Peripatetic

So the second phase of the big move is now underway: I’m back in Missouri (where it is a brutal 95 degrees, obviously in my honor—though it’s not much cooler in the NYC area), having returned yesterday to collect the cats and oversee the move. Right at this moment I’m taking a break from packing CDs and other things that I didn’t manage to pack before I started the new job. The packers arrive tomorrow, ostensibly to pack the kitchen, bathroom, our few bits of framed artwork, and our electronics, but I have a feeling they’re going to end up packing more than that. (It turns out that packing services don’t add as much to the cost of a move as I thought they did, which isn’t to say that they don’t add quite a bit–but it’s so worth it, as I discovered the one time I had an employer who paid full relocation expenses.)

And I am a big giant ball of stress. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think; between the heat (we have central air conditioning, of course, an essential in this climate, but it can only do so much) and all the worries and concerns racing through my mind, I just couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour or so at a time. I think that must be the biggest reason that I keep having bouts of uncontrollable crying. This house is just so crowded with…stuff, stuff of all kinds, some of it toss-able, much of it not. I’m afraid that we won’t get all of it packed in time, though rationally, I know that worrying about that is silly. If we don’t get it packed and the movers end up being delayed a day, or we end up having to get them to pack more than we plan to, the world will not end. Worst case, Bill can rent a truck and move the rest of it when he’s ready to join me in NJ. Rationally, I know these things; rationally, I know that worrying about things I can’t control is silly and even unhealthy; rationally, I know that there’s nothing I can do but to keep packing and see how it goes. But “rationally” and I aren’t getting along very well at the moment.

My cell phone has this cute little feature that lets me add a message that displays when I turn the phone on. During the two weeks when I was between jobs and should have been spending every waking moment putting stuff in boxes, the message read, “Shouldn’t you be packing?” For the past month, though, the message has been “Don’t forget to breathe.” It’s good advice; I think I need to tattoo that message to my eyeballs for the next few days.

But it’s not the advice I’m referring to in the subject line. That advice is far better, and it is my heartfelt gift to anyone reading this. The advice is: Never move house. Ever. Find a city and a house you like or even love, and stay there. Or if you really want to move, because you hate your house or your kids are grown or the neighborhood is going downhill or whatever, for heaven’s sake don’t move any farther than a few miles. And for the love of God, don’t do it in July.

This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give anyone.

I want my three-day weekend back. And specifically, I wish I could undo the last day and a half of it. It was bad enough that I was flu-y all weekend long, which (combined with my staying up until daybreak on Friday night, for reasons known only to God) would have wiped out most of the weekend. But worse, far worse, was the disappearance of our big kitty, Jasper, on Sunday evening.

I hasten to add that he’s back, and okay; if he weren’t, I’d be out looking for him instead of posting this. He was gone for less than 24 hours, as it turned out. But what a hellish 20 hours it was. And he refuses to tell me what happened. All I know is that he failed to return from a perfectly routine last trip outside on Sunday evening. Jasper is the only cat of the three who gets to go outside, and he’s earned that privilege by being totally trustworthy. He’s usually content to just lie on the deck, or to bound across the yard when Bill is out there playing frisbee with the dogs. So we’ve even gotten fairly relaxed about letting him out after dark; I’ve set an arbitrary curfew of 7 p.m. on weeknights (which gives him half an hour to an hour outdoors, depending on when I get home), but on weekends, things are looser. We usually keep track of him when he’s outside, though, so that on the occasions when he walks around to the front of the house, which he’s not allowed to do, we catch him, bring him inside, and scold him—and keep him inside for a while.

As I’ve mentioned, Jasper had a hard life before the Siamese Rescue people found him. You’d think he’d be happy to be a pampered indoor cat after all he’s been through, but nothing makes him happier than lazing outdoors in the sun. He doesn’t hunt; he’ll occasionally eye an insect or small critter moving through the grass, but he’d rather nap than get up and chase anything. And watching him basking on the deck on a sunny day, his face an absolute picture of bliss, has been enough to make me ignore my general objections to letting cats go outside; he’s just so damn happy out there.

I don’t know what happened on Sunday night, what prompted him to go wandering. All I know is that when I woke up from a nap and went to bring him inside, he wasn’t there, and he didn’t respond to my calling him, as he usually does. Lately he’s been a little slower to respond sometimes, but if I call him from the back door, then check to see if he’s in front, he’s usually at the back door on my second trip there. Not Sunday night, though. We called for him, and we both walked all the way around the house looking for him. No sign of him. I decided to give him a little while to come home, but when I checked again half an hour later, he still wasn’t there. It was time to start a full-scale search. We each walked up and down the street and over to adjacent streets, with panic starting to set in. Still no Jasper.

I’ve never experienced this before, and I’m not sure there’s a worse feeling in the world. Okay, there are plenty of worse feelings, I know. But the not knowing was just unbearable. We couldn’t find him anywhere, and yet I knew he couldn’t have gone far. I was sure, sure in my bones, that he was hurt or worse; I knew that if he could have come home, he would have. And as I was sitting at the computer printing out “lost cat” flyers, I had that “I can’t believe this is happening” feeling that makes everything even worse. On Sunday night, I couldn’t quite bring myself to really go to bed, because doing so would have felt like giving up. So I dozed briefly while Bill was still awake, then caught a couple of hours’ restless sleep, still in my clothes, between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning. I tried to convince myself that Jasper was just stuck in someone’s garage, and that he would come home as soon as people started leaving for work on Monday morning…unless they had the day off, as I did. I convinced myself sufficiently that I half-expected to see his sweet face at the door, and I was crushed when he wasn’t there. More uncontrollable weeping and a growing sense of panic took over, though I pulled myself together long enough to distribute flyers at every house on our block and the one to the north.

After I came home to print more flyers, I gave in to my flu symptoms and lay down for a nap before tackling the next block, leaving the blinds open so I could keep an eye out for glimpses of a tail or paw or kitty face appearing on the deck. (The bedroom only has a partial view of the deck; I wasn’t actually expecting individual cat parts to appear.) Maisy, who could tell something was wrong (both she and Liam were noticeably affected by Jasper’s disappearance), curled up on the backs of my legs, and I slept for a good hour and a half. When I woke up, I saw what might just have been a Siamese cat flank at the very edge of my field of vision; I thought it was probably just a rag rug or something (my vision was all screwy because I’d been crying so much), but I immediately got up to check. And there he was. I grabbed him up in my arms and cried into his fur for a good two or three minutes; I had to compose myself before I could call Bill to let him know that the boy was home. I’m still getting weepy just thinking about it.

It took me a little while to notice that he was limping, since I hadn’t actually let him walk when I first saw him—I’d carried him over to his food dish, and thought his refusal to eat was related to his being flipped out. But it turned out that he was in pain, and he wouldn’t let me close enough to his back left paw to see what was wrong. Feeling guilty for traumatizing him even more, I took him to the vet, and she found two big bite wounds on the paw. All Jasper had to say about it was, “You should see the other guy.”

He’s on antibiotics now, and a pain medication injection yesterday seems to have made him feel better; he’s still hopping, but he’s eating again and seems in relatively good spirits. He’s also showing no interest at all in the outdoors, which is fine with me. He won’t be going out after dark anymore, that’s for damn sure. I’d like to keep him inside for good, in fact, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to deny him the chance to lie in the sun once he’s feeling better. But no more evening trips outside. I don’t ever want to go through anything like this again. It’s bad enough when they get sick, and when they grow old and die, but at least then you have some warning of what’s going to happen; this was so unexpected, and so out of character, that it was worse somehow. (Or so it seemed at the time, anyway.) I’m still worn out and flippy from it, hence this long, rambling entry.

And meanwhile, I need a real three-day weekend, one free of viruses and kitty crises. Not sure where or when I’m going to get one of those, alas.

It will be 2006 here in the Central Time Zone in 36 minutes, and I’m digesting dinner and taking a break before resuming our typically low-key New Year’s celebration. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Eve, though it doesn’t bother me the way it used to either. I used to hate the feeling of being required to have fun just because of some arbitrary blip on the calendar, but I’ve long since stopped thinking I have to go to a party or a show or some other festive event, so now I don’t really mind the holiday. As long as I spend it with Bill (and with other loved ones, when possible), I’m happy.

It feels wrong somehow to not be writing a big summation of the year’s ups and downs, but I covered most of that stuff at Thanksgiving, and I don’t want to repeat myself any more than I usually do. Besides, 2005 hasn’t been such a great year for some of the people I’m closest to, so I don’t want to dwell too much on how good a year it’s been for me overall. I will reiterate, though, that I’m incredibly glad and grateful for how different things are on December 31 this year from December 31 last year. I had no inkling at this time last year of how many positive changes there would be in my life during 2005, and I was also in the midst of a particularly deep, dark depression. I’m not anticipating quite such major changes for 2006, just the usual vagaries of a year in the life, but at least I’m going into the year as full of energy and enthusiasm and positive feeling as I’ve been in a long time. My heart developed a few small, unexpected fissures (the metaphorical kind, that is, not the physical kind) this year, and there were certainly a few low moments (though for the most part 2005 improved with every passing month), but overall, this was one of the best and most plain old interesting years I’ve had in a while. I can only hope that 2006 will be half as full of intriguing and joyful and memorable and satisfying moments as 2005 has been.

I hope you’ve all been enjoying the holiday season as much as I have. (The fact that my office was closed this past week made the holidays particularly enjoyable—I can’t remember the last time I had a whole week off, much less one that didn’t involve using up any vacation days. Made me feel like a kid at Christmas, so to speak.) I was hoping to get my best-of list nailed down by the last day of the year, but I guess it will just have to be my first post of 2006 instead, because I’m still wrestling with it. In the meantime, it’s time to break out the toasting beverages and get ready for the year to change. I wish all of you a wonderful 2006.

(Apparently, I should post pictures of my cats more often—it makes people comment. I like it when people comment. That’s a hint.)

Several days ago, I was going to parse that T.S. Eliot quote, but I’m not sure it would be appropriate to discuss the exact thought process that caused the quote to invade my head, so I’ll just talk about the poem a little as a springboard for a thorough pimping of the magnificent Lori Carson. The poem is called “Portrait of a Lady,” after the Henry James novel (though the poem bears no resemblance to the book). I can’t say it’s my favorite Eliot poem—that would be “Prufrock,” of course—but it’s a poem that meant a great deal to me and made me a little uncomfortable for years and years. It’s about a young man having a relationship of sorts with an older woman, though it’s never made clear how much older she is (I’ve always believed that she isn’t much older than the narrator, and the references to her being “about to reach her journey’s end” are typical of her exaggerated, overdramatic style). The woman is vaguely ridiculous; this comes across when you read the poem in the way she repeats herself and inserts parenthetical phrases and makes dramatic pronouncements, but it was made even more clear to me when I heard a recording of Eliot reading the poem. He doesn’t put on a female voice or anything, but he draws out the syllables of her dialogue, and there’s a distinct note of contempt in his voice. But the narrator is also drawn to her, and the most stunning moment of the poem comes when she kind of puts him in his place:

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

(That last line may be my favorite in the whole history of poetry, I’m not sure.)

It was written around the same time as “Prufrock,” but where that poem showed how prodigiously gifted Eliot was at 29, “Portrait of a Lady” shows that he was also still a young man, and a little bit of a callow youth. I have sometimes worried about bearing a resemblance to the lady in the poem—a little excessive, a little ridiculous—but I also love the poem. I can recite it from memory, having learned it (along with another Eliot poem—not “Prufrock,” alas, though I’ve tried, but one of the “Ash Wednesday” poems) back when I was a college girl who not only read but, worse, wrote poetry. (It was a bit of a cliché, Barnard girls writing poetry, but I couldn’t help it.) Nowadays, I don’t read much poetry, except when something in The New Yorker catches my eye or I pick up my giant volume of the great Paul Muldoon’s complete poems, but I still make sure I haven’t forgotten “Portrait of a Lady” by reciting it in the car from time to time.

I’d never read any criticism of it till a few days ago, so the preceding paragraph is my own interpretation, but I hunted around a little bit for some academic commentary on it the other day, and the consensus seems to be that the poem is about the impossibility of communication between men and women. (I don’t disagree with that analysis; that’s what “Prufrock” is largely about too, after all.) And that’s pretty much Lori Carson’s great theme too. (How’s that for a smooth segue? Heh.) Her songs are preoccupied—you could even say “obsessed”—with the pursuit of love and the failure of love and the transformative power of love, which is part (okay, most) of what I find so compelling about her songwriting. It’s her great theme. I’m sure she’s not as regularly heartbroken as her darkest songs suggest, though judging by the (highly readable and engaging) journal she keeps on her site, she does go through relationships pretty frequently. But whatever her romantic life is like in the real world, the version of it that is revealed in her songs is exceptionally powerful and moving.

She’s also a perfectly wonderful singer, a breathy but very clear and pure and strong soprano (with the minor caveat that she will occasionally slip into a sort of baby-doll voice, not quite Victoria Williams-like, but still potentially off-putting if you’re allergic to that kind of voice. But she doesn’t do it much, and she’s done it less and less as her career has progressed).

Lori holds a place in my heart because her second album, “Where It Goes,” was my soundtrack/security blanket during the year that my first marriage was falling apart. When I think of that year, the first image that comes to mind is me on the train ride from Park Slope into the city, listening to the first four songs on “Where It Goes” over and over and over again. (It was a while before I learned the rest of the record as thoroughly as those four songs.) It’s really an extraordinary run of songs (and very well sequenced, too). The first song, “Down Here,” is addressed to a lover who has died, and it’s wrenchingly beautiful:

“Down here itâ??s as you left it
Iâ??m waiting for the grey to clear
Donâ??t know what Iâ??m running on
But some time ago all hope was gone”

That’s followed by the upbeat-sounding (but heartbreaking) “Waking to the Dream of You,” which is about surviving the aftermath of a breakup and the advice that you get from friends who want to help you get through it. After that is a very passionate and romantic song about new love after old, “You Won’t Fall,” in which she promises,

“You can rest easy
Your beauty is clear to me
You wonâ??t fall
You wonâ??t fall”

I could quote the full lyrics from all four songs, because they’re marvelous, but I won’t; I’ll just quote the fourth song, which so perfectly captured how I felt that year—bruised and battered (emotionally, that is) from one major relationship ending and simultaneously hopeful and terrified and thrilled at the new relationship that was starting up—that I could hardly bear to listen to it, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s called “Petal,” and it’s one of my all-time favorite songs ever ever ever.

“Iâ??ve been looking for it all my life
But never found it
I got used to being alone
I know how and I do it so well
Even if we learn to speak the same language
How long can it last
You know as well as I do
How it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

Iâ??ve been waiting for it my whole life
And so many times I thought
Hey this is it
Iâ??m ready letâ??s go baby
But it all led nowhere
Turned out wrong
And I still believe in it
But not much
I know Iâ??m strong enough to fall again
But isnâ??t it just foolishness
Knowing how it goes
The way it goes

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind
Iâ??ve changed my mind, Iâ??ve changed my mind

So, should we give it
Just another chance
Although I know the odds are against us
We know how to fuck it up
We do it so well
And even if we love each other so much
And plan our lives like we will stay together
Make a home and a family
Can we change the way it goes
How it goes?

You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those thorns
You are the petal in the rose
But watch out for those…”

And then there’s “Little Suicides,” a song that Lori co-wrote with Anton Fier. They recorded it during her tenure with the Golden Palominos, and it’s pretty much a perfect song, one that kills me every time I hear it, no matter how many times I hear it, with its repeated theme of “Can’t I (/we) just be happy for a while?/It happens all the time,” and my favorite line, “If love heals anything at all/We should be flying.” Not to mention the chorus:

“All these little suicides
They hardly make a mark
I can take these funhouse rides
I’m a natural in the dark
I’m a natural in the dark
In the dark…”

Lori’s best records, I think, are “Where It Goes” and “Everything I Touch Runs Wild,” but her more recent work is worth paying attention to also. The most recent record, “The Finest Thing,” is all textures and soundscapes and might be best suited for people who are already converts, but it’s still worth picking up. And “Stars,” which came out in 1999, is seriously underrated. Still, I’d start with “Where It Goes” and/or “EITRW,” and go from there, if I were you. So go buy them, right now. You can find them used all over the place, unfortunately.

(It’s a little odd to be writing about Lori Carson when my head is still completely possessed by Patty Griffin’s most recent album, and especially by the song “Useless Desires,” which I listened to no fewer than four times today. They’ve actually got a few things in common musically, Griffin and Carson. But I came late to the party with Patty Griffin, and I can’t say anything very well-informed about her; I can only talk about how powerfully her songs have affected me lately. I’ve been a Lori Carson fan for a lot longer, so there’s more to say.)

Oh, and while I’m going on and on and on, I have an actual movie recommendation: “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” a new noirish movie that is both homage to and parody of the noir genre but is also an insanely clever and entertaining film on its own. It helps that the cast is so great: Robert Downey, Jr., whom I love and always root for (geez, if anyone ever needed evidence that addiction is a real, and incredibly challenging, disease…), is at the top of his game, and Val Kilmer is equally good, just note-perfect. I’d never heard of the female lead, Michelle Monaghan, before, but she’s one to watch—she handles a not particularly easy role with aplomb. The movie stops just short of being too clever for its own good, but it is very, very clever, and hysterically funny in places. I expect we’ll see it again when it comes out on DVD. Go see it after you buy those Lori Carson records.

I had ambitions for this weekend. Not very grand ambitions, just little things, like going to the gym and running a few errands—typical weekend stuff. But after sleeping unusually late yesterday morning (I usually wake up quite early on Saturdays, then nap around 1 p.m.), I woke up with a mildly painful sore throat and achiness and general rotten-feeling-ness, and as a result, I’ve been useless all weekend. I can’t afford to be sick at work (or away from work) this week, so I’m cutting myself a tiny bit of slack for my slothfulness this weekend, because if I can keep this from turning into a real flu, it will have been worth it (though those errands are going to have to get done sometime…).

My one moderately productive activity this weekend was taking some photos of the cats, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages because I just don’t have very many pictures of them. I’ve never done this catblogging thing before, and I know it’s supposed to be done on Fridays, but I’m winding down and getting ready to go to bed early, and I wanted to post something this weekend (again, I had such plans), so here goes.

I was prompted to grab the camera when I saw Maisy, the queen, who is the smallest animal in the household and the boss of all of us, posing elegantly in the sun. Maisy is a lynxpoint Siamese mix, but since (like the other two) she’s a rescue cat, I don’t know how mixed she is. She’s dark for a Siamese, even a seal lynx, but Siamese cats’ points will darken up if they’re exposed to too much sunlight and heat early on, which is a distinct possibility for a street cat in Missouri. She’s got sort of a snub face that keeps her from being classically beautiful but does not prevent her from being the queen. Here she is in all her regal splendor.

Yes, I am the queen. You may admire me…for a moment.

Maisy is always ready for her closeup.

Inhibitions are for wimps.

Jasper, the big boy and the only cat who is allowed outside (because he’s mostly content to stay within ten feet of the deck, whereas the other two would wander), was enjoying the gorgeous Indian summer day while Maisy’s photo shoot was going on. He’s a little harder to photograph, because if you sit down with him, he immediately wants to be in your lap. And I do mean your lap, not just my lap. Jasper loves you. The fact that he probably hasn’t met you yet is irrelevant.

He’s the most even-tempered cat I’ve ever met, which is surprising given his rough past as a street cat (he has buckshot in his side from when some waste of sperm and egg used him as target practice) and less neurotic than most Siamese, though not entirely neurosis-free. He’s a blue-point, probably a mix given his large, sturdy frame, but again, who knows. And he has the biggest blue eyes in the world. He looks a little irritable in these photos, which is just because the sun was in his eyes, I think.

Is that an empty lap I see there?

Is there a reason you’re not petting me?

Liam, the fluffball kitty, was feeling a little camera-shy this weekend, so I wasn’t able to get any daylight shots of him. He’s actually the beauty of the family, though you can’t really tell here. He is most likely a Siamese-Himalayan mix; he has the splendiferous Himalayan coat but not the flat, smunched face that purebred Himmys have. He’s a lilac point, the most delicate of the four main types of Siamese coloration, with a few little lynx-y stripes on his head and sides. He’s also certifiably insane and has been since birth, as far as I know; when he was rescued from a high-kill shelter in southwestern Kansas, the rescue people named him Bounce, because he literally bounced off walls. And still does. But it’s a lovable kind of insanity.

Why are you pointing that thing at me? (Note the resplendent tail, which is nearly as big as the rest of Liam.)

Here you can sort of tell that Liam really is the beauty of the family.

And there you have it—my cats, the creatures who own my heart, who bring joy to my life every day, who are the best company in the world, and who, I hope, will be with me for a record-setting length of time.

PS: So no one wants to play my parallel-universe-career game? Hrmph. Fine. Be that way. I’ll get over it.

(I’m running up against the deadline for a big project at work, so I’ll be working tonight and tomorrow night and all weekend, which means I’ll probably be blogging a lot. I got home this evening and took out the laptop, and it was still warm from when it had been plugged in at work 20 minutes earlier. That’s how I know I’m working hard, I guess…So I decided to treat myself to a bit of goofing off before getting to work.)

I don’t have the will to parse that Eliot quote and/or write about Lori Carson just now (especially because the female singer who is currently occupying my head is not Lori Carson but Patty Griffin—soon I’m going to need some kind of antidote for having “Useless Desire” from Patty’s most recent album running through my head in an endless loop, but right now, a day and a half into the loop, I’m still enjoying it, if “enjoying” is the right word for a song that tears me up as much as that one), so…here’s something more lighthearted that popped into my head the other day:

If, in a parallel universe, you could do something for a living that you are not, based on your skills and experience and natural abilities, actually able to do in this universe, what would it be?

Me, I think I’d be an industrial designer. In the real universe, I have no skills whatsoever when it comes to the visual arts (okay, I’m a pretty creative doodler, but somehow, I don’t think that counts). But after years of working on children’s books at a publishing house where the bookmaking process was way more hands-on than anything most editors ever get to experience—the company had its own camera-stripping department, among other now-obsolete things, and I used to do paper layouts by hand on resin-coated paper with FPO photocopies of photos, and pick colors and typefaces and stuff like that—I developed a really strong design sense (which turns out to be a good thing, since my current profession requires a certain amount of design skill—or a lot of it, depending on who you ask; in fact, there are people in the field right now who are claiming that it’s inseparable from design, which makes me nervous, because I have “I Am Not A Designer” tattooed on my forehead. In invisible ink.). And I love good industrial design. Ever since I’ve known that there was such a thing as an industrial designer (which I don’t think I found out until I was in my late 20s—I led a sheltered life, I guess), I’ve thought it would be an amazingly cool thing to be. We looked at a couple of design exhibits at the slightly disappointing renovated Museum of Modern Art recently, and the stuff in the permanent design collection wowed me, as it always does. In the current universe, I could never in a million years come up with anything as cool and brilliantly designed as the iPod, or even as cool as the little colored-plastic-circle bookmarks that they sell in the MoMA store, but I’d like to think that I could imagine them—that the problem is one of lack of technical skill rather than lack of imagination. It’s possible that I’m fooling myself about that, though. Anyway, I’m not sure that being an industrial designer would be the exact opposite of what I do now, or what I’m capable of doing; I suppose the polar opposite would be manual labor of some sort. (Or maybe the real polar opposite would be making information harder to find and more confusing, if we want to be literal about it.) Nonetheless, being an industrial designer is something that the actual me is incapable of, so I think I get to be one in a parallel universe.

So what would the paralllel-universe you do for a living?

Of all the many (and somewhat unexpectedly) wrenching, horrendously painful things about the breakup of my first marriage, one of the worst was leaving my dog behind. My first husband and I got the dog when she was a four-month-old puppy, in April 1991. When we split, there was no question that I would get our one surviving cat (my Tim, the best cat I’ll ever know, about whom I hope to be able to write someday; he died shortly after I left my husband, and I miss him every single minute), and that my ex would get the dog. She wasn’t entirely a one-person dog; she adored me and protected me and considered me the alpha dog in the house. But Eric was her person, and there was no way I could have even considered asking to take her from him. But leaving her behind was incredibly difficult; I still can’t talk about the last time I saw her, a year or so after we’d split, because it’s just too painful.

He wrote me today to tell me that he had had her put to sleep, because it was her time to go. She was nearly 15, so she had a good long life (and a very happy one). But I’ve never stopped missing her, and now I’ll miss her even more.

She was a happy, delightful, funny dog—a beautiful and typical example of a wonderful breed, the Keeshond. As an animal lover, I’m a big believer in mutts, and adopting shelter or rescue pets, but because we were bringing a dog into a household with two adult cats, we decided to opt for the predictability that you get with a purebred. I’m a cat person first and foremost, and I wanted to make sure we found a breed that wouldn’t herd, hurt, or (accidentally or deliberately) kill the cats. We also wanted a dog that wasn’t too huge, since our house wasn’t, and we didn’t want a little yippy dog either. (I’m somewhat more tolerant of little yippy dogs, at least some breeds of them, than most people, but I still didn’t want one.) And we wanted one that wouldn’t need too much exercise but would enjoy a good long walk on a regular basis. It also needed to be able to tolerate the climate in Minneapolis, so Italian greyhounds, for instance (a breed I adore), were out.

So I did a ton of reading, and we went to a whole bunch of dog shows, looking at breeds we’d liked in pictures, talking to breeders and owners and finding out about the dogs. We thought briefly about a Borzoi (gorgeous, but too big, and the ones I met seemed sort of aloof), and seriously considered the Vizsla and the Schipperke—fine breeds both, but neither was quite right. I was sold on the Keeshond pretty early on; they were so beautiful, with their wolfish faces and their glorious fur, and they were bred primarily for companionship rather than hunting or herding or pointing or whatever. Eric thought they were a little foofy, till we were at a show and he saw the Kees that had just won its group competition leap up into its owner’s arms and give the owner a kiss on the nose. He was sold right then and there, and we set about finding a Keeshond puppy.

The one we found was Diane, named (by her breeder) for the character on “Cheers.” (She had siblings named Woody and Norm.) We didn’t change her name, because we figured she was used to it already, which in retrospect was silly—over the course of her lifetime, she answered to at least a dozen different nicknames, and we could have changed her name at any time. But we didn’t, and the running joke was that her real name was Dianewedidn’tnameher, because whenever we told people her name, we had to add the disclaimer that we had nothing to do with it. She was a show-quality dog—in the odd little corner of the world where Keeshonden (that’s the proper Dutch plural) can be famous, her father and grandfather were both very famous—and as a condition of our getting her, her breeder had the option to show her for a while, but as it happened, Diane had some fairly serious eye (actually, eyelash) problems, which made her unsuitable for breeding. Which was fine with us, because that meant she was all ours. (It also meant that we only had to deal with her going into heat a few times. Female dogs in heat…yeccch.)

She was my first dog, pretty much. My family owned a dog, briefly, when I was about four years old, but he wasn’t my dog, one I chose or helped to raise. That was Diane, who was and always will be my first dog.

I wasn’t sure we’d survive our first summer together, though. We took her to puppy kindergarten at a place that used the then-standard nylon choke-correction collar method, which works well for many breeds but not for Keeshonden, who need positive reinforcement and encouragement. They can be stubborn, and they respond much better to gentle coaxing and outright bribery than they do to corrective behavior, as we later learned. So she wasn’t doing very well in obedience, and I was finding it frustrating to try to train her—and Eric and I argued nearly every time we took her to obedience class. On top of that, Sophie, my female cat, quickly learned to love the dog, but Tim didn’t, so Tim would be aggressive toward the dog, which would make Sophie attack him, which would make me mad at Sophie, and none of us were very happy. Worst of all, Diane picked up fleas, and our house became infested before we realized it. Diane, Tim, and I all turned out to be wildly allergic to flea bites, and Diane and I were scratching ourselves bloody every day (I still have scars on my legs from that summer). It was a tough summer for all of us, though I can kind of laugh about it now.

But pretty soon, we got rid of the fleas, and Tim learned to tolerate the dog (though he loved to occasionally stand up on his hind legs and box her face with his paws—I wish I had a photo of that), and we started working with the local Keeshond expert at Keeshond-only obedience, which Diane and I both loved, and she turned fairly quickly into a well-behaved (though still impish) girl. And sweet and funny and charming and loveable, all 45 fluffy pounds of her. It’s a cliché, but it really was hard to be in a bad mood when she was around. Tim—like all my cats since—was a Siamese, or a Siamese mix, and cats of that breed are somewhat doglike in their devotion to people, so I was used to being greeted at the door by someone who was happy to see me…but even Tim wasn’t quite as expressive about it as Diane. Keeshonden carry their tails curved up onto their backs, so when they wag their tails, their entire back half wags along with the tail, which is very entertaining and endearing. They’re good-tempered, happy dogs, and being around her made me happy.

Most of the time, that is. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get annoyed with her, or that I didn’t occasionally resent having to walk her when it was -20 degrees out, or that the ubiquity of her fur didn’t sometimes get to me (I used to find Diane hairs on the inside of my clothing when I was out of town and hadn’t seen her for days), or that I never got angry when she misbehaved (which she didn’t do very often). But because of her sweet nature, and because she really did end up being very well trained, she was a remarkably easy dog to live with, and more important, a remarkably enjoyable one. I loved the fact that we could take her cross-country skiing with us—Eric even figured out a way to hook up her leash to his waist and let her pull him, which, with her sled-dog ancestry, she loved to do. Her first winter with us was the year that Minneapolis got 28 inches of snow on Halloween, and it’s one of my favorite memories of her: she wasn’t quite full grown yet (and she was only 15 inches tall at the shoulder even when she was full grown), so she was like one of those little mushroom toys with springs—the ones you push down and then they pop back up—she’d disappear into a snowdrift and then come bouncing out of it, only to disappear and reappear again. She thought it was the best thing that had ever happened ever.

And when we moved to Park Slope in 1998, I looked forward to taking her to the big dog run in Prospect Park every day, because she was a sociable dog, and when she got to the park and saw all those dogs (as many as 100 or more on a nice day, and usually at least 40 or so even in bad weather), she thought that was the best thing ever too. She was a boundless, furry, huggable container of joy.

There’s a Keeshond rescue group not far from where I live, and I know of others around the country, and someday, I’ll have Keeshonden in my life again. But there will only ever be one Diane, and I’ll miss her forever. Rest in peace, my sweet girl. You’re always with me.

I’ve always been fond of the phrase “Geography is destiny.” I’m not sure who said it originally, or indeed, if anyone said it originally or if it’s just one of those phrases that took hold in the popular lexicon of clichés. But I like it. I don’t know exactly how it applies to me, but geography has certainly been intricately tied to my destiny for most of my allegedly adult life. And lately, as I’ve been in touch with people from my past (raise your hand if you’re tired of hearing me talk about that…yeah, that’s what I figured), most of whom seem to have wound up on the East or the West Coast, it’s really been on my mind. It’s not that I’m wondering how I wound up here (and this time I mean “here” in the geographic rather than the emotional or metaphorical sense), because I can follow the path quite clearly. It’s that I’m wondering what I’m still doing here, and how much longer being here will be my destiny. If that makes sense. Which I’m not sure it does.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to end up here, “here” being specifically a dilapidated ranch house in a dull suburban-style area of a dreary midsized Midwestern city in the heart of Red State Land, but also more generically, “here” in the middle of the country, far from my family, the ocean, overcrowding, more ethnic diversity than you can shake a stick at, noise, four real and relatively moderate seasons, large Jewish populations, good or even acceptable pizza and Chinese food, and other things that feel like home to me. I’m not sure that I was supposed to end up in a high-ceilinged prewar apartment w/riv vu on the Upper West Side, where I grew up, either; nothing I’ve ever pursued as a serious interest would have provided the kind of income that would have landed me in a place like that. But I wonder if there was some sort of happy medium (with a slight eastward bias) that I missed somewhere along the line.

In several separate phases of my life in very different circumstances each time, I have picked up and moved to a completely new place: not counting the moves from NYC to DC and back again that occurred when I was little and had no control over my destiny, geographic or otherwise, there have been five of these major, disruptive, discombobulating moves. Of those, only one was an unmitigated disaster (my move to Chicago during the breakup of my first marriage, an ill-considered decision that resulted in a ragingly horrible experience—that year, and the profound effect it had on me, was originally going to be the main focus of this blog when I first thought about starting a blog, and maybe I’ll get to all that eventually, because there are lingering effects that I try to ignore but kind of can’t). The rest have been successful to varying degrees; I won’t go into details about all of them just now, but all have had their ups and downs.

But in purely geographic (and aesthetic) terms, the one that brought me here to Heartlandsville has been the least successful, and I’m wondering how much longer I can put up with this particular bit of geographic destiny. Love brought me here, and a pretty great job is currently keeping me here, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t occasionally worry that I’m going to be stuck here forever. I doubt that that will be the case, but then again, the idea of uprooting again is so overwhelming that my mind recoils from it when I try to think it through logically. It’s been almost five years since I got here, so I’ve reached the point at which the thought of putting my whole life in boxes and clearing out the detritus that I’ve accumulated and so on is something I can just about begin to contemplate, though even just contemplating it makes me tired.

I’m not, incidentally, equating geography with happiness. I’ve figured out that I can be unhappy wherever I am. And more seriously, I’ve learned that whatever you leave behind in a given place, you don’t leave much of yourself behind; it travels with you. So I’m not looking for a geographic solution to all my problems. (It’s true that living in a house I liked better in a neighborhood that I liked better would make this town more tolerable for me and would temporarily improve my overall outlook—I think— but it still wouldn’t make me feel like this is where I belong.)

Thing is, I’m not sure where I belong. I’m pretty sure it’s back home in NYC, or more precisely in Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey or wherever I could afford, but sometimes I wonder if it’s the idea of living in New York that appeals to me more than actually living there would. On the one hand, I was ecstatically happy the first six months or so after my first husband and I moved to the city; I loved the alive-ness of it, and I was so happy to be able to walk everywhere (and to see a million new things on every walk—other cities I’ve lived in, like Minneapolis, are good walking cities, but you see the same things over and over, which isn’t true in NYC), and having so many options for places to go and things to do made me less of a homebody than I’m usually inclined to be. On the other hand, I got tired of lugging groceries (from the surprisingly cruddy grocery stores in Park Slope—you really can’t beat Mpls.-St. Paul for grocery stores) up three steep flights of stairs; I got tired of the crowds and the expense and the way it seemed to be impossible to set foot outside the apartment without spending $20 on…something, who knows what. I missed things like cross-country skiing and being able to hop in the car and go to Target when I wanted to and having good restaurants that didn’t actually bankrupt you. I missed Minneapolis’s famous quality of life, which unfortunately now costs a hell of a lot more than it did when I lived there. Somehow, though, I now seem to have traded both the quality of life stuff and the excitement stuff: this town has neither. The very best thing I can think of to say about it is that it’s dirt cheap to live here. Oh, and the people are friendly…but since half of them are also far-right fundamentalist types, I’m not sure friendliness itself is much of a consolation.

So where does that leave me? I’m not necessarily prepared to go someplace entirely new again, unless there were a really great job opportunity or it were someplace close to but not in New York; I’m getting kind of old for that, and there aren’t that many cities left that I’m willing to try (other than St. Louis, a city so familiar to me that living there would barely be like moving to a totally new place; hell, I know way more people in St. Louis than I do here). So there’s a very short shortlist. If you count the four years I spent in the DC suburbs as a child, I’ve now lived outside of New York longer than I’ve lived there, and I always swore that that would never happen. But New York isn’t the city that I grew up in by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to make all the tradeoffs that would be necessary in order to live there. Again, I think the idea of not living there bothers me more than actually not living there, although the pull of being closer to family is very strong. I don’t know. Sometimes when I look into the magic 8-ball, it says “Signs point to Minneapolis,” which is the town that, other than NYC, feels most like home to me because I lived there for 12 years, 12 years that saw a lot of life changes and helped turn me from a lost and hapless twentysomething into a slightly less lost and hapless alleged grownup. But there are problems with going back there, too, not the least of which is a husband who hates winter.

So if geography is destiny, what’s mine? I wish I really did have that magic 8-ball to tell me where I’m going to be next. I hope to God the answer isn’t “right where you are now, sucker.”

But just a little, and maybe the last for a little while. Maybe.

I’m not sure where I first heard the phrase “There are ways and ways of looking at things.” It’s quite possible that I made it up myself, but if I did, it was at least influenced by (if not lifted from) Ordinary People, one of the best novels ever written about adolescent depression (or maybe I’m just biased because so much of it resonated with me when I had my first, worst bout of major depressive disorder (as the DSM-V calls it), at sixteen). Because that’s what Conrad ends up learning from his therapist, among other things: that you can choose, at least to some extent, how you parse a situation or a relationship. It’s my watchphrase in my better times, and sometimes even in my more difficult times, when I remember to invoke it.

Its particular relevance to all of my recent introspection about the subject of friendship—both the distressing little episode I had in St. Louis and the unrelated whirlwind of reconnecting with old friends—is that I’ve always, always tended to dwell on how bad I am at friendships, and I had been thinking that both what happened a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis and the fact that I’d lost touch with so many people who were once such a big part of my life were evidence of my inability to interact successfully with people over an extended period of time. And maybe they are, but there are ways and ways…and in this case, the fact that the people in that room in St. Louis are still my friends and not only don’t hate me for what I wrote but actually understand it, and the apparent fact that the people I’ve been reconnecting with are as happy to hear from me as I am to hear from them,* suggests that maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way all along. I was afraid of opening a Pandora’s box with many of these posts and the contacts that have developed as a result, and I haven’t at all, really (well, maybe a little bit of one in a corner over there, but we won’t talk about that just now, if ever…and okay, it’s not so little at all, but that’s enough about that). I’ve been in a tizzy of sorts from all of this, but not in a negative way at all. The only vaguely negative emotion I’ve felt has been apprehension, and even that’s been mitigated by something like joy, I think.

(And I have to say that even the remote prospect of possibly seeing anyone who hasn’t seen you since you were a sylphlike early-twentysomething is an excellent motivational tool when you’re trying to eat less and eat better and go to the gym as often as possible.)

There are ways and ways. It’s sort of a platitude, but hey, when you’re a clinical depressive, sometimes platitudes are essential in getting you through.

Three entries in one day = not a page read or a stitch knit since I got home…and I really need to finish the damn cat bed already so that I can start on a garment for moi, plus I’m reading, a year after every other lefty on the planet, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, about which more later, and would really like to plow ahead and finish it. I usually read nonfiction at a fraction of the speed with which I read fiction—I read fiction pretty damn fast, although not nearly as fast as I used to—but I’ve been finding this book a very quick read, except that between friggin’ new TV shows and too much e-mailing/blogging, I haven’t read more than a chapter since Sunday. And oh look, it’s time for “CSI” now.

*Got a quick note from my beloved friend Peter, who has been a close friend for just shy of 20 years but with whom I had slipped out of touch with for just a little too long, today and he was as glad to hear from me as I was to have finally written to him over the weekend. When someone ’s been dear and true and loyal and supportive to you for as long as Peter has to me, it should pretty much be illegal to let them fall out of your life entirely, even if you live in different places and both have busy lives.

It occurs to me that in my lengthy post about my particular attachment to Dolly Varden, I didn’t say a whole hell of a lot about what they sound like. That’s partly because their sound is a little bit hard to describe; for a while, they tended to get lumped in with alt-country/Americana, but that’s not really accurate. I really need to come up with a genre term that describes the style of bands like Dolly Varden and Dolorean—not that the two sound alike at all, just that they’re equally hard to describe. In the case of Dolly Varden, there’s a little twang, lots of melody, and the highly distinctive guitar work of Mark Balletto (who has a fine spinoff band of his own, My Record Player), which is capable of being both shimmery and unexpectedly crunchy, though not usually in the same song. Mostly, there are two words that come to mind when I try to describe the Vardens: “joyous” and “beautiful.” Even when the lyrics are downbeat, which they often are, there’s a sheer joy to the sound of the songs that just lifts the heart up and brings a little ache to the throat. Geez, I wish I had a better vocabulary for this kind of thing, rather than standard rock-crit cliches, but…there’s a lyric in the (happy, upbeat, joyous) song “I Come to You,” from “The Dumbest Magnets,” that goes: “And when my chest is open wide/You could pull yourself inside.” When you listen to it, you feel exactly what Steve is singing: your heart feels so big and full that it could just burst from your body. (Okay, now I’m starting to sound like the plot of “Alien.” Maybe I should quit while I’m behind.)

And beautiful: the melodies, the vocals, the arrangements. Beautiful and sometimes delicate, but in no way wispy or ethereal or frail. Just sheer gorgeousness and gorgeosity, to quote that little droogy Alex. Steve and Diane’s first band, Stump the Host, was kind of a punk band, I guess, but Steve says that it didn’t work so well for him and Diane to sing in that style because they’re both “pretty” singers. And it’s true, they are—both of them. Diane’s voice is full of color and timbre, capable of moving from light and sweet to dark and slightly husky in the same song; Steve’s is soulful and strong, but still, well, pretty.

Argh, enough trying to wrestle an adequate description to the ground. Just go listen to them: there are a number of MP3s on this page of their site.

Moving on: today’s NP list:

1. Michael Berube’s blog, because it’s been a while since I mentioned it, but also because the most recent entry (dated September 23) is exceptionally powerful. There are so many great political blogs out there (along with the crappy ones) that it’s hard to definitively say that any one of them is the best, but I will say that Michael’s is my favorite, bar none. (NB: I get to call him Michael because he was at Columbia when I was at Barnard—he was a year behind me—and though I don’t actually know him, we have mutual friends. In case anyone was wondering.)

2. The Brakes, “Give Blood.”* My online friend Ged has been pimping this UK band for months. I respect his taste, so I listened to some samples online. Liked ‘em pretty well, but wasn’t sure I was going to buy the album. But then it was released in the US, and half of the rest of Postcard starting raving about it too, so I caved in to peer pressure and bought it. And I’m very glad I did. It’s a weird little (and I do mean little: it’s less than half an hour long, which I guess is kind of a raw deal when you’re paying full CD price, but is nonetheless fine with me because I think almost every CD that comes out nowadays, including ones that I adore, is just too damn long) record, full of humor and quirks, but they’re not a novelty band by any means. Mostly, what they are is entertaining, in the best sense. Vastly entertaining, and definitely innovative. But perhaps not as innovative as…

3. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods.” I probably wouldn’t even know about this guy if he weren’t on the Delgados’ label, Chemikal Underground, because I wasn’t familiar with the band he was (is?) in, Arab Strap. Fortunately, though, I’ll listen to anything the Delgados tell me to listen to (though I draw the line at Mother and the Addicts), so I checked out Malcolm’s latest. I ended up buying his first record, the brilliantly titled “5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine” (how could you not love a record with a title like that?), and falling in love with it first, because “Into the Woods” was only available on import. When it was released here, though, I bought it right away, and it’s just genius. Maybe it would seem more ordinary if he didn’t have a heavy Scottish (Glaswegian, I think) accent, but I think the accent is only a small part of the whole picture. He takes deeply depressive but also sometimes hysterically funny lyrics and sets them against melodies that are alternately dreamy and just sort of jangly and upbeat, and his voice, which is gruff and talky and not at all sweet, is what ties it all together. Amazing stuff. Sample lyric: “You’re gonnae break my heart and I know it/And if you don’t/You’re gonna break my string of bad luck/And ruin my career.”

4. The first, self-titled David Johansen record, recently discussed here. Hearing a once-beloved record that you haven’t heard in eons is kind of like the reconnection with old friends that I’ve been dwelling on so much here lately: you wonder if memory has put too much of a shiny gloss on reality, and you question whether you’ll still have anything in common. In this case, there was no reason to worry. This is still a great album that doesn’t sound even remotely dated, and I was happy to find that not only do the killer songs that I remember vividly (”Donna,” “Cool Metro,” “Frenchette”) still sound as great as ever, some of the ones I had forgotten (”Pain in My Heart,” “I’m a Lover”) do too. And it’s another blessedly short record, even with the addition of a (totally inessential) bonus track. Of course, it’s probable that I can’t be objective about this record, because of the powerful time-and-place associations with it. But insofar as I can be, I feel comfortable recommending the record.

5. And sticking to following up on that same post, I’ve been treating myself to an episode every few nights of “Butterflies,” and I’m delighted to find that I still love it. It’s odd how much I remembered about it (and some little details that I’d forgotten, or misremembered: for my own satisfaction, I need to correct myself to note that Ria meets Leonard in a restaurant, not in the park—and it’s a very funny scene). I can’t unequivocally recommend it to everyone, I guess, for various reasons: the production values are pretty much nonexistent (I guess the Beeb didn’t have much of a budget for sitcoms in 1978), and it seems kind of stagy at times; you can sort of feel the writing behind the lines as they’re spoken. But they’re often very, very funny lines—I’ve been laughing at the show much more than I expected—as well as incisive and sometimes wistful and heart-tugging. And the acting is marvelous, even if the clothes and hairstyles are comically dated. I haven’t gotten to the more wistful stuff yet; in fact, I don’t think that cropped up much in the first season, which is the only one that’s available so far. But I do still get a little teary when I hear the theme song (a somewhat de-schmaltzed rendition of Dolly Parton’s extra-schmaltzy song “Love is Like a Butterfly”).

Um, I guess I haven’t really gotten the hang of this NP thing yet—these were supposed to be short, simple posts so that I could do them regularly without using up a whole lunch hour. More practice is required, I guess.

*(Lately, I’ve been putting album titles in quotation marks, which makes me a little uneasy, because I’m a Chicago Manual type of girl and at heart I believe that titles should be in italics. But quotes are so much easier to type…So if I decide to go back to italics, I apologize in advance to anyone who is driven crazy by such stylistic inconsistencies. Which pretty much means that I’m apologizing to myself.)