Casting Off Chains

One of the things about living in an out of the way place like either Point Roberts or Roberts Creek is that you are oblivious of much that goes on the in world. I seldom experience traffic jams or daily newspapers or even traffic lights. I don’t know anything about the kinds of things that are advertised on billboards. Since I don’t have a TV, I largely don’t know anything about most of popular culture. The tabloids at the grocery store are filled with headlines about people I’ve almost never heard of except in those (repeated) headlines. I’ve never been clear about whether Paris Hilton actually does anything other than be Paris Hilton. I know who Regis used to be, but am not clear at all about who he is now or who is the Kathy who is so frequently attached to him. I remember Oprah largely from ‘The Color Purple,’ and although I know she has a TV show and an eponymous magazine, I have never seen the one or read the other. She changes size, I know from the tabloids. And I know she endorses and causes to be sold large numbers of books, mostly about victimized people who eventually triumph over adversity. I’ve learned, over the years, to avoid the ‘Oprah's Book Club'-labeled books. Not that I have anything against triumphing over adversity. I mean, are not many if not most of the great 19th Century novels—Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskill, even Trollope—about people triumphing over adversity? It’s more the whininess of the adversity part than the triumphing that I object to.

In any case, all these things, I am untouched by. But what I receive in full measure are the chain letters of wonders that circulate endlessly around the internet. Virtually every day someone somewhere, someone that I actually know, sends me some series of sayings, or pictures, or videos meant to amaze or amuse or educate. The internet seems to be a hot medium, in the McLuhan sense, because I find it hard not to look, at least a little, at these wonders as they unfold via my email screen. Only yesterday, I was being counselled that all the wonders of our world were intended by God to do honor to humans: walnuts, look just like brains, and good for thinking; grape bunches, the shape of a heart, and excellent for lowering excess blood pressure; celery, like bones, and a real contributor to preventing osteoporosis;oranges prevent breast cancer; olives, you can imagine; etc.

Today, Ed got a video of a carnival ride in Texas that combines bull fighting with an Octopus ride; by the end of the video, people had been flung off the octopus and were being chased by the bulls. Yesterday, he got a b&w video of an Italian uniformed motorcycle drill team that looked like its routines had been devised by Albert Speer or whoever choreographed all those military drills in Triumph of the Will (or maybe it was in Riefenstahl’s Olympic Games film from Nazi Germany).

Ed’s chain letter gifts from others are largely action videos; mine, more like art stuff. I’ve received numerous examples of toothpick art, of street painting, of peachpit carving, of painting on feathers (feathers, I might add, that were much more beautiful before they were painted on than afterwards). There seems no end to this stuff. Today, I was visited (for the third time this year) with the fabulous series of painted cats. When I first saw these, my reaction was, ‘Amazing!’ Most of my family tends to respond with ‘How could they do that to cats?’ Perhaps this is because I take it as a given that nobody does anything to cats that cats don’t choose to have done to them, but perhaps I just don’t take cats seriously enough. In any case, sometime after the second email visitation of the fabulous painted cats, I had occasion to track down the pictures to show to a grandchild. Imagine my surprise when Google offered me, high up, a link to Snopes and the painted cats . Turns out the painted cats are a stunning example of (and might as well be a brilliant advertisement for) Photoshop: a fraud, a hoax!

I like those cats, though. Even photoshopped, it seems like a very interesting idea. When I first saw them, I couldn’t imagine how they got the cats to submit to it, but I walked right into believing that it was the real deal. Now, of course, I don’t know about any of those other things. Carved peach pits? Maybe not. Spectacular sand sculptures? Dubious. Italian drill teams, octopus rides with bullfighting thrown in? All of unknown status. If I have to check with Snopes before I look at every one of these chains, I might at last find a way to keep from looking at them. Unchained, at last!

Miranda's Revels

My daughter has an elderly cat named Miranda. Everybody thinks their own cat is a particularly special one, but Miranda who is, of course, not my cat, has had something of an unusual life. She was born in Minnesota and entered my daughter’s family life in the course of some personal sadness and that may be why, although she was never my cat, I had a particular fondness for her even though I’m not particularly a cat person, not least because I have a mild allergy to cat hair. After a few years of graduate student-apartment life in Minnesota, Miranda and her family moved to Washington, D.C., where she lived in a bigger apartment with a new kitten named Fenton. But in between Minnesota and D.C., Miranda spent a year with my son when my daughter and her husband went to Germany. At my son's 5-acre place, Miranda learned to catch mice and run wild in the tall grasses. But after that year was over, she returned easily to apartment living.

A few more years and a baby, and Miranda and Fenton, the baby, and the grownups moved on to a small town in Missouri on the Mississippi river. There, Miranda had the run of an entire house and, on occasion, a stroll in the yard with real grass and flowers. But she never went out of the yard by choice. She’s a pretty cat, but of an ordinary appearance in the grey stripe direction as you can see in the picture above. She watched birds right close out the window there in Missouri. She met and took no liking to yet another baby. She wasn’t all that crazy about the first one or about Fenton, either, but she tolerated them all in that superior way that cats have. On the other hand, she loved my daughter and my son-in-law.

Then, one day, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, when she was around ten years old, she walked out the door one day and didn’t come back. Days passed; no sign, no collection by the cat pick-up people, no news. No Miranda. Well, of course, there were plenty of cars around, and the town, while not rural in any way, has wildlife that could easily provide the end of Miranda. So there was mourning for Miranda. Then, many months later, Miranda reappeared. Wherever she had been, she was now home, but she was living in a drainpipe in the small woodsy area behind the house. She was sleek, well-fed, and self-sufficient, with no interest whatsoever in returning to the life of a house cat.

Over time, she did come to live nearer to the house and, finally, in the garage, at least in the winter. She accepted cat food as within her wild animal definition of okay food. She even let the children (and me) pet her now and then, though she definitely showed no interest in reigniting her relationship with Fenton who is a solid housecat in every sense of the word. She was in this domestic world, but she was not OF this domestic world, she made clear.

Last night, I received an email from my daughter with the picture of Miranda admiring some flowers a month or so ago. My son-in-law had found the cat dead in the yard that evening. She was 17 years old. Miranda’s revels now are ended, but I am very happy to have known a cat even slightly who had those kind of revels, who appears to have found--on her own initiative--exactly the life she wanted and was willing to undergo extraordinary changes to have it. She was a cat who, late in life, went on a quest and, in some sense, came back with the grail.