On the Joys of Belonging

Those of us who love having pets know that there is very little that can compare with the joy of seeing our little furry friend completely satisfied and content. If we've somehow managed to make that precious life a bit happier, we don't feel like, say for instance, a complete failure as a human being. And if we've done that little bit extra, it almost makes us feel as though it's made up for a multitude of, if not sins, then perhaps "shortcomings" would be a good word.

I live in a basement apartment. A one-room basement apartment. Bijou, my recently adopted kitty, finds the space adequate, but that's because she's never lived somewhere where the afternoon sun comes shining in on a comfy chair or couch. She's content to sit on various chairs and hasn't complained that there's no sun to warm her. I, however, am quite aware of this particular shortcoming, since napping on the couch in a pool of sunlight in the afternoon was one of my favourite things to do! And I feel badly for kitty that she hasn't known this particular bliss - yet.

But I have done something right. I've been making her food.

Real food. Chicken. Fish. Beef. And she loves it - the way the cats in all the cat food commercials lunge for their food. I just finished watching her finish her plate - and darn nearly lick the pattern off said plate!

Today's menu is chicken. And here's how it works:

First, you cook the meat whichever way you would for yourself. In this case, I pan-sauteed two chicken breasts in oil, salt & pepper. One for me, one for her. Hers, of course, will last her six dinners.

After the chicken had thoroughly cooled, I chopped it up into very tiny bits. I prefer to do this by hand, so that some texture of the meat remains.

I made oatmeal - 1/2 cup of oatmeal in 1 cup of chicken broth. And a pinch of salt to taste. If I wouldn't like it, why should she? And mixed the cooked oatmeal with the chicken, and let that cool.

I grated one carrot, separately, mind you. The idea is to put some fresh crunch into the food. And it wouldn't be fresh if I stuck it all in at once. Fresh means "just before you go to eat it" in any language. I put about a teaspoon of grated carrot onto the plate with 3 tablespoons of chicken/oatmeal. The rest of the grated carrot is covered and put in the fridge.

The pièce de résistance today was the teaspoon of cottage cheese added to this mix. Oh, my, did she EVER like that! I watched as she'd pick up a piece and give it a careful and thorough chewing. She loved it.

As I said, there's only the pattern left on her plate, and she's had a lovely bath and is now settled in for a LONG nap, as happy as it is possible for a kitty to be.

I done good.

While I live in my basement apartment, with occasional visits from Hubby, and occasional visits "home", and try to figure out what the **** I want in life, it's nice to know there is someone waiting for me to come home from work. Someone who not only needs me to make her food, but who LOVES my food. Someone who enjoys playing with me. Someone who enjoys being petted and loved and kissed.

Someone to belong to.

Putting Things Off

As I write this, I'm busily engaged in putting off vaccuming. My friend K is coming over for a late brunch, and I have to clean. In theory, I'm dreading passing the vaccum because of my new kitty, Bijou. She has no experience yet of machinery, and I can just see each of her hairs standing on end for a split-second just before she dives into the cupboard for the rest of the day.

"F*****g MEOW!"

While I'm putting off vaccuming, I'm also putting off getting started on a new quilt.

I LOVE this new quilt. Hubby came over and did some careful adjustments to the quilting stand so it's absolutely perfect, and I was supposed to put the new quilt on the stand yesterday, but I put that off to watch some tv...

I have made some progress in my life, vis-a-vis this tendency to procrastinate. Like the alcoholic, I'm not sure if it's possible to be "cured". I recognized many many years ago, in a different marriage, that I put off housekeeping until my husband came home, because if he didn't come home and the housework was done, where would I be then?

Something like that.

When I first moved here, to the apartment, away from Hubby, away from my family's ancestral homestead, I was thrilled with how small my new place was.

I can clean it, you see, in about fifteen minutes flat. That includes vaccuming and scrubbing the shower. It's a small apartment.

I was thrilled to death that I could do all my laundry in four loads, five if I washed the blues/greens separately from the pinks/oranges.

What a change from the House, where I'd had to ask K to come and perform a laundry intervention! (Though, in retrospect, we probably should have called it a laundry exorcism...)

I'm putting off having a shower just now, as well, because vaccuming gets me all sweaty. So I'll do that after I vaccum.

I don't know what I would do if I just DID everything! Like "normal" people, you know - get up, shower and dress, make the bed, vaccum, start preparing food for the next meal, get to work on a project...

I mean, what would happen if I got EVERYTHING done? Where would I be? I'd still be here, in my apartment. Alone, with the cat. With nothing to do? Perhaps. Nothing to look forward to? Well, there's ALWAYS something, just it's usually more than a day or two away... No place to go? No one to see?

My friend K is a very organized lady. VERY organized. But she has called me, from time to time, and we've discussed loneliness.

Is it better to be lonely than living in chaos, getting sick and angry?

Is it better to be alone than have a buddy who'll scratch your back? Lots of people stay with their spouses even if they're not completely happy with the situation, rather than take the step I did. When you stay, you know where your next meal/vacation/back-scratch/smooch - hell, you even know where your next ARGUMENT is coming from!

When you leave, you have to do all that for yourself. No built-in entertainment, no foil or patsy for practical jokes sitting in the easy chair just begging to be poked. No straight man for your funny comments.

When you're alone, you are free to do anything you want.

Even vaccum.

The "Sleep"-Over

Eight weeks ago, I moved out of the "family home." At first, when I'd leave work, it just felt wrong, felt like my heart was being ripped out with every step I took towards my apartment, away from Hubby, who works in the same building as me.

Now, not every step feels wrong. Usually by the time I'm halfway "home" I start looking forward to what I'll be doing when I get there. This is now especially true, since I've recently adopted a new cat, "Bijou". My evenings can now be completely full of "cat-adoration". No matter how little the phone rings or how sad I am, my kitty is happy to see me and loves my home-made cat food.

Yes, I make her real food. Not a by-product in sight. Yesterday's menu, for example, began with a filet of sole. I poached the filet in milk, with a few slices of onion to add a touch of flavour, and salt and pepper. Once the sole flaked lightly with a fork, I removed it from the pot. And I threw out the onions. Next, I added some oatmeal and a few kernels of corn and cooked them in the milk. When done, I pureed the oatmeal/corn/milk mixture and combined it with the fish. I tasted it, it was delicious, and Bijou couldn't get enough of it.

Tonight, I'll be braising beef shank, bone-in for extra flavour. In broth, not water. With garlic, bay leaf, perhaps a touch of Worcestershire. Oatmeal again in the liquid, and possibly some cheese, and chopped sprouts to add a bit of crunch.

At last, I have someone who LOVES my cooking!

Well, Hubby came over last night, for dinner, and he spent the night with Bijou and me. He too, enjoyed my cooking, though he did joke about being fed leftover cat food... Actually, I made him, from scratch, sweet & sour meatballs, served on rice with a side of asparagus. And I baked scones for dessert. A brief reminder of "Life With Hubby" came as he - I am not making this up - scolded me for putting the tops back on my scones the wrong way.

"They're misaligned," he complained.

"Hey!" I said. "It's a BISCUIT! For godssake, get a life!"

And then we did the dishes, had some ... romantic time... together, then, like a good married couple, turned our backs to each other and went to sleep.

Hah.

I heard him softly snoring most of the night. I wiggled and twisted, fluffed the pillow, turned this way and that, most of the night. Went to the bathroom about six times. He woke up frequently, but, being a man, was always able to fade back into dreamland.

Once, I almost began to actually nod off, when Bijou came over and walked along my legs to my chest and sat there staring quietly at me.

"How long is this going to go on?" she asked me politely.

"I beg your pardon," I queried.

"When are you going to throw this bum out so you and I can have our CUDDLE!?" she demanded.

"Well, Bijou, I can't throw him out now, darling! I invited him to spend the night!"

"So," came her cold sniff. "This man means more to you than I do, does he? I don't see what's so special. I mean, look at the room he takes up in the bed!"

I had to acknowledge the cat had a point here. For eight weeks, I've had the bed all to myself. It's not the most comfy bed in the world, but at least I could stretch out in it, stuff pillows in the hollow spots and get rested! Just not tonight. There was a man in my bed - a big one. And any time our limbs would touch by accident, he'd smile and throw a great big hairy arm around me and draw me close... a completely effective sleep preventative. God forbid I should end up face-to-face with him - his breath was like gale-force winds, blowing my hair around, going up my nostrils, drying out my eyes... If I should be on my back, the wind went straight into my ear. I'd lie on the other side as long as my muscles could stand it, but eventually I'd have to give that side a rest and the cuddling and the blowing would re-start.

"I don't take up any room at all!" said the cat. "And, I can purr!"

"Yes, you certainly can, little one," I said softly to her, scritching her behind her ears.

She wasn't mollified. "Well," she said, twitching her tail at me just before jumping down, "I'm going to sleep on the chair. There's no room here for a proper cuddle tonight!" And she held her head high as she sashayed over to the easy chair.

I received a poke in the ribs.

"You were snoring," said Hubby.

Sure I was.

A Little Humor Goes a Looooong Way!

So, Ron James was on CBC last night.

Ron James is from New Brunswick, I think, and he's been all over Canada, and he's ADHD, and has a rubber face. And every time he's on, my lungs get a good cleaning out! Last night, so did my bladder, but I digress...

My landlady, who lives upstairs, was obliged to knock on the door and inform me I was scaring her animals. After that, I put a pillow over my face to muffle the choking, gasping, and shrieking.

And this morning, she called me at work to say that perhaps it would be a good idea, after all, for Hubby to install some sort of soundproofing on the door...

How does one describe humor? The look on someone's face, and all the meaning behind it? When he talks about the Moose being addicted to road salt, waiting impatiently for the sun to go down so they can head out onto the highways for their fix... His face, looking exactly like a moose's face one minute, and Robert DeNiro's the next... His description of the huge trucks on the road while he squats on stage, pretending to be in his Corolla...

There is no way to describe Ron James. But if you ever hear he's in town, sell the farm, buy some depends, and go see him!

In Praise of a Great Friend

I have a friend, R, who I've know since I was sixteen. We met in filmmaking class and formed an instant bond, at least part of which was due to the fact that nobody else in the class wanted to work with either of us. We had a reputation of being... um... let's use the term "determined", and leave it at that!

We developed an instant respect for each other, having recognized in the other this determination. Oh, and a radical sense of humor.

In fact, before I met R, my sense of humor was mostly latent. He was the first person I ever heard give voice to some of the stranger thoughts I'd always had but had been afraid to let out. Once he loosed my tongue, a world of hilarity opened to me. Not everyone was thrilled about this development, but at least R always got my jokes! And as long as I had one friend in the world who found the same things funny that I did, I was content.

R is an amazing guy. He's really, really curious about the world, not only "how things work" but "why" as well. He's an amazing photographer, proving that he "sees" the world much clearer than most of us who merely stumble through it. Not only can he capture the essence, the "feel" of the moment, he does so with images that everyone would love to hang on their walls. Balanced, colorful, beautiful, they draw you in and hold you, inviting you to linger, to breathe in, to understand.

R is a self-made man. Oh sure, he finished school like the rest of us. But he never stopped learning. Even before the internet, he read, he looked things up, the hard, old-fashioned way, in books! And of course, with the advent of the internet, he soared like an eagle. Now there was no limit to what he could understand.

Sometimes, those of us who were his friends would joke about "getting the lecture" from R. We knew that R would have an answer to every question we could put to him, and that he was more than willing to share the fruits of his labor with us, not chiding us for being too lazy to look stuff up ourselves.

Over the past 34 years, R has been my "rock." There was no difficulty I went through (and I went through a few) that he could not find some word of comfort, snatch a piece of reality to allay my fear, find some way to make me feel better.

R has also had his share of difficulties, but he's always used whatever challenge he faced to learn what he could about the world, about himself, about life.

He had an amazing business for years, which he closed in order to go back to school and get a degree, something quite a few of us in this age group did not do. It was one of the larger challenges he faced, to be sure. He needed peace and quiet to study, so he took an apartment while he was a student, continuing somehow to pay his mortgage, child support, kept up his family responsibilities including the "hithering and thithering" of his teenagers. I don't know how he did it. He would offer to explain stuff to me, but sometimes, see, listening to R can be a bit like the Star Trek episode with Nomad, "The Changeling". Nomad, you see, was this amazing machine that could absorb and send information faster than anything could receive it, leading often the to burnout of the equipment it was attempting to interface with. It often feels like that to me when listening to R. I have to close my eyes and screw on my thinking cap and remember to breathe. He thinks at warp 9, or something. And here I am, impulse drive only. I could never catch it all, one reason he's had to patiently explain things several times to me over the course of many years.

And after he pulled that off, he went back and did a Master's degree!

It is impossible for me to explain just how much I admire R. Very simply put, every day of his life, he does the impossible. Climbs the mountains, wades the oceans, never takes the beaten path, and still comes out on top. He has, to my knowledge, never once "lost."

Well, recently, I hit a wall with R. Where I sent him something that I found radically funny, something that made me curl my toes and squeal with delight, sure that there was only one person on the face of the earth who would "get it" just like I did.

Only, he didn't. He didn't find them funny. The first time, I tried to explain to him what was so funny, but dug myself a deeper hole, metaphorically speaking.

The second time was a birthday card. I saw this birthday card for sale somewhere, and even though at the time I couldn't think of a single soul who I could give it to, I bought it anyway. It was like a razor's edge. It had a picture of a shot of liquor in a glass on the front and said "A shot for your birthday". Inside, it went on something like "a cold shot of reality, hitting you in the face with the fact that half your life is over and the future holds only gloom and death..." Something like that. If you take it seriously, it's positively sinister.

It made me laugh till i peed my pants. I had it about three years, and kept pulling it out to re-read it. Because if I've learned anything from "Uncle R", it's that the only thing the future holds is opportunity. That no matter how bad it looks, joyful determination will find a way through. I've often felt as depressed as this card described, but not for long, because the memory of something R has said to me has snapped me out of it, brought the spotlight of reality into the gloom, and shredded the shadows of self-doubt and timidity with a loud "Pah!" Putting nonsense firmly in it's place.

And then I gave the card to R, and he didn't find it funny. At all. In fact, it made him feel depressed. He told me he often feels this way, and there is nothing funny about it. And that I was being a little insensitive to what he was going through.

I was horrified. It's taken me about two weeks to process this, it came as such a shock. Not just that my bosom buddy didn't find it funny, but that he was going through something he felt he couldn't surmount. That my friend R felt like a "failure."

I still have a hard time putting that word in the same sentence with R's name. I talked to Hubby about it. I used the phrase, watching his face carefully, "R feels like a failure." Hubby's face registered absolute shock. "What???!!! No WAY!!!" was his response. Because we both feel, very deeply, that if R is a "failure", then so is all creation.

R is the smartest man I know, and I dare guess he is the smartest man I'll EVER know. And not just book-learning. I'm talking about Wisdom here. And Street-Smarts. And Intuition. And Compassion. Foresight.

I'd rather debate Mr. Spock than R. I'd rather debate god himself than try to match wits with R!

And from my lowly perspective, R, you are a trailblazer, and yes, I guess it gets a little lonely at the top where you spend your thinking time. But that's only because so few ever make it to where you have arrived. I can only catch the occasional glimpse of your reality when you're patient enough to explain it to me.

You are Leader, a Great Man, an Original Thinker. And you've done this while also being a Great Husband and Father, something damned few other "great men" have managed. And you are a Wonderful Friend. And you've done all this while keeping your curiosity and humor undimmed.

As a human being, you have no equal.