A Not-Very-Christmasy Random Collection of Thoughts that I Promise Will Pay Off, Somehow

I made pizza for dinner last night. I wanted to do it on Friday while it snowed -- stopped on the way home Thursday night and bought mozzarella cheese and everything -- but then when I went to make it I found we had no yeast. And it was snowing. And so we had macaroni & cheese that night instead (warm, soft, bad for you comfort food is warm, soft, bad for you comfort food, no matter how you slice it). Then I stopped and bought yeast on my way home yesterday and we had pizza last night. I'm having it again for breakfast now. And you know what? I don't care what you think? As soon as I finish this first cup of coffee I'm making me a big old Kahlua Sombrero to go with it!

Oh, hell, it's Christmas Eve. And besides, it's not like I'll be drunk at 8:00 a.m. You can't get drunk off Kahlua sombrero. And besides plus also, I make mine with coffee: equal parts Kahlua, cold coffee, and milk. One ice cube. So maybe it's not technically a sombrero. Maybe it's just a hat.

Speaking of hats: I dreamt this morning that I bought a bunch of hats and had a fashion show for My Lady. I've been thinking of hats a lot lately because I got a stupid haircut that I'd really like to hide, and these were fabulous. One was like a steel-grey fedora with a sparkly rhinestone buckle. One was giant -- I mean giant -- and black, and shaped like the big scalloped seat-compartments on the tilt-a-whirl. One I don't remember much about except I thought it made me look like a nun, so I pursed my lips and mimed rapping knuckles with a ruler. And one was black and big and soft and floppy and made me feel like a French (and white, and feminine) Sly Stone. I adored them all, though I allowed I'd probably return the tilt-a-whirl, seeing as how it took up half the room.

My Lady's on my mind today, too, because her kitty died last night. The poor old thing. Her heart just grew three sizes and gave out. The vet wanted her to go to Angell Memorial for ultrasound and surgery, but My Lady did the decent thing and put her down.

I should probably explain here that I technically have a pair of Ladies. I composite them here and refer to them as She, because I don't write enough about their personal lives for it to matter, and it seems more respectful mostly to fiction them up a bit. But for now, I want to tell a little truth.

Although my Ladies coincidentally attended the same boarding school (Westover, in Connecticut), they didn't actually meet until forty or so years later, when they both had apartments in the Dakota in New York. If you don't know what the Dakota is, it's the famous big old apartment building where both Rosemary's Baby and John Lennon were shot. This is my favorite picture of it:

It's called The Dakota because when it was first built, it was so far beyond the limits of the city (as you can see) that people joked it was like living out in the Dakota Territory. Needless to say, the city has since managed to find its way around:

I love this building for the story behind it, and also for the Miss Manners tradition that says if one lives (or lived) there, one never says so. You say you live at 72nd and Central Park West. If people know what that means, then they'll know, and if they don't then you aren't bragging. (Just like one never says one went to Harvard; you just say you went to college "in the east.") But when one has framed, signed pictures in one's bathroom, hand-signed "Merry Christmas, Lady! Love, Yoko and Sean," well, certain nosy Ones do tend to ask.

So there are stories I could tell you -- about Yoko, about Lauren Bacall and Jason Robards, about all kinds of other famous people (My Lady was on the board; she knew the what-what) -- but I won't. They aren't mine, they're only hearsay, and I wouldn't want to wind up getting sued. I do, however want to tell you about Jing.

Ages ago -- in the '70s and '80s -- My Lady had a pair of Siamese cats. They used to get out of her apartment all the time and go visiting. If someone in the Dakota was having a party, the pair of Siamese would inevitably show up, acting like they'd been invited. No one objected, but they did tend to overstay their welcome, so My Lady would get calls all the time when the party ended, telling her to come collect her cats. And then one day, two years after the second Siamese died, she got a call informing her her cat was on the roof.

At first she thought it was a cruel joke, or a spectre of some sort (the Dakota's full of both), but sure enough, there was a Siamese kitten on the roof, wet and sad and sitting in the gutter. You'd have to be a non-cat-person to confuse this poor wee thing with either of the other social bruisers, but you'd have to be a non-person altogether to say "she isn't mine" and leave her there.

So my Lady hung out the window and dandled a bit of something until the kitten inched forward far enough for her to grab a hold. And nobody ever claimed her. And that's how she got Jing. That was in like 1990 or something like that, so it's not as though the poor dead thing didn't lead a charmed existence while she led it.


Now, okay, let's see: how the hell am I going to bring this mess around and make it pay off in a Christmasy sort of way? Dead cats and big hats, murder and demonic possession, cold pizza and coffee drinks (oh, yeah, you bet your ass I've commenced with the Kahlua by this point)? Think, Erin. Think, think, think.

My thinker's sore.

Oh! I know!

Ta da...?

Crap.

I took a picture of my festive drink, and it's in a festive glass and everything. It has a festive swizzle stick (which I stuck in it just for the festive photograph) and I set it up with a festive Christmas card behind it for the sake of the festive scene. I took the festive picture, but before I could transfer it over, the battery in my festive camera died. And I know I have another one, but I can't festive find it.

So instead, I give you this:

I got bored drawing the card. But that's a pretty accurate rendition of my drink. Not quite so to-the-brim full anymore, though, naturally...


Merry Christmas!

Ha!

Read this.

"Whaaa?" says the filthy idiot I found in the crawl space because I left the basement door open while I was, you know, walking through it...

HA!

Driving home to see the family for Easter the other day, we heard a story on the radio about a woman in Texas who’s getting hassled by the Homeowner’s Association because she tore out her grass lawn and replaced it with naturally-occurring stone and sunflowers. The city (San Antonio, I think it was) has a program set up to encourage things like this – it’s a water conservation thing – and they actually gave her $300 towards the cost of the landscaping. But her neighbors hate it, and they’re taking her to court.

Taking her to court, can you imagine!? For landscaping her yard in the manner she saw fit. The ecologically-sound and politically-correct manner, no less!

Unfortunately, she’s screwed. Because apparently when she bought the house she signed a paper – she wouldn’t have been allowed to buy the house without signing the paper – that said she promised to keep the grass green and cut it every Tuesday and only hang pink curtains in the windows and stand on her tippytoes when she answered the door and whatever else the Homeowners Association decided was befitting their particular cachet.

What would possess a person to go and sign a thing like that?

Oh my god, if there were a Homeowner’s Association in this neighborhood they would have us tarred and feathered. We made a conscious decision when we moved in that we were going to deal with the parts we had to look at first – in other words, the inside – and when (if ever) we get that under control, then we’ll think about the parts that other people see. I mow the lawn, but that’s really about it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Johnny plants a garden every year but then he doesn’t weed it and it gets all overgrown. I don’t weed it either because it’s not my fucking garden. He also plants things along the whole length of the fence so I can’t mow along it, but then he doesn’t weed them either. And I’m not gonna do it because they’re not —well, you know.

Speaking of the fence… It is not only chain-link, but rusted and disgusting, and it leans over in a couple places where people came around the turn too fast and wound up in the yard. That happened before we were here; it’s been like that since we moved in. A neighbor once offered to pull it up for us for nothing, if we gave him $2600 to take down the only healthy tree in the entire yard, but I said no, thanks, and I haven’t seen him since. We can’t afford a new fence yet, anyway.

Oh, and speaking of trees: There are six of them in the yard. Four silver maples: that big healthy one out back and three along the fence whose roots have bubbled up and cracked the sidewalk, and which are so big and old they threaten to throw branches down on passing cars every time the wind blows. Then two in the middle of the yard that I don’t know what they are because they haven’t any leaves. They’re sick with some kind of festering rot that kills the branches from the bottom up. One of them’s lost all its branches – it’s just a naked trunk blowing precariously in the breeze – and the other oozes brown goo on the picnic table from the branches it has left. The goo hardens up like rubber cement, and the squirrels eat it.

Oh, and speaking of squirrels: Johnny feeds them. Throws whatever’s gone bad in the kitchen out into the yard. Mushy apples, sprouted potatoes, hamburger buns that have been in the freezer since last Fourth-of-July. The squirrels come and eat it all but other things do, too. Starlings, skunks, raccoons. Just this afternoon Johnny saw a big black cat eating the hamburg buns.

Oh, yeah, speaking of cats? I feed the strays. It started with this runty one who only had half a tail and one perpetually swollen ear. I felt bad for her so I started putting a bowl under the porch. Well, of course, you never feed just one stray cat, now do you? The last time I checked there were six – plus a few who actually have owners but still like to come down for a little evening nosh.

Speaking of the porch, it kind of sags. (“Kind of” my ass, the thing’s a goddamn U). We actually were going to take care of that when we first moved in because a friend offered to lend us a set of jacks and all it takes is a week and a couple of cement blocks, but then he decided his mum’s house was uneven, and jacking up a whole house takes much longer than just jacking up a porch, and then his brother thought it looked like a good idea, and, well, blood is thicker than water after all. If our turn doesn’t come round soon we’re going to have to go ahead and rent one, because we have to get it done before we paint, and – oh, yeah, speaking of paint…

We’re not just talking a little mildew or an unfortunate color choice – actually, the color’s not that bad. No, we’re talking peeling you can see from the street at 40 miles an hour. Some windows have different color trim than all the rest. The whole back part that was rotten when we bought it got all new cedar shakes and they never got so much as primed.

Let’s see, did I forget anything? Well, there’s the pile of dirt that Johnny had delivered for the garden that turned out to be more dirt than he needed and what are you supposed to do with extra dirt? There’s the trashcan with the hostas in it over by the fence, which Johnny dug up somewhere and I which I wouldn’t let him plant because I hate hostas, so they’ve sat in trashcan-stalemate in the yard for going on three years. There’s the composter that all the veggie scraps go into but never get turned or treated or used. The fenced-in section in the corner where the leaves go every fall so that they, too, can never actually get composted. Oh, and then there’s the back porch, where Johnny puts paint buckets that he doesn’t feel like washing out, and where they sit until they’re full of rusty rainwater that probably really oughtn’t to be washed into the watershed.

In other words, our house would give any Homeowner’s Association fits of St. Vitus’ Dance. It’s a blight. It’s an eyesore. It’s a stain. And I don’t care what the neighbors think about it. I’ll get out there when I’m good and ready. And when I am, if I decide I want to fill the yard with rocks and plant sunflowers then, dammit, that’s what I’ll do.

Actually, I did plant sunflowers last year, all along the chain-link fence. They didn’t come up, not a single one.

Eek

Cats go crazy at night, that’s what they do. So I didn’t think much of it when Girl Cat tore across the bed and woke me up from a sound sleep at three a.m You get used to these things. Those of you without cats – or kids, I guess, or dogs or husbands – might not understand, but it happens. You learn to just roll over.

But Sister tore and tore and tore: up on the bed and under it, out to the kitchen and back again, round and round in circles in the corner of the room. “Hey,” I thought to her in my half-sleep, “that’s enough already…”

And then I heard the little squeak.

Well, cats chase mice, that’s what they do. I’m not one of these save-it-save-it-save-it! folks – not since I turned twelve, at least. I don’t hate mice. I really don’t even that much mind mice. I mean, I wouldn’t want my house overrun with them or anything; I wouldn’t want their poopies in my corn flakes every morning. But they don’t bother me as much as, oh, say, spiders.

When we first moved in this house it had been vacant for six months. The mice months, too: October through April. There were windows missing in the basement, a crawl space open to where the bulkhead used to be (a long story I’ll get into some other time), and food left in the cupboards. Weird food – nothing I’d eat – but calories nonetheless. And yet there were no mice. Spiders galore, but not a single mouse. Or not a single mouse poop, anyway, and for two and a half years no squeaking in the night.

We found this odd. Disturbing, actually. Frightening, in fact. What's wrong with this house, we thought, that it could stand wide-open, empty, and heated – with food in the freakin' cupboards – and still the mice won’t come? Well, that became one of those la-la moments, where you just decide not to think about it and move on. La la…

Meanwhile, in the dark last night: more tearing, tearing, tearing, and then another squeak. Only not really. This one, at the top of its tiny little lungs, went more like:

Squea—

Whoops. So much for Mickey. Well, that’s what cats do. Cats kill mice. At least now I could go back to sleep.

These beasts of ours (we have two. They have names but they don’t use them except at the vet's: we just call them Boy and Girl, or Brother and Sister) – anyway, these beasts of ours are champion mousers. The apartments we’ve occupied have given them plenty of practice, and He was always best. He’d sit for hours staring at a hole (literally, for hours: his record – in the Southie hole – was overnight) just waiting for that half-second lunge when the poor wee thing would stick its sniffer out. But since we moved to mouseless here, He’s gotten lazy. And fat. And now She is the Mouse King – or Queen, if Tchaikovsky will forgive me.

The first mouse we found here was laid out under the Christmas tree this past December, right next to the Nativity, like a gift from some alternate magi-cat universe. We knew it was from Her, because She’s always been a keeper.

In the old place She had stashes. Under the bed, behind the door – places you don’t always look. Until you do, and then you’d see six or eight dead mice collected there and you'd know why She'd been in and out of the back room so many times. See, in addition to keeping her collections, She likes to visit them as well. So every time I’d clean out the latest disgusting stash, I couldn’t help but sit and wait for her to drop by for a look-see. She’d go in, find nothing, and come back out shooting me such a “drop dead” look that I that I just had to feel bad for having flushed her store of rotting, smelling, teeny little corpses.

So the first thing I did when I woke up this morning was to search the bedroom. Where’d you put ’im, Sister? Under the bed? Nope. Behind the door? Nope. In the bathroom? In the closet? Under the radiator? Nope, nope, nope.

Hm. Maybe she didn’t kill him after all. Maybe they just had their little chase and then he got away. I have to admit that after this thought I couldn’t stop myself from adding “Good for you, wee tiny Mouse!”

But then I saw the spot.

I was just starting my workout on the floor when I saw a small red circle, just about the size and color of – oh my god, a drop of blood. Dead mice you find under the bed don’t usually bleed! They usually, I think, have little mouse-sized heart attacks and just keel over, peaceful-like. You pick them up and flush them and ta-da. Blood, though. A bleeding mouse? That’s heart-wrenching.

And there was more. It was a gorefest down there now that I was looking. The first drop I’d seen was the only round one, the rest were teardrop-shaped – in other words: mouse-running-away-shaped. I could just picture the denouement that had occurred at the foot of my bed while I was thinking mean thoughts about the noise. I felt bad, until I saw the blood-drop on my bed, and then I stopped thinking anything at all.

La la la, pretty pretty kitty, Sister is so smart, la la la…

I got a sponge and wiped the crime scene clean – except the comforter, which will need professional attention. And when I was finished with the wiping, and had gotten over the discomfort, I decided to commence that workout after all. But when I unfolded my mat, I found a little long-grain poopie in it. Presumably his last.

Eek.