The Death of Imagination

I'm not at all surprised that no one guessed the one and only human food our cat has been confirmed to eat. Cornbread is something we never would've come up with either. I would've expecting something saltier, fattier, sweeter, or, indeed, all of the above.

By comparison, guessing his absolute favourite plaything for the past five days should be a breeze. I'll even give you all a helpful hint and tell you it's naturally something that was never brought into the house with any intention of it becoming a cat toy.

I woke up this morning feeling so much better than I had any right to expect 24 hours after a night of unsleep in the suburbs (of which more later) that I'm feeling almost apprehensive. In fact, I awoke better rested than I am most Mondays. Poor monshu had a fasting test this morning, something that slipped my mind until I remarked on how bizarre it was to find him up and about without the coffee pot brewing. "Rub it in, why don't you?" he retorted.

A short while later I stepped into the tub and noticed two blurry squirming shapes. No, I didn't shriek like a little girl, but I was out of there so fast that I became a blurry shape myself. There was nothing I could capture them with (besides the water cup), so I pulled out the drain cover and rinsed them down. (If you want to see how I've disappointed my farm-bred father, look no further.)

The good news is that they were nothing worse than fluffies, and that--in retrospect--the bug that I watched the cat pursue and kill just outside the bathroom door a couple weeks back must've been one, too. The bad news is, well, bloody bugs in the bathtub. I ended up shampooing with my eyes open because stinging eyes still better than inadvertent contact with a complete harmless insect. (Hear that? It's the sound of my ancestors weeping all the way back to the goddamn Germanic invasions.)

While drying myself off, I heard a thud above, doubtless monshu wrestling with the kitchen trashcan. I'd left hairbrush and deodorant in my bag which was in the dining room, so as I came down the hallway half clothed I called out, "Do you need any help tearing apart our house?" A second later, I spied the garbage strewn across the floor and realised my mistake. Needless to say, the Old Man was fit to be tied, so I chased him out of the house and resigned myself to walking in to work fifteen minutes late after all.

The cat sniffed at the garbage but didn't try to play with it and it wasn't raining yet when I hauled it all to the dumpster. Despite how mild it was, I decided a sport shirt alone was too little and tried to figure out what had become of my blue pullover, which I'd washed on Saturday. As I failed to excavate any memory of folding it, a dreadful suspicion began to creep over me.

Sure enough, an entire load of laundry in the washer since Saturday afternoon. Well, I'll wash it again tonight and, whatever else happens, it will make it into the drier.

Behold, the newest addition to our growing collection of cat-themed art. This was a birthday gift from monshu, and a welcome one at that: I love art, but I suck at buying it and he is a Weltmeister in eBay. Since the colouring is all wrong (I offered to fill in Bū's gray patterning with a magic marker but somehow I can't imagine that would go over well, whatever he might say), what particularly recalls him for the Old Man is the position and the presence of the live sprig. When I noticed the cat chewing up fallen begonia blossoms and spitting them back out, I started bringing him fallen jasmine flowers from the garden (at least for the ten minutes this summer the damn thing actually bloomed). He'll also go after dead leaves and other detritus. As long as they don't make him sick, they're the cheapest cat toys you could want!



A perfect counterfeit like this makes it easy to forget how pilly he's been, particularly in the last couple of days. We're playing nicely, we're playing nicely, STOP BITING MY HAND YOU LITTLE FUCK! On the other hand, with the Old Man out of the master bed, he's been coming right up to me and falling asleep against my arm. Sometimes up to four or five times a night. Too bad loss of sleep makes me such a crabby puss.

Złapał Koczurek mola wczoraj niedługo przed zaśnięciem. Wpuścił go monshu, gdy wychodził na papierosa. Zwyczajem kotów on go wyzwolił a odzyskał kilke razy zanim go zjadł. Przynajmniej on nie wymiotował później.

One of the things this spring has been about is remembering. For the first twenty or so years of my life, minus a few interruptions, I lived with cats. (The Story of My Life in Family Pets is a post for another time.) Over the next twenty or so years, I still had an amount of contact with them. I would always stop to pet them on the street or whenever I visited anyone; "He doesn't like strangers," usually resounded in my ears as a gentle challenge. So when we got a cat three-and-a-half months ago, I thought all the little revelations would relate to the new resident and his unique quirks.

But the surprises were, of course, as much in myself as anywhere, starting with my own body. Somehow, despite occasionally sharing a bed with cats during those twenty-odd years, I had managed to forget about some of the adaptations you make. Somewhere in my youth, I absorbed that it is a major sin to disturb a sleeping cat except under the direst of circumstances and, in trying not to commit it, I developed Sitzfleisch and a certain resistance to muscle stiffness and other minor complaints.

This all came flooding back the first time our new feline deigned to share the bed with us. He prefers the foot of the bed--close, but not too close--on my side, so he can be clear of monshu's restless legs. Often, he settles in only after I have laid myself down, but it's just as common for him to curl up while I'm still sitting up reading. Stretching myself out then requires inserting my feet carefully between those restless legs and the cat's extended body. After only a few moments on the first night, I began to feel an oddly familiar ache in my calves--familiar because I'd experienced it countless times before, but odd because the last time had been so long before.

Now I'm feeling other oddly familiar aches because I'm doing something else that hasn't been part of my routine in ages: Gardening. When I was visiting my father last weekend, I picked up one of his nursery catalogs and flashed back to the hours and hours of my youth I spent paging through them. I combed each full-colour booklet cover to cover as they arrived in the spring and fantasised about the plantings that would fill our scrap of urban land. Very little of this ever came to fruition, of course, but I talk incessantly about the bits that did.

Now I've got not only my own little plotlet to seed and weed, but the disposable income to make many of those dreams come true. Frankly, it's a little overwhelming, since the Old Man is ready to defer to me on any of the planting decisions. Again, it's not like I haven't had opportunities to scrabble in the dirt when visiting relations. (My brother tells me I'm welcome to come and garden at his place any time.) But just as with the cat, there's things that are as unpredictably different when the land under your hand is your own.

Since this is the first year, we're mostly testing out some ideas, trying to keep the investment low until we know what the payoffs are. monshu has already done a beautiful job with the hanging planters, which somewhat raises the bar for the 24 square feet earth we have in the backyard. I've started with herbs, since I understand them better than vegetables, and our guiding principle has been "Things We'll Really Use But Which Are Pricey In Stores When You Can Even Find Them".

For instance, sorrel (if we can ever track some down) and borage. Also lemon thyme and chives (regular and garlic), joining the oregano which survived the winter (something that bodes well for some of the other less-hardy species we plan to include). The mint will have to be kept in a window box if we don't want to earn the ire of our neighbours for setting it loose in the garden plots. We're even going to find out whether jasmine will work as an annual in a Chicago setting; if not, autumn clematis would decorate the trellis just as nicely I think.

Aw, isn't it sweet? You know, that's what I thought too, the first one or two hundred times. Now it's getting a bit old. I should've known when we started--I'm the one who invented the game after all--that if he enjoyed it once, he'd want to do it again and again. I keeping telling myself that the exercise is as good for me as it is for him, but he's the spry young one, so why am I doing all the tossing while all he does is sit there and take the occasional swipe? Today I woke up with a very sore throwing arm. As my throwing arm is also my...er...self-service arm, there may be some hard choices ahead. Amusing a cat or killing kittens? It's a real dilemma.

(For more context, see the photostory linked to from monshu's LiveJournal. He's actually begun updating it again, if you can believe it.)

DUCKIES! There's a tiny Japanese-style garden tucked in between our ugly modern building and its elegant predecessor next door. It's shaped like a flattened trapezoid with the fieldstone wall of the older building as the base and floor-to-ceiling windows on the other three sides. I was passing one of them this morning when I saw something unexpected: A female mallard, standing right next to the glass. Then I saw something even more unexpected: At least eight recently-hatched ducklings, maybe as many as a dozen, swarming behind her. How the hell did they get in there? The walls around the garden are over four metres high. Obviously the mother can clear them; did she pick this as the most protected brooding site around? Where do they find their water and forage? Does she ferry everything over in her beak? How is it possible that none of the Green Committee--who recently moved all the standing plants from the first floor out in the garden--happened to notice a duck nest in there?

HANKIES The plants were moved outside to protect them from the construction going on all over the first floor. No Brimleys among the current crop of workers, but one guy did catch my eye with the snug-fitting denim over his round butt and the...hankie hanging out of his pocket? Remind me, boys, what's a white hankie in the right-hand pocket? I want to say "anything, anytime", but I don't remember and no way in hell am I going to Google "hankie code" at work.

Recently, monshu said something about the "tulip trees" blooming. I asked him the same thing I've asked others--"If you call the magnolias 'tulip trees', then what do you call tulip trees?"--and got the same response I've heard before--"What's a 'tulip tree' then?" I couldn't find a really good image when I did last year's plant quiz, but it turns out it was because I didn't know to search under the Japanese name: