Life Could Be a Dream, or, Out on a Limb: How I Met the Man of my Dreams and How I Fell
The Clark Report: Happy Thanksgiving, or, The Book of Practical Cats
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Here’s the before and after photos for Clark, from when I fostered him in 2015; he was on death row at San Francisco Animal Care and Control. The photo of him on the left was taken by Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue; on the right, a few weeks after I adopted him. In the left photo, he was in a cage where he could not even stretch out full length, and after three weeks, he got hissy and was marked “unadoptable.” Well, who would NOT get hissy being kept in a cage where you could not even lay down without curling up in the fetal position?
I remember showing this photo via Facebook to my mom, who was then 84. My darling Contessa Piglet had just passed away a few weeks earlier, and I was on the foster list for Give me Shelter. They offered Clark.
“He’s so… plain looking, after having such a gorgeous cat, I mean it’s just a foster but…” I sighed to my mom over the phone.
“Well, he is Just Plain Clark. Nothing wrong with that,” my mom said in her practical way….
We began referring to him as “JPC” or “JP Clark”, looking for the right nickname (though in the end, once I met him, he was just plain Clark after all).
I was looking forward to meeting him for several days. However, the woman from the agency changed her mind the morning that Clark was due at my house. She was worried that because he had become hissy and snarly, he would not be a good fit for me.
“Oh, I think I can handle it. Who wouldn’t be upset to be in a cage?” I said.
She wasn’t convinced, though, and since I was a “new” foster mom, I decided not to push it. She brought me a “medical” cat instead of a “behavior” issues cat.
Well, that tiny little “medical” cat was like a feral chipmunk, and got out of the bathroom where I was told to keep her. In the middle of the first night, she was flying around the apartment in a panic, pissing behind the sofa (NONE of my cats, even the sick ones towards the end, ever peed outside the box). Talk about “behavioral” issues. I could not even catch her, and she was supposed to have medicine twice a day. I texted the woman to come pick her up the next morning as I wouldn’t be able to do the medication.
When she came by to pick up the crazed cat, I said, “You know….. I think Clark really would have worked out fine. I showed his picture to my mom, she’s 84, and she thought he was handsome.”
“OH!” Said the woman, “I had no idea I was keeping you from your new BOYFRIEND!”
I thought that was a weird comment but let it go as she continued to say she could get Clark to me that afternoon.
And true to her word, she showed up with Clark around 4 pm. He stepped out of his carrier into the kitchen, where I had laid out a delicious expensive meal of three varieties of wet kitty food. He acknowledged the food but kept walking, checking things out. After a quick tour, he said, “This is fine, this will do,” and sat down and started washing his face.
“You did tell him this was temporary, right?” I asked the woman.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she said, but I knew she hadn’t. Clark had clearly decided, he was staying.
And we were together for nearly 7 years.
I am thankful for all the time we had together. He had undiagnosed and undisclosed seizure disorder which reared its head shortly after I adopted him, so he had to go to the vet quite a lot – which he HATED. I got him the stroller to make trips to the vet more pleasant for both of us – he could stretch out and watch the world, and we’d stop at parks and other places on the way – and sometimes we just went to the park so he wouldn’t associate the carriage with the vet.
Soon enough he had me trained to take him out a few times a week. He saw me through a lot. He flew across country with me three times, twice to my mother’s house before she died. He was there with me for a month as she lingered in hospital, and waited patiently at the house, never complaining about erratic mealtimes. He knew his GrandMew was not well. He comforted my siblings and he was there for me after she died.
His adventures are partially documented in the Clark Reports, but the real story is written in paw prints on my heart.
Missing my furry guy this Thanksgiving, but thankful to have the memories, and Miss Darla to keep me company.
Clark would probably say, “Drop all the maudlin reminiscing and just say HAPPY THANKSGIVING and pop open another can of turkey in gravy, lady.”
Happy Thanksgiving. <pop>
Darla’s Diary
Dear Diary,
Tonight my huMom took me to a Poo-a-Tree Reading.
Ok, first. Who wants to read about poo on a tree? The act is fun of course, but reading about it? Talking about it? Humams…. Weird.
Second. To add insult to in-poo-tree, she drags me to a place called ALLEY CAT books. The effrontery! The gall! No dog treats!
Thirdly, there was ANOTHER dog in the store! I tried to sit through the poo-ums, but, come on! The other dog in the section behind us, whining and complaining, but I was supposed to be quiet? Come on! My huMom tried to zip me into a bag but I was NOT having it! NO! NO!
I tried to be a Good Girl and sat through a few Poo-Oms, but then when that other dog came RIGHT into my space, I had to speak my mind! For that, I got grabbed, picked up, she tried to stuff me in my bag but I wouldn’t go in; we wrassled in the chair for a few minutes and then I was dragged into the stacks of books. AS IF the disruption was my fault and not the fault of that white curly haired fluffball. Geez, next they’ll be blaming me for the cell phone chimes that some dude had going off for five minutes! And the phone was in his pants! Was that my fault TOO???
Another lady read some poo-ems and seemed like my huMom REALLY wanted to stay nearby to hear them, but I’d made up my mind that it was time to go and dragged HER toward the door.
She bought a couple paper things (NOT edible!) and made some excuse to the store guy about having to leave the reading early. “The dog doesn’t like poo-a-tree.” Oh nice, blame me!
Then he followed us out and she said she USED to bring Clark the Cat to this store! And started talking about how cool he was before he got cancer and how he went all over town in his cat stroller. Oh CLARK IS SO COOL!!! EYEROLL. Blah blah. So I peed dangerously close (1 cat paw by my calculations) to a stack of books — and that got their attention. Off we went! Sniffin’ down the cobblestones…
Then we walked to the bus stop, where I REFUSED to get into my travel bag. We continued the struggle on the bus, she kept trying to coax/bribe me in, I was NOT having it!! Some guy kept telling me to do what my huMom said but a girl has to draw the line sometimes!
Later he asked why I wouldn’t get in the bag, which my huMom told him I normally love to ride in.
“Oh, I know why, I took her to a Poo-A-Tree reading and she Did Not Like It!. She was cranky and wouldn’t go in her bag, I couldn’t focus on the poems, it was so embarrassing that I had to leave…”
The man laughed, a gentle, easy, kind laugh. “You took the dog … to a poetry reading?”
HuMom smiled sheepishly. “Well, they don’t allow dogs at Flower Piano at the Botanical Gardens.” She leaned over and pulled the bus rope. We got off at the next stop.
The Inner Child
Cannot get this image out of my mind. It was the first thing my consciousness landed on as I awoke this morning, after getting the purring cat off of me and into the kitchen and fed. Clark the cat has many strategies to get himself fat again: they vary from biting my toe to wake me up (rare, since I have learned not to leave a toe exposed during sleep), to walking up and down my torso until I wake up, or to just putting his feet on my chest and sitting next to my shoulder and purring in my ear. Of all the methods, that is my preferred wake up call.
Back to the photo, which my aunt emailed to me yesterday, after having mentioned it at the previous week’s family zoom “quarantini.. The story from my aunt is that the grown up Quinn siblings got their little kids together in the Valley Road backyard in northern New Jersey one summer afternoon, in the house where they all grew up and where grandpa still lived at the time, in the upstairs apartment. The idea was to line us all up in order of height. I was probably about 22 months old at the time.
Of course I was too young to have formed any lasting conscious memories of this particular event, though there are shadows that lurk, I can’t be sure if they were from this day visiting New Jersey, or other subsequent visits over the years. Likely we would have driven the 2.5 hours down the New York State Thruway that morning, my Dad driving an aging white Oldsmobile with rust around the fenders, chain smoking and cursing at the other drivers at the top of his lungs once he got onto the Jersey Turnpike (“Roadhog!” “Cut ME off, will you? I’ll cut you off back you goddamn……”). My Mom would have dressed us up as nicely as possible for a hot summer outing. She in a light pink gingham summer dress, her own hair was as fine and straight as mine, she must have slept in plastic curlers to get the volume and curl that can be seen in the hairdo behind me, as she holds me in place to get the planned photo. And my sister, three years older, always got the new pretty dress, and I was always in hand me downs. Those shoes went through more than one set of tiny feet by the looks of them….
Anyway, it looks like this wall of cousins photo was not going to happen until my mother decided to forcibly hold me in my place as the just slightly youngest and possibly the shortest, though perhaps I wasn’t shorter than my cousin and that’s what I’m objecting to. It’s almost like I’m her proxy in this photo, or her prisoner, or I’m her inner child materialized. Clearly I as an individual had no agency in this situation. No toddler really does have any power, except to throw a tantrum to say “NO.” No, I don’t want to do this, no I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to wear this pink dress, and I don’t want to wear these shoes. I want to be barefoot and in sleeveless overalls like my tow-headed cousin. Why can’t I climb around in the dirt like he was? Why can’t I pull worms out of the garden rows and throw them at people like he got to do, and get laughs and smiles for it? What is this word “ladylike” and what on earth has it got to do with ME???
But my Mom got her way, as she usually did. I am in the photo, immortalized as the cranky toddler, future freedom fighter, never again to be captured in a photo wearing a pink dress with white shoes.
But why has this photo stuck with me overnight, the first thought I had waking up? I still identify with this feeling, particularly now during the pandemic. I feel like I want to just cry and wail and say No! I do not want to be restricted, held in place, lined up against a wall…. No! I want to be free.
I guess we can all relate….
Watercolor Workshop 8/22/20
Barbara Early
Watercolor on paper, 10″ x 8″
2020
Painted this during another of our Hayes Valley Art Works watercolor workshops, with the lovely and talented Lucia Gonnella (www.luciagonnella.com)
The Clark Report + Darla’s Diary: DR. DARLA
Tonight, for the second time in a month, Darla dug her way into a storage box where I had a backup container of glucose test strips, which I use to test Clark’s blood sugar (he developed diabetes due to the steroids that treat his cancer).
The first time Darla did that, I put it back. She dug it out again. I decided, “Well, it couldn’t hurt to test Clark’s blood sugar” even though his new doc said his levels were close enough to normal to stop the insulin a few weeks earlier….
Good think I checked – he was nearly 400. He’d been lethargic and nauseous, which I thought was from the chemo – but it was high blood sugar. I put him back on a small daily dose and his symptoms resolved.
This morning, his sugar was a little higher than it had been (325). Gave his dose. He seemed fine all day….
But Darla seemed to know something tonight. She dug out that spare container of test strips again. I decided, again, “Well it couldn’t hurt to test” – and he was up over 300 again. So he got a second evening dose.
Guess his diabetes is slowly progressing so will go back to twice daily testing…
Thanks to Dr. Darla.
What an amazing pair of fur people.
Easy Living in the Past
Write. Write it down. That thought has been nagging me for a few days now so I decided that today, Saturday at 4 pm, that’s what I’d do.
I started composing my essay in my mind. Standing in the kitchen, tossing a Trader Joe’s salad set to expire today, had all these heady ideas — and now that I am seated in front of a keyboard, they’ve moved on without me.
The themes: memories, memoirs, not living in the past even though I seem to be inhabiting those ghost towns in my mind’s eye much of the day. Sort of like that Twilight Zone episode, where the character wakes up in a world without any people, as if they were there moments ago and all disappear. That’s living in the past, in your mind…. but there are glimpses of people though; phantoms, ghosts …. but those ghosts, like dreams, feel real when you’re with them.
And they arrive unbidden. Composing an email for work yesterday, I was transported to late summer day a few years ago, driving my mother in her Honda through the back roads between Albany and Schenectady. We’d gone to do an errand in Colonie, and I wanted to take the scenic route home. But she didn’t. While other times she had been a sport about taking a little country drive, on this day, she just said, “No, I want to go home. I’m old. I want my own bathroom. I want to sit in the kitchen. Thanks but no thanks, please turn around. But stop at a restroom first.”
So we pulled into a nearby strip mall somewhere out near Guilderland. Guilderland – what a name. Land of Guild…ers. A boy I once had a big crush on was from there. Guilderland. Was I even then on a mind trip to the past, driving her through a ghost town of an unrequited crush? A dream within a dream, this flashback of mine.
Suddenly yanked back into the here and now by a ringing phone, a barking dog, a cat on the keyboard, and it’s gone again into the mists of time.
Now, as I pick up my fork to take a bite of that Trader Joe’s Chicken Caesar salad, Darla stands up on her hind legs, licks my elbow, then lies down next to me in her bed, a little kiss to say, “Yes, put in some elbow grease, get those thoughts out, and then come back to me here when I wake up from my doggie dreams of my own…..”
Memoir Piece: Dragging my shoes
(This is a snippet from a longer piece in progress.)
It was spring and time for shoe shopping. There were two shoe stores where we shopped: Barney’s on Union Street, and the Junior Bootery in downtown Schenectady. The Junior Bootery sign is still there, the paint on the old brick building fading away over a parking lot behind what is now the DMV.
Going to the Junior Bootery was an outing, with Mom bundling us all up, trudging the two blocks to the bus stop, and riding the 3 miles downtown, then trying to keep us herded together. The Junior Bootery prices were a little cheaper, I believe, as the big outing involved school shoes for everyone old enough for school. But Barney’s was just a two and a half block walk, and that’s where we went when shoes were outgrown between school year purchasing.
I was in kindergarten, and I liked my old Buster Browns: a sort of soft oxford with the big round toe and soft side flaps. But they were too small and my toes were pushing up against the front, so on a sunny May Saturday, off we all trudged to Barney’s, sans Dad, who was sleeping late on the sofa.
“Well, hello there, Mrs. Early, I see you have brought the whole family today,” the smoky salesman said as we tumbled through the door. He grinned at all of us, a jumbled crew. I was five, my sister eight, and John was just two, and in a stroller. He looked pretty mad about it, his dirty blond bangs fringing a frowny face that could have scared even Count Chocula away. We scattered through the small store, which featured a huge picture window looking out onto Union Street, with a view of the Friendly’s restaurant, flanked by Musler’s ladies fashion and a small plant shop (which has since become a pet hospital). It was brightly lit, with lots of seating, and those old leather stools with the ramp to put your foot for the shoe saleman to tie the shoes for you.
“Yes, well, we just need one pair today, for Barbara,” she said, nodding in my direction.
I had wandered toward the big windows, my eye drawn to the MaryJane’s in the display: bright black patent leather and shiny! These are the shoes dreams were made of, in kindergarten. These were the shoes that said, “I’m cool. I belong here.” These were the shoes I could see my face reflected in….
“Weeeelllll, then, let’s get you all measured up!” said the salesman, heading toward me. He smelled of cigars and shoe leather, and had one of those thick moustaches that would now be called a porn-stache. It was salt and pepper colored and looked as if it might be hiding part of his breakfast.
I must have cringed, because his pornstache drooped a bit.
“Barbara! Do what the nice man says,” my mother scolded, as she bent over the stroller to release John from his baby-bondage-seatbelt.
I sullenly crossed to one of the chairs. Mr. Pornstache brought out the metal foot measuring device, and gestured for me to sit down. I sat down, and he sat in front of me on the ski-slope stool, again gesturing for me to put my foot up. I plunked my foot on the ramp, and he proceeded to unlace my right shoe and slipped it off.
“Ok, miss, please stand up,” he said stiffly, and indicated for me to put my foot in the cold metal measuring device. I did so, and he leaned down and adjusted my foot with his thick fingers, pushing until my heel was firmly against the rear of the device, and then proceeded to push the side sliders together, and finally pulled the front slider to the tip of my big toe. He pulled his glasses up from a chain around his neck, and peered through them with his neck at an odd angle, as if he could only seethrough a long spyglass held at just the right position.
“Ok, missy, now, which shoes do you like?”
I sprang free from the foot prison and ran, one shoe one, one sock on, to the patent leather Oxfords. My mother, dragging a pouty John behind her, picked up the shoe and turned it over. Her already stern face seemed to get a little sharper and sterner as she sucked in a little air and said, quietly, “No.”
The salesman sidled over and said, “Well, if it is the price, we have a similar shoe on sale today – it’s brown, and not patent leather, but it is still a Mary Jane style.”
There was a long pause. My mother didn’t like being sized up as a budget conscious housewife. She probably should never have had children; she would have made a formidable, steely executive at some big corporation, or the Mother Superior at some enormous Abbey somewhere in northern Europe, surrounded by blue eyed postulants doing her bidding. She ruled with an iron fist, and her decisions were final. “Because I said so,” was her standard refrain.
But to the salesman, she never spoke a word in response. She just gave Mr. Pornstache a look with her pale blue eyes fixing him in her gaze. He muttered, “I’ll go get it from the back in the young lady’s size.” He slipped away as my mother replaced the shoe on the stand, not looking at me.
I stared out the window. Why couldn’t I ever get the shoes I wanted? The only reason we were even here was because Kathy’s cast off shoes had been left outside by mistake and gotten moldy, and so – for once! – a new pair had to be purchased for me in the off season. And where was Kathy? Sulking in the back of the store, somewhere, jealous because I was getting new shoes instead of her! Even though I almost never got new shoes, still, she was jealous.
Mr. Pornstache returned with a box and sat down on his ski-slope. I walked over, sat in the chair, and dutifully put my foot on the slope. He pulled out the shoes… and…. ICK! Oh, noooo. I hated them! Mousy brown, and with a sort of tapered toe that ended in – gasp – a squared off tip! They had a sort of Mary Jane strip across but that was ruined by a little buttress that ran vertically to the front of the shoe. Ick ick ick!!
“Why, these fit you like a glove!” he exclaimed, and pointed to the walkway covered in a rubber like coating, for walking up and down with the shoes to prevent scuffing the soles. My mother asked for the box, and turned it so she could read the price – which seemed suitable as she nodded to the salesman.
“We’ll take these,” she said, as John began to sob in the middle of the sales floor.
“No!” I said. “I don’t like them!”
“These are perfectly good shoes and You. Will. Wear Them.” She pulled out her wallet as she simultaneously scooped up a blubbering John and plopped him back into the stroller.
On the walk home, I trudged behind Kathy, Mom and the stroller as it bumped over the broken sidewalk pieces along Regent Street. How was I going to be able to show my face at school with such ugly shoes?
When we got home, my mother told me to put on the new shoes, and show Daddy, so I did. He smiled at me but then reached for the box, turned it over, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Mom then explained to him that this was a good price, it was less than half of the price of the other shoes in the store and as they began to bicker about money, I went outside.
I got the big tricycle out of the garage, and proceeded to ride up and down the driveway. I had a plan!
How would I ever get out of wearing these shoes? The ONLY way would be if the shoes became useless or damaged before I grew out of them. Knowing this, I rode the tricycle using the tips of my toes as brakes, instead of braking the normal way. After about an hour of this, I had managed to wear a hole completely through the tips of the shoes, rendering them useless. Or so I thought.
When my mother saw this, her lips tightened and turned blue.
“You. Are. Going. To. Wear. Those. Shoes,” she said slowly, in a voice barely over a whisper, but still as clear as a church bell. “You will wear them until you grow out of them, even if your toes are sticking out the top.”
And, I did.
This was probably not the first time I’d learned that my mother was not to be crossed, but it is the first time I remember clearly that there was (almost) no getting anything by her.
Hello from Hayes Valley
Now planted firmly in the dirt that used to be under the freeway, I’ve grown quite a bit since landing here. Thanks Hayes Valley for being a rich artistic home base.