September 30, 2002
September 29, 2002
The Spider Plant
I got a spider plant in April 2002. In July, I got a kitten.
The spider plant looked pretty good in July.
And it looks nice today, too. In fact, it's thriving (9/15/2002).
This is how it looks to the kitten.
This is how it looks to the kitten now (9/29/2002).
This is how the kitten looks at it.
It's definitely thriving now (January 2005). I think maybe Mr Bun has elected to let it live. It seems like he never pays attention to it anymore.
But then, maybe that's just what he wants me to think.
September 26, 2002
Like a dog with a bone
"My cat plays fetch, too!" the photographer told me. We were in a crowded bar on Valencia street, at a schmoozefest for media professionals. He really just wanted to get access to the bar to order a drink, but we started talking about where we do our work, and I'd remarked how hard it can be to work at home with a new kitten. He gave me hope. He couldn't solve the problem of my kitten being too cute for me to concentrate, but his own cat still plays fetch at eight years old. All I have to do is keep playing with him.
The problem is that when a kitten discovers a new thing, that's all they do for a while. My dad told me recently that he was impressed by my series of pictures of my kitten chasing his tail. He couldn't understand how I got my kitten to chase his tail on command in several different parts of my apartment. What my dad didn't realize is that my kitten did absolutely nothing for two solid weeks except chase his tail. Chase chase chase chase chase. Even now, in fact, at this very moment, he is sitting on my desk, and the tip of his tail is jerking around a little. It's not quite rhythmic. He's staring fixedly at it, as if he has no idea what it will do next.
The big thing right now, however, is playing fetch. I barely remember how this got started. I was sitting in bed, reading before I went to sleep, trying to distract him from my toes. I threw something. He brought it back. Our first few games involved me trying to get him interested in playing -- or just off my toes. In the past week he's started initiating games of fetch himself. He won't take no for an answer.
At first, we had a game of fetch at some point during the day. Then it became a brief game of fetch first thing in the morning. There was an interlude during which we played "catch" on the bed. He'd roll the ball over to me. I'd roll it back. He'd roll it over to me again.
Lately it's been a game of fetch every hour or so throughout the morning. I suspect he can go all day, but it's so hard for me to work under that kind of pressure that I've been fleeing the apartment with my laptop in the afternoon. I am careful, as I walk out the door, not to tell him in so many words, "I'm leaving -- because of something you did," and so far he seems tolerant when I leave and pleasantly cheerful when I return. I sit down to sync up my laptop and desktop, and I hear a little ball drop and my feet. And a small meow.
Yesterday his fetch game leaped to the next level. I played a few rounds with him as I ran my bath. Tub full, I went into the bathroom and settled in for a nice soak. He wasn't finished. He bounded into the bathroom, jumped onto the edge of the tub, and dropped the ball into the water next to me. When I stopped laughing, I gave it a good throw, out the door and down the hall. He brought it back. Over and over again. I somehow got my hair washed and rinsed, dried off, and got dressed. Then I packed up my laptop and got out of the house for the rest of the day.
September 26, 2002
September 24, 2002
September 21, 2002
My kind of pet
Dogs are bred for so many things -- herding sheep, gently retrieving felled animals, carrying those little barrels of booze around in the Swiss Alps -- but cats are pretty much as they have always been, and breeds differ mainly in color. Many breeds don't even differ in color, sharing color schemes and markings with others. Cats all do the same kind of work. With the luxury of a St Bernard, the light touch of a retriever, the tenacity of a herd dog, they kill.
Some cats have specialties, and you can train your cat to value one sort of victim over another. My brother's cats devastate the vole population before they, ho-hum, turn their attention to birds. My father's barn cat focuses on rats, for each of which my father rewards him with a can of food. He doesn't just stack the rats up and let my dad run a tab, either. He delivers the goods and then stands there, all friendly like but just doing business, until he gets his can of food.
My kitten has a doggy good nature that sometimes obscures his catness. He lopes over to the door when I come home and purrs raggedly when I scoop him up and say hello. He's happy and friendy and curious, even with strangers, and he likes to be handled (mostly because I've handled him frequently since I brought him home). He even plays fetch. And not some perverted cat-person version of fetch, where you throw a ball, he runs and gets it, he plays with it, and then you have to walk over, take it away and throw it somewhere else. Real dog fetch, where he runs like crazy for the ball, trots back to you, and drops it at your feet. After about 20 minutes, he seems to remember he's actually a cat and loses interest and wanders off, sometimes pausing to attempt to rip open the ball's abdomen with his back claws. This playing is all well and good, but he remembers, if dimly, the object of the game.
It's hard to say what kind of killing my little one would grow up to prefer, but the toys tell some of the story. He goes bananas for the kitty fishing pole if it has a feathery bauble at the end of the line. He is merely transfixed for other objects, but for those faux birds, he leaps with such abandon that he sometimes slides across the floor when he hits the ground again. The toy is somewhat fragile, and when he succeeds in capturing the lure, I reel him in and release his jaw so I can retrieve the feathers. He waves me away with a paw, claws out, staring harshly up at me over his prize.
I got him a little furry mouse last week, one of several floor toys, with the idea that a variety of floor toys could keep him perky when I was hard for him to distract. The furry mouse was a huge hit -- too huge.
I broke it out at night, when I was tired and hoping for some quiet time to read before I went to sleep. I was sitting on my bed, and I tossed it across the room. The kitten zipped after it. After a brief struggle under a chair, he vanquished the furry mouse and then came trotting back to me, lighting elegantly on the bed.
I was happy to postpone my reading for a game of fetch. I reached for the mouse and got a dark look. I persisted. I reached toward his clenched jaw and took gentle hold of the end of the mouse. He backed away. I gave a little tug, and he growled. In my surprise, I tugged again, and this time I got the mouse and almost got a faceful of claws.
I tossed the mouse again. He ran, he tussled, and he returned to the bed. This seemed to indicate a desire to play fetch, but I never got near the mouse again that night. He ran back to me to growl and glare and then ran to another part of the room to rake his hind claws over the toy's belly, returning frequently to my bed to growl some more.
The next morning when I wandered into the bathroom, I saw a shadow or two in the tub and blearily noted that he must have left his toys there, as he sometimes does. When I looked in, I was startled to see what was left of the mouse. He'd ripped off all its fur and ripped the fur itself into chunks. The core of the mouse was firm plastic; he hadn't torn that. But it had scores of tooth marks on it. I cleaned up the mess, almost as anxious as if it had been the bloody remnants of a recently live rodent.
Cats concentrate near completely when they hunt. Their pupils fly open as they pounce, and their excitement is palpable. The violent death of the furry mouse was a little more excitement than I'd bargained for.
Just this afternoon, the kitten and I played a rousing game of Chase Each Other All Over the Apartment. We peeked at each other around doors and ran after each other. We stood up, waving our arms and staring menacingly. He flew around my ankles and on several occasions launched himself into the air as if to reach my face in a single leap from the floor. He came quite a bit closer than you might expect.
I love this game. I love how easily he switches between affection and play. I love how responsive he is when I decide it's too rough, and I let him know. I love that half the times I scoop him up to show him the monkey can win whenever she wants, I find that he's purring. A cat owner can never really know the satisfaction of a dog owner whose animal is orderly, attentive, and under full control, but when my kitten backs off on signal, I feel a shadow of that, a sense that my kitten wants to work with me and not just take me for all he can get.
For all I know, my kitten is playing me most subtly at those times -- watching, working, waiting to stage an endgame to his precise preferences. As well he should. He'll have to move carefully and with great disclipine if he wants his specialty to be the most dangerous game.
September 21, 2002
September 20, 2002
September 19, 2002
September 18, 2002
September 17, 2002
September 16, 2002
Blind date
They'd never seen anything like each other before, although the fixer-uppers sent jpegs. Neither was really consulted -- the fixer-uppers made a plan on the phone, and she was brought over to meet him. Suffice it to say, there was no kiss on the first date.
--
Blanca is a ten-week-old white German shepherd who is afraid to walk up and down stairs on her own. The Streamlined Cannonball is a four-and-a-half-month-old tabby kitten who likes to be on top of things. They didn't fight crime, at least not today, but they may have a lifelong friendship in the offing.
Ryan lives around the corner from me. He's a programmer who works at home and has raised dogs all his life. He surfs with a friend of mine. She told me a week ago that he has a new puppy and was hoping he could introduce her to my kitten. He wants to socialize her to cats, and I want to socialize my cat to all kinds of things, including dogs.
Our mutual friend has an exquisite dog herself, and we're planning to bring her over. Her dog is a great Dane / greyhound mix and one of the most beautiful animals I have ever seen. She has all the elegance of a greyhound with none of that cold, uncomfortable pinchedness, and almost all the size of a great Dane. When my friend mentioned Ryan's new puppy, it was immediately obvious to me that that would be a gentler introduction. My cat weighs barely six pounds, after all.
Blanca, Ryan's puppy, weighs about ten pounds and is about ten weeks old. She is adorable and very responsive to Ryan. Ryan kept her on a short leash, and within just a few minutes of their arrival, The Streamlined Cannonball was approaching her. She was remarkably quiet and calm in my apartment, although there were moments when she simply couldn't hold back, and she barked and jumped about a little.
Their arrival was a bit dramatic. When the doorbell rang, I picked up the kitten and took him in the hallway. We looked down through the stairwell and watched Blanca negotiate the stairs, which she has not mastered. When she got to my floor, she was thrilled at the sight of another animal and greeted him enthusiastically, putting her nose directly on his face and probably licking him. I didn't see clearly. He was surprised and, we cat owners assume, absolutely appalled. The monkeys were amused, if a bit sheepish.
The Streamlined Cannonball did spend the first few minutes under the bed with his fur standing on end. I drew him out from under the bed with a cat treat, and he spent the next hour or so making slow circles around Ryan and the puppy. He rushed her a couple of times. At moments, partly hiding behind me, he observed her minutely and moved his back legs, as if to pounce. Could he have regarded her as food?
--
His afternoon with Blanca was not his first date. He's been over to the next-door neighbor's a couple of times. That really is a love that should never be. We know that he and Blanca won't get up to any trouble, but the next-door neighbor's pet, Seven, is an unfixed female tabby about two years old. She'll probably go into heat any minute now.
Ryan said that he's been told that part of the reason cats are so hostile to dogs is that dogs do physical behaviors that, when done by other cats, indicate aggression. My kitten was, of course, offended by Blanca until his curiosity took over. I had to laugh, because she approached him exactly the way he approached Seven. I doubt he has the self-awareness to look back and think, hey, maybe that's why Seven was hissing and spitting at him.
When Ryan told me that Blanca would be on her "best leashed behavior," I remember thinking that shouldn't be necessary, that she should be able to be off leash in the apartment. The moment her nose touched his outside my apartment door, I realized how naive that was. She's a good, sweet puppy and not that much bigger than he is, but she has a very different idea of how to have a good time. As it was, they were remarkable together today. There was only one event of hissing in the very beginning and no growling whatsoever. Off-leash peace is a reasonable goal, perhaps sooner rather than later.
--
The Streamlined Cannonball kept an eye on Blanca, but he relaxed as the visit went on. Then she walked out the door, and it was back to business as usual. Within moments, he was lying in my arms, his eyes fluttering shut, purring and gently teething on my hand.
September 16, 2002
Blind Date
They'd never seen anything like each other before, although the fixer-uppers sent jpegs. Suffice it to say, there was no kiss on the first date.
September 11, 2002
Why I love country music
I've listened to country music all my life. My mom likes it, and my dad plays it. Real country music, old-timey music. Plus bluegrass and assorted just-plain good singer/songwriters from that general tradition.
My dad played in an old-time band that toured when I was a child. The other players were a married couple and the woman my dad lived with most of my early childhood. I knew all the songs by heart and often sang them to myself from an early age; I'm not sure when. It's always been there, on stages, in parks, in coffeshops and halls and tucked into every corner of people's houses, at festivals and contests, and in my head.
My mother had more traditional country music in her collection, and I was exposed to everyone important. Performances by Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstandt float uppermost in my memories. I could listen to them for hours and memorized everything. I haven't heard those albums for almost two decades, and I can sing dozens of their songs from memory at any moment.
When I moved out of the house, I didn't form my own collection of country music. I could still go to my parents' houses any time I wanted, and I still went to see my dad and his friends perform from time to time. I explored popular music and developed a respectable collection of chic 80s and 90s CDs, a project I embarked on with a gift from my dad of one of the early portable CD players and $100 to start me up.
My parents changed, too. My dad focused on work for a long time, and most of the music in their house was the traditional, instrumental Celtic music favored by his wife. My mom slipped into jazz, and there was a lot of jazz around just in general. Even one of the players in my dad's old band became a jazz vocalist. I joined my dad at a party at their house one evening, and it was as different as it could have been from the sprawling bluegrass jams I remembered from childhood: well-dressed people in small groups, mostly talking, nibbling on elegant little snacks, someone occasionally sitting at the piano. It was easy to feel left out by all the "high-class jazz people," as my dad called them.
I listened to various kinds of jazz (with vocals) and standards all my life as well, and I know the Rodgers and Hart songbook as well as I know Emmylou. That's the music I sing to myself nowadays, and I've contemplated vocal techniques classes, which I'll get to one day, maybe this year, maybe next, maybe five years from now. I sing around the house, not just in shower, sometimes pretending that my cat is listening.
I ran into a friend recently who reminded me of the way my last cat listened. I had managed to forget this, and in retrospect, I can't imagine how. The City of New Orleans could not stand to listen to me sing "Crazy" (I emulated the Patsy Cline performance). She became visibly distressed when I sang it, and if I persisted, she made terrible sounds and bit me. There is no evidence to suggest that this was a response to my ability. I've sung regularly since childhood, with musical family and friends to reinforce and guide me.
I sing often around The Streamlined Cannonball, and he seems pretty relaxed about it. Today, I thought I'd give him a try on "Crazy." His neck went rigid, his eyes watchful. He peeled his lips back and made a distressing sound, a sort of hunting sound. It was suggested that I try "I Fall to Pieces," and it got the same reaction. I tried an Emmylou favorite, "Luxury Liner," and this seemed less distressing, but he put some distance between us. He came back when I stopped singing. I started up with "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia," and he gave me a doleful look and trotted away again.
Was he just tired of singing? I sang a couple of verses from "The Lady Is a Tramp," which he's heard many times without incident, and this was apparently perfectly acceptable. I was relieved. I want to feel like I can sing in my own apartment as much as I want, even if I defer to my neighbors by closing my windows.
Some sadness remains. What is it about country music? A trial of "Pancho and Lefty" produced the same distress, the same flight, although "I Fall to Pieces" and "Crazy" appear alone in their ability to provoke overt hostility. I knew my new pet had a personality of his own, but I confess this is a disappointment, that something I have loved for so long is so much not to his taste. I guess our honeymoon was bound to end.
September 11, 2002
