Tag: cats

Dead Dogs

FeaturedDead Dogs

The cat jumped from the cabinet behind the Christmas tree onto the back of the couch and slinked over to perch behind the woman sitting across from me. 

“Watch out! The cat’s behind you,” a nearby party-goer warned.

“Oh that’s ok. I like cats,” said the guest in proper guise.

Staring down the resident pet, I drifted off to a time long ago when I was in the same position as the proper guest. When I turned to greet the host’s cat  (a stupid-human gesture), she swatted me in the face, claws out.

The Christmas party conversation turned to pets.

“Do you have any pets?” I was asked.

“Oh yes, I have a Westie.”

I love my dog and I talk to her a lot, but I don’t talk about her much. My mother, Agnes, hated people who anthropomorphized their pets. Really hated them. My feelings aren’t as strong but I have the genes—an aversion to pet talk.

It turns out Agnes was onto something. As long ago as the 1870s Charles Darwin criticized the natural tendency to ascribe humanlike attributes to non-human animals. His pitch was for humans to show as much interest to the natural world of insects and plants as we do to our pets. In doing so, he opened the forbidden subject of anthropomorphism. Darwin’s England was ground zero for the upper classes treating their pets like children or stand-ins for friends. Since then, many scientific abstracts and PhD theses have tried to punctuate the negative consequences of anthropomorphism: over-spending on human-like clothes, feeding pets non-compatible human food, beautifying dogs with toxic cologne, nail polish, breath freshener and worst of all, expecting non-human animals to have human emotions.

I suspect Agnes was more drawn to anthropomorphism than her sophistication would allow. Her sobering suggestion that trees are worth adoration are probably my earliest spiritual experience of our life together. Another was her reverence in quietly revealing the nesting robin’s eggs outside the bathroom window. But she’d never stand for conversations about them. In her world, if you didn’t present a funny story based on serious articles from the New York Times or Time Magazine, you were an out and out bore. Her ghost leads me to the Never-Trumper’s Bulwark podcasts, whose tagline reads “a few laughs to wash down the crazy.”

There’s a trail of dead dogs nipping at my aging heels. I threw this into the mix at the Christmas party in order to join the pet talk.

“Do you dream about dogs from your past?” Someone asked of no one in particular.

“All my dead dogs are present,” I blurted out. 

It’s a goofy thing to say, like I’m a Buddhist or Spiritualist or the crazy white-hair in the corner with her Diet Coke. Other than my dog Henry, who talked to me during the Covid shutdown, I’ve always thought of my pets as nothing more than animals (forgetting that I, too, am an animal). No fancy garments, doggy day care or prepared meals. But as dead pals, they are sentient. Here. They may be the beings between the here and the hereafter, waiting to guide me to wherever that is. I hope so.

I’ll need protection to escape the cruel and the crazy running my country.

Eclipse of the Century at the Jersey Shore When My Mother Kicked the Coupling Cats

Eclipse of the Century at the Jersey Shore When My Mother Kicked the Coupling Cats

We stood in the street in front of my mother’s house five blocks from the Atlantic Ocean for what Walter Cronkite called the Eclipse of the Century. My 3-year old son Joe hippity hopped atop a bouncy ball clinging to the red rubber handle between his legs. Stacy, my 13-year old sister huddled on the frosty curb with her friend Billy. They had those cardboard gizmos with pinholes. I thought they got them at school but Stacy said Billy made them in his garage.

My mother never got chummy with her neighbors. A group of them came out from under the trees lining our sidewalks for an unobstructed view of the eastern sky. At one end of the house across the street, a construction tarp hung from the roof to the ground hiding a big hole. The mangled house was under repair after my mother pushed the wrong button on her 1959 Chrysler push-button transmission, slammed on the gas instead of the brakes, shot straight out of the driveway, jumped the curb and punched the house in its face. Unharmed, she passed out but not from the impact.

Billy reminded us earlier in the week that we needed a filter to look at the sun or we’d go blind.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you just have to look through the dappled sunlight under the trees,” my mother said. It was March. We didn’t tell her there were no dappling leaves.

The eclipse moved along the east coast from Florida to Maine. In her 1972 song You’re so Vain, Carly Simon memorialized the once-in-a-lifetime 1970 total eclipse of the sun. Cronkite and others reported that we wouldn’t see another eclipse like this until 2017, an absolutely unimaginable future time.

As the umbra started to move into position for the brief period it would black out all sunlight, my mother appeared on the darkening street carrying a can of Budweiser. Our long-haired white male cat, Mae West trailed along. He abruptly mounted a passing 308px-Solar_eclipse_1999_4_NR.jpgtomcat prompting my mother to kick the cats and scream, “You queers! Cut it out!”

Joe stopped bouncing and looked toward the shadowy sky. Stacy bolted toward him. “Cover your eyes!”

I gawked at my mother, already relishing the laughs I’d get acting out this scene to my friends. They loved her. One of the neighbors hurried over to my mother, “Stop kicking the cats!” The others, distracted by the commotion on our portion of the boulevard neglected to look up. The dark cloaked us but we missed gazing at the Eclipse of the Century.

Billy, unfazed by the street theater, peered at the solar system event through his homemade cardboard pinhole filter for the entire three minutes the moon passed in front of the sun, his Eclipse of the Century. He lived to tell the tale for another five years before a drunken driver took his life.