The Mighty Handful

Summer can be so many things: as Abel here is discovering, it can be a chance to unwind (and maybe sweat while you’re doing it), take things less seriously (and dress accordingly), get away from it all (while moseying). Like swallows returning to Capistrano (or more likely buzzards coming back to Hinckley, Ohio), summer for me is not official till I see the fireflies at dusk (which, working second shift, can be more evanescent than usual). Deep summer is the constant humming of cicadas, one of the more annoying sounds in nature, especially for someone with my brand of hyperacusis.

Soon, the Dog Days of Summer will be upon us: we’ve been lucky this year, here in Central PA, with periods of hot humid weather alternating with cooler drier air (which uncharacteristically seems to be hitting us on the weekends). Of course, the difference for me this summer is, I’m now in a house with Central Air, unlike the first-floor city apartment of yore where you were afraid to leave the windows open at night because it was also Break-In Season (of course now I’m awaiting the Electric Bills of Summer, but that’s another chapter).

At the moment, however, for me – but especially for the Big 3, Sieti, Murphy & Max – these are the Cat Days of Summer. The kittens are now three months old which means, figuring out the comparative ages of cats and humans, they are the equivalent of having two-year-old quintuplets loose in the house: welcome to the Terrible 2s (which last, I’m told by parents who have survived children, until they are perhaps 22 and, if not before, out on their own).

If I had known they would be such a handful, I would have named them after the Russian Five (not to be confused with another Russian Five...): Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modeste Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev and, uhm... oh yes, the one most people have never heard anything by, Cesar Cui, the Little Finger of the Mighty Handful as they’re also known. But those are some pretty stiff names for something as tender as a newborn kitten.

The cream-tabby (originally Blanche until I discovered it’s a male, so he became Guy Noir) could be Rimsky. Of the 3 Blondes, perhaps Charlie would be Mussorgsky (more macho, his personality might warrant calling him “Moose” for short). Abel & Baker would probably be Borodin & Cui, respectively, since these are only temporary names to begin with for them until they find new homes and subsequently new names. That leaves Balakriev for Blanche (originally named Guy Noir three months ago before I knew this black lump of squirming fur would turn into a tortoiseshell and therefore a female): as the only female in the bunch, she could then become Millie. If I’m only going to keep three of them, however, then a matched set of Five Names is kind of pointless. (Though I kind of like “Moose”...)

For the past week, all five have been out-and-about in the rest of the house. I had kept them “quarantined” in the largest bedroom until I knew they would be safe to introduce to the others (no contagious diseases or parasites), but once they were okay, there’s still the issue of their mother, Frieda Farrell, who, still as feral as she was the day I trapped her in at my apartment, has not yet been tested. If the kittens need to retreat to the safety of their lair, I have to leave the bedroom door open. Since Frieda rarely comes out from under the bed when I’m around, it’s unlikely she’s going to start wandering through the house herself, but the others might go exploring in this room and be very surprised to find another fully adult, fully armed and extremely snarly cat.

From the kittens standpoint, these days might be headlined “NEW WORLDS TO EXPLORE.” From the Big 3's standpoint, it varies: “ROME FALLS AFTER BARBARIAN INVASION” Murphy heralds from the kitchen counter, looking down with disdain in between various acts of pissive resistance on my bed (I now do several laundry loads of towels a week); “THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT” is probably Max’s constant whining lament; Sieti, lobbying loudly for a very high fence to keep out this wave of undesirable immigrants, spends most of her time hiding on the floor of my bedroom closet or behind the computer desk, hissing like a steam engine ready to explode when any of them get close to her. Max has taken to pummeling his scratching post like a boxer working a punching bag. Curiously, Charlie thought this was pretty cool and tried it himself, but he doesn’t look quite as awesome (yet).

Max and Murphy sometimes hide in the shelf under the microwave where, for some reason, they seem to be invisible to the horde of furballs romping the length of the kitchen and dining room beneath them. Meanwhile, Charley's preference for a hiding place leaves a little to be desired in terms of general invisibility if not practicality.

Having now gone from exploring to playing, they seem most fascinated by the chair that goes with my grandfather’s desk (his graduation present in 1905) and it is not unusual to see all of them engaged in typical kitten games on the seat, between the legs and levitating up to the very top, 4 feet off the floor and advantageous for aerial attacks.

The picture (“Commotion in Motion” at left) shows four of them on the chair – you can barely see Blanche the Tortoiseshell getting ready to slide off the seat just as Guy prepares to lunge for the top while Able & Baker tussle on the seat – Charlie is already exploring the desktop. Moments later and before this sluggish camera reset itself, Guy took a flying-squirrel leap to the floor, chasing Blanche out through the kitchen and around the living room. (Nascat would be a good name, too.) Keep in mind, it’s a 67-foot straight shot from my study to the garage door which I think they can do in 3 seconds, now.

I should know better than to walk around the house without a camera ready to shoot some candid kitten-ish scenes. Like when Abel & Charlie treed Max on top of his scratching post – imagine a 12-pound cat balancing King-Kong-like on a 4"x4" post with two kittens each under 3 lbs jumping up at his tail – or the time all 5 kittens, buzzed by a suicidal fly, ended up charging after it in a flash, first to the top of the dresser and from there, two of them suspended from the drapes, all in a few seconds...

They all move much faster than my camera can. Now, they're fascinated by these little plastic storage crates outside my study door, not that they’re a great place to hide, but they apparently assume they’re too small for any of the Big 3 to get them.

Then of course this morning I find all five of them racked up like bowling pins in the doorway, all sitting in the same position – and the camera, after I just took another photo a minute ago, says “oh, sorry, battery dead...” Argh...

Meanwhile the process of settling in continues: I needed bookcases at the house before I started moving my library out from the apartment. Odd, though, to go to one of the larger office furniture & supply stores in the area, find three varieties on their floor that I want, order them and then find out one of them has been discontinued. So I order the rest of them, only to have all but the two really important ones show up. Oh yeah, they’d deliver them between 9-and-5 on Tuesday which I figure as a second-shifter I could handle, so of course they arrive at 7:30am and the guy has no idea why there are only 6 of the 8 units I ordered... Several phone calls later it turns out they’re on back-order – no wait, they’re discontinued, too, darn... So, what, the central office doesn’t tell the individual stores what in their stock is no longer available? Kind of an odd way for someone to design an office space, don’t you think? I want to stop over there today and see if those units are still on their sale floor and try ordering them again: who knows, maybe this time they’ll have them... hah hah...

I was just thinking, not that I mean any disloyalty to Public Radio branding: while I've disliked the idea of naming a dark cat Blanche (which after all means white) and who knows if my kittens will outlive a certain radio private eye, but now I'm thinking about renaming Guy Noir the cream-tabby as Blanc (which means White) and renaming Blanche the dark tortoise-shell as Noir (which means Black). Hmmm...

Meanwhile, a beautiful weekend: good times for summer concerts or for reading Harry Potter! Of course, indoors, the forecast is calling for frequent but widely scattered storms (despite occasional showers) with possibly damaging winds and large fur-balls. Excuse me, but I have to go check something: I just heard a crash in the living room...

Pictures by Dr. Dick... Captions inspired by LOLcats...

My Dad

Today is a day of anniversaries. Less so that it's the birthday of Marcel Proust, the author of "In Search of Lost Time" (formerly known by the Shakespearean inspired but less apt translation, "Remembrance of Things Past"), born on this date in 1871, than it was the anniversary of my moving back to my home town in 1980, having left the University of Connecticut and New York City behind me.

July 10th, I often explained, was the date of "my accident." The plan had been that I would move back to my parents to help with my dad for a while and in the meantime look for a new teaching job before moving on. Instead, I ended up staying, never really finding that job I had planned on, never writing the music I had planned to, nor living the life that had been part of my plan since I was a child.

Today is also the anniversary of my father's death. That hadn't been part of the plan, either, at least not then. It's been 22 years now, not a "major"anniversary like 20 or 25, but this is the first time since my mother died that I observe it without her. I didn't really think about it before, but I was talking with my doctor who had also been my mother's doctor and had known my father as a friend and patient, too: he mentioned that he hadn't really taken the time to mourn his own father's death until his mother died a few years later and I'm finding, perhaps, the same sense of a double loss as I go through the house they built together, finding pictures and memories that might not have come to mind in the past 20 years or so. I'm told, in talking to other people, this is not unusual: it is how we are. Our energies become concentrated on the parent that is left. Whether it makes the void larger in the end, I don't know. My focus in the past four months has been my mother, adjusting to life without her; but more and more I realize how much a part of those memories are of "them" and not just "her." And I realize how much more I miss my father that I had been aware of before.

Many of the pictures and memories are of my father sitting at the organ or the piano. The first photo (above), taken before I was born, shows him playing a little spinet over at a friend's house. Whenever there was a piano or a Hammond organ in the room, he always gravitated toward it. Friends knew if they were having a party and they invited my mom and dad, they wouldn't have to worry about entertainment because my dad would play for hours. He enjoyed entertaining people and he loved to play.

In 1978, when I was playing piano for ballet classes in New York, I wrote to my father how someone asked me to play "Melancholy Baby" and I, for all my classical training, had not a clue, once you got beyond a few bars, how it went. My dad sat down with a list he kept of the songs he could play from memory, collected over the years from the '40s to the '60s, and #1,000 on his list was "Melancholy Baby. "

He had perfect pitch which meant if he heard a note he knew which pitch it was -- an A-flat or a C, whatever. They figured this out when he was still in school: the class had already begun singing "Happy Birthday" when he slipped over to the piano to accompany everyone and knew exactly what key they were singing in. It always amazed me to listen to him when I was a kid: he'd hear a song on the radio and could sit down and play it back - not just the tune but all the chords as well. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't do that myself - I still can't, for that matter. He never took lessons, in fact never learned to read music. When I started taking lessons at the age of 6, he would show me a new song he'd gotten the sheet music for but couldn't figure out this one passage: what was that note? how did this phrase go?

In 1947 (see right) he got his start as a "cocktail organist" playing some nightclubs in town. By 1955, he had a 15-minute radio show live from the Blue Mountain Hotel every Wednesday night (as I recall). I would be allowed to stay up to listen to it. It didn't seem extraordinary to me (I was only 5 or 6 at the time). After all, didn't everybody's dad have their own radio show?

I grew up with the Hammond organ and the grand piano in our living room, placed in such a way he could sit on the organ bench, play the harmony on the organ keyboard with his left hand, the bass line on the pedals with his feet and the melody on the piano.

My folks built their suburban dreamhome around this combination, the focus of the large living room. The original plans called for a dining room and a living room separated by an archway, but they took out the archway and placed the organ and the piano at the one end, the fireplace at the other end. In this picture, taken in the early-'60s, he was playing the piano. That's a Leslie speaker tone-cabinet behind the piano.
In the mid-60s, my dad started having trouble with rheumatoid arthritis and eventually could no longer play the piano which required more strength and stamina than his fingers could manage. When it became clear I was going to pursue music as a career and trying to practice in the middle of the house's activity was not very practical, we sold the piano and I got an upright which we put back in my bedroom. The organ, however, was different, and my dad continued to play it for a few more years, despite how his hands were deformed by the arthritis.

When he would go into the hospital, he would play the little spinet piano in the solarium for the other patients after dinner, a nightly sing-along. He had song-sheets printed up and he took requests. Soon the room was full and they had to move it to a larger lounge. It was good therapy for the patients but it was also great for my dad. When he was in for a more extended stay, J.H. Troup's, one of the major music stores in town, brought in a Hammond for him to play.

But eventually he could no longer play - at least not well enough for his own liking. After they became born-again Christians, my parents didn't want to get rid of the organ. They were always praying for the miracle that he would be healed and he'd be playing just like had been before. To sell it now would be an act of bad faith. Even though he could barely walk after a knee replacement, he still would slide over onto the organ bench to play some hymns for their friends who came by for prayer meetings. They often said how they came by to cheer him up and instead left feeling cheered up and blessed themselves.

At some point in the mid-70s, there was an accident and he broke his neck, riddled as his bones were with the rheumatoid arthritis. They put this "halo cast" on him to keep his neck immobilized, a steel ring around his head held in place with four screws that went directly into the skull with a brace around his torso. I don't remember how long he was in this contraption but as soon as he was able, he was playing hymns at the organ.

By 1979, he was confined to a wheel-chair. In early September, sitting opposite my mother at the kitchen table as they were reading their Bibles together, my dad got a phone call from a friend of theirs who had been led by the Lord to throw a surprise birthday party for my mother who would turn 60 that year. Now of course, he couldn't very well just blurt this out while she's sitting right there, so the guy started naming the months. My dad was sitting there saying "No, no, no, no, no" and then finally "yes." But now they had to get the date and so they did the same thing again as he went down the list, "1st? 2nd? 3rd?" My dad kept saying, "no, no, no..." and eventually "yes" without letting on that it was a little over a week away. My mother was looking at him like "what ARE you talking about?" The friend would make all the plans and do all the calls, but anytime Mom would walk out of the house -- to get the mail, to walk the dog, to make a quick run for groceries -- my dad would get on the phone and call them with more people to invite.

It almost didn't happen: they had planned it around a prayer meeting regarding some particular need which, as it turns out, was no longer an issue the day before the meeting -- "an answer to prayer," my mother said but my dad was fretting about how they were going to get her to go for the party, now, without spilling the beans! My mother was not one to go out much, especially considering dealing with Dad and his wheel-chair, but they convinced her to come because it would now be a "thanksgiving meeting for answered prayers." When she got there, it was a complete surprise! I love this photograph, taken just as she wheeled my dad through their door. The look of surprise on her face is one thing, but the look on his face, delighted that they had all managed to pull this off, is priceless.

A little more than a month after I moved back from New York, my father had another accident. The doctor said if his bones had been healthy, it would have snapped his spinal cord and he would have died instantly (though of course one could argue if his bones had been healthy, it wouldn't have happened), but because they were porous and fragile from the arthritis, it merely pinched it, causing him to become a quadraplegic in a matter of minutes. It was another five years of constant care at home, during which he regained use of his arms and legs and was able, for a while, to walk again, taking 66 steps on his 65th birthday, with one to grow on before a bad jolt in the wheel-chair broke his tail bone. There were occasional stays in the hospital before he went to the Lebanon Veterans Hospital where he had a series of strokes a month later.

One of the horrible things with rheumatoid arthritis is that it won't kill you. He had dealt with this for about the last 21 years of his life. His first visit to the hospital for some kind of treatment for it -- in the days when "gold shots" were the standard form but he was allergic to them -- coincided with my first week in high school: I was 15, he was 46. That, too, certainly wasn't part of the plan.

My dad was a typical dad who tried to interest his son in the things he loved. He was disappointed that I didn't want to play baseball -- or even watch it. When I was 6, they took me ("dragged me") to a Phillies game back in the mid-'50s when Richie Ashburn was the big name star of the team and I was so bored out of my mind, I sat there the whole time reading a pile of comic books I'd taken along. I guess they were hoping the excitement of seeing it live - the experience - would win me over. My father loved to fish but I didn't even want to kill the worms, much less the fish. But I loved being outside in nature, wading in the stream, watching the birds, catching newts and crayfish. I didn't always like getting up even before the crack of dawn to get to the good spots before the fish would start biting, but then what teenager would?

But when I started to show an interest in music, my father was behind me 200%. He didn't know anything about classical music but he had a few friends who did. My folks found out what that tune was I was listening to all the time on one of my little kids recordings when I was 3 years old and when I was 4 or 5, they got me my first record, an LP of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherezade" though it took them a while to find one without a belly dancer's midriff on the cover which they didn't think appropriate for a 5-year-old. I was probably 10 when my dad came home one evening with a book he'd found for me: Rimsky-Korsakov's autobiography, "My Musical Life" which I read from cover to cover.

After I had started taking piano lessons, he wanted me to also take "theory" lessons about the language of music, more than just reading the notes but finding out how it works. When he saw me copying out one of the little songs for my lesson -- an exercise in learning notation -- he got all excited because he thought I was actually composing it on the spot. When I really did start to compose my own music a few years later -- certainly by the time I was 10 -- he was there but never pushy or judgmental. I had written a short piece for orchestra when I was in 7th Grade and he told a friend of his who played in the Harrisburg Symphony. So my dad took me into a rehearsal at the old William Penn High School Auditorium to meet the conductor, Edwin McArthur, and hand him the slim score I had completed. When he told us the orchestra would perform the piece on a children's concert, my dad contacted friends he knew at the paper, on the radio, at the TV stations, and we did a round of interviews and photo sessions. It wouldn't have happened without his effort and I know I took it for granted -- this is what you do, this is how it happens. Doesn't every father do something like this for his child?

But he never stopped being my biggest fan. When I had works performed at Susquehanna University, my folks would make the hour's drive up from Harrisburg even though by that time it was difficult for him to walk, much less sit that long in a car. After I conducted a Harrisburg Symphony concert he couldn't attend because by that time he was bedridden at home, my Uncle Bob congratulated me by wishing his daddy could've been there to hear this -- my grandfather, who had died about 4 years earlier, played the trumpet when he was younger and was the member of several bands in the area -- and when I responded in the same tone of voice that I wished my daddy could've been there, too, Paul Beers, a local historian and columnist with the Harrisburg Patriot-News, overheard this and assumed that meant my dad, who was no longer working as an uptown businessman or playing the organ in the clubs any more, must have died So he referred to me in his article as "the son of the late Norm Strawser" which got a number of Dad's friends shook up, since they hadn't heard. Much to their surprise, he answered the phone when they called the house to find out what had happened (Paul wrote a very gracious correction á la Mark Twain in his next column).

When it finally did happen, we were all there with him to say good-bye. Though he had on occasion been confused following the strokes -- mostly language things, like nouns not having their accustomed meanings which made it rather difficult to communicate some times -- mentally he was still very good and his faith was still very strong. He had always prayed for healing and it took a great deal of faith not to be discouraged when he wasn't. But at the very end, with minutes left, I realized his eyes were once again the brilliant blue they used to be, not the milky nondescript off-blue they'd been the past 15 years or so, as if that too was a side-effect of the arthiritis or the medication. The healing had begun. And then, his breathing slowing down, he went peacefully and without any apparent additional pain or fear.

It struck some people as odd, but we buried him in his red fleece jogging suit rather than the more traditional suit and tie, the kind he had worn most of his life as a businessman or an organist. 21 years later, when we were making arrangements for my mother at the same funeral home, Fackler-Wiedeman, they still remembered that red jogging suit. But his Christian friends who'd come to the house for prayer understood: red was "the blood of the lamb" and when he went to be with the Lord, he would be jogging in heaven.

Dr. Dick

Kittens beyond the Toddler Stage

For the past week or so, I haven’t been taking many pictures of the kittens – it’s not that they’re now beyond that “adorable kitten” stage but fortunately, they have stopped growing visibly by the day. Plus, the more active they are, the more difficult it is to get group shots unless, of course, they’re eating, but even then, sometimes, they play musical dishes with the greatest of ease.

Speaking of shots, now that they’ve had theirs (at least the first round) and the worm medicine should have cleaned them out (this was a pre-emptive strike, but the vet has known few kittens from a stray mother who wouldn’t’ve had some internal parasites to deal with), it’s time to introduce them to The Big 3.

Thursday night, after I spent an hour back in the kittens’ room, I went to crawl in bed only to discover an odd wet-spot near the pillow that... uhm... had a familiar odor that... drat! One of the cats peed on my bed! Judging from the placement, this did not appear to be an accident but perhaps an act of “pissive resistance”...

And since Max was the most wary as I tore the bed apart to change the sheets (and at 3am I was beyond pissed), I suspect he’s the culprit. He’s also the only adult male and perhaps knowing there are four young males cordoned off in this otherwise inaccessible room, he may feel the most threatened. He probably does not remember what it was like, six years ago, when I introduced him into the household as a newly adopted stray: the three females then (in addition to Murphy and Sieti, there was also Sieti’s mother, Tobie) accepted him easily enough, but the one had the most difficult time of it was the senior male, an 18-year-old black-and-white cat I’d recently taken in named Keyboard who’d outlived my neighbors. Eventually, Keyboard became less aggressive, Max found less need to assert himself and the apartment (cramped as it was) returned to a reasonably acceptable state of chaos.

So this is the first time I’ve had to introduce a new cat to the caboodle – and there are five kittens to introduce, not counting the mother who is still untested and unbowed.

I’m not sure whether to do this en masse, just let all 5 of the kittens out at once to overwhelm the adults by sheer numbers and excess of energy and curiosity, or do it one-at-a-time so they can be officially introduced. I tried this yesterday with Charlie:

Max: hissed and batted at him – Charlie hissed and batted at him right back
Murphy: sniffed a while, then with a short resigned hiss went off to hide in a paper shopping bag under the table...
Sieti: Initial indifference but then a quick hiss and a scowl as she ran off and hid somewhere...

And then, later, Blanche:

Max: hissed and batted at her – Blanche sat back with a “what’s with you?” attitude
Murphy: sniffed a while but no hiss before returning to the paper bag under the table...
Sieti: just ran away and hid somewhere for the rest of the afternoon....

Meanwhile, this morning, I managed to get a few portrait shots of some of them. Only once did Charlie sit still long enough for this delayed-reaction camera. Other than the one where he was detained by an especially tempting phone cord, there are two shots of him with the head chopped off as he moved out of range, and several of just blank carpet. Blanche, like me, has found the best placement when dealing with a camera is standing behind the idiot holding the camera, and Baker normally just stays under the bed. So these photos are of Guy (atop the post), Charlie (left) and Abel (below).

Not that much else is going on: the back continues to be a problem but at least now I've got a number of bookcases on the way. I ordered a ton through Office Max which should be delivered mid-week, and even though I'm no fan of Martha Stewart, there was a bookcase in her furniture line at the local K-Mart that I really liked and knew would look well in the living room (while the house is not full of antiques in the general sense of the word, just old stuff, this seemed better than the standard style of nondescript bookcase one normally finds these days. There are two small ones in the office at this point, both pretty old, one of which has scribbled on the back where but not when it was purchased: that means it was probably my dad's bookcase when he was a kid, making it about 70-80 years old or so.

There's been no composing, unfortunately -- though when a colleague came over to help with the one bookcase yesterday, he mentioned one of his neighbors is a piano tuner who has a small trailer he uses for moving pianos. Wow -- that means I might be able to have him move my upright piano out from the apartment and get my studio set up in the room my mother used for her office (which had been my childhood bedroom)! Hopefully, that will be this week's project.

Dr. Dick

Pictures: Top = 5 for Dinner; #2 = Guy Noir contemplates the world from the top of the scratching post; #3 = Max innocently asleep; #4 = Charlie; #5 = Abel

Kittens, Gardens, Angels & a New Work on the Back Burner

Friday was a big day.

The kittens, who turn 10 weeks old on Monday (and that's Charlie and Abel in the picture), had their first collective adventure outside the confines of their known world (i.e., the bedroom they’d branched out into after being born behind the bathroom toilet): catching them and putting them into the two cat carriers was easier than I thought and the trip to the vets was a very quiet one – considering some of the other cats who do not travel well and might be classified screamers, it amazes me that a stray cat's kittens were all quiet if not calm. While they all got their first round of shots (they go back in a month for the rabies shots) and took them graciously, Charlie was a little reluctant to part with any of his blood and therefore ended up with a bandage on his leg that he kept holding out for everyone to see like a little kid (“so cool, check it out”).

The good news is their blood test came up negative for feline leukemia, a huge relief.

The doctor who examined them (one I’ve been going to since 1990 at a clinic I’ve been going to since I was in 6th Grade and we took our pet skunk out to them back in the ‘60s) was amazed they had no visible parasites, especially ringworm (which is surprising when you consider I took Frieda in off the street just two days before they were born and I’d never even thought she might have fleas). He gave me some internal worming medicine just in case, but flying colors for all five kittens.

It will take a tranquilizer gun to get Frieda to the vets, however: I’d already considered calling in one of those “traveling vets,” so that’s next on the to-do list. Not only does she need her shots and to be tested, she’s also getting spayed.

But Friday night, while I was sitting in the room after I fed them, Frieda did something she has not done in the 10 weeks since I’d rescued her: she let me see her!

At least, when I fed her on my old apartment’s porch, she would let me get a little close to her as long as I didn’t try to touch her. But now, seemingly more feral than she’d been before, she’d rarely slink out from her hiding place (first, behind the toilet where she raised her litter; now, from under the twin beds in the bedroom) and then only to eat as quickly as she could, always attuned to how far away I was (and the farther, the better). She always waited until well after the kittens were done, like a good mother, but this time was different, a little less wary and hurried as if she were savoring the meal, not bolting it like fast food.

I sat in the old chair at the other side of the room with Blanche curled up beside me, Guy Noir stretched out on my lap and Charlie on the back of the chair playing with my hair. Then Frieda plopped herself down beside the one bed facing me and rolled over into the Buffet Position. In a flash, Baker and Charlie joined her as did, gradually, Abel and Guy, Blanche only reluctantly giving up the comfort of her chair. It amazed me that, at 68 days, she would still nurse them (much less have room for all five of them). Soon, there was a mound of slurping and purring and I swear she did it just to prove to me who has the real control over her kittens!

When they had finished, they nestled in around her (in this picture, Baker rests behind her, with Blanche in front and Guy beside her; Abel and Charlie were already off and romping) and she stayed there for a good 20 minutes. Even after the others had wandered off to play, she continued stretched out on the carpet, even moving a little closer to me but not too close.

It was, in a way, a moment of understanding, perhaps, which I’d waited for for a long time. Ironic that it should happen the same day I’d taken the kittens from her for the first time (they were gone for almost 3 hours) and they must have been full of tales about being poked and handled by other strange people.

Or it could just be she’s getting claustrophobic under that damned bed. After all, she’d had the run of the streets of Midtown and was never one to just hang around for lack of anything to do. Being cooped up in this bedroom, as large as it is, must seem like prison. But she was given good grades as a mother by the vets, having raised five healthy and very cute kittens. As she sat there looking at me, she seemed proud of that: I doubt any of the earlier litter she’d had last summer did as well if they survived at all.

Meanwhile, things in the garden haven’t been doing as well as I’d hoped.

Plants that like “well-drained” soil apparently prefer to commit suicide than just grow not-as-well-as-they-could when transplanted to the rocks and dirt that passes for my yard. The first to go, a variegated bushy plant called “Jacob’s Ladder” reached its last rung after the first week, to be replaced by something called “Angelica” which so far seems to be doing fine. On the other hand, the wooly thyme, a ground-cover herb so durable you can walk on it, turned into a mass of brown in two days. The hoped-for carpet of alyssum seedlings was hoovered up in short order by the rabbits who have found that their fresh tender shoots were preferable to the tough and bitter herbs that comprise most of what passes for a lawn.

It's more plantains, dandelions, chicory, wild strawberries (they prefer my neighbor’s cultivated ones, of course) and even the clover and oxalis than real grass. Years ago, Mother and I joked about just getting dozens of containers of wildflower seeds called something like “meadow-in-a-can” (phlox, poppies, cosmos and who knows what all) like somebody we knew had once done, giving up on their patch of dirt otherwise inhospitable to the well-manicured suburban lawn, a modern contrivance that seems to me about as impractical as the necktie in men’s dress codes. But that’s another issue and I digress.
Then I discovered the rabbit(s) had mowed down the designer fern with its rich dark emerald-green fronds planted near the back. Do I try peach-basket diplomacy or just bomb the hell out of them?

Squirrels might have been the culprits with a yellowish-green sedum that apparently offended their sense of garden decor, so they just kept digging at the center of it until they had uprooted most of it, scattering the broken stems over a two-foot-square area (not exactly how I imagined a ground cover to cover ground).

Today, I’ll put the guardian angel out in the garden – it certainly needs one (better, if I could get one that emitted cat-like noises when it senses the nearby presence of rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks, just to scare them off).

This little statue seemed appropriate for my mother’s memorial garden because she was always praying for the angels to keep watch over me: a few days before she went to the hospital in February, I had to call home every time after I left work following the Valentine's Day Blizzard so she’d know I was okay, even though she didn’t bother to tell me about all these “breathing spells” she was having.

Finding the right angel wasn’t as difficult as I thought, wanting to avoid something too morose like it had just stepped down from a tombstone. The one I found – holding a small bird in its outstretched hands like the sparrow of Matthew 10:29 – was something Mother would have liked herself, a bit of whimsy for being a little different from the stereotypical image but a meaningful one for us both, all the same.
On Thursday night, I had a chance to practice on the WITF Steinway Grand in the recording studio. It was the first time I'd touched a piano in over a month, probably only the fifth time I'd practiced since mid-January. This time, things came back a little quicker, despite stiff fingers and wrong notes. Like physical exercise, it felt good on several levels - especially realizing I could play through some things I haven't worked on in years, especially some Brahms (the G Minor Rhapsody fell together quickly unlike the Schumann Fantasy in C last movement which fell apart even more quickly; Brahms' A Major Intermezzo and his transcription of the Bach D Minor Chaconne for the left hand alone, a good muscle stretcher but only after you're suitably warmed up which I wasn't, really) and some Bach Preludes & Fugues (especially the C-sharp Minor fugue from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier, one of my favorites), always good for the soul, too. Though only an hour that went by quickly, I felt like I'd run several miles, both exhausted and elated.

I look forward to getting my piano out to the house, though I'm still unable to do much in the way of lifting which makes the next stage of the move more of a challenge. I'd seen the doctor on Thursday about the pulled muscle &c and he said it could take six months for it to heal if I let it rest -- that would be November 1st!! I think I overdid it on Saturday, though, going in to pack up and move some more books and CDs as well as some sketches and manuscripts, including my full score of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande which I want to follow with the recording, part of my summer Debussy Discovery project.

One of the things I found, sorting through a shelf-ful of manuscripts, was a set of three short choral pieces I'd written at a fairly down time around Easter 2001 - three short Tenebrae responsories - but never really polished into final shape.

As my mother would have pointed out, “there are no coincidences.” I've started working on another set of short choral pieces, some of her favorite Bible verses, which are so far only in the planning stages. I've been listening to a lot of Renaissance polyphony, mostly Josquin des Prez, to get a feel for their continuous textures and seamless flow of the various lines, something my more harmonically oriented style lacks. This time, there are five sections: Romans 8:28; Proverbs 29:25; Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; John 13:34-35; from John 14:1-20.

And I'm eager to get started on them once the piano gets moved into place in my new study. But that's another project. Feeling out-of-sorts because I'm not composing is a good sign: it means I'm still a composer. No pain, in it's own way, no gain...

Dr. Dick

The 3 Blondes

In this case, the three blondes in question are the golden tabbies in the Frieda Farrell's Litter of 5: they had been named generically Abel, Baker & Charlie. They took time out from their active schedule recently to pose for pictures.

In the first one, Baker's looking at a food dish while Charlie and Abel look like they're getting ready to rehearse the Rumble Scene from West Side Story. (That's Blanche in the background.)

Charlie is the Great Purrer, usually the first one to greet me when I come into their bedroom, feeding time or not. He is lobbying hard to be kept, always showing me how cute he can be. In this picture, he's making one last primp to look good for the camera as Baker tells him to sit up "or we'll be here all day."

In the next shot, Abel, who has turned into an expert belly-rubber (or perhaps the right word would be 'rubbee') and who's become something of the class comic, advises Charlie to move over "just a bit" because he's covering Baker.

And then the last shot, taken before they all took off in three different directions, is one like many parents get with their kids, finally, completely bored with the whole camera thing. But it was amazing that they stayed in one place long enough that I was able to snap the pictures I got!

Baker is getting over being the Aloof One and has recently been seen eating canned food: he was the last one to be fully weaned, caught eating adult dry food when he was 53 days old but never coming out of hiding to eat with the rest of them. I thought perhaps he might turn out to be a drybivore (one who eats only dry bits) though in the past couple of days he has been spotted chowing down on a plate of Chicken & Tuna, proving that he can be a canivore, as well. I wouldn't mind any of them being drybivores since I have to put down bowls of each for the other cats already, but we'll see how they develop. Baker is also getting more acclimated to being picked up and held, a move that would have had him running for cover last week, still. Perhaps a few chin scratches and belly rubs helped him overcome the advice his mom had given them about the Big People.

Frieda, their mother, has now graduated to lurking around the bedroom, having finally come out from behind the toilet, now that her kittens spend 95% of their time running around the larger room and sleeping either on the old stuffed chair or under the double beds. She still won't let me get near her, but one small step at a time. It will take a tranquilizing gun to get her to the vets...

It's amazing, after handling these little furballs, how big my other cats seem.

They haven't been fully introduced yet though Max managed to sneak into the room when the door blew open after not having been latched properly: he ran back out into the hallway as if he'd just discovered the room was full of these tiny manic fur-covered energy fields bouncing around all over the place (he probably thought there might have been 20 of them, judging from his expression). They will be 8 weeks old on Monday and their energy level increases exponentially with each passing week.

Kittenplay

It's been a quiet weekend for the most part, since I've been trying to rest my "pulled muscle and hernia" -- the doctor said I shouldn't be lifting anything over 10 pounds which means, I guess, I can't read that new translation of Tolstoy's "War & Peace" I got the other month... Now that I've finished Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Loss," I started looking around for something else to read and decided to pick up where I'd left off in Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." Curiously, I sat down on the garden bench underneath the spreading Japanese maple (the one that 45 years ago looked like a tiny stick in the middle of the yard) and began reading a paragraph that began "He thought about that, sitting on a bench under a tree in the Summer Garden."

Easily distracted by watching the chipmunk on the porch and the birds at the feeder, there wasn't much to think about on a beautiful mild Sunday afternoon. It had never occurred to me, for instance, that kittens apparently learn to purr. Friday night was the first I heard any of them purring – Charlie, first, who then on Saturday velcroed his way up onto the ugly chair beside me, nestled down beside me and began purring like a miniature outboard motor. Later, Blanche did the same thing, though not as loud.
Here is Abel checking things out from the arm of the ugly chair This chair, over 60 years old and still with most of its original stuffing if not upholstery, is covered by a couple of strikingly conflicting throws (I should perhaps do something about that) including a strangely yellow sheep-skin we’d once used to make my dad’s wheel-chair more comfortable for him. Regardless, it has become a center of kittentivity from climbing and clamboring to resting and observing. Once in a while, when I manage to sneak into the room, I will find two or three of them curled up on the seat sleeping but of course they’re usually up and at my feet before I get the camera warmed up and ready to go.

Baker, meanwhile, remains elusive, usually back by Frieda’s side. Last night, he came out to play with the other kittens, but he still runs from me whenever I approach him. I was concerned that he was still nursing since I’ve never actually seen him eat adult food from one of the bowls, but some of the cat books I have mention kittens are weaned between 40 and 50 days’ old. And they’ll be 50 days old on Monday. It’s just odd, considering Charlie and Blanche started eating some of Frieda’s canned food on Day 31, Blanche even crunching away on adult dry bits later the same day!

I’m still having problems getting used to calling the kitten previously known as Guy Noir “Blanche.” Sometimes, looking at her often quizzically sad expression, I recall the name I’d given a stray long-haired hamster taken in over a decade ago (yes, found on her back, lying in the gutter after I’d parked my car and nearly run over her: how she got there was always a mystery) who became Bertha deBlooze. I suppose 10 years is enough time to allow a name to be recycled. On the other hand, watching the tortoise-shell and the cream tabby wrestling away, perhaps Yin & Yang might be better.

So last night, I went out and got one of those “Cat Condos” – my other cats have one they’ve ignored religiously for the last 9 years but as soon as I brought this in, two of the Big 3 were in and out of it in 30 seconds. The kittens, however, took a while to get the hang of it. This afternoon, I managed to catch Charlie & Blanche sharing a quiet moment, meatloafing on the roof, but pretty soon it was a rowdy game of King of the Condo as all five of them threw themselves into the game.

Somewhere, I think there’s work to be done...

Kittens On the Run

While every Day could be Cat Blogging Day at Le Maison du Chat, the kittens are well into the “leaps and bounds” stage, now loose full time in the master bedroom (as if I didn't know already who's in charge here) and fully capable of going from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. With a camera that takes 3 seconds between pressing the button and the flash going off, I have numerous photos of empty carpet to prove it.

(For instance, in the first photo (above right), Guy Noir is ambushed by Charlie just as Abel reared up into the Godzilla Attack Position when the flash went off. Oh well...)

The other day, Abel discovered if he throws himself at the side of this old stuffed chair in the corner (which actually appeared in that 1947 photo of my dad playing the Hammond organ in our living room – as I said, my mother never threw anything away), he’s like velcro and can climb up the back of the chair with ease.

Here he is (left), having scaled the side of the bed. Abel has become the more adventuresome of the five even though he still hasn't quite mastered the art of eating the adult food Charlie, Blanche and Guy Noir are already enjoying.

And there's nothing like a good relaxing rest after a hard climb (right).

This velcro maneuver does not, unfortunately, work for the highly polished surface of the blonde-wood desk where, much to their surprise, they fall immediately back to the floor, particularly bothersome once you’ve made it all the way to the top of the chair (several kitten-lengths off the ground) and figure you can just throw yourself over onto the desk. Oof!

And, by the way, I’ve discovered it does not work well on my legs, either.

Another discovery they’ve made is what a sweet cave the dark space under the dresser makes, though they will be disappointed in a few weeks when they next discover they will be too big to squeeze their way in. Soon enough, they will be going on-line and running up my bills at iTuna...

And now they’ve been introduced to their first catnip toys, too. I got them kitten-sized catnip mice, hoping it would keep their minds off the phone cord. It works -- for a while.

At one point, after Guy tossed the red catnip mouse, seconds after this picture (left) was taken, a paw suddenly appeared from under the dresser -- Baker, otherwise invisible so far this play period, was perfecting his audition as Thing for the Addams Family musical, and quick as a wink whisked the mouse back into the cave. In a flash, he was gone, mouse and all, and my loud LOL caused the other four to scatter to the four winds (and once again, a picture of empty carpeting).

Baker is still fairly reclusive: though he always comes out to play eventually and romps well with others, I still haven't seen him eat any adult food yet. He spends much of his time curled up in the corner with his mother, Frieda (who still has yet to come out from her corner of the bathroom when I'm around anyway). He's the only one who shies away from me -- and will occasionally hiss at me when I go to pick him up -- so perhaps he has been listening too much to those “Tales from Behind the Toilet” she's been telling them, especially regarding The Big People. Hopefully, time will prove these to be nothing but Old Cat Tales...

Meanwhile, Murphy, the Russian Blue of the Big Three, a cat I took in as a stray almost 12 years ago, plays the perfect hostess, sitting on the planter by the fireplace, enjoying the relative peace and quiet of the living room. She's been wondering what, exactly, is behind that door: she's met one of the kittens and hasn't seemed overly concerned, but that was before they were going 50mph in a 35mph zone... and little does she know there are five of them!

Dr. Dick

Guy Noir & His Lovely Sister Blanche

After much debate and subsequent non-scientific poll, it appears the latest names for the Tortoise-shell and the Cream-Tabby kittens will just be the reverse of the names originally given them at birth, Blanche & Guy Noir. The female Tortoise-shell formerly known as Guy Noir is now Blanche Noir (see right)...
...and the male Cream Tabby formerly known as Blanche (see left) will now be known as Guy Noir. Though it annoys me to name a dark cat "Blanche," perhaps there's a bit of humor in that, but hey... it's still Guy Noir & his lovely sister Blanche.

I had considered Positive and Negative, but then I'm not a photographer (and I have the photos to prove it). I had even toyed with the idea of the "white" one being C Major and the "dark" one F-sharp but then I contemplated how many times I would have to explain where that came from and decided "naaaah..."

The Orange Tabbies, all males, are still Abel, Baker & Charlie, though Abel & Baker are becoming more alike as they get older -- they will be six weeks old on Monday, after all. I suppose I could change their names to Larry, Darryl and the Other Brother Darryl...

Charlie has turned out to be the more adventuresome of these three, though still lagging behind Blanche (formerly Guy Noir) who, the only female, has already circumnavigated the bedroom on her own. She also discovered this neat cave -- the lower shelf of a night-stand in my parents' old '50s-style blonde-wood bedroom suit: I'm not sure she was all that thrilled that Charlie decided to join her but then she figured, "if you can't pick your relatives, at least you can join 'em."

Those three are already quite independent of their mother, Frieda, already eating adult canned food, even the adult dry bits as well as the standard kitten chow. While it's quite a struggle in and out of the adult litter-box, they seem quite proud that they don't have to use the little baking dish set aside for their specific use which they are quickly outgrowing.

The other two -- Abel, somewhat, but Baker mostly -- seem reluctant to leave their mother's side and also walk by the dishes of cat food as if they have no idea yet what it is, even if the other three are busy woofing it down.

Since that first night I brought her inside, I haven't seen Frieda anywhere but lying behind the toilet, facing either direction (not that the scenery changes that much) or occasionally lying on her side in the Buffet Position. She still hisses at me if I get too close to her but she has sat there hissless watching me play with her kittens and even picking them up and holding them. This afternoon, while I was sitting outside the bathroom door watching the kittens play, I saw her start to step out from her corner heading toward the food dishes herself. But she saw me, quickly hissed and disappeared into her lair.

Meanwhile, Blanche has discovered how to play with a ball. The first time I rolled it toward her, she stared at it like "what the heck...?" Two days later, she's batting it around and tossing it in the air, chasing it around the room, just like a normal kitten. The others look at her like she's gone totally, freakingly nuts. Trying to photograph her in motion has proven pointless, but I would caption this one, in the manner of LOLCats, "I HAZZA BALL"...

But then, tired out after a half-hour of rough play (and protecting her ball from the curious Charlie), Blanche disappeared. As, for that matter, had her brother Guy. Getting out the flashlight, I began looking around and found them, curled up side by side at the far end under the bed (see below). Yeah... it's a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets...



Dr. Dick