The past few months travel seems to be the name of the game for me. I have found myself on the road more often than not, and for an old wanderer like me that’s not a bad place to be. Currently, I am visiting friends in the Bay Area, my best friends to be specific. We have known each other since Eve ate the apple, and over the years have come to accept, dare I say love, one another’s flaws and personality dents and continue to enjoy each other’s company. The only man in the picture, my friend’s husband, had shoulder replacement last week. With the other half of the couple scheduled for knee replacement in the fall, a white flag was hoisted above their house and I answered the call to arms. We have been there one for the other, as friends do over time, and this was simply my turn to show up and represent.
Let me begin this writing by noting, for I do feel it is notable, they house ten cats. Yup, ten. That’s a lot of Fancy Feast I’m here to tell you. Each cat has it’s own personality, likes and dislikes, and schedule of events to be attended to. Whew. Somehow they manage to have a neat and odor free house where you don’t take home half a cat on the seat of your pants every time you sit on a piece of furniture. How they do this even when everyone is fit and healthy, is a question I’d like answered. They did not set out to amass such an array of felines, but sometimes the universe designates us to step up and take care of the world around us, and such is the case here. Five of the pack showed up within one week. Neighbors down the street moved, abandoning the cats to the elements without so much as leaving them a bowl of water to survive on. I cannot begin to tell you how much writing that line irritates me. Personally, I believe someone should abandon those people on a desert island with nothing but the clothes on their back and see how they feel about it. These are not feral cats, but animals who have been domesticated and depend on the people who take them in to care for them. Fortunately, there are people like my friends who don’t look the other way when someone shows up for help, whether they arrive on four paws or have two feet with which to get around on. I believe after the first five were welcomed into the fold, they got together and created a flyer for other cats to find and know there is a safe harbor. The next five sort of seeped in one at a time, undoubtedly after receiving their flyers, until the present number was achieved. All the animals get their shots, their special meals if needed, many ear rubs and fresh food and water daily. I may grow a tail and whiskers and show up on their doorstep one of these days myself. Beats getting a cup and a monkey, which is my Plan B if I reach an overly ripe old age and find myself low on funds. Going forward, I will call this Plan C.
My job while here, is to make their lives a little easier and help them get things organized while their life is a bit controlled by chaos. This is a good job for me. By nature, I am an organized person. I was raised for the most part by my mother who suffered from OCD, though we didn’t have a name to attach to it back then. We just called her “nit picky” or when we got particularly irritated, “anal”. In our house when I was growing up, there was a place for everything. You had better make sure whatever you took out of a drawer, closet, or receptacle of any kind, it was returned as it was found to the place where you had found it. Pink towels, for example, only belonged in the pink bathroom, blue only in the blue. As a kid, if caught taking a pink towel into the blue bathroom, this could be considered a treasonous act with cause for a court marshal or at the very least a tribunal of some kind with my mother as the judge and jury. In spite of my upbringing, I am not militant about my towels. You may take the green towels into the blue bathroom and spread them about with wild abandon. Nor do I follow people around the house with a stack of coasters lest they decide to set their drink down somewhere. I do I have to admit I try keeping things neat, and enjoy living in a house without a lot of stuff piled around. On the other hand, I never want anyone to visit my home and feel they can’t be comfortable or are forced to sit on a couch wrapped in plastic to keep the potato chip crumbs at bay. A house, to my mind, should be a sanctuary for those living in it, not kept like a showplace lest House Beautiful might be calling to choose your home for it’s next feature story. I’m just saying.
My friends I am staying with tend to be more likely to pile things here and there. That is their way, and this is their house, and it is always a welcoming and lovely place to visit. I respect everyone’s right to live as they will. It is not my job to decide what is right or wrong for anyone but myself, oh, and maybe Boo, the Queen of Cats. As we get longer in the tooth I think we all tend to get more set in our ways. Two women of any age in the kitchen, whether pilers or not, can result in bodily harm coming to one or the other, or possibly both, if things go awry. My friend and I have known each other so long, however, we defer to one another without the need for any weapons to get involved. The two of us are very alike, and very different at the same time. She is Italian, while I am Canadian. As one might imagine, in many ways we are polar opposites. She grew up in a large Italian American family. Cousins, aunts, uncles, nonis, and like all lived on the same block and got together regularly for crab feeds, or to break bread, likely Italian bread. A get together in their family looked like the crowd outside the doors right before they open for a Filines’s Basement Sale in Boston. When living in Massachusetts, I worked in Boston. One of my co-workers suggested I accompany her to one of Filene’s famous sales. I could have entered myself in a mob fight and attracted less adversaries. People were amazingly aggressive once you were inside the building, mainly populated by women. I did see a few stray male faces in the crowd, mostly looking terrified at the carnage going on before them. At the first table piled high with tops, I picked up a sweater to look at it. A woman with blood in her eyes caught my eye across the table. Making the “I’m watching you” sign with two fingers waving back and forth in my direction, she walked over and brazenly yanked the sweater out of my hands before I could look at the price tag. This happened repeatedly, until I started putting them under my shirt if I liked them. By the time I got to the cash register I looked nine months pregnant. Amazing. Another issue was there were no fitting rooms open. That being said, the general rule of thumb for the day seemed to be simply to strip down to your skivvies and try something on the aisle. It’s not that I have anything against the human body being displayed, I find them quite beautiful as a general rule in all shapes and sizes, but rather I prefer to pick my venues and definitely an aisle in a store basement was not on my list of choices.
At any rate, my dear friend was brought up far differently than myself. Being an only child, if there was any boisterousness to be generated, it would have had to have come from me. I did not have to fight for position in a large family, but rather held all positions including first, middle and last born, best of the litter and worst, tallest shortest, fattest thinnest. You get the idea. There are pluses and minuses to being an only, such as with everything. Though you are the only apple of your mother’s eye, you are also the sole target of her displeasure. Another thing listed on the negative side of the chart was we moved around considerably once we moved to Southern California from Nova Scotia. I was the new kid in school repeatedly with no family members around to ease a bit of the newness attached to that particular label. I fought my own battles, would have eaten lunch alone if I hadn’t reached out to make friends, and learned to find the pleasure of my own company enough on days when I was the only one to share my space after school.
People come and go throughout your time on earth. Some leave lovely memories, some bring us lessons to be learned, and others stop by for a moment to teach us something new, or share a bit of wisdom. All of them contribute to our human experience in one way or another, or so I believe. I think often of all the bits and pieces that fit together to make the whole we hopefully become at some point in our lives. Some of us, I would suppose never complete the puzzle, others discover the whole picture early on in life, and others (I would suspect the largest group), wait until mid-life arrives to figure out who they are and where they would like to go. I always say I didn’t become a “real girl” until my fiftieth birthday. By that age I figured out on some level what I did like about myself, and what parts I felt I could slough off and leave behind, and even new ones I wanted to explore incorporating into the mix. Since then, with the two steps forward, one step back approach as life has intervened, I have kept moving steadily forward towards becoming the best version of myself with intention and purpose. Yay.
So here I am a cookin and a cleanin and enjoying myself with my friends during the recovery period. Life is so much easier when we work together to help each other rather than put up roadblocks to stand in our way. Have a great day!!!!
Leave a comment