Forever Isn't Over Yet

Okay, I can understand my dentist yesterday morning, after poking around in my mouth, handing me a toothbrush and asking me to demonstrate my brushing technique to him and his assistant. Plainly they needed to get to the bottom of what they'd seen. But was it really necessary for them to laugh?

I’ve always thought of Easter as one of the more watery, pastel colored holidays. It’s not that I didn’t have fun. It just couldn’t compare with the slightly sinister red and gold richness of the winter holiday season, and there were a lot of “buts,” “stills,” and “howevers,” attached to Easter that were absent when it came to that incomparable Christian trinity, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Easter egg hunts were entertaining, but I usually ended up lumbered with a slightly higher quotient of hard-boiled eggs to malted milk eggs/jelly-beans than I liked. Sometimes all of us would dress up and make one of our rare appearances at church, a sop to our Episcopalian grandmother, but afterwards there would be a party at her house with a baked ham and milk punch and lots of cheerful grownups, so that was some compensation.

It had something to do with the illustration in one of the books at Sunday school showing Jesus trickling in a vapor out of a cave around a boulder, his arms over his head like a cartoon ghost going “boo!” When we talked about this, we children were savvy enough to look serious because, we had been given to understand, that was the TRUE meaning of Easter, but we were really just humoring the grown-ups. Back then it was all about rabbits for me, specifically chocolate rabbits.

Biting the head off the bunny was one of the high points of the day. We had a very brainy cousin who, on one of our Easter visits to his family, confessed to being a chocolate bunny hoarder and proudly showed us his collection, still wrapped in their foil and plastic, from one Easter, two, three, and four Easters ago. Given that he was two years younger than me this was impressive, but I still felt he'd failed to grasp an important point.

And for some reason, it was also about hats. Part of our get-up, when my sister and I were dressed up for Easter, had to include a hat, which was a little baffling, but just enough of a novelty to be entertaining. Then we children would be lined up for pictures. The most famous of these, the one that’s still put on mantels, passed around and chuckled over by the older generation shows my sister and me in our pastel dresses and Easter bonnets, my face a mask of anguish because our little brother had just leaned forward and bitten me.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamoro/2054745797/

It’s a mysterious picture. He was not known for being a hellion. On the contrary he was and remains one of my quieter, more self-contained siblings. I can’t remember what I did to provoke him, but it must have been pretty bad, perhaps involving the theft of a bunny. Or at least its head.

One of the advantages and drawbacks of having a top-floor apartment is that we can appreciate a lovely day without actually going outside. Sitting here at my desk I can look up and see the city west of Van Ness, a crust of buildings with light colored facades reflecting the sun, Sacramento Street rising up the hill towards Pacific Heights, the green bulge of a park, the twin spires of Mission Dolores on one side, the Golden Gate on the other. If stand up, I can even see surf breaking against the shore just beyond the bridge.

YOU can’t see it because the camera on this computer faces into the room. You can, however, appreciate the sunlight coming in and perhaps make out the yellow smudge of our cat in his customary place on the sofa. In defiance of all common sense, I’m going to sit here and type instead of going out into this beautiful day. And I’m going to type about an indoor subject. Our cat.

Herewith, the obligatory cat post.

Yes, we have a cat. We love our cat. He is large. He is orange. He is aggressive and unmistakably a guy cat. He does not like to be held. He does not like to sit in laps. He purrs, but he purrs quietly from some motor buried deep within and muffled behind all that sinew, muscle and yellow fur.

He likes to be in the same room with us, in a location where he can see us both plainly, and he permits us to feed him, pet him, brush him, and rub his stomach. We adopted him fully grown seven years ago after the black and white kitten I’d picked out at the shelter hissed at M and made it plain she hated him on sight. Our cat took one look at my husband and stretched himself full length against the glass of his little cell, clearly saying, “I want THAT one.” In as blatant an example of false advertising as I’ve ever seen, he curled up in M’s lap and allowed himself to be cuddled while I filled out the paperwork.

It’s all about sucking up to the alpha male. M is his human, and I am an auxiliary human. He seems to believe that M is far too lenient with the female in the household. Among my offenses are using the cordless phone, picking up the remote, and speaking suddenly in a normal tone of voice, all of which will sometimes get me an enraged, deep throated rebuke and, if I’m sitting on the sofa, an attack. Not a serious attack, of course, but he does march over, stiff-legged, his eyes blazing, takes my arm in his mouth and sits there, growling around the wool of my sweater until I pry his jaws open and dump him on the floor.

Every now and then he’ll remember that he is supposed to at least attempt to supplant the alpha male, and he’ll up the ante of these attacks by tugging at my arm as if to get me to go somewhere with him. Once I decided to humor him and allowed him to hop down onto the floor, my arm still in his mouth (the rest of me following). He set my arm on the floor, sat beside it for a minute, licking his lips, then tried to have his way with it. I don’t humor him any more.

Sometimes he exhibits some tenderness towards me. Every once in a great while, if I sleep too late, he will move over from where he’s spent the night curled up against M’s legs, tip-toe up to my pillow and gently, romantically, kiss me just behind my ear. When I open my eyes he tells me it’s time to get up, go into the kitchen and open a can.

This has led me to do at least one Google on names from my past. I’m halfway convinced he’s the reincarnation of someone I used to date.