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Miss Grace and the Mouse: A Very 2020 Parable

November 11, 2020 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition

So I’ve been laid up for the last three days with my now-annual autumnal bad back. This year I chalk it up to being a middle-aged woman who danced all Saturday night and then ran a victory lap around lower Manhattan on a broken baby toe. That, and the Slow-Moving Coup the Trump administration is attempting to stage in the shadow of Biden’s inarguable victory. People I love and trust tell me it’s all going to be ok but anyone with genocide in their family lines doesn’t rest easily while a fascist is refusing to cede office.

On every level, in every way, Donald J. Trump’s mic should be cut. No social media. No quotes reported by news outlets. Yes, document the policies he’s pushing through, the terrifying appointments he’s making. But don’t grant his ravings a platform. The amount of chaos and hatred he can still sow is dangerous, if not lethal. Let’s not exacerbate this.

All to say that while I’ve been largely immobile a certain furry roommate has been acting peculiar and finally yesterday gallumphed into my bedroom with a living mouse in her mouth. After triumphantly laying the vermin at my feet, she recommenced chasing it in a dance that went on for two hours–Grace’s happy squawks and the mouse’s fainter squeaks punctuated by the duo’s dashes to where I was, gulp, lying on the floor. This permakitten was in permakitten heaven. I could tell in her mind she even had named this new playmate. “Herman,” maybe–“Hermie” for short. Continue Reading →

Invasion of the Cat Lady Snatchers

October 24, 2020 in Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Etiquette Matters

Watching 70s horror on Criterion with Grace, drinking ginger tea, wearing a velvet robe, smiling. Because today one neighbor in my building lent me a wonderful book, another installed a new paper towel dispenser in my kitchen, and I helped a third fetch groceries. Which is to say: I feel bathed in care. There have been so many terrible things about 2020, but one wonderful thing is that for the first time in my 27 years as a New Yorker, I have let down my guard and connected to people who live in close proximity to me. Trust me: This is a major shift for this proud domestic isolationist. What happened was this: when the pandemic got real, the annoying millennials in my building left and ones I hadn’t known were lovely stayed and more lovely people moved in, and at first we all acted like a team out of necessity and now we’re just friends with our own text message thread even. I’m sure I’ll be the scary cat lady again at some point when they’re loud and I’m sleeping but for now I have traded the luxury of NYC anonymity for something warmer and cozier, and I am safer and a little more happily seen as a result. This seems like a metaphor for something not bad, it really does. And in a year of so much pain and so much loss and so many cold hearts, all mitzvahs deserve mention and anything not bad must be embraced. That got simpler, anyway.

The Feast and Famine of Being Green

August 30, 2020 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Snapshot

Lumet’s Emerald City (lit by Oswald Morris; costume-designed by Norma Kamali).

It’s 7:30 am Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for hours.

That I rose before dawn is not uncharacteristic. But I’d planned to sleep in this morning. To bask in a morning of quiet stillness, quiet comfort after returning from a wonderful week alone in the woods of Columbia County and jumping head-long into the clamor of New York.

I spent so much of this busy weekend activated by the presence of others—in sessions with clients, then walking and dining and bedding my beau—that today I was pulled out of sleep hours before dawn, the need to process my interactions more powerful than my need for rest.

Mae Sarton has a wonderful passage in Journal of a Solitude about shutting the door to the world.

Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…

I find that last line less ironic than simply factual. Because I do not just absorb other people’s realities. They absorb me. For me to spend time in the presence of anyone is to climb inside them, so that I am regarding the world through their senses, processing information through their nerve-endings and brain synapses. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy