The evening was nearly over and I was struggling with a topic for tonight. I used up all my energy doing physical activity during the day, and I feared I had no brain power left for tonight. Then my daughter and my mom's lifelong friend both commented on the photos I put up of the pride, and suddenly I had a torrent of ideas, and now I have to filter. I like it this way much better than writer's block.
My mother's friend told me that she wanted to be reincarnated as one of my cats after she dies. This is the third time I've been told that in the last six years, and it echoes something a member of my grandfather's generation said to my mother, after watching how good a life her dogs live. (Mom says that she always saw a little of her father's cousin who said it in a dog she had recently, a needy boy who looked like a cross between a greyhound and a shaggy blue tick hound. He was quite possibly their favorite ever.) I would happily save space in my pride for my mom's friend, and my buddies from California who felt the same way. I make every effort to the best life possible for these fur babies. But as fun as it is to imagine pets come back to us, or people do in subsequent lives, I can't commit myself completely to the validity of the idea. I need a little more empirical proof for things, much to my mother's consternation. Besides, I have said that my favorite white cat and my rabble-rousing boy feel totally brand-new to me. I've called them "bonus round kitties," like I have leveled-up in the crazy cat lady game.
Two years ago, I was allowed to babysit seven paintings done by my stepfather. The idea was that I would be his local rep, and try to get him into some galleries down on the coast. Turns out I'm as rotten a sales rep now as I was back when I was trying to sell my own clothing designs twenty years ago. I tried showing them to everyone who would look, and I tried talking to a couple gallery owners. And then I accepted that I suck at this, and hung the paintings in my house. He has decided to list them for sale in an online gallery, and now they've sent me a parcel scale so I can ship directly from here when they sell. For all that I was okay with rearranging furniture, completely upending my flow, and taking some of the old furniture to the consignment shop, something about pulling paintings off the wall, even for a few minutes, freaked me out. It made it feel like it was already time to move, and seeing the blank walls made me feel a huge sense of loss prematurely.
And for the record, it has not been an hour since I opened the box the scale came in, and the girl kitties have already knocked my water glass over on it, tried to crawl in it, and stomped on it, crushing it. Geez. It's a good thing it worked and I don't have to try to send it back in the damaged box. Oh, and I've had to chase my white cat around the room twice to get her to stop eating the plastic bags the pieces came in. What was I saying about a cushy life for my cats? Circus. The word I meant to use was circus.
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