Where's the Cat?

I woke up uncharacteristically early. It was this dream, watching one of my cats, my easily-spooked black and white long-haired Elly dash across a busy street and climb to the top of a palm tree and squall and I was in a maze. Gotta get that cat out of the tree, I’m dreaming. And the maze of buildings gets more complicated, building 4, floor 5 and then taking the stairs to 7 and confronting the wise but perverse administrator who knew the answer and would not tell me because of rules. It was like a bad role-playing game. I did make friends with the administrator but I was still looking for the broadcast booth for the radio station.

Yeah, I’ve been a little jumpy lately.

It didn’t help that my dream about Elly-Belly’s flight to the palm tree in my dream seemed to touch on a terrible reality. I couldn’t find Baby. Baby’s real name is Pixie, although the concept of a cat having a real name is something like naming the stars. Cats and stars laugh in your face at your petty attempts to name them!

Baby was an impulse rescue, the kind that doesn’t make sense and probably upsets the natural order of things in a household just getting used to the latest addition even if she is a benevolent tyrant. This is not a conflict in terms in the cat world as it might be in human terms.

Baby started out as a foundling in Napa. I was trying to help her finder find a forever home for her. We had a deadline, the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend. I didn’t want her to go to the pound. Sometime midway through the weekend, I caved and asked Andrea to bring her to me. Seriously, what’s one more cat? My older cats stand with picket signs, citing food riots and other unpleasantness should their world be shifted.

Shift it does and Pixie comes to live at my house and since she’s only a ball of fluff, just a few weeks old, we call her Baby, too. It sticks. To  keep her from becoming a feral indoor cat in her formative years, I determine to take her with me on a road trip to the Four Corners area. Since the dog was coming along anyway, what’s one more?

You’re starting to notice a theme, I think? What’s one more? I have Jupiter in the nadir in my birth chart, Jupiter in Gemini. This is “generous to a fault” but perhaps super-sized. After all, what’s one more? That’s called Jupiter in an “ill-dignified” sign. Uh, oh, OOPS. As the fearless leader of the Daughters of Divination, Thalassa, says, “Dignity. Always dignity.”  OK, how about sometimes dignity? There are other planets. My natal Venus is in Taurus and couldn’t be happier.

So it is energy that lends itself to planning an opera out in the barn called Die FliederRabbit starring a familiar looking rabbit with unfamiliar looking bat wings through the Miracle of Photoshop. Suddenly, I envision customized little blue jackets, a slathering-mad Mr. MacGregor waving wooden stakes and a gun with silver bullets, a toothy minion chorus, and, well, remember the scene in Fantasia where the basement floods due to an overboard spell by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?

OK, fine. More isn’t always better. More is more. But the dog, the other cats, the humans and Baby all settled down into sort of a Cold War if not truce. Our house has all the intrigue of a walled and divided city. There are those who go to the North Sector and those who never do. At least one never goes to the South Sector. Alice, the Empress, likes to vacation in the downstairs apartment, luxuriating in having the place to herself.

Baby, who believes her presence is appropriate for any occasion, goes wherever she pleases. She hangs out on the ironing board waiting for an unsuspecting resident to walk by. She leaps, knowing she is likely to land badly, so all claws are used to get a purchase on her target. This is especially inconvenient when carrying a bowl of soup, for instance. She likes to lie in wait for Derek our ordinarily pleasant housekeeper who comes once a week to despair over all our personal failures. When he ventures near, she likes to remove a chunk of flesh to see if he tastes the same this week.

Lately, however, her terrible twos have mellowed just a touch. She has forgotten herself for a moment and left her Hell on Wheels personality behind. She has actually taken to giving me a snog good night. Nice kitty! Perhaps there is hope for my Holy Terror.

Any mother with any time on the job knows that the time to be most afraid is when the children are quiet. So after waking up from my dream about scared cats in palm trees, I detected the silence of the Lambie-Pies.

“Ah, snoozing,” I thought and wondered why I wasn’t snoozing also. I sat dutifully at my desk, hoping I was really looking at two computers instead of having had my astigmatism stuck in left gear. I read my work email. The street sweeper came by.

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

I waited for Baby to pound on my door as she does whenever the street sweeper comes. She’s pretty sure that, for her sins, that thing is going to eat her. I don’t discourage the notion entirely. Heavy machinery is hell on cats. Loud noises among the sound-sensitive are particularly jarring. The Coming of the Street Sweeper must be the scariest movie she can imagine.

But there was no pounding on the door. This didn’t make sense. This didn’t smell right. I had to investigate because where the heck was the kitty? Noses counted and I’ve come up one short. Where’s Baby? I start to whimper. I call her name, her names. I call her lots of names. Other cats come to see if there’s food involved and retreat when they realize it’s just me on my hands and knees checking under furniture. Binket beeps at me and sits, explaining that she might have told me there was nothing under there except a cat toy, which she wouldn’t mind having.

My panic grows. The little rat charges the front door every once in a while. Did she make a break for it as long ago as last night? I wander down the back stairs and pad around the back yard calling softly for her. John takes a walk around the block while I imagine the worst. She is hit by a car? She is stolen by hawks? She is scared and alone?

As I settle down to my desk to have a good cry in utter despair, fully “fived” about the whole thing, I consider which might be worse, the 5 of Pentacles, the fear of material loss or the 5 of Cups, the sadness of a heart sunk low by loss.

A small form emerges from behind the stove in the kitchen. Naughty kitty to give your cat mama a heart attack! I say a little prayer to St. Angina, the patron saint of “You aggravate my heart and soul.”

My day begins.

Best wishes.

Legacy

Since my husband and I hosted his family's reunion last weekend together with his sister and their cousin, I'm exhausted but still thinking about family ties.  I do, of course, plan to write about the family reunion, keeping with the tradition in blogging, if there is such a thing, that no topic is safe from discussion via a blog.  However, until I can gather my wits...or was it just the one wit?  Until I can gather myself back together, this is a reprinted column previously published in Aleesha Stephenson's lovely Timeless Spirit eMagazine, November 2010.  I hope, if you have not already, you will take advantage of the free subscription.

Mom married late in life and had my brother and me eleven months apart when she was 41 and 42 before there were a lot of special medical processes to assist with late in life babies. She was overjoyed to have children. It was her lifelong dream. She had tremendous insecurities about her own looks and attractiveness, so two happy babies with big blue eyes were a miracle to her.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t have hair for a year or so; she taped bows to my head until my first wispy, then thick blonde hair grew in. She marveled that I spoke complete sentences at 9 months then realized the downside of an introvert mother raising an extravert child.

“The reason you talk in your sleep,” she explained, “is that you just didn’t get everything said during the day.” Most of the time, she adjusted as much as she could to having a chatterbox child. She was curious and eager about childhood mental development. One of my earliest memories is sitting in my high chair in the kitchen telling “Banana Stories” with her.

“If I had three bananas,” she held up her fingers and drew bananas in yellow chalk on our chalkboard on the kitchen wall, “and you ate one of them, how many bananas would I have?” I giggled uncontrollably at the thought of the delicious naughtiness of a possibly purloined banana and answered. I never tired of Banana Stories or the stories of her childhood. I became her confidante, her sounding board and sometimes her only friend.

Over time I realized my mother, despite her delight in her children, was almost constantly depressed. She held onto what was painful in her life like clutching a knife at the blade or gripping broken glass. I knew the stories of her pain so well that it was almost like being there. Her first grade teacher made fun of her drawing of a 4-legged bird. Her mother always dressed her sister in blue dresses and she got brown ones. Her college professor held a tuning fork to her head to prove it was a vacuum. She was flashed on a train. She was humiliated by her parents, her sister, her teachers, her first boyfriend, her friends, her friends’ families, her bosses.


Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



Of course, she persisted in life. She had a journalism degree from a respected university. She was a reporter and an editor. She was a WAVE and worked at decoding secret messages. She was a wiz at Blackjack. She started her own business as an antique dealer. She loved baseball.

She told me in a matter-of-fact voice more than once that the more intelligent you are, the more suicide seems like a good option. The smarter you are, the more you realize how hopeless everything is, she explained.

Even as a small child, alarms, healthy alarms went off in my head when she would say this. She had praised me for my intelligence, rewarded me for it. I wanted to be smart. It was fun, fun being me. I wanted her praise. But I did not want to die. My mother had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and voracious urge to learn more. She explained that the requirement for being a truly good journalist was to know everything. And I watched her every time she posited the correlation between intelligence and suicide, Chatty Cathy made silent at these times.


Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



Must I choose between being stupid and alive v. being intelligent and dead? And of course, was she going to succumb to her idea of the ultimate intelligence? Was she the realization of the Queen of Swords reversed: bitter, sad, so focused on the negative, denying her own empowerment, hopeless, angry, constantly disappointed with herself and the rest of the world? Was she the embodiment of the 8 of Swords, the limitations of her own thinking imprisoning her? Was she also the 5 of Pentacles, always feeling on the outside, rejecting all comfort of religion with her professions of agnosticism, citing her favorite Biblical moment identifying with Doubting Thomas?

You never know the gifts you will give others, especially your children. In spite of her enduring and passionate negativity she had given me a few gifts, one consciously. “Just remember,” she told me, “Nothing, nothing diminishes you.” I don’t know exactly where this ray of hope came from within her. Perhaps she, like any ferociously protective mother, sought to sacrifice herself to her demons but save me.


Picture Postcard Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord


An in her terrible Sphinx riddle connecting intelligence to suicide, she gave me another gift, unwittingly. She cemented my identity as separate from hers. I could not agree with her. I realized the limitations of logic, especially hers. I could not be diminished by her depression. I could not be dragged down into the hell of her sadness. Sensitive as I was, aware of spirit as I was, I was given such an important gift. I was able to separate myself from those near me.

Being a tarot reader, I hear and sense some amazingly wonderful things but also some horrors beyond the most frightening movies or books. Some tarot readers ask each other, “How do you separate yourself from your sitters or from a reading? How do you keep from falling in a hole with them?” Even if they survived an “identity crisis” in childhood like I did, I recommend exercises to maintain sense of self.

Take time away. Do something linear and tactile like wash the car, walk the dog, pull weeds. Meditate. Be conscious of your own boundaries and revel in them. They distinguish you, in more than one sense of the word. Soon, the paradox we live in, of being all connected, yet all separate in this life will settle in comfortably. We are spirit and matter. Both are important.

You’ll find the gift, the legacy of learning from others’ lives. Nothing diminishes you, either.

Best wishes.

Outside

I’ve got to get out more often. It’s one thing to have an interior life. It’s one thing to have a day job and an occupation on the side. It’s spring after all and there are roses blooming here, roses, calla lilies, apple blossoms, freesias. And that’s just in my yard. My husband says, “You need to get out more.” Even my tarot buddy Kristine says, “Girl, you’ve got to get out more.” OK, they’re right.

What better opportunity than to watch the Big Match between our rugby Barbarians and, well, those other guys? Maybe they are right. I haven’t been to even one of the games and the Barbarians had a shot at the championship, quite a difference from last year. We don’t want to talk about last year. I think that’s the official story.


Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) 2010 Marcia McCord


It takes a lot to manage the field and keep the rugby team going. It’s not just the financial part, which is substantial. I’m the “silent” partner in this although I think the title is just an honorific. I do like to tell people that I’m the quiet one in the family so they get an idea of just how extraverted an extravert can be. This is also a labor of love for my husband. Oh, true, he never played rugby and still hasn’t. He had never seen a rugby game before a few years ago. When Lani asked him if he could help find a place for the Tongans to practice rugby, John couldn’t resist helping. Then Ben came on as head coach. He’s originally from Fiji. Both Lani and Ben fit what I think of as the “typical” rugby persona: big enough to fill a door, laugh loud enough to fill a room and a handy delayed reaction to pain.

That delayed reaction to pain is a good trait. It’s not that rugby is in itself dangerous. But except for the mouth guard to keep your teeth in relatively the same place they started and for some a cap that keeps ears attached to heads (worn by only a few), it’s an elegant, unpadded, fast-moving match typically between two teams of 15 guys who should be able to qualify for the winning team of any cartoon Gothic combat game. It’s a contact sport, perhaps something of an understatement. Sometimes the contact results in arms or collarbones broken. Sometimes there’s a cleating incident. Usually if someone gets hurt, unless there are bones visibly sticking out or a lot, not just a little blood, the game is played around the downed warrior in a gentlemanly fashion. The clock doesn’t stop though. The men address the referee as “sir” and only one player per team is allowed to talk to him. The fans, of course, are free to speak their minds from the sidelines. They do.

Rugby is played in the winter which in California usually means cold mud. They seem to like it that way. One game ended with both teams the same mud-color although they started out with different colored jerseys. In spite of the rain we have in the winter, we have to keep our field watered year-round to make sure there is grass on it when winter rolls around. And there’s a bit of electricity for the lights for the night time practices. And there’s the washing of the shirts, shorts and socks. Usually the uniforms have to be sent through the wash cycle twice to get the ground in stuff, mud, blood, whathaveyou, out. A lot of teams choose dark colors, a practical choice after I’ve seen what it takes to wash after a game. Large commercial washers are best. You don’t really want to put all that in your own washing machine; most of them weren’t built for rugby.

Yesterday’s Big Match seemed like the ideal outing. It was going to be nice, in the 70’s at most, partly cloudy, breezy. I found my sneakers and my Barbarians t-shirt. No question, we were taking the dog. Quincy goes to the field with my husband for every practice, runs up and down the field with the team, collapses in the shade and follows John around like shadow. I know the popular dog among the barbaric nowadays is something more ferocious, but our cocker spaniel is loyal to his “boys.” No question, we were taking the dog.

We drove down to Morgan Hill with our travel cups of tea and forbidden donuts. I had my sugar high and crash and by the time I woke up, we were there. I hadn’t been to Morgan Hill in a long time and remembered that was where I had had my first steak quesadilla, still a favorite.

We paid for our parking at the sports complex, grabbed our stuff and jumped out to find our field. We sat at the picnic tables for a little while waiting for the rest of the team to show up and then started towards field B. A young man stopped me.

“You can’t bring your dog in here unless you carry him. We have a policy. No dogs on the grass. It’s either carry him or leave him in the car.” John and I looked at each other, shifted our loads and he picked the bewildered Quincy up. We got to our pitch, found that there were two metal staircases to a trailer office on the sideline and made sure Quincy’s feet never touched the grass. We were a couple of hours early and the boys started to practice.

I should mention that our boys are not just boys. Oh, sure the team is made up of mostly young men built like fighter robots in a sci-fi movie. But then there are a couple of guys you would not call young. Lani and Ben are on the far side of 40 and one guy reminds me of one of my favorite San Francisco Giants’ catchers named Santiago, a guy who could be knocked down and get back up again and again, a guy who looks like he’s made of barbed wire who is past 50. And then there’s Lovina. She’s Lani’s daughter, in high school, and one of the best athletes I’ve met in a long time. She has an incandescent smile and beautiful long hair. She plays too. She knocks the other team on their uniforms so fast they don’t know what hit them.

Just before the game started, another man associated with the field came up to me. “We have a policy about dogs.” “We know,” I smiled. “We carried him in. He won’t touch the grass. And I understand, sir. We have a field too. We have bags and paper towels to clean up if there’s an accident.”

He puffed up and showed himself to be the bully he had hints of being. “You can’t carry that dog!”

OK, I am only 5’1” and of an undisclosed weight and a certain age. Let’s say I’m older and I have more insurance, OK? But I did have the dubious honor of being the arm wrestling champion of the junior high two years in a row and in spite of my obvious physical decline into the uncertain age thing, I can still lift 100 lbs. pretty easily. Jerk, I thought. I thought other uncharitable thoughts. But being blonde can help and I have been accused of having a firm grasp of the obvious.

“My husband can,” I pointed to John who is over six feet tall and not of a willowy nature. The rude man grunted and I explained that the young man at the gate had said we could bring the dog in if we carried him. We carried him. He wasn’t touching the grass. We were good. Mr. Rude was not happy but went away. Other people and their dogs arrived in various modes of transport.

The match started, the running, the yelling, the ruck, the scrum, the goals by the other team. And another employee of the park came up to me. “We have to ask you to remove your dog.”

John turned the videotaping over to Lovina and carried Quincy out. Since it’s cruel to leave your pet or your child in a car if the weather could kill them and since this was the Big Match and since we had driven two hours to get there, John and Quincy sat two fields and several fences away in the picnic area outside the grass while I videotaped with my camera too. Kenny went down a couple of times hard but got back up again. Lani took a tremendous hit from several of the other team’s players simultaneously. It was a hard game.

At half time, I switched places with John, but not before meeting another woman coming to watch the match carrying her fox terrier. They had apparently let her through. I saw other dogs. It looked like the dogs from our team were the ones sitting in the picnic area. It didn’t seem right somehow. I started to steam. I’d paid thousands of dollars to see this team to this point and even if they were losing, it was the championship. I mentioned the other dogs to the management and asked that in the future they make their policy better known to occasional users, like rugby championships. If I had known there was such a policy, we would have left him at home.

They thanked me for being so nice. Apparently they were grateful I didn’t pull a knife on them. Cocker spaniel owners are known for that in the south bay, perhaps. Or maybe it was the word Vallejo on my shirt. I had a knife in my desk drawer at home. Oh, there are some in the kitchen too. I really had little sharper than my wit to pull on them. And I felt that was a waste of time and wit.

Lovina played. The only injury was a concussion on the other team. We scored a kick at least but lost. When the match was over, we headed for the car. I was warming up to the after-match verbal explosion of the things I would have told the rude man if I too had been rude. But Quincy said it all for me. On the sidewalk in front of the parking lot, well outside the fence and the grass, he sniffed a lamp post base rising out of the concrete walk and relieved himself. Not a drop was on the grass.

“Good dog.” I smiled and walked to the car.

Best wishes.

O Christmas Tree

It had to happen sometime. I was bound to put the Christmas tree up again someday and today was the day. My husband found the artificial tree in the garage and brought it in, full of doubt about the whole project.

Now, remember, I like Christmas. I like the music especially. I'm not much for Grandma getting run over by a reindeer but I enjoy the fun carols, the sacred carols, folk carols, instrumental and vocal. One of my favorites is in Latin, O Magnum Mysterium. I live under the delusion that I'm musical, that it's part of our family. A brother plays guitar and sings, a sister the cello, another sister the oboe, guitar and who knows how many other instruments, and Dad played the oboe. It's a family thing. My sisters and our sister-in-law have actually cut (personally produced) albums of their music which I just love. I sing.  I sing all the time, whether out loud or in my head.  I used to worry about it.  Now I figure it's my own personal elevator music.

I sang in school choir, in church choir and in Sweet Adelines. I was part of a quartet called Jigsaw Jazz (as if we were famous) and sang at a county fair. Little old guys wanted my autograph! That's when I was pretty sure I wasn't cut out to be famous. Still, one of the things I love best about the season is singing the songs. Finally, the soundtrack that is my constant companion in my head is appropriate to sing out loud this time of year and people don't mind so much if you sing along.

Well, they don't mind so much, I found, if they approve of your singing. My husband was blessed with many things, but a singing voice wasn't one of them. People have a hard time believing that, thinking he must be an Irish tenor. After all, he has sparkly blue eyes, and smile as big as County Cork and stories that last forever. How can a guy like that not sing? Well, he does sing. But people ask him to stop. He's so far from perfect pitch that people wish he were just in the ballpark.

My favorite Christmas story of his is sad but true. One midnight mass he enthusiastically joined the congregation in singing Christmas carols. After a couple of looks and suggestions, one brave (or brash) soul asked him to go outside the church if he was going to continue to sing because he was throwing the choir off! Some Christmas spirit!  Bah and humbug.  At least the story gets funnier each time he tells it.

So, without children and and with only a song in our hearts or running through our heads, we usually don't put a tree up. We've done a few tree substitutes. Usually I will hang the Christmas cards we get in a tree shape on the Venetian blinds, easy up, easy down. One year I put presents under the television.  Hey, it has lights.  What do you want?  And generally if we're really in the spirit, we will move a wreath we keep up year 'round from the hutch to an oscillating fan on a tall stand that we've consistently failed to put away after summer is over. After we decorate the Christmas fan, we put the presents under it and wait for the cats to steal all the bows from the presents and hide them under the couch.  You have your traditions, I'm sure.

This year, though, good heavens we will have guests! With children! Frank is from France, his wife Seiko is from Japan and their two sons are definitely from Orange County. The older boy is going to support his parents in their old age with a career in professional tennis. Well, maybe. And the younger one has learned to surf. Very California! Frank's parents are gone and since we don't have children and he doesn't have parents, he's adopted us. He felt it was time the children spent more time with their "grandparents." This is cause for celebration for us, followed quickly by panic. At least, that was my experience. Naturally part of that panic is the, "OMIGOSH we've got to find the Christmas tree!"  I was pretty sure we still had one.  It's not like we've thrown anything else away.

The hubs came through with the tree, pulled from who knows where in the garage, along with two boxes of perfectly hideous Christmas ornaments. Now, I am proud that we are an all-rescue family. The cats love the dog. The dog loves at least one of the cats (the neighborhood inter-species scandal but at least it's just the animal version of courtly love, a lot of singing and poetry and goo-goo eyes between our otherwise ferocious little calico cat and our otherwise mild-mannered cocker spaniel.  Think Jeeves, not Bertie.). But I have to say that rescue Christmas ornaments are pretty pitiful. After we figured out how to put the tree up, a sort of tab A-slot B trial and error effort, we dug out strings of lights. One string is multi-color and steady. The rest are blinky and blue. Some of the ornaments are made out of painted pastry, some out of shredding polyester thread over styrofoam balls, some crocheted and some the usual store-bought glass balls. I remember getting them back in 1988 when I lived alone and was determined to have a Christmas tree, no matter what. Well-meaning friends have gifted me with the occasional spectacular single ornament like Friends Forever 2000 and a few Frog Princes.  This year I got some rather nice seashell ornaments from an exchange package.  Plus, there is a sparkly blue garland and a china angel-doll tree topper with lights that still work after 20 years. Score. Add this hideous jumble to our fake Charlie Brown Christmas tree and it's a rescue Christmas special! But we plugged in the tree lights and turned off the living room lights and, you know what? It's Christmas!

Sometimes the message of love and light goes out and misses the mark. When people are starving or hurt or crazed with grief or anger, singing a jolly carol or repeating a worn phrase can be like an insult. But sometimes, with bits of felt and glue and glitter and paint, with cards and music, with a plastic tree and blinky lights, sometimes the message gets through. It's not whether your tree wins a beauty contest. It's not whether your singing gets you on American Idol. It's not whether the family that comes to you for a holiday of love has DNA, language or sports in common. It's that we can gather around our rescue tree and sing, with all our voices, big and small, flat, sharp or outside the building and transform ourselves and our lives into the spirit of love. Suddenly, that tree is the most beautiful tree in the world. That Christmas carol brings a tear to your eye. And our hearts are full of the wonder of the season.

No matter what you celebrate at this time of year, may your hearts be full of love. May they be decorated with the gifts of the season. May your family, whether they are the family you choose or the family you came with, be a little closer. May your white Christmas not be dandruff. May all your presents fit and flatter you except the pink sweater that your aunt loves and you hate. And, may the cats not discover the joys of tree-tipping until after the guests leave next week. Please.

Best wishes!