She wears it well

A little old-fashioned, but that's all right

Free at Last

On January 20th, 1981 the man I was seeing told me that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. A day or two later, billboards went up throughout the Bay Area: Free at Last. The signs referred to the end of the Iran hostage crisis, but Jerry and I took the words personally. We'd found each other; our spirits were soaring. The road ahead would be rocky -- both of us were still married to other people -- but we'd travel it together. Ultimately, anything was possible.

January 20th is one of several dates we still keep track of; we refer to it as our Betrothal anniversary. (Isn't "betrothal" a lovely, old-fashioned word?)

I don't have to tell you what happened on January 20th this year. Free at last. Free of the lying, dysfunctional... don't get me started. It won't be easy, but I'm filled with the sense that, ultimately, anything -- and I mean anything good -- is possible. I haven't felt that way in 28 years.

In his prime

The universe has a weird sense of timing. Without making a resolution of it, I decided at the turn of the year to start decluttering, a little bit every day. Last week I was working on the storage shelves under the basement stairs and found a box of video-cam cassettes Jerry shot back in the '90s. I asked him to decide what to do with them, and of course he started watching. "I think you might want to see this," he said. The first tape he'd popped into the player had a long sequence of Abbie at the age of five or six -- it was at our house in the Berkeley hills, so it must have been prior to March of 1996 when we moved to the coast -- freaking out with a baggie of fresh catnip. He was a beautiful boy, and he loved his 'nip well into his dotage.


A later tape, shot at Sea Ranch, captured part of a stunt Abs used to do fairly often. He'd accompany us onto the second-floor deck, off the living room, where Jer and I often went to watch the sunset. From there he'd jump to the railing, then up to the lower section of the roof over the porch, and from there to the steeply-pitched main roof, where he'd climb to the peak and sit by the chimney to watch the sun go down. He had the best view in (or on) the house. When the show was over, he'd retrace his steps and leaps in reverse. Watching the tape reminded me that I had a couple of stills of Abbie doing his evening acrobatic routine. What a guy.

One of the other videos consisted of an existentially boring tour of the apartment that Jerry had rented for his mom at Rossmoor, a senior community in the 'burbs east of Berkeley. He'd taken the footage to West Virginia to show her where she'd be living once she moved to California. Of course, Tom's been gone for more than a decade now.

Another showed my brother and his wife in San Diego, before their son was born. Josh is 14 now, and Larry and Sheri have been divorced for ages. Another was shot one Easter at Jer's daughter's house in Marin county. It included his son Marc, who died of AIDS later that year, my mom, Lauren's then-partner Lucinda, and me in my long-haired and still relatively youthful glory. Sic transit...

My inner academic pointed out that I could have called this post "Historical artifacts unearthed during a routine household archeological dig." Yeah, that'll bring in the readers. Of course these priceless treasures will be re-archived. We should digitize them, I suppose.

I got a lot of comfort from watching that footage of Abbie in his prime. He had a good life and, on whatever level cats process such things, I think he knew it.

Rest in Peace, Abbie

We took Abbie for his last visit to the vet this morning. He's been declining for the last three or four weeks -- arthritic, semi-incontinent (though he tried, heaven knows), not much more than a familiar furry presence camped out on the heating vent in the living room.

He stopped eating a few days ago, even tuna, and stopped drinking voluntarily yesterday. Up to that point, though, he still yowled to be picked up and placed on the bathroom sink, his favorite oasis. But this morning he refused the syringe of water I was trying to administer, and was too weak to stand.

The vet said that his temperature was 92 degrees, way below normal. Clearly his systems were shutting down. They say you know when a pet's time has come, often because there's no there there anymore. But Abs was present until the last moment -- vocalizing, though faintly, registering his surroundings, nestling in for strokes, looking at us with his big blue eyes.

Being more or less snowbound the last couple of weeks turned out to be kind of a blessing; lots of lap time for the Abster, two full-time servants tending to his needs. This is the last picture I took of him, earlier this month, with the capacious Stella Luna in the background. I posted a birthday tribute when he turned 19 last April. We'll toast him in absentia on his 20th. You were a damn good cat, Abbie, and we'll miss you more than words can tell.

Snow Fun

I last posted a week ago Sunday, when the snow started falling. Here we are almost ten days later, and that initial snowfall seems balmy and bucolic by comparison. The headline above is from this morning's paper. It's snowed almost daily for the last week and a half. Until today, when we did nudge 32 degrees, temps have remained well below freezing. I'm tired of the cold, the cancellations, the constraints on getting around. Whiiiine.....

But the wintry weather does have its compensations. It's beautiful, of course; I put up a bunch of mostly-artsy pics on flickr. And it's primo weather for hot-tubbing. Squint and you could be at an expensive ski resort in Vail or Aspen, a handsome cowboy waiting for you in the steamy water:


We've been walking every day, as usual, breaking through the crunchy crust, trying not to slip as we follow foot-deep vehicle tracks on the mostly-deserted streets. I spotted this vanity plate (below) just around the corner from us. Yes: visualize rain!

I made up a new word the other morning, as each step we took fractured the ice-covered snow into sharp, ankle-biting shards: Snice. Here's a representative specimen:


And here's a snice example of ad hoc automotive sharkification:


As a matter of fact, I do have cabin fever, and apparently some of my neighbors do, too. On the other hand, our old kitty, Abbie, is losing ground, and it's nice to have an excuse to stay home, catering to his needs and providing almost-unlimited lap(top) service.

Still Not Used To It

I only have four years of personal data to go on, but I'm reasonably sure by now that it snows most winters in Portland -- just not very much or very often. The last part of that sentence probably accounts for the tizzy into which the entire city seems to be thrown every time flurries enter the realm of meteorological possibility. I keep reading about our "mild" Northwest winters, and I suppose they are, compared to, say, New England, the Midwest or Greenland. After all, here it is mid-December and some of my roses are still blooming. But I spent half my life in that sunny C-word state to the south, and snow spells "serious winter" to me.

It's also primo hot tub weather, even better than rain. We dunked ourselves a couple of hours ago, and I felt like I was in a ski resort in Aspen. Hot-tubbing is my favorite winter sport, I fear.

The snow started around 7:40 this morning. At 7:30: nothing. Suddenly, the air was filled with huge fluffy flakes. Hours later, it's still coming down, finer and with quite an east wind behind it.

Another couple days of this would be just fine in my universe, but by mid-week I'd like it gone, please, so I and the other weather wimps in town can get on with our lives. And to think that winter is officially still a week away...

The Pattern from Hell

Many months ago I picked up a pattern for a multi-pocketed totebag designed for schlepping crafts projects around. It had loads of compartments and specialized holders for knitting needles or paint brushes and other accoutrements. When I finally started the project I was appalled at how badly the instructions were written, with ambiguous and unhelpful illustrations, missing steps, measurement errors, and -- my pet peeve -- an inefficient workflow overall. The tech writer in me wanted to redo the entire thing.

An inexperienced sewer would have thrown up her hands in frustration. Instead, I grumbled my way through the process, making notes and drawing arrows and asterisks for the order in which I wanted to proceed. What a hassle. I had to force myself to work on it, a sure sign that something's wrong. But I'm actually rather pleased with the result, and now I know that I'm perfectly capable of designing and drafting my own patterns, duh, at least for a stupid totebag.