Originally posted 06.27.2005

It’s been a hard summer for my parents, or spring at least, as summer’s only started. The last of the cats, Truffle, has been laid to rest in the backyard cemetery, along with some kibble, a catnip toy, and a slipper of my dad’s.

“He liked to sleep on your dad’s shoes,” Mom said. “He’d just carry them off, and we’d have to go tracking them down.” Truffle, who succumbed to kidney failure, died less than two months after Willow, his littermate, who died of cancer. Although I reminded mom that she still has Josie the horse, she pointed out that this is the first time in their 40 years together they haven’t had animals in the house. The pitter-patter of furry little feet.

My father has just started treatment for prostate cancer, and made the decision to enter retirement at the end of the ’05 semester. He’d threatened early retirement on several occasions, but always softened up at the realization that, after 35 years, he actually likes teaching anthropology to college students. But then the diagnoses came, he’ll be 65 in October, and it just seemed prudent to him to hang up his hat on his career. I’ve worried that my dad, who has never taken a vacation that didn’t have research it’s heart (“Let’s have dinner at that Indian place as soon as I’m done at the Land Tenure Center”), will not fare well in retirement, a life change that is difficult even for those whose identity isn’t so entirely bound up in their work. He’ll continue to write, of course, fresh material and updates on World in Disorder, but he’s had to give up his office. The university, in conciliation, set aside a space for him: a desk, phone, file cabinet, in of all places, the Death Dying and Bereavement Center.

Meanwhile, Richard, next-door neighbor since my parents took up residence in that green house on 20th street in 1973, also has prostate cancer. But his is full-blown, requires a prostatectomy; his prognosis is not quite as sunny as my father’s. Tall, affable Richard, father of three, devoted Catholic (he attends a mass every morning at 6 a.m.). His wife, Cathy, plump, no-nonsense, cheerful and direct, standing on the back steps of their house mumbling in a voice so low my mom strains to hear her, finally giving up (“I felt like I was hassling her, saying ‘what? what?’ over and over”).

My parents, otherwise not very sociable, have decided to attend the wedding of Dick and Cathy’s middle child the weekend of my mom’s 60th birthday as a gesture of support. Jimmy’s getting married in St. Paul, Minnesota. Not too far away, but mom really doesn’t like to travel. She hates to leave her house, her garden. But mostly she’s hated to leave her pets, which is no longer an issue. They’ll make the drive, attend the wedding, and dine someplace lovely afterward; stay the night in a good hotel. She’s put the best spin on it that she can—for many people, it would be a nice way to spend a birthday. But for her, it’s a sacrifice, though of what she might not be able to say.

What would be the best way, I wonder? We’ve never really had family celebrations. Our family is small, spread out. My brother and I tried to coordinate a trip home together, but couldn’t make it work: I’ll go mid-July, he and Annie will visit in August. I would like to see them surrounded by friends and relatives, well wishers, festive cheer. But the relationships are all so complicated; so many of the friends, they don’t seem to actually like all that much, and the relatives are all so far away. The Midwest, unless your roots there stretch back a few generations, can be as remote as an island when it comes to maintaining family ties. La Crosse isn’t a popular tourist destination, people don’t go there for major medical conferences, your cousins don’t swing through for the night on the way to somewhere else. Which may be why I am the way I am. Still remote and a little removed, despite my longing to be a part of a group, whether a nation of two or a congregation. As are my parents, lonely and needing something, but unwilling or unable to step into it, whatever it is. Not that they ever felt they had a place to do this. This is what I learned.

I’m going home in less than two weeks. Every time I do this it’s harder to come back here. I think maybe it might be easier to be alone in a small city than it is to be alone in New York. For all they say this place has such a frantic pace, relationships here move glacially. I actually know some of my neighbors; have been in the apartments of two in my building (three, actually, but only because the workmen let me cross the threshold to admire the work they’d done on Adrienne’s kitchen). But back there, even if I could secure employment the way Ellen has projected I could (“just take over whatsisname’s health column at the Trib, and there’s the Mayo in Rochester; you could get medical reporting work, easy. And you could buy one of those little bungalows on Cameron Street. And marry a farm boy. You need a farm boy”), I’m not so optimistic.

So I’ll just visit. Drop by the Death Dying and Bereavement Center to take my dad out to lunch. Pay my respects to the critters in the backyard graveyard. Ask Richard and Cathy about their children and grandchildren and say I wish I could be around for Jimmy’s wedding. Maybe squeak another quasi-marriage proposal out of the Os. And spend a lot of time running over the bridge, and up the bluff, and along the trails, and trying to figure out how to belong and to let go at the same time.

Originally posted 06.16.2005

Perhaps it’s the calm before the storm. I’ll start a job soon, and will have a regular schedule for the first time in years, and I’m a little worried about how I’ll adjust. The last couple of nights I’ve spent eight hours under, solid, waking in sheets so undisturbed I barely need to make my bed up. What’s more, mid-morning, the bed draws me back for a nap and all the coffee in the world won’t set me upright until I’ve given in.

So here I am, at 9:30, wake-up time for a lot of people, but four hours into the day for me, stuffing my ears with foam, pulling down my cheap eyeshade, and returning to the field of restoration that dominates my room. For someone who doesn’t spend much time in nature, I’m ruled by the seasons, sleeping longer and deeper in the winter, short and light in the summer. Lately sleep has been unusually precarious: I’m like prey, one ear open for the rustle that will mean my end, I wake all through the night with my heart racing, and break from the sheets even before dawn shows murky through my window sheers.

What I’ve got, if I may be permitted to indulge in self-diagnoses and made-up conditions, is juvenile onset periodic insomnia. Perhaps I developed it, during my daddy’s girl years, in emulation of my old man. But while he battled his with half-marathons and vodka, I courted the slithery sleepless hours, using them to indulge in additional reading sessions, propped up by the extra pillows I dragged out of the linen closet. I liked the new word and adult complaint, and the lost hours didn’t have much effect on my daylight world. Besides, it made me more like dad: I don’t sleep either.

As I got older, it lost its romance. Those sharp, early morning hours are useless after a while, as the string of three or four-hour nights, sometimes weeks of them, leave me too drained to snap my fingers. It’s unwise to run in Brooklyn (or anywhere else, really) at 4 a.m. Rude to practice fiddling or make phone calls. The under-rested brain that hungrily devoured novels when I was 10 can’t focus on the printed page at 36, so work is out of the question. The one task I have left, based on a suggestion my mother made a quarter of a century ago (and I thought she was just being self-serving), has its own timeline and periodic recouping: after four weeks of restless nights, there is nothing left to clean.

I sleep better when I’m not alone. “You didn’t move, not an inch,” said the last man who let me stay the night in borrowed pajamas. This despite the martini and two glasses of wine: a recipe for wakefulness more potent than the blackest coffee: whatever sedating effects the alcohol has are trumped 10-fold by the crest in blood sugar hours later, the closest thing I experience to mania.

The man I lived with for two years accused me of engaging in our serious relationship merely to alleviate my sleeplessness. It was envy, I think, that drove him to belittle my love; sleep approached him with utmost caution. “Your head hits the pillow and you’re out. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he chided. Meanwhile, he stayed up until 4 a.m. watching TV, playing computer games. But he still got eight hours to my five or six, sleeping until noon. It was a little unfair. He ran little risk of waking me with the bustle of his somnambulant activities, but I walked gingerly on eggshells, wincing at every crackle, during the 5 to 9 shift (after which I figured, the rest of the world is up, if he can’t sleep through the buzz of the coffee grinder, to hell with it).

Now I find myself living with another nighthawk. This one doesn’t share my bed, but she does share exposure to the summer racket that careens down Flatbush, the roar of the rooftop air conditioners on neighboring buildings, as our bedrooms share the same outside wall with the kitchen between us. Worse, while my bed is as far as I can get from the window, hers is directly under. Yet she sleeps through the morning light and racket, and not even the ringing phone, which to me is no less alarming than a shotgun blast, will make her stir. So I worry less about rousing her, but I’m starting to understand that envy.

Originally posted 06.11.2005

Friday night the young man my roommate’s been seeing for, oh, on six months now, informed her that he was in love with his roommate.

“She’s young, beautiful, very thin. Socially involved. A Marxist vegan. Pretty much the opposite of me,” she said. “So if that’s what he wants, then it’s best we’re not together.”

Friday night she was angry, healthy mad, defiant. “I won’t be shedding any tears over this,” she said.

But it wasn’t so easy today. I returned from a race and met up with her in the kitchen where I had, early this morning, left a couple of roses and a card in which I apologized for not being able to come up with anything better than: “He has a lisp.” (Well he does. Lispy, banjo-picking vegan.) She got a chuckle out of the card, but the roses made her cry.

They aren’t red roses. Pale sort of apricot-y, not the stuff associated with romantic love. But we do associate gifts of flowers with love or sympathy, and it sucks to get one when you want the other.

She’d been guarded through the relationship, acknowledging his short-comings, potential problems: he’s nine years younger than she, about to quite the job he hates with nothing on the horizon, the object of his affection is only one of three roommates with whom he shares a loft space in Long Island City (so hard to get to Queens from Brooklyn), he’s a vegan, doesn’t want kids…. Basically, he’s young.

But she was having a good time. He had pursued her doggedly, winning her confidence and affection over great conversation and gentlemanly behavior. “And he’s built like a brick shithouse,” she giggled one afternoon. (True. Lispy, but built.) “I’m just going to have fun with this,” she said, with some frequency. And she was. She was happy, in a cautious sort of way. And I was really happy for her.

So, what was he thinking? This falling in love with the roommate business didn’t happen overnight. Careless, careless.

But what I don’t get is why there isn’t someone loving her. Hasn’t been in a really long time. She’s loveable. Odd, intense, yes, but not everyone wants conventional. She has a following of admirers. Where’s the lover?

I feel heartbroken myself, in sympathy. And puzzled. And pissed off. I gave her Stefanie’s pep-talk about how he, the one, could be out there, you never know when, which is why, despite Stef’s surface pessimism about New York men, she never leaves her house without putting a little effort into her appearance. (I do, all the time. When you spend as much time as I do sweat-drenched in ill-fitting running clothes, lip gloss becomes moot as far as a dash to the deli goes.) So when I left she had donned a pink skirt and was making plans to go out and buy herself something pretty. Put a little of that ‘love-me’ energy out there.

Yeah, he’s out there. I know he is. And I hope he finds her. Soon.

Originally posted 06.10.2005

It is with great joy that I announce the engagement of my brother, Ethan, to his wonderful girlfriend of three-plus years, Annie.

We worried about him a bit. About him missing the boat here, dragging his feet too long. The fear of commitment, blah, blah, blah. Though with some of his girlfriends, that was probably a good thing. But with Annie, well, geez. They just make sense together. Complement each other in ways that seem ideal to me. What a happy couple looks like. Thing is, he’d been around the block enough times to know what a healthy relationship doesn’t look like; I worried that he was putting his fears in front of his reality.

But it seems my little brother’s grown up a lot in the last year. Maybe overcome some fairly deeply rooted anxieties about marriage (our parents’ union was rather difficult to witness), and the trepidation a lot of young men seem predisposed to when it comes to serious relationships, to be able to see the truth of what he has with Annie. He proposed to her while they were vacationing in Italy. “The Tuscan hills do things to you,” he said. Neither of them were expecting a proposal just then, but the time, it turned out, was right.

From how he describes it, it sounds more like they’re engaged to be engaged. They’re not going to spend the next year planning a wedding, but discussing what it means to be moving in that direction. I think it’s a wise plan, a mature approach. I think they have a fine romance, within which they will find an even finer love.

You know what I’m talking about. The roots that hold the tree through all seasons, long after the buds of spring have dropped and blown away in winter’s wind. What holds tight through the storms, and has faith in the eminence of renewal.

So Ethan, if you’re reading this, here’s my favorite Shakespeare sonnet. Sort of sums it up.

#116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken,
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Originally posted 06.08.2005

Pre-op

Four hours from now, a half-hour after I’ve swallowed a Zanax, the corneas of both my eyes will be sliced and peeled back, reshaped, then laid into place where they will heal into permanent contact lenses.

Those of you who don’t know me very well may never have even seen me in glasses, cause I’m vain as hell. But I’ve needed visual correction since I was 10. Although my sight can be brought up to nearly 20/20 with glasses or contacts, without them I’m nearly helpless. The hand in front of my face starts to blur less than six inches from the end of my nose; street curbs are practically invisible, and slim trees appear entirely trunkless, their leafy heads floating like green clouds.

Dear readers, I cannot see the big E.

But that will change very soon, and although I’m excited and happy as a lark about this, there’s a pull of trepidation. Part of my identity will cease. My hand flopping about the nightstand to find my glasses, as though there were eyes at the end of my fingertips. The wall that glasses are between me and the rest of the world: sometimes a hindrance, sometimes a buffer. The sexless way I feel behind spectacles. The watch I wear to bed because I can’t see my alarm clock. The gestures of a lens wearer: sliding the contact over with a finger to even out a wrinkle, deftly pushing the glasses back up the nose (and covertly flipping someone off at the same time).

And then there is the Zen softness of my surroundings when I walk about unaided. For the last month or so, in preparation for the surgery, I’ve left my contacts mainly in their case and gone about all tasks in glasses. Needless to say, no strangers have flirted with me—the glasses are 12 years old, far past their expiration date for style, and they never looked that good on me to begin with. But I’ve played a bit with their convenience, the ease with which I can reveal the world to my naked eye. I’ve watched every detail of the Tea Lounge fuzz out, the track at Red Hook reduced to primary colors and simple shapes. It’s the ocular equivalent of putting in earplugs, something I do often to keep the external chaos of New York manageable.

I wonder how or if I would be different if my vision had remained eagle-eyed. How my personality was shaped by the ugly glasses I had as a kid and by the later prestige of owning contact lenses, how my parents understood that I truly needed them. The reputation I had for being geek smart: was it based on my vocabulary, or on my appearance? (It certainly wasn’t based on my grades.) The nights I didn’t stay somewhere because I had to take out my lenses. The clutter of solutions and cases and glasses in small overnight bags. The anxiety of not being able to see Power Point presentations at medical meetings because those conference rooms are so dry, squinting and wondering if I’m the only one. All the times I’ve heard, “you look smart in your glasses,” and wondering if that meant I look like an airhead without them.

Whatever. I can always get glasses without a correction. If I really feel the need to.


Post-op, Post Script.

When I awoke this morning, my eyes were fairly sealed shut by dried tears. They didn’t open easily, but when they did I could see my alarm clock in a bit of a haze. I looked like I was up until 4 a.m. crying and fell asleep in my contacts, and that’s sort of what it felt like.

Four hours later, however, there’s only a slight scratchiness and barely detectable swelling. The only thing noticeably odd are the small red “hickeys” left by the suction of the first part of the surgical process, but I wasn’t alarmed, as Dr. Coad told me to expect them.

I ran eight miles in the park, twice the figure-8, and as I ran I could feel the swelling of my eyelids diminish with the circulation of blood and fluids. It’s a humid day, and I suspect that some of the haze was atmospheric, but was immediately apparent to me what kind of clarity I can expect to emerge in the next day or two.

Crystal.

Originally posted 06.07.2005

As much as I adore her and her people, the dachshund is too much for me to handle. The more people, the more food; the more food, the more excited she gets, and my reflexes are no match for her supersonic jaws.  “I could never have a hound,” I confess to my friends. Though I love beagle faces and basset voices and the droopy countenance of bloodhounds, that particular branch of the canine tree is just too food oriented. Ever the careful diner (frugal, abstemious, just plain mean), I can’t identify with a creature that would eat until it bursts.

But aren’t all dogs like that? “I can see you with a border collie,” says Marj, touching a buried desire. “Oh, I love borders! I’ve had border lust for years, but in the city. Well. I would never have a border collie unless I had sheep. Borders can’t be happy on love alone: a working dog’s gotta work.”

I wonder if they heard the “bing!” as loudly as I did.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to cultivate my inner French poodle, my happy lab, my roll with the punches mutt. But they’re all out of character to some extent. I’m a working dog with mud up to my knees, and when there isn’t work to do I start chewing on the furniture and whining to get out.

I guess it was that dogmatic nature that served me well in my third and final interview for a medical writing position with the city. Yes, dear readers, the long dry haul is over. The finish line for my four-year job search marathon is within view. “You seem like the kind of person who would be meticulous about meeting deadlines, and would have no compunction against marching into someone’s office to discuss the work,” said the assistant commish, when I asked what qualities led her to her decision.

Now there’s the battle to secure the salary I requested. It seems the city has this ridiculous policy of paying people no more than 8% above what they made at their last position, even if it means demoting them to a lesser title before they even begin work (I guess that would put me somewhere around ‘car park attendant’). But I’ve got the weight of the commish’s support behind me, as well as a letter from one of my editors praising my work and guaranteeing a projected salary of an amount close to the one I requested.

More good news: the hot club style swing band I started courting six months ago has opened their arms to me. Seems all that practicing paid off. As did training: I broke my former personal record for the half-marathon a month ago after diligently increasing my mileage by a third and cracking down on speedwork.

Look out, sheep. Ruff.

Originally posted 05.02.2005

Saturday afternoon we swung out for Caledonia, Minnesota, to look at the Steinway Liz’s husband Joel had restored. I was a little sleepy, dozy in the back seat of the car—my weekend 10-miler had turned into 12, looping up around the base of the bluff, through the marsh, over the river and through the woods (well, really, it’s more of a park). In my lap I held the cookies we’d bought at the People’s Food Co-op. Once an inconveniently located little shop that smelled of cinnamon and cumin, the relocated co-op is now larger than anything I shop at in Brooklyn, with powerful fluorescent lights and a staff of young people who are clearly not volunteers.

I’ve spent little time in near Minnesota. Or Minnesota at all, for that matter. So close and yet, all I know is the apple stand in La Crescent; my last visit to Minneapolis was more than 15 years ago. I guess dad was driving south, because the river was on the left. In Wisconsin, it would be on your right. Going south. With a train trestle and marsh grasses and a limestone swell on the other side. We turned onto one smaller road after another, mom wondering out loud what was the fire number of what could be best described as Liz’s driveway. Dad pointed out a bald eagle, with the frustrated “look where my finger’s pointing” that I remember so well from childhood. (Note to parents: where your finger is pointing hinges very much on where the eyes are set that are looking at it. That is, you and a five-year-old have a much different idea of where that finger is pointing.) As the roads narrowed and became gravel, our elevation grew, until the tree line dropped away and the sky opened up like Montana.

Una the German Shepard was the first to greet us, escorting us loudly to the outbuilding we could only assume was Joel’s workshop. The door opened easily on its hinges, and there we were, broadside to a glorious cherrywood grand, at the helm of which sat my last piano teacher, Dorinda, pulling off a flawless Chopin nocturne. Liz and Joel’s eldest child, Sadie, sat nearby, looking like something out of an old master, with her serene oval face, calm blue eyes, rippling brown hair down to her waist, and figure like a willow. Dorinda turned the keys over to Sadie, who flawlessly executed some abstract modern piece with all the composure of a child who has never known failure (although I’m sure she has, she must have, she’s nearly 15, for crying out loud). And then we repaired to the kitchen for tea.

But not before passing the possum, a return guest who seems to live only to amuse the dog. “She just keeps coming back,” Liz said of the creature, which had fallen over and let its tongue loll pinkly out of the side of its mouth. “That doesn’t seem like much of a survival strategy,” I commented. “Maybe not. But it works,” Liz retorted. Una took up her post then, practically standing on the “dead” possum, uttering an occasional “voof.”

I got the tour of the grand farmhouse. Or what was once grand, had faded to less than spectacular, and was returning to, probably surpassing, its former state. Windows all around allowed broad view of the cornfield stubbled countryside, the master bedroom looked like a hotel suite. And the attic, still mostly plywood and ideas, was being built into a bedroom for Sadie, who would probably have two years to enjoy it before trundling off to a narrow dorm room (and, if she’s like me, progressively smaller spaces for the rest of her life). Downstairs in the kitchen, Joel uncorked a bottle of French wine he’d retrieved from the wine cellar (wine cellar?), and we sat and nibbled chocolates and cookies and drank wine the color of sherry that tasted of earth and talked about pianos and composers and the shrinking rooms of divorced people (Dorinda and I have more in common than we did 17 years ago) until the possum stood up again and it was time to be off.

All of what I heard and saw and tasted was spectacular, and yet so quiet, almost taken for granted. I’m trying to understand what was special about this. Here in New York, I’m surrounded by beauty and grandeur, by intelligence and wit. But maybe not so much wisdom. And I never meet teenagers. Ever. I have to go to Jersey for that. Here there is such a buzz and humm, always. I meditate in the morning, sitting on a cushion on the floor of my 120 square foot bedroom trying to ignore the Flatbush traffic, the thrum of helicopters hovering low in the sky. At 6:30 a.m., the only sound I should be able to hear is my own breathing. But that is not the case.

Maybe I can find some silent solace in knowing that high on a ridge in Caledonia is a family with bright children, un-self-consciously plucking out all the right keys before banging out the front door to catch the bus, not to careful to not disturb the possum.

Originally posted 04.02.2005

There are no direct flights from New York to my Wisconsin hometown. I’ve gotten used to the dogleg from Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, the 52-minute flight on a puddle jumper that barely crests before it begins to descend. People with even the slightest flying anxiety sit rigidly on these planes, their arms crossed tightly in front of them. But I have no such anxiety—to me, flying is as natural as diving, breathing underwater from a tank. That is, it’s not natural at all. It’s so unnatural as to be surreal. So of course it works. Absurdly, it works just fine. I love these little flights, so close to my home turf, and I fall into a misty reverie as the plane dips toward the river valley, its ridges still crested in the last of winters’ snow, tributaries of the mighty river snaking through farm country. The outstanding physical features of La Crosse look like a tourist post card from the 50s even in the full light of day. Grandad’s Bluff looms pinkish-orange, a jutting sandstone chin and forehead, the sky beyond touched with teal. At the bottom is a golf course, neatly tended, so squared off it seems I could pick the whole scene up by a corner and scrawl on the back: weather is here, wish you were beautiful. I’d send this card to the man I’ve been seeing in Brooklyn. He’s of an urban archetype that believes if you’re not in therapy, you’re in denial, and that my periodic lapses into depression stem from childhood insecurity and repressed anger toward my parents. Their early negligence, he insists, classifies as abuse of a most insidious sort, made all that more damaging because it is so vague. He considers my suffering to have been on a par with that of his ex-wife, who was shoved into a childhood prostitution ring at the age of 6, an arrangement from which her mother benefited financially. I can't really agree with this comparison. My father is waiting at the baggage terminal when I arrive. He’s had about 24 hours with the news that he’s got early stage prostate cancer and the strain of this knowledge shows around his eyes. He catches me in a one-armed hug and the brim of his hat digs into my cheekbone. “Your mother couldn’t come with me because she’s cleaning up after one of the cats,” he tells me. “We don’t know which one.” The carousel buzzer bleats and we take a few steps toward the conveyor, eyes pealed for my duffle bag.

I know that the sweetness of homecoming will wear off in a day or two. The design of my parents’ house—an oval path through kitchen, dining room, living room, hallway—makes privacy difficult to achieve. That, and my father’s disregard of boundaries: sitting in the living room, he’ll interrupt anyone else’s conversation, chore, reading, with whatever’s on his mind at any given moment. The anyone else is usually my mom, and the beckoning sounds like this: “Hey Fern, you’ve got to see this; let me read you this; I just thought of something.” During the evening news, the interruptions fly fast and frequent, with “Hey, Fern!” assaulting the ears like big-city sirens. It makes my mom cringe and pantomime strangling him, an act to which he, on the other side of the wall, is oblivious.

Beyond that, though, is the sinking into family life, the way the self spreads out thinner around the edges. As a single person, it’s pretty much all about me. Though a good friend and neighbor, a thoughtful and considerate conversationalist who tries to curb the tendency to interrupt others’ thoughts, speeches, and activities, my life is basically about doing whatever I want or need to do whenever I want or need to do it. Or think it. But within minutes of walking into my parents’ house I’m faced with the task of helping my mom explain to her hairdresser just exactly what should be done with her bangs: “Just look at them. What do I tell her?” I need to contribute to dinner ideas, figure out some schedule of running, practicing, eating: “What do you want for dinner? Anything I should pick up for you at the store? Any nights you won’t be home? What time do you eat breakfast?”. My habits and systems get slotted to fit into their schedule, and what was an organic process in New York becomes deliberate and a little desperate.

But for now, I just float in the warmth of that house, with its four seasons of light from every direction and golden floorboards, the comfortable clutter of objects and people who are so happy to have me back. When I read about homecomings, or watch films with that theme, there always seems to be an awkwardness when the prodigal child stiffly kisses her parents, sighs while unpacking in her childhood room, obviously feels overgrown in the once familiar surroundings. That’s never been the case for me. I always return home as myself, a more considerate person than when I left, at 18. Still a slob, but a slob who knows how to pick up after herself, an interrupter who has learned how to listen, an adult comfortable in the dual roles of daughter and grown-up. “When I think of you in New York,” says my mom, “You are so clearly there. Especially after we visited. Your apartment, your roommate, the street you live on. In my mind, that’s where you live. But when you come back here, it’s like you never left.”

I know exactly how she feels.

Originally posted 04.20.2005

My father, rumpled from sleep, swaddled in a plaid wool robe, follows the cats to the basement stairs. Truffle squawks, inching slowly forward and turning his head to check on the progress of the man shuffling after him, and Willow steps daintily, bringing up the rear. Cats are terrible leaders. A dog, having secured your attention, will bound away, then turn and look at you with pity: your two legs are no match for his four, and although he adores you, this limitation either takes you down a notch or merely frustrates him. Besides, you’re clearly patronizing his wish that you follow, and he is not amused. The cat, in contrast, doesn’t lose a second in trusting you, and will stay only inches ahead of your toes. If you’re lucky. More likely, the cat will lead from between your feet, occasionally looking up at you as you try not to step on him. Progress for both of you, especially at an early hour, before coffee, especially for a man who relies on a variety of sleeping aides, not the least of which is a nightcap that would send most people under the table, is painstakingly slow. They’re out of sight, but I can still hear the three as they descend the wooden stairs for the morning treats ritual. The two seal-point Himalayans, with their dark little clown faces and chocolate legs like long velvet gloves, are creatures of daily ritual and demand. The training between biped and feline went both ways with these critters: they endure the daily groomings through something that looks like a circus trick; in turn, my parents know where to be and when, the morning treats, the evening naps. I wonder if this cameraderie is unique to the breed, or if the twins’ behavior is a result of living under ideal cat conditions, that is, as pets belonging to my mom. I’ve never seen anyone quite like her. As though she’d grown up on a farm, which she didn’t, she doesn’t coddle or anthropomorphize anything. Yet she has a softness toward them, a respect for their intelligence and integrity. She believes they have souls, but she never forgets that they’re animals, that even the tamest housecat is a little wild. So she creates an environment where they can be their full creature, and they appear to love her for it. There is a price to pay, however, for loving animals. Despite the best environment, nutrition, attention at home, and veterinary care, her critters never live beyond the typical life expectancy for their kind, and often die younger. The collies didn’t make it past 8, the last one having some sort of cancer. Chaco the horse shattered a leg and had to be put down in her prime; Zephyr the cat died of ailments nobody could figure out at 14, and Maggie was found stiff with death under the porch steps at 15. Of the two remaining, littermates mom picked out to fill the emptiness left when Houdini was hit by a car, the boycat has failing kidneys, a death sentence, and his sister…. Well. She stopped taking all food and water a week or so ago, and mom has to hook her up to take fluids by IV in the morning and force feed her wet food with a syringe twice a day. As we’ll learn by the end of the week, she has a tumor in her chest. Cancer seems to be the theme of the day. My father’s prostate cancer is in an early stage and highly treatable, but cancer nonetheless. Something to scare him, and when he’s scared he leans on her even more heavily than usual. It’s unfair, she cries, in a healthy moment of resentment, “this dear little cat who has never done anything but make me happy, and your father, who is the biggest pain in the ass.” Not that she would wish a different outcome for my father of course. He’ll be fine. But Willow won’t be. She died two weeks after I returned to New York.