2 AM Call

Last night at 2 am my cell phone rang from an unknown local number. I picked it up and heard some noises but no voice.  Cell reception is awful at my house and this often happens, yet I figured it was a pocket-dial and hung up.  They called back right away. Twice.  Now fully awake and sitting up with the lights on, I sent it to voice mail. They left no message and called right back again. My heart was beating and my mind was whirring — I was certain something terrible had happened, a friend was in trouble, someone has died.  Since they were calling every 30 seconds, I sent a text to the number asking them to call the landline.  

The landline rang right away, and I stood barefoot in the cold kitchen looking at the phone on the counter, doing an inventory of the people in my life, getting ready for the middle of the night call that changes everything. I’ve had those calls before, and here it comes again. There’s nothing to do but step towards it, bring it to your ear, and begin. 

I pick it up and say Hello?  A casual, deep, smoke-heavy, female voice says “Itsjade.”  Pardon me?  “It’s JADE!” she barks.  Um, Hi, your phone just called me several times.  “I didn’t fucking call you.”  Well, actually you did, and if you don’t need to speak to Eaddy then there’s been a mistake.

“Don’t be texting me at two o'clock in the morning asking me to call you! Who the fuck are you?” and on she went, yelling, as I hung up the phone and bumped my way back to my room.  

The landline rings a minute later, I pick it up and hear the same causal “Itsjade.” Smoothly, she says, “Look, I don’t mean to be an asshole, but why the hell did you text me asking me to call you?”  I calmly explain that her phone called me multiple times, I have bad cell reception, and I thought there was an emergency.  

Jade doesn’t buy it. “I didn’t fucking call you. Are you sleeping with my wife? Why the hell else would you be texting my wife’s phone, asking her to call you? Are you sleeping with my wife?” Trying to stay mellow,  I replied, Nope, I don’t think so.  She roars back, “Oh you don’t THINK so?!? Where do you live? Where do you work? You’re fucking sleeping with my wife, just tell me. . . .” 

I hang up the phone, turn out the lights and get back into bed, relieved and amused.  A text arrives a few minutes later: “Yes don’t ask the wife to call you on the landline and get pissed at her! Slut!”  

Being called a slut in the middle of the night by an angry stranger was much better than the alternative — it was like waking up into a David Sedaris essay. I’m glad that everyone I love is safe, but it looks like I wasn't the only one afraid of losing someone that night. Cheaters beware, she’s checking your phone, she’s on to you, and she's ready to fight for what she loves. 

A Tale of Two Kitties

We were ready to welcome a new cat into the family during the first year of the pandemic but couldn’t get close to a kitten for love or money.  We had lost our Coco kitty in March to sudden illness, and all through the summer I searched on rescue and humane society websites, on regional “kittens wanted” Facebook groups, on Petfinder with a 200 mile radius.  Every available kitten was scooped up within moments, and all that was left behind were the begging, pleading comments streaming off each post.  We were in the running against a large and desperate pack of forlorn kitten contenders, and our application forms were locked and loaded and ready to launch into any portal that was open long enough for us to reach it. 

It didn’t help that we were picky.  I was determined to find another tortoiseshell, in honor of the best kitty I’ve ever known, Coco.  We didn’t want a solid color cat, or a tuxedo cat, or an orange tiger stripe cat.  We wanted a cat with a certain kind of marking and expression, a certain look in the eye, a certain kind of energy.  We wanted a female.  We’d spend hours swiping through cat photos like Tinder, with no’s far outnumbering yes’s, knowing that we’d be happy with any snaggletoothed ally cat we could be so lucky to have. 

It wasn’t until November that I saw the photos of one tiny tortiseshell and one grey tiger kitten on our local humane society website.  I called that moment and they offered the next possible appointment the following day, which alone was like winning the lottery.  Naturally, we only expected to visit the kitties and begin the arduous and uncertain process, but an hour after saying “we love them both,” we were walking out of the building with not one but two fat folders full of information and two cardboard boxes with a kitten each.  The staff and volunteers had invested a lot of time and care into these particular kitties, and now they sent them off with enthusiasm, extra blankets, familiar toys, and a bag of premium kitten food.  We were stunned. 

This is what we knew — they were both born around the same time to different mothers, both wild and feral, and both litters were brought into the shelter on the same day.  We don’t know how each litter of kittens fared in the wild, whether they were in cozy barns, or cold abandoned buildings, in the woods, or under porches in a caring neighborhood, but around eight weeks old, someone scooped them up and away from their mothers and brought them to the Humane Society.  The two batches of kittens entered an expert cycle of care, warmth, litter boxes, bowls of wet food, and gentle loving hands — the efforts to welcome them into human civilization took patience and skill.  Once cleared for health and temperament, spayed, neutered and micro-chipped, their photos were taken for an adoption listing where they were instantly Hoovered into homes across the county.  

Our two kittens were to last ones left from each litter. The tortoiseshell was clearly the runt who was so small when she arrived they said she was “just a pair of eyes.” They assured us she was not technically a midget or dwarf cat, and that she had made huge progress since arriving, but she might have trouble with stairs. She was balled up tight in her little cage and did not want to come out, but she did nuzzle our hands when we put them in and her little golden toes peeked out and sealed the deal. The other one was so busy chasing her own tail and rocketing to the top of the climbing pole that we only had a fleeting impression that she indeed had the energy and the look we were seeking. 

This turned out to be Bootsy.  Once home, she bolted out of the box with alacrity and charm.  Her markings are striking, pure black lines painted onto a fine sable coat, wet glossy ink drawn in patterns of perfect symmetry. She’s marked with the crisp, exact arcs and zigzags of the deepest jungle creatures, the jaguar, the leopard,  the serval.  The lined eyes of Egyptian funerary artists grace her features,  the flow of perfect stripes moves over the crown and down her neck, the fearful geometry of the tiger ripples down her front legs.  Her thick, short fur is soft like a mink, her chin and underbelly glows golden with complexity.

Bootsy moves through the room like she’s ready to kick ass and take names, her sense of self is a wonder to watch.  Within the first moment of emerging from the foundling box into her new palace of comfort, she owned every square inch. She absorbed it all in an instant, a few sniffs around the edges and soon she was anointing the litter box like a queen.  

As she moved through the room on the first day, it’s obvious that this kitten carries the lineage of a hundred wild generations throughout her frame, especially in her freakishly large paws.  This is more than a simple extra toe, the cat has full double paws.   They meet the earth like elephant feet, wide padded staffs of stability, but these are designed to kill.  She has not one, but two opposable thumbs on each paw, glided with fine pinpoint razors.   Her front legs are bowed out like she just slid off a long ride on the range, she swaggers when she walks, the curves in the front arms are all the better for scooping up the prey with her massive mittens.  

Bootsy's pupils are tuned towards movement, and her body tenses like a trained dog when a bird flutters in a tree she cannot see. She can’t see the bird, she can’t see the tree, she doesn’t even know what a window is, but she sensed the shift of light and shadow within her periphery and her instincts were loaded in a nano-second.  This is the wisdom of generations of cats surviving in the wild, preying on more birds and small mammals than we are ready to comprehend.  

For now, Bootsy will be an indoor cat, it is winter and there’s a large house to explore, including a rodent filled basement that we are eager to introduce her to. She is a fine-tuned feline killing machine, and we aim to keep her inside, yet she’s clearly voracious in drive to conquer. She studies the door when it opens, she is making plans to expand her world, you can just tell it is going to be a problem to keep her inside. 

Here’s how she met the dog, a large yellow lab who is mellow and sore with age.  Bucky was kept out of my office where the kitties were quarantined for the first  weeks, and all three of them exchanged long, curious sniffs underneath the door. The kittens could hear his paws coming down the hallway, hear his whines to be let inside, we all knew how bereft he was to be excluded and demoted.  He had a dog bed in the office for the days he liked to keep me company, the kittens knew his smell intimately and had assumed the dog bed as their own. 

The kittens got a lot of attention those first weeks, but we were sensitive to Bucky’s jealously and pledged to give him double love and extra walks.  When I couldn’t take his forlorn sighs behind the closed door any more, when the kittens had relaxed enough to lounge around the office like it was a sultan’s den, snacking on rich pates, surrounded by soft and special things, blissed out and milk drunk on the oversized dog bed, I opened the door and let him in. 

Good boy, good Bucky, nice and slow, I commanded.  Praising him, soothing him, congratulating him on his noble approach, he sniffed around the room while Bootsy watched and the other kitten burrowed deeper into her small dark hole.   Bootsy didn’t flinch as he clattered around her den, Bucky gave her the side eye, afraid to look directly at this new thing.  She sat upright and relaxed, he approached and they touched noses in a sniff, and soon she was stretched out in an eyes-half-closed pose of approval.  We have always called Bucky an Omega dog, the opposite of Alpha, the submissive and deferential dog, and Bootsy seemed to be making plans to rig up a saddle for his back and command him as her personal steed. 

What about the other kitten?  We wondered about her too, for we rarely saw her the first month.  All we knew was that she was a female toritshell with green eyes and golden toes, a diminutive echo of our Queen Coco. 

Where Bootsy expanded instantly to fill her new den with natural dominion,  the other kitten shrank.  She withdrew into herself with such force she involuted into thin air.  I wished I’d taken more care when opening her box and introducing her to the room, I assumed a timid yet curious little kitten would emerge.  Instead, a tightly wound ball of fear and vigilance jammed itself into the smallest possible space and stayed there.  

My office has plenty of deep hiding spaces, stacks of boxes in front of bookshelves, an old armchair with sagging springs,  creaky oak dressers. She wedged and burrowed into all of them, we could find her only by the gleam of her enormous eyes in the dark corners, her fur the perfect camouflage for the shadows, her optic pans dialed open and stuck in a state of alarm reflecting back to us.   We left plates of wet food as close to her as we could get, and tried to keep Bootsy sated so the little kitty could have a chance. 

One day I couldn’t find her, I crawled along the perimeter of the room and peered into all of her places and she was gone. A few hours later, I called for reinforcements and my husband found her, or at least her tail.  It was hanging down underneath one of the dressers, where she had jammed herself between the closed drawer and the backing, a space of maybe two inches.  She must have been spread eagle in the crack like a spider and only a few inches of her tail was hanging down. 

Bootsy has the energy of the Roman army rippling through her fibers, she was born fully trained for destruction, death, and decadence.  She pounded around the room and thumped and wollopped everything in her path.  She was only twelve weeks old and her mega-paws filled the palm of my hand. The little torishell kitty had tiny dark paws with golden patches, and at a distance, it created an illusion of even smaller paws, half-paws.  Boosty had a fist full of knives, but the little one seemed to have barely any claws at all - she used her paws like the fins of a fish, waving towards things with a gentle, impotent brush. 

We cooed at her and soothed her from a distance as best we could.  Occasionally we’d find the two of them snuggled deeply into a corner, and were greatly relieved the little one was receiving healing warmth, that her fried nervous system was relaxing into the rhythms of a feline embrace.  We couldn’t provide any physical comfort, only soft blankets and beds, we knew she needed to unwind the stone cold fear that set in her bones and that touch could help, but not ours.  

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I’ve never wanted to replace a thing like I did Coco.  I didn’t want just another cat in the house, I wanted one like her.  A tiny tortoiseshell female with green eyes and golden toes.  A tail with constant expression, a voice that was less meow and more chatter and chortle, wise kitty words.  A cat who exuded intelligence and smarts.  Only another tortisehell would do, an idea that fixed early and stayed strong throughout the half-year search. 

It is a bias based on coat-color, yet there’s a little bit of science that suggests that tortoise might be distinctive.  There’s only been one study done into the correlation between coat and personality, and tortoise stood out for their “tortitude” — it’s true that every tuxedo cat I’ve known has been a dingbat, and every orange cat a thug.

Yet in every measure, this cat came up short - tortie or not, she was clearly not Coco, they were very different critters.   The fault with attempting to find a replacement became clear, it’s just not fair to the new one, they will always disappoint as they stand in the after-shadow of the deceased.  The fallen rises up to perfection, while the one standing before you becomes known only by its deficiencies.  It took awhile for the comparisons to purge, which was a relief.  We tried to figure out who this new kitty was, but first she needed a name. 

Bootsy arrived with her name already implanted in our minds.  More than one of us claims to have named her, we each believe we were the first to refer to her that way within the first moments of her arrival. But we all agree that there was no question — with paws like that, Bootsy simply is. Sometime we call her ‘The Boot” and we have fun with the pronunciation of Bootes, the constellation in the sky. 

The other kitty, who we barely knew and wasn’t exactly making a great first impression, remained nameless for a rather long time.  So long that I considered it was a sign that maybe we should return her - I wasn’t sure we were doing her any favors here at our house, instead of getting comfortable and relaxing, she seemed to be re-traumatized every time there was a loud noise or sudden movement.  She seemed much more comfortable in her tiny cage at the shelter. The longer she remained nameless, the more I wondered if this was the right place. 

We tried out a dozen names and nothing made sense. It was all forced and based on a cat we hoped she would one day become, such as a Trixie or Ruby.  The only names that seemed to match with her personality and way of being in the world were Weasel, Marmot, Martin, Stoat — when we saw her at all, she was a stiff, fleeting streak of crouched shadow. Her tortoise colorations were mostly black with an uneven sprinkle and a few smudges of tan, only her toes had the golden spots.  Where Bootsy’s fur is every inch symmetry painted by the creators practiced hand,  this kitty was a splat of paint on the studio floor.  Naming her was a challenge. 

Finally, after about a month, we came into agreement that we should just go with what we know so far — she’s a miniature cat, so we’ll call her Mini, Min-Min, Minzer, Minnow.  She is rather fish-like. 

We opened the door to the rest of the house after three weeks when Bootsy was about to take matters into her own enormous paws and twist the doorknob herself — the way she sat and studied it was a little scary. 

Predictably, Bootsy mapped the entire upstairs in one tour, launched into the downstairs rooms, and immediately accepted her expanded dominion.  For Mini, this development fried her circuits and set her back significantly.  We didn’t see her again for a week. 

With long hallways and big rooms to amplify her footfalls, Bootsy moves through the house like rolling thunder, like a rider on the storm.   I wouldn’t be surprised to see her cruising down the road on a fat Harley someday, leather-clad and studded, with the mufflers tuned to maximum roar.  She’s got that look in her eye, she’s the boss of any hog, her powerful limbs and copious thumbs would thrill to the throttle. 

For those first months, we’d say to ourselves, it’s a good thing these kitties  are so different. What if we had two cats like Bootsy?  They’d tear the house down.———————————-

Mini is terrified of the humans, the ones who ply her with soft beds, toys, rich foods and sweet words.  She’s in a stiffened state of terror in our presence, hunched, alarmed, with a tail that sticks straight out and doesn’t bend.  It’s like she’s plugged into a low-voltage source that keeps her electrified and taught.  If she comes out while I’m working in the office, all I have to do is slide my glasses up on my head and she bolts. 

Meanwhile, her feline sister is a savage who uses her as a plaything.  Bootsy is a natural-born killer and her kitten-play could turn deadly in a heart beat — I’ve watched her pin little Mini and lunge for the windpipe with a force of a million generations, the ancestral lioness echoing through every move.  That’s who she should be afraid of. 

Thankfully, Mini is not just a punching bag, she gets some good swats in. They are far from equally matched, but Mini does initiate a pounce about a quarter of the time and enjoys a good parry.  She can and does squirm out of the feline full nelson when she needs to and she is soon prancing back for more.  But all the while I’m worried that Bootsy will accidentally kill her, it would be so easy. We humans give her nothing but comfort and gentle kindness and she’s terrified, but the cat who beats the crap out of her every day, no problem.

Mini is a kitty pulled in two directions, two opposing forces of biological imperative.  One is a force of urgent fear and alarm that she felt in her mothers chemical cascade and rapid heart while in the womb.  Tightly coiled tensions wound around this kitties bones while they were still soft, and they hardened into a defensive crouch.  This force jams her away from us whenever we appear or make a noise, her mother’s survival a testament to her skill of escape and hiding. 

The opposing force is the one that needs mammalian comfort to survive, needs the bonding that comes from grooming and plush comforts.  She’s curious and desperate for this loving, you can see the two halves of her body twist and torque, one running away, the other straining forward.   She takes one step forward then snaps back down the hallway.  She sees one of us and freezes in her crouch, then lurches forward, then runs away with flying limbs.  

It’s at feeding time when the biological needs collide and the force of hunger brings her forward.  Here I delay the opening of the can to give Mini time in my presence, where she keeps her front end as far away as possible while her backend steps backwards.  I use my hands like wide paddles of gentle pressure, not scratching or petting, no rapid movements, but slow and steady pressure on both sides of her.  She stays in motion and paces back and forth, and moves through my palms like a chute.  

I focus on her stiff tail as she slides through, curving it, bending it, gripping the base and giving it a wiggle, trying to get some mobility and life force into the thing.  I run my fingers down both sides of her spine, smoothing down her network of neural pathways that are tangled at the switchboard, adding a zig zag that crosses the midline from crown to root to encourage integration. She never stops moving for this, she’s constantly moving both away and towards me at the same time, stillness is not an option. 

After about three months, Mini had widened to the size of two slice toaster and it was time to wean them off the wet food.  In our house, wet food is for the bookends of life and kibble is for the duration. Wet food was essential for them both, as it was about relationship and positive association as much as it was nutrition and calories. It was often the only time we saw Mini, they both knew the regular feeding time and swarmed us until we produced the goods. We began spacing out the wet food feasts with more and more days until the final can was consumed. 

Mini shrugged it off pretty easily and settled right into constant kibble, but Bootsy took her complaints to the management, following us around, lasering into us with the evil eye, darting between our feet and roadblocking us at the top of the stairs.  We became the wet food she was after, all she had to do was kill one of us and she could feast for weeks. 

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Bootsy is a busy-body, trailing after everyone, always getting up to investigate.  She has a need to confirm and understand what is going on.  Strange sounds send her towards the source with her tail twitching, while Mini dives under the covers and isn’t seen again for hours.  What ever is going on, Bootsy is in the middle of it - she thinks the sweeping broom is just grand, especially those little piles of crumbs and bits, she dives into it again and again. Packages are a dream, especially the tape and empty box. Groceries, the mail, anything that enters the house she needs to investigate.  Mini’s world is very small, and she likes it that way, while Bootsy’s horizons are straining against the house walls. 

Bootsy crawls into the dishwasher when it is open, she follows me into the bathroom and jumps on the seat, she waits with the dog at his food bowl, eager to be present for the event.  Worse, she flies up the stairs when she hears me cooing to Mini.  We talk to Bootsy like an athlete on the field, trying to get her to rein in her power, stay in line and not destroy the house. We talk to Mini like a newborn baby, with lots of gentle sweetness and soft tones.  When Boosty is downstairs roaming and Mini is lonely upstairs, she will often come out into the hall and consider an interaction.  As soon as I start talking to Mini, trying to coax her down the hall, her lead-footed sister comes charging up to the stairs to see whats’s going on, like a jacked-up cop on the beat.  

Fortunately, she’s not a complete attention hog.  I pay her no mind whatso ever in these moments, except to nudge her away if she gets too close. I keep my focus on Mini and reward her approach with long stokes and scratches and Boots soon gets bored and goes on her way.  Mini can handle a few moments of positive interaction and touch before she gets overcome and runs away, comforted by her own startle reflexes. 

Have you ever seen a cat twist in two, pop right in half?  That’s what Mini does every time she sees us. She strains forward towards connection while rocketing backwards into safety, it’s a wonder she’s still in one piece. 

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The way Bootsy studies the world really makes one wonder about the relationship between hands and brain development.  She’s definitely getting more sensory input through her extra large paws.  When she walks on your thighs, the breadth of the warmth emanating from those pads is surprising, even after you’ve come to expect it.  There’s extra information flowing through her system, and the powers of cognition have expanded to meet it. 

Given the right conditions, she seems capable of inventing the wheel.  

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Bootsy is always one of two places, underfoot or on our laps. Her ownership of a seated lap, especially one with a soft blanket, is pre-ordained, divine law.  She assumes her position without acknowledgement, she simply begins by tossing her head back with sinuous abandon and flexing her paws in ecstasy, awaiting the stroking hand.  

The wood stove is her alter, she’s a shameless supplicant, stretched out along the length of its warm embrace. We bought a little kitty bed that’s perfectly round, deep, and fluffy, and put it near the wood stove where she immediately found her place deep within its curves.  Sometimes we’d only see her ears  peeking out, sometimes the back leg fully extended into the air, sometimes her head lolling over the edge in an overheated stupor.  We call it the kitty hot tub.  Sometimes she spills right over the edge in a long soft stream of silken fur, draped and drunken and limp, like a soft-porn photoshoot of feline decadence. 

Mini, we don’t even know where she sleeps.  We suspect it is under the extra bed in our daughters room, the one that is against the wall and has a thick coverlet that drapes to the floor, we imagine she spends about 20 of every 24 hours under there, but we haven’t investigated.  If she’s under there processing her fears and steadying her nervous system, deep within a sensory deprivation chamber of safety, then we certainly don’t want to disturb it.  She materializes when she does, but most of the time she’s simply not present.

Mini can barely screw up the courage to walk along the upstairs hallway from the bedroom to the office. Bootsy shoots down the hall on hyperdirve, ricocheting and scaling the vertical surfaces with an inner momentum that has yet to meet its match. The stairs are her launching pad. Wherever the action is, she slinks into the center, tuned in, turned on, and running hot. 

Bootsy rules over both floors and the large seven room home plus the full basement, often emerging from the darkness frosted with ancient cobwebs.  She prowls along the windowsills chattering and vibrating with tension and expectation.  Mini has made it down the full set of stairs perhaps three times in six months, each time a brief, wide-eyed, high strung endeavor that ends quickly with her snapping back up to safety.  So we have a downstairs cat and an upstairs cat.  

We spend most of our time as a family in the den, where the books, couch,  dog bed, and wood stove are.  The stairs leading to the second floor go up along the wall above the couch, and the fourth stair down has become Mini’s perch.  She hangs out on the stair edge and watches us like she’s watching an adventure movie, her head swiveling back and forth with wide eyes to follow us as we move around the world.  Between Bootsy, Bucky and the humans, there’s a lot to keep track of and she seems genuinely entertained. She’s up there most nights, her tiny golden paws hang over the edge, her little head strains forward with interest, she doesn’t run away when we say her name and extend a hand.  

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She presents her back end for attention while looking over her hunched shoulders in wide-eyed anticipation. She’s a roly-poly little kitty with a width out of proportion to her length, she’s a tiny chunker. Her backend behaves like an overloaded semi-truck, always on the verge of a jack-knife.  When she sits down to commence a cleaning session, she tends to flop over with the weight.  She has a habit of rolling her backend onto one hip and as her girth spreads out, her head remains high and tiny, making her look like a microscopic Jabba the Hut. 

By Valentines Day, Mini had reached some key developmental milestones.  Her tail had softened from a rigid, awkward appendage that shot out in a straight line into something closer to a naturally curving expression. Once, she ran towards me down the hall, a motion so unusual that she surprised us both.  I think she was genuinely excited to see me and her enthusiasm pushed her forward faster than her fears.  It ended in a skitter and a spaz, but I took it as an excellent sign of progress.  The next major milestone was a crash and a bang as she knocked over her first plant. 

Bootsy reached this milestone within the first 24 hours, and she learned her lesson fast with a stern scolding — she’s smart enough to understand and lord knows she needs to get the message that she’s not the alpha around here.  The number of plants in this house is considerable, and they must remain outside of her dominion or it will look like an overturned potting shed every time we come home. 

When I heard the crash upstairs, I looked at Bootsy nestled in her kitty hot tub and smiled — Mini was up there pushing the edge of her known world, exploring the windowsills, sniffing the greenery. She was firing new neurons and mapping new zones and then bang — I didn’t need to see it to know that she shot like a cannon into her little hole and we barely noticed when we didn’t see her again for days.  She was under the bed, we assume, recovering and processing the calamity, and I’m pretty sure the houseplants upstairs are safe for a good while longer. 

By Easter, Bootsy is in a full blown love affair with her dog, Bucky.  She gazes at him with longing, ambushes him around the corners, lays down in front of him and reaches out with gentle taps, inquires for engagement of any type. When he harmlessly snaps his jaws in her direction, she thrills with excitement and jumps up to take the party to the next level.  Bucky is annoyed and would like some peace, Bootsy is desperate for some action.

She takes full ownership of his orthopedic dog bed, choosing it over her hot tub on most days. The old yellow lab stands next to his bed looking down at this little cat who has stretched to her full length and managed to leave no room on the copious cushion.  He’s such a good boy that he won’t step onto the bed until we move Bootsy to the side and hold her back until he gets settled.  She then snuggles in with the huge dog, taking deep inhales of his paws and fur, and turns her purr up to 11 while Bucky sighs with resignation.  She loves him so much, she’d take his face in her fat paws and make out with him if he’d let her. 

Bootsy goes on wild kitty tears through the house, burning out in crazy spins that leave the rugs in a tangle.  She’s bolted for the open door more than once and it is a matter of time before her killing power is prowling among the songbirds, voles, and mice.  I tried a collar with a bell and it was truly awful — for an hour, she was contorting in seizures of panic and confusion, it was clear that she was going to lose her prodigious mind and go insane if it stayed on.  Next is the clown collar, a fabric ruff with crazy designs that give the birds a few moments of extra awareness before she pounces, which I am sure she will hate, but hopefully she will only feel silly and ridiculous, not insane. 

As the daffodils began to rise and the bluebirds land on the nesting box, Mini begins to weave between my feet while I sit at the desk. She reaches her little golden paws up my leg for attention, a pressure so slight I hardly notice.  I reach down and give her a pat and then get back to work, but she wants more.  Preoccupied and distracted, I scoop her up and put her on my lap, and she purrs and circles back and forth like it’s always been this way, her tail straight in the air and tickling my face.  She walks onto the desk, tiny paws clicking the mouse pad and prancing along the keyboard, jeopardizing my work but worth it.  

It’s taken six months, but this little trauma bound kitty has unwound a few notches and has accepted the safety and stability of our home. She’s still only four steps down the stairway to the whole second half of the house, but last night she was stretched out on her stair with her paw extended languidly, watching us with a casual gaze, perched in her balcony of observation in a state of deep contentment.  We coo and cheer her on, congratulating her new confidence and sense of comfort and she gives us a slow blink of acceptance before Bootsy has to charge up there to investigate. 

These two kitties are a balanced pair of temperaments, both born feral, both separated from their mothers and brought into the warmth of human care on the same day, but imprinted with opposite inclinations.  Bootsy was born ready, her sharp mind matched by sharper instincts and served by massive paws, the world is her pleasure playground. For Mini, half a year of calm security has only just begun to soften the grip her fear-soaked first weeks. She’s literally floating above the world from a safe distance, four steps down from certainty, residing in an in-between reality while her circuits get soothed, rewired, and welcomed home.  

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One Year Update

In the late summer of that year, we figured both kitties were celebrating their first birthday, each in their own way.  Bootsy had expanded her kingdom to the great outdoors and was full of pride.  They way she struts back into the house then preens in the center of the large dog bed is all ego.  She relented to both the clown collar and the bell, and in fact she seems to like them.  She parades around the yard asking, don't you like my new collar?  It's a modern lion's mane, and she seems to feel perfectly at home in it.  As for the bell, I think her senses became so overwhelmed with delight in the outside world, that she no longer hears it.  

Unfortunately, neither do the birds.  Both the extra visibility and the jingle isn't enough to save them all.  Saddest of all, she caught not one but two hummingbirds her first summer.  That's a testament to her skill, but devastating for us as longtime bird enthusiasts, bird feeders, and bird-friendly gardeners.  It seems to be a binary choice -- if we are going to let Bootsy outside, we can no longer continue to feeds the birds at our two deluxe feeding stations, filled with nuts, seeds, fruit, suet, and hand-mixed  humming bird food, Nor should we fill the popular bird baths with fresh water nestled in the garden, and plant flowers we know the birds and butterflies love. She also came in the house with more than one monarch!  We can't draw these vulnerable creatures into our yard when we've let a killer loose. 

It's a serious dilemma and we limit her time outside, but keeping her in was impossible -- she bolts for the door every time it opens, she strikes like a viper, more than once she's been squashed in half by the slamming door, every cell of her being is a magnetized force demanding her presence outside. 

In the mornings, she joins her best buddy the dog, both shooting outside side by side, Boosty kicking up her hind legs with a mustang flourish, setting out to conquer the new day.   

Mini had a more subtle breakthrough, but we all noticed that around her first birthday, she started showing up more.  With Bootsy gone and otherwise occupied, this gave Mini the space to figure some things out on her own terms.  Bootsy didn't bully Mini (they ate together peacefully, sniffed and licked each other with affection) but she did dominate, harass, and run her around the upstairs rooms to exhaustion.  Mini was her plaything, which didn't leave a lot of room for Mini to explore on her own.  Once Bootsy was either outside, or inside sleeping off her wild benders, Mini moved into the available space.  With caution but increasing confidence, Mini descended the stairs and joined the fringes. 

Three Dreams of Premonition

Have you ever had a dream come true?  I’m talking about the nighttime, sleeping type of dream, when images and symbols move across a deep screen below your waking mind — have they ever moved into the sunshine of reality during the next day?   They have for me.  Premonitions, heralds of the future, or coincidence, I don’t know, but here’s the true story of three dreams that came true . . . . .

The real-life backstory: My mother has died, she was unmarried and unpartnered, and I’m an only child. I am recently divorced, have two children, and am working full time in a demanding job.  My mother’s apartment in Florida is full of beautiful things - furniture, art, rugs - but empty of a person, just as she left it on the day of her sudden, traumatic, death.  I live 2,000 miles away and am struggling through overwhelm and confusion to manage the situation from afar - so many decisions to make, so much responsibility, a profound feeling of being alone, and terrified of making a mistake forever shackled to regret. 

The sleeping dream: The walls are crumbling and water is pouring in, dripping, running, flowing. I awake from this short, powerful but vague dream with a start, gripped with the sensation that my mother’s apartment has flooded from within.  Heart racing, mind whirling, I try to logically compartmentalize the sensations as unmoored grief and sadness.  Water is the element of the unconscious, says Jung, it makes perfect sense that the space where my mother was is now filled with a flow of loss. It makes sense that my anxiety has given me this image of literal overwhelm, it’s just a metaphor.  I put the dream aside and push on into a wrinkled half-clean set of clothes and attempt to meet as many of my immediate responsibilities as I can manage and head into the day. 

Three days later: The phone rings with a Florida number, I pick it up, and it’s the manager of the apartment complex.  My mother’s apartment is flooded. Literally.  The central drainage pipe from the air conditioning  units in the surrounding apartments has clogged, causing a backup — the AC unit in my mother’s apartment shut off, but the others kept running, causing a wet, hot, moldy situation to bloom throughout the walls, carpets, and everything within.  The dream came true, I had an actual hot mess emergency 2,000 miles away which was consuming the physical remains of my mothers home.  A living nightmare. 
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The backstory, the truth:  I’ve met a wonderful man and within a year we are slowly and cautiously considering joining as a family.  With measure and ease, he begins living part-time with me and the kids in our new home while he works and commutes to a demanding job an hour away.  I’m still in my long-term recovery from waves of compound loss (mother, father, divorce) and neither of us are skilled enough to navigate the typical challenges of partial co-parenting, housework habits and differences, and new levels of emotional care-taking.  We love and adore each other deeply, we feel magnetic warmth between us, yet our communications frayed and tattered and disintegrated so deeply that one day, we called it off.  We sobbed and clutched one another in the darkness, then he packed up his things and drove away.  For good.  The sound of the departing wheels on the driveway thrummed through every cell of my weary heart.  

The dream in the night: A squirrel is climbing high in the branches of a large tree.  The tree is the family tree, the branches are lineage, branches of connection, forking, spreading, fruiting.  The squirrel is traveling along the lines, moving upward towards the top, when the branch cracks underneath him. It breaks and falls, one branch, then another, leaving a big gap in the tree and the sky filled with only air and emptiness.  Falling, I wake up in a pool of flattened, resigned, sadness.   That dream pretty much summed up the situation, the fractured sense of family, the big hole and loss, how interesting that dreams can pull together the threads of reality into poetic metaphors behind our closed, resting eyes. 

That morning: The kids are still sleeping, I take my cup of coffee out to the porch to stare through my bereavement at the garden in the spring morning. In the driveway are two parking spots, one is my space with my car, the other was his space, filled with absence.  I look over and in his empty parking space is a large broken branch.  A large tree branch is now resting in his parking space.  A branch heavy enough to have done damage to a car, it gave way in the stillness of the night and landed where he used to be. Just like my dream. I examine the tree above, the night was perfectly still and windless, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.  But it’s real, a family symbol is in pieces, there’s nothing to do but drag it over the bank and give it to the hungry forces that will consume it, releasing it back the soft, spongy forest soil.   
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The backstory, the shameful truth:  The piles of mail cascade like scales on a snake, like crests on the rapids, like dunes across my long-neglected desk.  I can’t deal.  The envelopes are silent, they arrive, they gather. They may be shouting on the inside, but if I don’t open them, I’ll never need to know.   I’m choosing not to hear it, just stay over there all sealed up and flat, growing by thin layers, slithering just out of earshot, the bite and venom of neglect won’t get me as long as I stay over here at a safe distance. A lifetime of perfect credit hangs in the space between me and the piles, and somehow, I catch most things just in time. 11th-hour jolts of action get nine out of ten bills paid, squeaking under the wire.  But I missed one.  Big time. 

In a fit of muddled thinking, I attempted to simplify everything and I closed all credit accounts.  I think I’m mitigating my risks. However, deep in the pile, there’s a $200 account fee seething, a message that I failed to open, failed to comprehend, and failed to pay, for a very long time. The envelopes piled so high that the big credit card company gave up, gave my bill away to get bundled up with other bad debts. They it sold off to an unnamed third party, and my single unpaid bill got swallowed up into a credit-damaging hellscape. 

When I finally realize what has happened, it had been a while and the damage was pretty deep. I try to right the wrong and pay the bill, but I’m soon caught in a relentless circle of corporate disfunction and obfuscation — no one knows who holds this old debt, the amount is so small, the deals are so large. It’s been bundled and sold on a fast-moving marketplace, wheeled and dealed and stripped of everything except my social security number.  No one can tell me who to pay to make it go away. I plead, I calmly explain, I rage, hot tears of stress and disbelief burn my cheeks.  I yell and curse at innocent people in India who can only read from a script. I call lawyers, I call credit agencies, no one offers to help me, not even for a fee, and I go limp, spent from the efforts of trying to give someone, anyone, $200 to make the madness stop.

This unpaid bill is making a really awful mark on my credit report, red-zone bad, I am now clocking in near the lowest possible numbers. I’m now at the bottom of the barrel in this stratification of credit and worthiness.  I’ve been marked as prey by the predatory lenders, and the letters that pile now are slickly laid traps for the desperate, the destitute, for those who have been starved of all options and will grab any offer that looks like a lifeline.

This is penance for my neglect.  My perfect score is now in the basement, getting monthly dings that will keep it there until I hire the right team to unearth the new owner of this debt and undo the damage from my willful ignorance.  I am resigned, but genuinely scared for what this means for my future - unexpected expenses, hard times, rejected car loans, mortgages denied, no credit to use as a cushion.

I try to make a fresh start by combing through my credit report every month and opening a new credit card — all I can get is a $300 limit with 27% interest and a hefty annual fee.  I used to have a fat multi-digit limit because my credit score was so good, but now I swallow my shame and take it. For a year I pay off this bill every month and my credit score still stays in the red zone because every month that unpayable $200 bill shows up as a scarlet letter that marks me as unworthy. 

The wonderful nighttime dream: A computer screen shows my credit score on a graph, skipping along the bottom.  I’m haunted by this failure, my regret is heavy, the line is dragging me through the depths of remorse. Then the screen changes color and becomes animated. A blinking, smiling star emoji appears and is now following a sharply rising line.  Like a hockey stick, my credit score is now peaking to the highest level at the top of the screen.  Ding Ding Ding, it’s the big moment on the Price is Right, I’ve won the prize, rejoice! 

That morning: It’s such a nice, hopeful dream, but I wake rueful and resigned.  I think about how it’s time to set aside another three-hour chunk, to saddle up for the frustration, make the calls, and go to battle in the depths of bundled bad debt.  I sit at the kitchen counter with my coffee and check my email on the phone and see this Subject Line: New Information About Your Credit Card.  

Oh great, I think, they’re letting me know my score has dropped again, just like it does every month.  I open it and instead the full email says this: Good News!  We’ve increased your credit limit to $1,000! My worthiness had increased by a multiple of three. Just like the star emoji promised. Another dream has come true, and this time it’s good.  

I was charged with excitement, something positive had finally happened, the rock I’d been pounding against had rolled uphill just an inch and it felt like a mile. Empowered by the progress, I dove deep into the folds of shadowy ownership and contact information and found a human on the line who could help.  First, she confirmed that this was indeed a problem and that I wasn’t the only one who had been unable to pay my bill.  And then she promised to make amends, and she did.

Within three months of the dream, the whole matter is resolved, four years of red-zone history is absolved, my credit is restored. The needle is jammed so far into the green zone that they called me “Exceptional.” Everything is blinking stars and cries of victory, sitting astride a ride straight to the top, Ding Ding Ding, just like the dream. 

The Lucky Pearl of Mirth

A flash of fear comes right at you, grips and shakes you as it rips through your system, but it was a false alarm, everything is actually fine.  When someone pops around the corner and startles you,  the innocent movements flash into our reflexes faster than our thoughts, and our bodies get ready for action faster than we understand none is needed.  When fear comes nestled right up next to safety, both arriving in almost the same moment, the juxtaposition is so instant and alarming that you yell, curse, and laugh. The laughter is called nervous laughter, but I think it’s deeper than just the butterflies - your entire nervous system has been shocked while you still stand secure, and laughter uncoils the spring that instantly wound tight, ready to fight or flee for life.  

We all laugh when this shock/relief happens, but when it happens to me, the mirth might overflow. There’s been a few times when the shock/relief hit me in a way that got out of control, laughing way beyond what was appropriate, such as the time I was sitting in a small, darkened, college classroom listening to a ho-hum slideshow presentation.

This was an Ecology class, and the day’s topic was about environmental highlights in the local area, everything was dim and cozy.  The mood in the room was quiet and a bit sleepy as we stared at the screen and listened to the fan and turning gears of the projector. He talked on and on in his mild and pleasant way as he clicked through the slides of maps and photographs. 

He turned to the screen to point to something specific, and at his touch, the scene exploded - the screen flew up into a clanging, flapping dervish, spinning and flipping the cord with alarming speed.  The invisible screen had jumped alive like a wild cartoon, a threatening menace with a pull-cord whipsaw and metal banging glee. The spinning and ringing went on, then slowed, and then stopped. All was quiet again and he was safe, standing there in front of us and the bright empty wall, with his pointer still in his hand and a wide-eyed, stunned look on his face. 

Everyone laughed a polite laugh, it was funny to be so startled and to see the professor’s expression, but I lost my mind.  The class pulled itself together, the screen was cautiously pulled back down,  the lecture was set to resume, but I was still in the grip of the moment.  It was too much - the gentle man, the explosion, I could not stop laughing.  Soon an assistant teacher in the back of the room shot me a dirty look and I took myself outside, where I stayed laughing for quite a long time, taking sips of water, walking around, breathing, trying to pull it together.  I eventually slipped back in, unsuccessfully chagrined and still simmering with giggles, kind of embarrassed, but come on, that was hilarious, right? 

A few years later, I was at the end of a long-distance bike trip, 800 miles of cycling and camping through the south.  I was with a friend whom I admired for his playful, silly ways - he got my attention when he rested his forehead against the wall in a glass elevator and said, “If you look down and flap your arms, it feels like you’re flying.”  Soon after that,  he rolled a cherry tomato down the health food store aisle to say “Hi” and we went for a walk where we found a piece of rope on the sidewalk, tied it to our ankles,  and did the three legged walk the rest of the way. We soon set off on a two-wheel adventure with open minds, little money, and a vague destination.

As the summer heat became unbearable, it became clear it was time to park the bikes for the season. We arrived in a new town with only what we could carry on our bikes, so the first night in the new apartment in a rough neighborhood was not so different from the camping we had been doing for the past six weeks. The electricity hadn’t been turned on yet, which also meant no hot water, but it had been more than a week since we had showered so very cold water and the absence of a shower curtain didn’t deter us. We lit a candle in the darkening house and stood together in the bathtub, taking turns under the icy stream. It was tough, but we were used to it. 

Shivering, he kelt down in the tub to gather up his warmth and courage, all balled up in a tense little squat.   Then, leaping like a frog over the edge of the bathtub, because that’s the kind of silly guy he was,  he sprung up and over, hit the wet linoleum and shot across the room on his back. In an instant he was wedged under the toilet, his knees up to his ears, straddling the throne with two butt cheeks nestled around the porcelain base.  

When I say he shot across the room, that’s just what I mean, like lightening. One minute he’s right next to me and the next he’s a like a helpless pale bug on its back, throttled across space and pinned under the crapper, gleaming and wet in the candle light.  It is a position you never, ever expect anyone to be in - there are lots of ways to approach a toilet, whether you are peeing, puking, or cleaning it, but this - this was a way of relating to it no one could even dream of. Bare asses and toilets naturally go together, but not like this.  

I think I laughed for three hours straight that night - the kind when you are ready to settle down into rest and sleep but you cannot. Just as things begin to relax, you see the whole scene in your mind again and explode, snort, and weep.  And it was like this for weeks. 

He also thought it was kind of funny, and yet a little put off that what could have been a head crushing concussion was my new favorite joke. “I could be dead right now and all she can do is laugh.”  I had to tell this story —and as we made a few friends in our new town, he had to endure the retelling, always playing the straight man, “I could have died, but ended up with my ass wrapped around the toilet, thanks.” 

Sometimes I laughed so hard I couldn’t talk.  I could tell the lead up to this story, but when I got to the moment of leap, I could only squeak out the words “floor” and “toilet” before giving up to take a breath and wipe my streaming eyes. 

The humor of the scene is pure and perfect, the alchemy of innocence and calamity, falling through grace to land in safety, into an intimately compromised but unharmed state. And it happened so fast, with a thud and a streak across the dark floor, it entered a place beyond time, there at the base of the throne.  That may seem too grandiose, but time has not dulled this moment, not one ounce, and in fact it’s only richer. We left this little apartment in the south, headed north, made children and careers, fell out of sync, divorced, and continue on in a co-parenting friendship that has over twenty years behind it. All of the future context of that moment adds to the mix and keeps me rolling, apparently forever. 

I still laugh ‘till I’m exhausted, witnessing again and again our goose pimpled nakedness in the dark apartment without a single dish. If laughter is the best medicine, then I have my own inexhaustible private reserves.  Like a magic pearl of mirth, it’s one of the few things I can count on in this world - I can take it out of my pocket and laugh ‘till I cry at the memory of an ill-fated leapfrog and an ass-hugging embrace in the candlelight of our sweet, shivering youth. 

Turk's Cap Fireball

In my first year of college in Florida, I lived with three other women in a small, magical house on Turk's Cap Lane. The house was hidden under oak trees, it had shiny terrazzo floors, and an unbelievably private pool - it was the perfect place for a party.  A fellow student named Joe lived on the same tropical block, and he was a frequent visitor, obviously delighted to have some new neighbors. Devising a way to spend even more time at the house, he planned a week of “sensual delights” for us, a series of innocent experiences designed to delight each of the five senses. 

This eager gesture was a little annoying, but Joe was harmless, and my housemates and I were game.  For the senses of smell and taste, he brought over fresh loaves of French bread, warmed them up in the oven, and served them with cheese and wine. To delight the sense of sight, he did magic tricks with cards. There was a long-standing offer of massage for the sense of touch (of course), and for the sense of sound, he invited over a bunch of musician friends for a sing-along jam. 

On the morning of the ‘sound night,’ a bunch of us drove to a restaurant for a huge Southern breakfast. While paying my bill at the checkout counter, I picked up two books of matches and put them in the pocket of my shirt, an old, plaid, button-up.  The day went on and we cleaned the house for our first big party, and I must have been pretty comfortable in my old shirt, for that’s what I was still wearing when the festivities began. 

The living room was decorated with strings of Christmas lights and a dim, cozy scene was set as folks started to arrive. Soon there was a group with guitar, flute, and drums, maybe twenty people sitting in a cheerful circle, all there at Joe’s request to serenade the ladies with lovely sounds. The little band was great, the singing was strong, and in honor of our host for the evening, someone suggested “Hey Joe” by Hendrix . We gave that dark, twisted song a lively go, somehow making even that sad tale sound cheerful.  We were really getting into it when someone began “Amazing Grace.” I’ve always loved that song, it has great momentum, and it’s so fun to sing with a loud, silly twang.  

So we were really swinging into this song about holy redemption, holding the high notes on “like meeeeee,” when a flash of light burst in the center of the circle — the music stopped and we all looked around with huge startled eyes, and then everyone was staring at me. Wisps of smoke were rising from my left shirt pocket. I reached in and pulled out the two forgotten matchbooks, opened one up, and saw that every single match head was burned off and smoking.  Only the match heads, not the matchsticks, not the paper of the books, not my shirt.  Both sets of match heads in two separate, never-opened matchbooks had ignited at the same instant, over my heart, in a crowd of people. While singing “Amazing Grace.” Spontaneous combustion. 

Someone said, “What the fuck was that?” and the whole group began chanting “What-the-fuck-was-that!” with freaked out, drum-banging glee. Some new folks arrived just then and said it smelled like fireworks out by the pool. The chant went on, people were looking at me, afraid to get too close, and all I could do was laugh. I think we were too stunned to do much singing after that. 

We talked about it for days, incredulous at this near-disaster-miracle that had occurred in our midst, right on my body. How was this possible? Things actually blow up in an instant, just sitting there? What exactly had we just witnessed? I carried the perfect but burnt matchbooks around campus to show people, for it was unbelievable unless you saw it for yourself — the burn was so clean and uniform, so instant, so precise. Joe was mighty pleased with the grand finale to his week of sensual delights, I had earned brief fame, and the house became a legendary party destination for years.

I told the story to my family, and my cousin, who was a recent and fervent convert to Catholicism, was convinced a true miracle had taken place, amazing grace! She had warned me that my tarot cards were the “doorway to the devil,” so this event gave her great hope. When I told my dad, he roared with laughter and recalled something he hadn’t thought about for decades.  As a young man, he was sitting in a dark bar with a row of hardcore alcoholics. One of the older men pulled on his overcoat and stumbled towards the door and his coat pocket erupted with a flash of light and smoke — his book of matches blew up, just like mine. The old drunk yelled and stomped and knocked around and cussed, the whole bar got into it. My dad laughed ’till he cried remembering the scene, and he did a great imitation of bewildered, slurred cussing. It gave me some comfort to know that matchbooks had, in fact, exploded before. Both my dad and I knew it. 

In the twenty-five years since the Turk’s Cap fireball, whenever something startling and strange happens to me, I can hear the chorus chanting, “What-the-fuck-was-that!”  I still see the looks on the faces, euphoric and mystified in our glamourous, grungy, sparkling youth. We were present for a moment of mystery and it was thrilling.

Recently, I decided to finally look into the science and history behind spontaneous combustion, and I applied the power of Google to the questions that were never answered - how exactly does it happen, what is the chemistry behind self-igniting match heads, and two sets of them at once?

“According to expert phillumenists, spontaneous combustion of a bunch of matchbooks is almost unheard of.” This is a statement on the website of the organization devoted to the collection of matchbooks as a hobby, known as Phillumeny. Just like collecting coins, toy cars, or stamps, some people are serious about their collection of matchbooks, and questions about safety are frequent with beginners. Some collectors remove the match heads, just to be safe; others think this is a sacrilege and renders the collection useless. Either way, combustion is not a real concern.  

The Smithsonian Institution Archives, which deal with the safety of collections of every type, recommend removing large quantities of sulphur-based ignitable materials, yet they suggest this might be over-cautious: “The chemicals in the flammable tip may suffer natural degradation through natural aging, but it is probably unlikely that a match of this mid-twentieth-century vintage may spontaneously combust. Where loose early matches of the pre-safety match era may rattle around and cause friction enough to ignite the flammable head, it is unlikely that a set of twentieth-century wooden or paperboard strip matches would move enough to spark an ignition.”

I looked into what the National Fire Protection Agency had to say about spontaneous combustion, and there was no mention of matches.  The official statement says: “Spontaneous combustion is a byproduct of spontaneous heating, which occurs when a material increases in temperature without drawing heat from its surroundings. If the material reaches its ignition temperature, spontaneous ignition or combustion occurs. Examples of materials that are prone to spontaneous combustion include: oily rags, hay, and other agricultural products.”

When both sets of brand new, never opened matches flared up over my heart, I was sitting still, and had been for awhile. The weather was a cool Florida fall day, and I’d kept my long-sleeved shirt on from morning to night. I have a low natural body temperature, the type where the thermometer reads 97 instead of 98. There was no external heat source and no friction. I was beginning to wish I had kept the old matchbooks. I’ve lost them by now after dozens of moves, but maybe I could have made a few bucks on eBay — maybe the expert phillumenists would have been interested. Or I wish we had, at least, consulted with the chemistry professors on campus, for it seems we had a genuinely unusual event on our hands. 

After more internet searching, I finally found a genuine reference to exploding matches, and it was in the most unlikely place — a discussion board for Catholics. This was an old-style discussion board organized by deeply religious people looking for online company. It was ten years old, but Google found it, because they were talking about my topic.  A thread of folks were chatting in response to a friendly question: Do you have a collection of things? Are you a collector? Dolls and stamps were the theme, but one poster, named LimaBean, collected matchbooks. LimaBean shared that when he or she was feeling down and lonely, they would take out the collection and re-live good memories.  And then . . .

“One evening, I had my matchbooks scattered all over my carpet. I was looking at them and reminiscing about the places I have been to (restaurants, hotels from vacation, jazz clubs, etc.) While enjoying my collection, one of the matchbooks spontaneously combusted, while on the carpet!!! I had to act quickly and put out the fire.” 

Laying out matchbooks on the floor, somewhat like tarot cards, and one of them bursts into flames, while thinking about it? With strong, melancholy feelings? That's crazy! Did the folks on the discussion board take this as a sign or a miracle? I certainly would have, and I bet my cousin would have, too. But poor LimaBean was left alone with this alarming experience, just another unexplained moment in life. No one acknowledged that this was odd, there was no chorus banging the drums of surprise, what-in-tarnation-was-that!  Matches that blow up in bars and parties get lots of attention, but not in Catholic discussion groups. No one even asked about the memory behind that flaming matchbook,  I wonder what happened for poor LimaBean at that hotel, that jazz club. . . .   

So there it is, a third matchbook up in flames, just sitting there. It is still a mystery how this could happen, even with Google, and if there is a theme between an old drunk’s overcoat, a ratty old shirt pocket, and the carpet of a devout Catholic, I don’t know what it is. 

One last piece to this story —  I was at a hotel last year, a super-hip, luxurious spa hotel in Florida, reconnecting and celebrating with the only college friend I’m still close with, and at the checkout counter, I saw a box of brand new matchbooks. Very retro, very hip. I wanted something to remember the amazing weekend by, so I popped two of them in my left breast pocket — without a single thought to the last time I had done such a thing, not even a faint echo of what could happen. It wasn't until weeks later that a distant memory clicked and it struck me - I had two unopened matchbooks from Florida somewhere in my possession. With alarm, I rushed upstairs and found them sitting in a pile on my desk. For now,  I’m going to keep them off my body and be very careful the next time I sing, and especially when I think about that wonderful weekend at the spa. Or I might just turn down the lights, set them out in front of me on the carpet,  get real focused, and see what happens . . . .   

The Starlet on the Tarmac

Judi came swinging around the bookshelves on a mission. It was a dull evening on the second floor of the campus library and I looked up from my carrel of books just in time to see her whisper-yell “Down with the patriarchy!” with a raised first and swinging breasts. She was moving fast and headed right towards me, but her focus was above my head and far out beyond the walls and into the world. Her smile was radiant, her eyes were fierce, she’d read one too many tome of the canon. The dead white males had piled too high, the switch had flipped right then and there on that night, and she was ready to burn it down with ebullience and glee.  I scurried to slam my books shut and join her wake, a few more women gathered, and we hatched a plan — our fight against The Man would begin tonight with a raid on the student center. 

One of us rode our bike to the corner store and bought an armload of magazines — Glamour, Cosmo, Vouge — conflicted about paying money to support such things, but certain they were being used for a cause. Others went back to their dorms to gather fancy bras, undies, and lipstick, and I was mystified that they had these things at all. We met in the dim light of the empty student center with our gathered loot and began to decorate, to vandalize, to deface  — slogans in lipstick on the glass, collages of tawdry mainstream magazine ads taped to the brick walls of the staid, beige, common space.

Cleavage-selling-bimbo-bombshell advertisements were cut up and magnified, let us show you how wrong they are. Bras were stretched and pinned down onto bulletin boards in a chaotic display of defiance, a subversion of culture, and elevation of the female mind over body. Don’t look. Don’t touch. This body is not for you, it is not for sale, the objectification will end now.  Expose the tools, flip the script, and rebel. The patriarchy will die because this is how we kill it.

The next day, the talk on the small campus was curious and cautious, everyone who showed up for breakfast and lunch saw our artwork. Who did this, are they organized, what’s next? To my surprise, this act of political vandalism in the public space was being taken seriously - not by any college officials, but by our peers. While there were plenty of liberal vibes in the school, it also attracted do-gooders and dweebs — this was an honors college and the people who were admitted were in the habit of doing their homework on time and getting straight A’s. They were the good kids, and this display rattled the sense of order. The undergarments and slogans went up onto the walls early in the first semester and the new crop of students had their notebooks out, ready to learn the rules.

We had no plans beyond that wild night, this was just a one-time way to bust out of the chilled stacks and the monotony of the entombed white male. Later that week,  having been identified as one of the vandals, I was pressed for an explanation by a strident young man - what does it mean, what exactly is your point?  I was inarticulate and failed to elegantly summarize this situation because I hadn’t taken the course on the Male Gaze yet — I didn’t have the crafted, smooth language to describe the essential problems with objectification, subjugation and control.   Judi was way ahead of me, she had logged semesters of dutiful readings and analytical papers within the Women’s Studies department.But me, all I could say was Men Bad, Women Good, and here are my hairy legs to prove it.  Bras on the wall mean take me seriously, get it?

Beautiful, young, and sexually empowered women had posted twin messages in a place no one could avoid seeing - Do Not Look, Do Not Like. For the small group who did it, the moment had passed, but the impact on the little community lasted.  The young men fresh from the countrysides were quaking in the corners with their nuts cupped under their hands, and I don’t blame them.  There was a band of women among them, watching from the shadows, eager to take them down for crimes they didn’t yet know they were committing. This took place on a campus in steamy Florida,  bare feet, tanned skin, and tiny clothes were everywhere - how exactly was one supposed go through the world and not look, and not like? 

Three semesters later, Judi had graduated and I was sitting alone in a very different part of the library, a dim back corner.  A tall, sweet, shaved-head rock-n-roll playing young man with beautiful eyes emerged from the stacks, slipped into the seat across my table, stared right into me and said: “When a woman bends over and her shirt falls forward, I look at her breasts. Do you hate me?”  I stared right back at him and shrugged, “I do it, too.”  With that delightful volley of pick-up lines, we began a year-long romance that lasted until his hefty thesis on the dissonance of Sonic Youth and my homemade butch hair cut slowly fizzled us out.

———————-

Fifteen years out of college and well into family and career, I lived near a two-lane country road that branched off the north-south interstate and leaned into the center of Vermont.  This road carried crowds of people driving up from the big cities,  streaming up to their retreats, ski mountains, and B and B’s, traffic the little state counted on to survive. My regular gas station was just up the road from the interstate exit, and occasionally huge out-of-state SUVs stopped for gas, but mostly they kept on going. 

The pumps were typically full of local commuters, construction crews, cordwood haulers, repairmen and office workers, all filling up and grabbing some grub. The summer brought the roaring packs of motorcycles, in the winter enormous snow machines clattered up like snarling beasts. Inside was a deli counter that was the home of the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted. I bought gas at that store every week, and was a serious regular at the fried chicken counter, and no matter how many times I ordered from the same person, there was never a glimmer of recognition. I lived down the road and for seven full years I remained a newcomer not worthy of acknowledgment.  

New Englanders are a cold and stony bunch, everybody keeps to themselves, deeply fortified in each house and car, peering out with cool, spare regard.  It’s the kind of place where businesses don’t bother with signs such as “We’re Open” because if you don’t know, then you shouldn’t be there.  I kept to myself, just a tad miffed as the years went on and the blank stares continued.  By keeping my head down, I was doing just what the locals do, as if we were all trying to blend into the woods and look like just another stone in the wall. 

So this is the scene at my gas station on the hot summer’s day I headed down for an afternoon treat. The pumps and parking spaces were full of lunchtime business, with quite a few people sitting in cars waiting for a spot. When off the little highway in pulls a big black SUV, a city car with orange New York plates. It is filled with young cool people, road tripping in cushy style, clearly on their way to a gilded place far away from the dusty station.  We’ve all seen this before, but what happened next was less common.  The back door opened up, and out teetered a rumpled starlet - blond hair, bronze skin, and wearing gold - a mini skirt, a tank top, and high wedge heels. She walked across the pavement, not to the door of the store, but to the soda vending machine along the wall, and it took her a few moments of fiddling with the change, pushing the buttons, figuring it all out before the bottle dropped down for her to bend over and retrieve it.  

I was fascinated.  Living where I lived, and working where I worked, was pretty much like living in a nunnery.  Drab, plain, no ornament, not a sequin or a sparkle to be found, and certainly no skin. So there in that moment, in the summer heat of the grey and gritty gas station, the beauty of the female form struck me, and in the most objectified way possible. She was not a person, but a divine specimen, dropped down from a rift in the heavens to alight on the tarmac for only an instant.  I was fascinated because I had forgotten that version of female beauty was possible, that it was even an option. I don’t think I’d seen a woman walking in high heels for decades. That people do this, they dress up in fancy clothes and make-up, they dress to impress, they dress to proudly and loudly say Look At Meeeee - this was a revelation. 

We all looked. We drank her in like a tall glass of cool water - those legs, those shoulders, that hair, oh my god! After a few moments of being utterly entranced, I snapped out of it and took a look around, and there I saw every single male head turned, gazing.  Men walking out of the store, men walking into it, men sitting in the cars waiting, men paused in mid-chew,  men standing outside the gas pumps frozen in place — all of us were transfixed. Each of us in our isolation felt free to stare, and stare.  I seemed to be the only woman in the crowd and I bonded with those guys across the ages and professions— we experienced this moment together.  And it was good.  And I got it —  sometimes the female form is absolutely, drop dead gorgeous. A gift for eyes filled with grit and surrounded by stones, a golden starlet with bouncing curls and graceful curves was here for just a moment, and we saw.  

My years after college were lived in a bubble far away from the mainstream - no TV, no internet, no movies, analytical publications the only source for news of the outside world. Watching my gardens grow, struggle, thrive, and die each year was my main source of drama and entertainment.  I was in a uniform monoculture of simple, spare conformity — the patriarchy raged on, sex continued to sell, the female body was commodified and brokered as one prong of a complex web of domination and control —  it all carried on without me as its witness.  I hadn’t been saturated and bombarded with cleavage-selling-bimbo-bombshell advertisements every day, I’d kind of forgotten about it.   

That’s why I wasn’t filled with rage to see us all in the thrall of objectification.  If I had been, if Judi had been in the driver seat, I’m sure we would have had a different response to all of those men gawking, lusting - Not this again, pigs!  How about we run you over right now so you can die while you’re happy! 

The golden one wobbled with her mile-long legs of bronzed skin back into the waiting vehicle, a single bottle of pop in her hand. The door closed, she was gone, and off they flew down the road with sunglasses on and heads nodding to the music.  All of us there left behind, they never noticed us, we’d done a good job of blending in, we didn’t exist in their world, in this pit stop on the way to a grand adventure.  But they gave us something good, a taste of what’s possible, a drop of sweet honey in our dry whole wheat world, a moment where we looked and we liked it, and everything turned out just fine.