On This Cold Brooklyn Morn

Got up with the roosters, pulled on myriad layers of wool and fur, and bustled down to the coffee shop to swig Americanos with my Muppet critics, who sorted out all my problems, bada bing, bada boom. So bolstered, I ventured to Red Hook while it was early enough to fetch my Fairway Thanksgluttony with less fuss than blunderbuss. Indeed, the bagels were still hot, the aisles still relatively unfettered, and I breezed through so quickly there was even time to flirt with the cute families already underfoot, not to mention Lady Liberty, who waved like a proud mama from across the waterway. Driving home I followed the East River as the sun danced upon its big-wind crests, and I thought: Sweet Brooklyn, you really are my heart.

More Cat Lady Chronicles

My neighbor—who has held agonizingly long and agonizingly audible fights in Italian with her philandering husband at least three times a week for the entire time I’ve lived in my building—came up to my apartment this morning and informed me that I had to stop with all the thumping and bumping at night as the gigantesco noise was disturbing her famiglia. I nodded, perplexed. I keep very decent cat lady hours, after all. Then I noticed baby kitty Grace batting her toy with a studied innocence, and ye olde wheels started turning. It is true that my tiny, five-pound feline has been hunting and trapping her evil, evil enemy The Horrible Catnip Mouse with an unusual gusto lately. “At least she doesn’t chase big blondes,” I thought, and fed her a bit of fish.

A Tiny Swan Song for Doris Lessing, 94

Doris Lessing died this morning at such a good, old age that I can hardly complain about her departure. But she did go just as I’d just been thinking about how much she’d given us and how little we’d noticed it lately. She said many wonderful, incisive things that opened our eyes, minds, hearts and crystallized a lot of realities with which we’d only been murkily familiar. The quote I always kept taped somewhere near me was this: “A simple grateful thought turned heavenward is the most perfect prayer.”

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