Throw in the Towel

My future as an inventor has sunk. I’ve dismantled the brilliant experiment in the last post and tossed the address of the Patent people.

I don’t know beans about thermodynamics. I’m just an English major who can spell it (a long crush on Einstein). What I know about mechanics, I learned in “Humanities 471: Human Values in Engineering.” My final project was sci-fi story (got an A!).

My father was a mechanical man. He designed complex heating and air-conditioning installations, using two tools: the tape measure that lived on his belt, and crude shapes he scribbled on napkins, paper plates, bits torn from little spiral tablets. He nearly failed high school, then spent his life inventing mechanical solutions.

He didn’t teach me those things, and he enjoyed my ignorance. When I was 17, I cracked the head of my 1960 Studebaker Lark convertible by letting the radiator run dry. He handed me the keys to an old VW Bug and sternly told me to be sure I kept its radiator full. Then he fell out of his chair, cackling, when he heard I’d asked a gas-station attendant to check the Bug’s water. That’s how I learned about air-cooled engines. Thanks, Dad.

So here I sit, hopes dashed in my venture into the use of convection-heated shelter for a wild cat. The cat loves the food but scorns the toaster bed. “I have not failed,” Thomas Edison once said. “I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

I’m going to put out food for the cat and stick to inventing sentences and poems.

Wildcat Experiment Continues

(Today's update below)

(Tuesday, 1/24/12) I keep my hands off feral cats unless they’re nursing kittens who appear to be abandoned. I’m a sucker for those, having adopted five ourselves over the years and placed a few others elsewhere.

But my heart’s gone out to a long-haired cat who adopted our front shrubbery last year. It doesn’t behave like a feral tom. It behaves like a frightened abandoned pet. I kept hands-off for months, but the temps have dropped to low twenties/high teens, and the cat has made a tiny nest in the nook of the fireplace wall this past month. It’s right outside my sunroom. The first rains came last weekend.

At dusk last night I saw it curled up there, and I swear I saw it shivering. The sight plagued me. Early this morning while nesting in my warm bed, I dreamed up a toaster bed for this cat. It involves heavy-duty aluminum foil over a wire hut and under its nest of leaves (carefully saved and replaced while wearing gloves), supplemented with hanks of Spanish moss under and over for insulation. I put out food as well to make this hut enticing. I think it might be too tall to reflect any heat, but better than nothing perhaps? We’ll see if the cat welcomes my interference. I let you know.

Day One: Cat Checks Bed, Says Yes to the Food, No to the Bed

Night Two: Food’s gone again. Cat slept under my car, even though I made my husband burn the last of our wood in the fireplace. This morning I’m getting sneaky. Put two morsels in food bowl but a whole handful on two leaves inside the hut. More firewood’s on order. Mark the Walking Man has offered construction advice in his comment. I shall refine the bed per his suggestions, since I don't know shit, really, about the reflective properties of inward-facing aluminum foil.

Third Day: (Investigator's notebook)

Someone was here during the night: evidence
leaf out of place
contents of offering plate, gone
footprints on moss carpet (maybe)


Nothing proves
who: any hungry nightcrawler
might have fallen joyfully upon the altar


Possible suspects: recently noted
gray squirrel w/ high-plumed tail, sniffing fence
tomcat, B&W cruising northbound
27 cedar waxwings casing the place
skunk on road (dead)

Poetry Jam requests poems of the senses this week, so I’ve adopted the feral cat’s view of this ridiculous experiment. Find more sensual stuff here.

Wild Cat Haiku

Whoever you are
What have you done to my nest?
It smells like a trap

I see what you made
That foreign thing is a mouth
I don’t enter mouths

Food magnet draws me
Crackling danger sounds inside
Ears laid low, I flee

Catastrophic mess!
Suspicious hair stands on end
I watch, quiver, wait

Then attack the food
Place stinks but how dear the meal
It tastes like more, please

Catastrophic Thinking

I’m watching the neighbor’s two dogs run loose in the neighborhood. The tall golden one with tail lifted like a flag trots ahead, footloose and fancy-free, while the short-legged corgi-type scampers along like a caboose. They seem to be enjoying this lovely summer morning while we neighbors fret about them. One neighbor has corralled them once already and returned them to their back yard. She and my husband confer when the dogs free themselves again: What to do? No one is home at the dogs’ house and obviously the back yard cannot contain them.

People here care about their neighbors. My observant, friendly husband walks our dogs every morning and garners news or dispenses advice. I wonder if anyone has noticed we have a new housemate. Our 18-year-old granddaughter has moved into my daughter’s old bedroom to work and attend the local community college.

This has wrought a monumental change in our methodology. That bedroom was the bedroom of our two foundling kitties for the past two years. It was where we sequestered them to keep them safe from the dangerous outdoors when the doggie door was open for the beagles. I wanted indoor kitties when we adopted them because we once lost a cat to a predator, we think, and we once had a cat mauled. By this time, the young cats know their room, and they gallop into it with tails high at night, or whenever enticed by shaking a tin filled with cat food.

Since the advent of Lalas, as we call our granddaughter, the cats’ material goods have been moved into our room, and the cats are confused. They dash to the closed door of what used to be their habitat, and stare at it. At night, they wander our bedroom, wreaking havoc, opening cupboard doors, climbing the blinds, terrorizing the beagles, generally creating mayhem that keeps us awake and grouchy.

Twice last night in the dark I tripped over a frightened beagle who didn’t know which way to run: away from the cats, or away from the human feet. So she froze and was tripped over with great cusswords. By midnight, I was considering divorce. I’m a catastrophic thinker.

Thank God the weekend brought an AA convention to our area. At least for pockets of time I was not crazy. The Friday night speaker, Cliff R. from Southern California, gave me food for thought. He quoted Mother Teresa, and I wrote part of the quote on the back of my name tag:

“The fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.” (Mother Teresa)

I suspended my plans for divorce this morning and made a date with a newcomer to meet her at an AA meeting today. I want some peace in my life, and the only peace I’ve ever found from my catastrophic thinking is in the oddly wrapped gift that is Alcoholics Anonymous.

Cat Humor

I am simply blown away by how many little flying bugs are out tonight. When I came home from dinner with friends at twilight, a plague of no-see-ums was waiting at my house to assault me on the short walk to the front door. Their little bodies had weight, too, striking my face like tiny kamikazes.

Even my cat Kate was wondering the hell was flying around as she took her ease on the couch in my sunroom. Outside was abuzz.

Inside was abuzz.

What the heck was that?

I am grateful as all get-out that someone invented screens for windows. Otherwise, I would have to flee. 



The Diamond-Seeking Cat Updated

The fickle sun popped out of the clouds for minute, so here's a look at the ice. Thank you, Pouncer.
This is Pouncer. He’s a diamond-seeking cat. I would show you all the diamonds I found last weekend at my niece’s wonderful house except that it’s raining here, in my neck of the woods, so the light’s not good for a photo. But I’ll show you the cat at work.
Receives instructions from his mistress.
There are diamonds over here.
I saw some over there last week.
Follow me. More diamonds this way.
Wait. I’m lost.
Oh. There you are.
Here’s a nice little gem.
Mistress directs skip loader to load the goods.

Enough of this. It’s time for a poem. Dana of The Bug’s Eye View calls for water, for swimming or something like it, for this week’s Poetry Jam session. I worked on something I started two years ago on the last day of a vacation at Club Med in Cancun. I like thinking about the Caribbean, so I offer this:

Moon Over Cancun

A silver road on black water
leads from our balcony to the white ball of moon
hovering over ghostly cruise ships that plow
to and fro on the horizon.

La luna de miel
said our guide in Tulum when I asked
What is the Spanish for honeymoon?
He gave me the literal moon of honey
and I savor it tonight
as the laughter of others
dialogues with palm trees
rattling their fronds in the warm breeze.
Northward the city is a necklace of lights
that launches diamonds into the sky
with the roar of jet engines
followed by the wink of stars.

You are el sol, the guide said to you,
and to me, You are la luna—
two separate, who make One complete.
He cradled his hands on his chest
and sighed for us. We have been married so long
I had forgotten that.

Now I remember. We have spent days
in turquoise water
and our skin is still hot
with the equatorial sun.
We have been together so long we don’t care
if we touch. Longevity has freed us
from the lies we once told as lovers
to inflate our value—You’re the first…
the only one…Before you I never…
We have spent days on the white sand
passing shells between our toes
and we have not told
one lie.

Today I set free the seashells
collected in these days on the beach,
released them to the waves grasping at the shore.
See them scurrying back to the sea, you said.
I remember now
in the light of the moon of honey,
the truth about you,
why I married you eons ago.
If I told you that I walked on water
you would say yes my big beautiful girl you

The Trees Laugh

Early October

A new wind blows in from out of town somewhere
and sets the sycamores dancing. Their leaves flutter
like flocks of green birds rustling on the branches
and every leaf is the wing of a bird flapping. The cat

in the glass room stares up at the birds and everywhere
is a new bird landing. She slinks, little yearling lioness,
from couch to table to desk to table, yellow eyes wide
in that up-tilted head, bewitched by the spectacle

of birds, birds everywhere, everywhere she looks.
She does not remember last autumn, when the new
wind blew in and the sycamores started chuckling,
waving hello until they shook off those leaves.

She does not remember and so it is new, almost
more than she can take in, but look: a bird falls!
The cat freezes at the sight of prey and when
it lands, a dead curled leaf, she cries.

My Cat Writes Poetry

I was writing a poem yesterday and I stepped away to do something, refill my coffee or whatever, leaving the cat Katie alone in the office.

What I’d written was a perfectly nice little poem, and I’d been chugging along on it just fine. When I returned with my coffee or whatever, I found this other poem on my screen. I would like to add that I don’t talk this way or cuss this way, and I apologize in advance for her language.

Mamacita Done Gone

so there we was, her on her last legs
gaspin’ like a fish outta water

and me like I knew sometin’
rubbin’ on her bony old hand

tellin’ her C’mon, leggo, leggo,
S’awright, I gotcher back,

like that shit mattered, see?
like she could hear me, right?

when I knew all along she weren’t there
and her hand was fuckin’ empty, man,

just an empty sack-a bones
and she ain’t hearin’ none-a this shit

cuz she is gone
and this here hand-a mine

didn’t hold her good enough
to help.

shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit mattered shit matteredQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA