family – Nomadic Noesis

What’s it Like in Cat Heaven?

For the first time in 22 years, my household is catless. For a period of years, we had three cats. But one by one, they have crossed the Rainbow Bridge. Puffies (or Puffaroo or Puffington or Puff Daddy or Puffing Thing, depending on the day) was our last feline standing.

He showed up on our porch nearly 12 years ago and communicated quite clearly, “I live here now.” The vet at that time estimated him to be 3 or 4 years old. So he was getting on in years lately. He and my husband had developed an old guy ritual of going out together in the mornings to watch the sunrise before coming back in for breakfast. I swear, they even started looking like each other.

Last week, out of the blue, our beloved kitty had a seizure. Then he stopped eating. After a trip to the vet ER, we learned he had a mass on his pancreas that was causing his blood glucose to bottom out. But we were able to take him home with some medicines that helped him perk up and enjoy some food for a couple of days before the pills stopped working.

His brain cells were scarce, but he was an exceptionally affectionate knucklehead and craved human companionship at all times. Over the weekend, we were able to make sure he spent very little time alone. The weather blessed us, and he got to spend a lot of time out in the back yard, lying in the grass, feeling the sunbeams and smelling the smells, while we hung out in camp chairs. When he was inside, I refrained from upsetting behaviors such as running the vacuum.

Monday, we had a vet come to the house and help Puffies the last bit of the way across the veil, before the pain became unbearable for him. It was about as good an ending as you could hope for, even if we would never be ready for it.

Now that all of our cats are gone, I find myself wondering what cat heaven might be like. There are no vacuum cleaners, for sure! Also no garbage disposals. I believe any door can be opened with a wishful thought, rather than a need for height and opposable thumbs. The food is always smell-rich, and humans never take away the bowl, saying you’ve had enough. Of course, it’s the correct food–human servants will never make a wrong selection. There are heating pads aplenty, all set at the perfect temperature for napping in the ever-present sunbeams. Oh, and boxes. So many boxes! This is what I like to imagine as I try to heal the cat-sized hole in my heart.

We are not ready to think about another pet. At all. So please don’t tell us about your cousin’s step-sister’s cat’s new litter of kittens. Though I am happy we took in every kitty we ever had, we just can’t go there again yet, or maybe ever. Time will tell.

Is There Blood?

Is there blood? No? Then why are you opening my office door?

Is something on fire? No? Then why are you opening my office door?

Does someone need CPR? No? Then why are you opening my office door?

Are the police here asking to question me? If they are, tell them I’m not home and let me get back to my writing.

I have had my home office for nearly three years now. It’s the place where I’m supposed to be able to retreat to focus on my writing. Yet, no matter how often I repeat it, my family can’t seem to understand the following statement: “If the door is closed, this means I’m writing and you shouldn’t interrupt me unless there’s an emergency.”

Their ideas of emergency and mine don’t overlap much. To me, an emergency means someone needs immediate first aid. Needing a band-aid doesn’t qualify. Needing driven to the hospital does. Fire – that’s an emergency. My husband informing me he bought the wrong brake light for our van? Not so much. My daughter wanting to know if we have any hot cocoa mix? Nope. Not. An. Emergency.

With the current state of my life, I’m managing to spend about two to three hours per week here, so it’s not as if I’m checking out for days at a time.

Here’s what’s an emergency. My imminent trip to the hardware store to buy a lock.

In praise of unstructured being

Haven’t gotten much writing done lately. A cold has been working it’s way through the family, so lots of having the kids home from school. I’m trying to look at it as an opportunity to enjoy having some time with them, though the proliferation of snotty tissues detracts a bit. As soon as both kids were well again, school let out for a teacher work day. I’m off work from my steady paycheck job on Fridays, and I usually try to get in at least a morning worth of writing. But again, I decided my kids won’t be around forever. They’re 13 & 10 right now, and the older one especially is gravitating more toward friends than parents. But yesterday, I had them to myself.

Besides, the weather did a turn-around. Tuesday’s overnight low was around 6 degrees F. Friday’s daytime high was around 67 degrees F. The 10-year-old needed a haircut. Since the salon we used is next door to a sandwich place, I decided we should pick up some lunch there. My daughter (the teenager) suggested taking our food to a park for a picnic. It was at this point that I realized how easy I am. All it took for me to swoon with joy was finding out she still wanted to do such a thing with her family.

It was one of the happiest afternoons I’ve had in a while, a day at the park with the kids. We had no pressure, no agenda, no school or other activity for which we had to rush off, no goals to accomplish, nothing to do except enjoy the weather and be with each other. We ended up at a creek that was still thick with inches of ice, despite the warm day. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, so the thaw was slow. The three of us spent a good hour sliding rocks and sticks on the ice, then throwing rocks to see if they’d break the ice, and occasionally examining rocks for fossils.

Did this activity educate us in some way? Don’t know. Did it improve their chances for future employment? Probably not. Was it worth the time we spent on it? Absolutely. At the end of the day, I was in a better mood than I have been for ages. The evidence shows the kids were, as well.

My favorite memories of family time all involve unstructured, unplanned, informal hours of doing not much more than hanging out. We all recall with fondness a night we set up an indoor tent using bed sheets tied to furniture, then took turns sitting in it while other family members made designs on the top with glow sticks. I can’t remember who first thought of doing it. It’s not something you’d find in a magazine article about enrichment activities for your child. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen spontaneously.

Sometimes I think we tend to get so scheduled and so concerned with development or enrichment or improvement or whatever that we don’t leave ourselves time just to be. But it’s okay sometimes not to be able to give a list of accomplishments for the day. Sometimes it’s okay, and even preferable simply to hang out, to spend some time enjoying our existence.

When not swimming comes in handy

The lovely part of being the sole non-swimmer in a family of swimmers comes when we go on vacation and stay at a hotel with an indoor pool. Everyone else heads for the water, leaving me alone to commune with my laptop.

I finished a chapter of my novel this past week while we were in Oklahoma visiting family. I’ve been saying this for two months, but I can see the finish line. The first draft is almost done. I have 17 complete chapters, and I’m pretty sure I have three left to go.

Not Doing the Math

I’ve been reading the new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. He says there’s a consistent pattern to the lives of the wildly successful. They’ve each put in 10,000 hours before reaching the pinnacle of whatever they’ve reached the pinnacle of. The Beatles – 10,000 hours playing music together. Bill Gates – 10,000 hours programming. Mozart, thanks to his father, had his 10,000 in by the age of 21.

I wonder how many hours I’ve spent writing. I imagine it’s far short of 10,000. I wrote a lot in school. I chose college courses that required many lengthy papers. I have written creatively, off and on, since I was in grade school. But the off periods really add up, I suspect.

Here’s how my not writing has gone today. I have a theoretical Monday, one that works in the computer model. On my hypothetical Monday, I send my daughter off to Jr. High, drive my son to grade school, and report in for a three hour shift at work, getting off at noon. I then come home, eat lunch, and have an hour all to myself to use for writing (real writing, the kind that requires me to concentrate and can’t be done with the kids in the house) before doing a quick chore or two and starting my afternoon drive around town picking up the kids from their schools. After that, it’s dinner and back in to work for another three hours while my husband is home with the kids. A somewhat hectic day, but I’ve put in one of those 10,000 hours.

My real Monday usually goes more like today. The schools are out for a snow day. My husband stays home while I work in the morning. I come home & he goes to work. My daughter announces that I need to drive her to a friend’s house at 1:00. After my son and I drop her off, he realizes it’s almost Christmas and he hasn’t bought anything for anyone. I pause to appreciate having a generous kid before pouting over how I’m not at home writing. I take him shopping at WalGreen. We come home and I have to help him find the wrapping paper, scissors, gift tags, tape, etc. so he can wrap the gifts himself. Almost time to go pick up my daughter again before cooking dinner, and rushing back off to work. Not enough time for me to get into any deep writing, but I can hammer out a blog post.

Getting in my 10,000 hours 15 minutes at a time. And no, I don’t want to know how long it will take to get there. I have no intention of doing the math.