.

I quietly made my way back into the conference room, and lifted a couple of bagels from the buffet table, and then hurried back outside.

The duck was still waiting for me, beady eyes still beading. I tore a small piece of bagel and offered it to the duck, who I swear, was now smiling.

Quack. Thanks lady. Big pieces please.

So I'm tearing pieces of bagel for this little beggar, when I hear this incredible riot in back of us. I turned around and there is horde of ducks and geese swimming towards me and this little brown duck, and they look mad as hell.

HONK, QUACK, SQUAWK, HONK, HONK

Suddenly I'm surrounded by a vicious crowd of these waterfowl, and they're flapping their wings and nipping at my shoes, and I only have one bagel left, and I'm trying to quietly tell them "shoo, shoo" without anyone in the conference room seeing me surrounded by birds.

But they're mad, they saw me feeding the little brown duck, and they aren't going away. Then the worst thing happens: I'm holding the last lousy bagel in my hand, when one of the big geese, and I mean a big geese, just pops up and takes the entire bagel from my hand.

The goose starts to waddle back to the lake with the bagel in his beak, and all the other birds are after him, chasing him right back to the water. That's when I realize I'd better make a break for it, seeing as I am now bagel-less and surrounded by mad waterfowl. I start to edge back to the conference room door and I'm almost there, when suddenly I turn around, and there's that damn little brown duck again.

Quack. Hey lady, you going somewhere?

I pretend I've never seen him before and coldly walk in to the conference room, and close the glass door, making sure that I don't look back and get turned into a pile of salt.

Hours later, the Important Speaker is giving an impassioned speech, and the all the suits in the conference room are hushed, listening with the mouths slightly open, breathing in shallow gasps, listening to the words and the silence in between them. Suddenly there is a knock on the door. Someone gets up and goes to the side paneled door and opens it, and no one is there. A moment later the knock is heard again. The paneled door is opened again, and no one is standing there.

I turn and look out the glass door which overlooks the lake. Standing with his head cocked to one side is my little brown duck. He is pecking the glass door with his beak, waiting for that woman with the red hair, to come back outside and give him that last lousy bagel she promised him.

I laugh to myself. The headache from this morning seems very far away.



The Metaphor of Deer


I remember hearing the story of an estranged couple, friends of my sister, who were going through some difficult issues in the custody of their only child, a boy who was four years old at the time.

The father took his son to see 'Bambi'� at the movie theatre, and bought him boxes of popcorn and candy and hotdogs and sodas. The little boy was happily munching popcorn and enjoying the movie until the scene where Bambi and his mother were chased by the hunters. The little guy grew very quiet when the rifle shots rang out and Bambi's mother called 'Run, Bambi, run!'�

The father watched his son's lower lip start to tremble, and tears were brimming in his eyes when the gunshots blasted Bambi's mother. The little boy froze as he watched Bambi frantically run through the forest, trying to get away from the gunshots and the hunters.

Then the father deer, a magnificent stag with enormous horns, appeared out of the forest and said in a deep baritone voice: 'Bambi, come with me.'�

At that moment the father reached out his hand to the scared little boy sitting motionless in his seat, and the little boy grabbed onto him for dear life. In the darkened theatre, the father squeezed his son's hand, and the little boy squeezed back.

Shortly afterwards, the little boy announced to his mother that he wanted to go live with his dad, just like Bambi.

I've always thought that was a brilliant, if somewhat underhanded, strategy of the dad's to influence his son's feelings. And I don't quite remember how the custody issue was resolved, but every once in a while, my sister and I will see a misbehaving parent and say in a deep baritone: 'Bambi, come with me.'�

Deer. Somehow they've become one of those metaphysical animals in my life ' like one of those American Indian visions. They appear as a kind of benevolent signal that something is about to happen. Change. Die. Appear.

And I'm always annoyed that out of all the members of the animal kingdom, my talisman is deer. Not rattlesnakes, or spiders, or ravens. They would seem more like the sacred messenger spirit. But no. I have deer as my guide.

The first time it happened, I thought it was just a poetic circumstance, not to be repeated. I was eighteen years old and living with my aunt in Middletown, Connecticut. I was recovering from a nervous breakdown of sorts, although I didn't recognize it as such. I couldn't sleep, or eat, couldn't read or think or talk. My young life had fallen apart and I had gone to stay with my grandparents at their farm, Bonnie Brae, in Upstate New York. Now I know that I was experiencing clinical depression, but I didn't recognize the symptoms until they came back to haunt me many years later.

But now, I was living in my Aunt's house, working part time as an assistant to an architect at Wesleyan University, and selling clothes at a high-end designer store on the weekends. I felt as if I were sleepwalking in this muffled college town where life seemed like an underwater ballet. I surfaced through most of the experiences that summer with a pretense of coping, but mostly I participated as a kind of ghost, unsmiling and self-absorbed. I had settled into a kind of half-life, unlived and fully occupied at the same time.

I lived that summer with my aunt Cynthia and her husband Benji in their colonial brick house in Middletown. They had smart mouthy friends and hosted dinner parties, and served gin and tonics, with freshly picked blood red tomatoes and skunky basil from the garden. She was working with the performing arts department at Wesleyan and he was a teacher. I was their sulky 18 year old niece who stayed in my bedroom, the first bedroom I had ever had to myself. I read Emily Dickinson poetry while Creep, their Maine Coon Cat with six toes, sat on my lap and slashed her tail in my face. I loved that house: it had four fireplaces, wide plank wooden floors, and screened in porches, and big stairs. And it smelled like a home: smoke and old furniture, and coffee and dog fur.

And most importantly, there were two dogs ' Nickerson Grundy and Hoggarth. Two Golden Retriever brothers, with the personalities of the Three Musketeers. Their nickname was 'The Boys'�, and they were loved more than any dogs I had ever known.

One afternoon in the early fall, I took the dogs for one of their favorite walks. It was unseasonably warm and the sky was cobalt blue, without a single cloud. I loaded the boys in my aunt's pumpkin colored Pinto, the one car that featured exploding gas tanks if they were hit from behind. I turned on the radio, listening to some awful disco music, and we went to the park that we loved. The boys loved racing around the dusty paths that led to the pond and waterfall that was hidden deep within a bowel like canyon in the park.

The boys would splash around in the pond, snapping and jumping like furry seals. I would throw sticks in the water and they would wrestle with one another, bothering each to get their big jagged teeth around the stick. I was sitting in the grass and the dogs sloshed out of water, shaking their coats and groaning as they threw themselves on the ground next to me. The sun glistened on their wet auburn fur, and their sides heaved as they lay in the sun, their eyes closed as they panted.

I don't know what made me look up at the top of the waterfall, but I saw a movement somewhere, and it took a moment before I could focus my eyes in the sharp sunlight.

A beautiful male deer, with an enormous rack appeared in silhouette at the banks of the waterfall. The sunlight glistened around him as he was drinking from the stream water. He slowly straightened up and looked out, and then suddenly he saw me. He stared down at me, only fifty feet away, not moving a muscle.

I could see his unblinking eyes staring at me with a look that seemed to show a sense of pity and concern. Then he turned and looked up at the beautiful blue sky and then he turned back to look straight at me again.

He's warning me, I thought. But warning me what? Warning me that there's a beautiful blue sky? I glanced over at the dogs, who were now sprawled on their sides like road kill, their breathing loud and heavy. Great hunting dogs, I thought. I looked back up at the stag and he was gone. I blinked to make sure, but he had disappeared.

Funny, I thought. It seemed like he was warning me about the blue sky. And then I forgot about it.

Several weeks later, we had a severe thunderstorm in Connecticut. I hadn't lived through a severe thunderstorm in many years, and I had forgotten what they were like. That afternoon the damp oppressive heat had created enormous thunderhead clouds that crowded the sky, looking like ominous cities on the dark horizon. You could smell the sulfur and the sprinkles of rain in the breeze, and then in the early evening the thunder and lightning started.

I was home with the dogs, and they started whining and pacing as the booming thunder began. Cynthia and Benji came home just as the downpour started to pound on the roof, coming down in streaks of hard driving stinging rain. The lightning made the dogs pant and pace and yelp as the bright arcs of light, little nuclear flashes, blinding everything in the darkness.

After a spectacular flash of lightning, the power went off, and we lit candles and lanterns, and had flashlights to help illuminate the dark. There was a sense of wonder at the fireworks of the storm, and an anxiety that this was going to be a long night.

It was almost midnight when the phone rang. From my bedroom I could hear Cynthia's terse 'Oh god'�, as she was talking on the phone in kitchen. Something bad had happened. I slipped downstairs and saw Cynthia talking on the phone, with her face buried in one hand. Ben