III. Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
"Do you want to contact somebody, first, leave someone a letter?
You can come now or you can come later..."
Joni Mitchell
Boogers is keeping my feet warm. It's very cold tonight.
My neighbors had a bonfire. Several of my cats were there. Junior was his usual charming self, he's a real lady's man. Smoky was scarfing up a brownie somebody left on a plate. Smoky will eat anything.
A female friend said I looked beautiful with my hair curling out from under my beret like that. It's always nice to hear a compliment like that at my age and high mileage. I don't always feel beautiful. I just told her that the beret was really old, like me.
I owe it to my dad that I have twinkling blue eyes, an approachable friendliness (Derek said I was approachable! Bless you, Derek!) and an absurd, childlike wit that borders on the scatological ( as well as eschatological!).
My father, Melvin "Dedalus" was a very amazing man!
He was born in a sharecropper's shack in Paducah Kentucky.
His family moved to Mississippi during the great depression,
Grapes of Wrath style.
He enlisted in the Marines the day after Pearl harbor was bombed and fought in the South Pacific.
At one point during the war, he was stationed in Chicago, at Navy pier.
It was at the Trianon Ballroom, that he met my mother, Maria Pietrzhak, a Czechoslovakian immigrant who'd grown up on the South Side.
(More about mom, later, she was a trip unto herself!)
They married in 1945, had my sister Claudia in 1947, had me in 1958.
We moved to Mississippi from Chicago in 1962, when I was 4.
My father built a thriving RV dealership, Capital City Campers and took us on awesome vacations!
He always stressed personal discipline and accountability.
Me:"Dad, what's an allowance?"
Dad:" Well, I allow you to mow the front yard and then I allow you to mow the back yard and then when we go to Woolworth's, I allow you to have a quarter!"
He also knew when to laugh and cut up. That's where I get my silliness from.
I just lit a cigarette. My dad never smoked. My mom never smoked, nor did my sister. They all hated that I smoke. Oh well.
I am pausing in the present because I caught myself giving a very dry synopsis of what was a great classic American life. My parents were an epic. They didn't care that they were ordinary and that made them all the more extraordinary in my eyes.
My father could be as earthy and down home as Andy Griffith and as urbane and in control as Ward Cleaver. In the fifties, my parents were, Ricky and Lucy, in the sixties, they were Ward and June, in the seventies, they were Archie and Edith.
By the eighties, they were a fixture, one of the few constants in the universe. I could always count on them. They were always there, and it seemed they would always be there.
On his deathbed, my father slipped in and out of time. His face kept changing, one second,he'd look like a baby, the next he was very ancient.
I remember one particular moment when I was changing him out of his pyjamas, and I remembered something I hadn't thought of in decades. When i was a toddler in Chicago, he would sing to me as he was putting me in my "jammies":
" Put'cher little foot, put'cher little foot, put'cher little foot right down..."
As I relived this in my mind, I began singing this to him as I was putting his jammies on him. My voice broke from the sobbing and the tightness in my gullet from choking down my grief. To the very end, my dad, the Marine, kept a stiff upper lip. I had to weep for both of us.
When he died, he rolled over onto his side, into a fetal position and just stopped. He just froze there and was no more. I ran and got my sister, who lives right behind him and she summoned the lady from the hospice.
When Paula, the hospice lady arrived, my father was still as he had passed.
I sat on the floor, at the foot of the bed, in a lotus position, rocking and chanting a sacred mantra from the Tibetan book of the Dead involving embracing divine light.
Paula radiated kindness and spoke gently and endearingly to me. She looked at an ancient faded sepiatone portrait of my mom's family and said" You look exactly like him," referring to my maternal grandfather, Josef Pietrzhak, "but you definitely have your daddy's blue eyes!" Flattery will get you everywhere with me and I forgot my grief for a moment and felt godlike with the genes of Bohemian Grampa, and twinkling Melvin, the gregarious.
I had a moment of proud tears and I thanked her.
After it was all over, I was glad to get back to my shack and good old Boogers, who was almost doglike in her gladness to see me.I had brought every single thing I own, cabinets full of songbooks, milk crates full of vinyl records, books, paintings, everything, and filled my garage with that part of my life that had been in storage at my dad's house.
I spent Christmas eve at my sister's and gave her an art piece, a 3d bowl of Froot Loops, to her disconcerted ( she hadn't gotten me anything) surprise. All in all, it was a pretty horrible Christmas. I was glad to get home to my cat. Sometimes, it seems our animals are the only ones who know the importance of love. Sometimes it seems that they're the only ones who understand when we hurt. People, especially (ironically!) those closest to us, are often the hardest to share our grief with. Also, let us not forget, I was raised by a Marine, a manly man.
"Big boys don't cry", as my favorite sappy pop song used to whisper.
The winter of 2006-07 was not any longer than Mississippi winters usually are, but it seemed to drag on forever. Twenty degrees outside, the icy wind howling through the walls like they were made of paper, Boogers and I huddled under four layers of blankets with my dad's ancient space heater (thanks, Dad!) at the foot of my hide-a-bed, keeping my feet warm.
I got commissions for one dawghead and two abstracts. The dawghead was a black Pekinese with black eyes, which made it nearly impossible to make it look cute or funny like the others, it was just a black blob! The patrons were a couple where the wife wore the jockstrap in the family and loved that ugly little dog more than she did her husband. Nothing against powerful women, these people were just out of a bad sitcom! The abstracts were color-coordinated to match a lady attorney's waiting room décor. They were a pleasure to do after that awful dawghead and easier to work on in the cold in gloves with the fingers cut off.
I stopped doing pet portraits after that. I might do one of Teacup. She's very photogenic, she poses like royalty.
....cont/d below...
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| Runamuck Diaries : Part 3 [Formerly Zen and the Art of Cat Wrangling] |
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BionicCouple
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Jun 4 @ 6:23PM
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One Friday night, Bill and I were sitting at Fennian's, our neighborhood Irish pub, having the "usual"- Bill: beer(s), Me: coffee. That's when I met Merian.
She floated in with the large crowd that were there to see the band and the standing-room-only drifted her back toward our table. I noticed her as she walked in, she had very pretty blue green eyes and a cute nose. She was wearing a scent that I can only describe as being the color turquoise. I asked her what the scent was and before I knew it, she was sitting with us, and she and I were hitting it off and holding hands. She had a disarming smile and that bubbly charm that is still exotically Southern Belle to me, although I grew up here. She was bright and affectionate, and warmed my cold dry heart immediately.
Time flew by as it does in that space of new infatuation, the atmosphere of such joyful surprise. They started flashing the lights on and off and it was time to leave. Bill and I looked at each other. Our usual routine was to go to my pad and burn a fatty (if you don't know what that means, you don't need to). She kept batting those eyelashes and clearing her throat like waiting for me to be the gentleman (70s style)and invite her to our party.
That's when I explained to her that I live in what the untrained (or inexperienced) observer might consider a below poverty level shithole with the wind blowing through
it and I hope she's not allergic to cats or cannabis...
" Sounds like fun! I'm a country girl, I like campin' out!" was what she said. Bill ran ahead of us in his truck and Meri and I fondled our way across the parking lot, sharing body warmth and saliva all the way to her car. I was beginning to smell Turquoise and she was beginning to smell of patchouli oil (hippie right guard) and nicotine, but it was nice for both of us. When we got to my Kamp Runamuck, Bill had run ahead of us and had bagged a huge mound of my "bachelor trash", mostly the product of my severe depression and grief of the past couple months. Grief is sometimes paralyzing to me, especially in twenty degree temps! Anyway, Bill's fine and noble effort made my place look a little less horrible. We all got high and goofy, with Meri and I fooling around under our shared blanket and Bill teetering drunkenly on my tall guitar stool.
Bill went home and another one of my "one -month-wonders began.
Aside from the few times I experienced lasting love, once, mainly, Bathsheba, whom I nearly married and had a child with, my relationships have been numerous but sketchy, which sucks for me because I'm just not a one night stand kinda guy. But, what usually happens is, women find me fun and we get together and then they realize I'm not fun all the time, because nobody is, and life certainly isn't fun all the time, and they vanish. I hurt for awhile, write my best bitter-sweet love songs and go back to being happy in my own company. When I'm alone, I'm fun most of the time.
Meri was a registered nurse and a Baptist grandma with custody of her granddaughter because her daughter was strung out on crack and hitting the streets. She'd been married four times, once to a man who molested her kids (hence the daughter's issues), once to a guy who preferred enemas and videos of elderly strippers to regular intercourse with his wife. I laughed at that because she'd married him for money. And because it was funny. Sorry, but it is. Sad but funny.
I fit into her life like a 1969 Buick Riviera would fit into a bag of dried apricots. We just happened to meet on a night when she needed a wild man and I needed a nurse.
I may be a wild man, but I'm still a gentleman (70s style) so I'll skip the details. I'll tie up this one month wonder story with: it ended with an e-mail! Meri sent me a dear John e-mail! I found it hideously ironic since we met in person and I had met so many women on the internet! She wrote that there was no room for Buddha in her house, only Jesus. I joked later that she'd found a Mexican boyfriend. She gave me an electric blanket. Bless her for that. She also gave me a case of strep throat that almost killed me.
Boogers was pregnant at the time. I was totally demolished by the sickness, the breakup and the still remaining, hovering oppressive grief. For an entire two weeks, I didn't leave my bed except to go to the toilet. My friends Michael, Bill, and Derek brought me bags of fruit and food.Boogers stayed near me the whole time.At the peak of the sickness, I was laying there, burning with fever, slipping in and out of fever dreams. One was that I was Mozart and Bill was Salieri, egging me on to complete the Requiem. My ex girlfriend Faith was Mozart's wife begging Salieri to let me rest, "You're killing him!" Every two hours or so, Boogers would stroll up the length of my body and pat me on the cheek with her paw and say "Meow?" like "Are you still breathing?" She even brought me a dead woodpecker. I think that's the cat version of chicken soup. Sometimes, I think she was what got me through. That and my friends, so it was love, I guess, kept me alive. And knowing that Boogers and I needed each other.
I think being needed keeps us from giving up some time.
Boogers is at my feet, keeping them warm. She is curled up in an ornate, striped ball like a giant Christmas tree ornament. I approach her gently and stroke the fur around her back. I breathe warm breath into her fur to warm her up and she purrs. That is how we kept each other warm that first terrible winter. I feed her some mozzarella, but none to the kittens, I don't want them to learn to beg. Boogers, on the other hand, can have anything she wants. She loves mozzarella!
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