Ræmboʊ Come Home

He's 16 pounds and about two years old, he's all boy, and the dog is afraid of him.

He's The Cat Formerly Known as Rambo. And he's the newest addition to my home.

The daughter chose him for his big saucer eyes, which aren't well captured in this photo. Those eyes make him appear permanently startled, a state of mind that is good preparation for my household.

Within an hour of his homecoming, he was already tired of the little basement office where we'd put him and was freely exploring the house. He's absolutely at his ease now.

There was one glitch. Confronted with a pristine pan of highest-quality, odor- and dust-free, processed-wheat kitty litter (the latest thing in kitty products), Rambo tucked in and began eating like there was no tomorrow. When I brought it upstairs, the dog began eating it. This necessitated still another trip to the pet store (where they are starting to have my frequent buyer card number memorized) to buy something that would read as unmistakeably appropriate to poop in and inappropriate for all other uses. Now all is, um, going well.

The only other thing holding me back from total enthusiasm when we brought him home was the cat's name. I mean who ever heard of a cat named Rambo?

Okay, a lot of people who ride cabs in West Palm Beach.

But seriously. Whether he earned the name from his hunky girth or from his crazy eyes, how was this cat going to fit into my neuraesthenic, literary, and altogether unathletic household?

My generous and knowledgeable bliend Grammaticus came up with the solution: change the spelling, save the cat's dignity.

So Rimbaud, welcome home.

Poetry Thursday: To Stuart

To Stuart

(after Marvin Bell's "To Dorothy")

You don't love me, exactly.
you love me inexactly.
You let my toad lilies grow
by the air conditioning unit and the
recyclables pile by the door.
And sometimes,
in the ever-more-personal quiet
of our daily nights,
you even tell me it's all right.

You said it yourself, and it seemed true:
"I try to improve things."
But it's not true. Without you,
things would be more than unimproved.
The fans wouldn't turn, nor the kitchen be a "wow."
The air wouldn't move and the tree wouldn't grow.
Someone else would have to hang the shelves.
Without you,
I would have to ask the unanswering
morning
to let me sleep.

A Day in the Life in Northampton

Ah, the Pioneer Valley in general...

(and Northampton in particular).

via my mom-in-law, Steffi.

Cobber

We adopted him two weeks ago from the Washington Animal Rescue League.

He's an Australian Shepherd and his name is Aussie slang for "pal."

He housetrained in a week and is now working his way through our collection of bedroom slippers.

A very traditional guy.

He rocks.

And no, it's not too late to donate to WARL's annual Mutts Strut through my secure, guaranteed low-hassle donation page.

(Do not worry, CC, I am still a cat person at heart).

Counting Gargoyles

Local literati Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole launched the unbelievable 50th issue of Gargoyle magazine a couple of weeks ago, with a gorgeous cover by Colin Winterbottom (who coincidentally did the cover for my novel Borrowed Light).

The important thing to know, for me anyway, was that this issue of the magazine contains what I consider to be the best story ever written by R. Gilad Schamess, my first husband (how I hate that phrase, and all the history that attends to it). The story is called "Lucky," and it is also readable online here:

Lucky
by R. Gilad Schamess
1965-2000

They kept the luck they found in ledgers. Making it their business, their noses into everything.

There was the car that wouldn't start that kept a family safe from black ice on the highway and twenty-eight deaths, so much twisted metal.

There was the drycleaner's number misprinted in an advertisement that brought together two strangers who fell in love and married.

There was the clumsy painter who knocked a hole in the plaster of the baby's new room, revealing a wasps' nest built in the wall.

There were lottery tickets and gambling sprees and answers to important questions guessed out of the blue and old coins found in attics; they were entered in columns and dated and totaled and covered by the turning of a page.

She kept no food in the house except spices, and she brought home every day what they needed and they ate it all as if there were no dog begging or as if they were preparing to be gone for a long time.

He came home with the papers folded under his arm and more stuffed into his briefcase and some days with magazines in a bag.

They finished the meal and he looked for stories of luck, reading aloud when he found them, and she kept the books.

There were coins in the attic and lottery tickets and lightning striking out of a clear sky the exact spot a man had stood just one second before; he had moved when another man called his name. The other man did not know him but a man with the same name who looked like him.

There were the brothers adopted by different families who married and moved from their homes to the same town to the same neighborhood to meet when their children became friends.

There were hunches to stay in and hunches to go out and to not board that plane and to buy or sell that stock and to look under that cabinet and to try a new route home.

They went out on weekends, driving past where they had left off the last time, with clipboards and the forms they had made and favorite pens, and they found luck that way among houses showing nothing from the outside.

They kept track in ledgers.

She was home earlier and had the dinner ready. He brought the papers and, when they were new, the magazines. When they climbed into bed there were only spices left and the fresh page covering the old.

"We are lucky," they whispered at night. Not remembering how they met, they whispered.

"Lucky. Lucky." Huddled in the dark, only spices in the kitchen, the papers outside in the trash with the clean bones.

-fin-

(with gratitude to Stuart for putting up with my gargoyles, as I put up with his).

categories: life love words