Cat Story
I just now saw something that I have never seen before and hope never to see again.
There are flies in the Dumaine house and this has come to mean one thing to us the residents here. Something dead: in the walls?, the attic?, or under the house.
To get to the beginning of this we'd have to go a ways back to the day I quit smoking while a slightly insane fellow named James sat with me on this Dumaine porch bumming what I told him would be the last, "so let's live it up." I have not seen James since that day. It was late August of the year 1998, almost three years before this day today when I would see something I have never seen before, and me a guy with eyes wide open. Mama D was still alive at the time.
Near the end of the pack a matronly feline who would soon be named Point Blank (posthumously, I'm afraid), ran in front of a small red car and became in an instant nothing more than cooling meat on the asphalt covered brick pavers of Dumaine. I scooped her still limp facsimile of catness with a shovel into the dumpster across the street. I wrote a piece about it and ended it or nearly ended it with the sad sad imagery of Point Blank's recently born progeny lurking longingly by the dumpster.
Those cats begat and so on until there were three fairly identical balls of pitiful fluff begging for food at the back door here. This will be if nothing else a lesson: Don't feed the strays.
One lost half his tail, one got eaten by wild dogs, and one remained, with or without our care, feeding, or watering, she remained. I did occasionally entertain what now can be seen as fairy tale versions of how she survived.
Is that enough clue? Just twenty minutes ago now I'm looking for the paper which might have been thrown over the fence into the side alley (yard) and what I witnessed is what I'm telling you. The little cat, scrawny, no bigger than an adolescent kitten but truly an adult, bent over a sleepy newborn kitten, sucking it's fur. However the kitten is not sleepy but dead, and its mama is not sucking but chewing, and the kitten is not all kitten but half gone; the hind quarters are missing.
And I've toyed with the theme of kitten as metaphor for the urban reality here but the metaphors are not up to it, are not up to describing or enhancing a reality so severe as a scrawny feline you shoo away from rubbing against your leg because the vibrating neediness of it repels you, you suspect a con, you have good reason to suspect a setup, and the needs you don't provide for another are often met in ways you'd rather not suspect.
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I just now saw something that I have never seen before and hope never to see again.
There are flies in the Dumaine house and this has come to mean one thing to us the residents here. Something dead: in the walls?, the attic?, or under the house.
To get to the beginning of this we'd have to go a ways back to the day I quit smoking while a slightly insane fellow named James sat with me on this Dumaine porch bumming what I told him would be the last, "so let's live it up." I have not seen James since that day. It was late August of the year 1998, almost three years before this day today when I would see something I have never seen before, and me a guy with eyes wide open. Mama D was still alive at the time.
Near the end of the pack a matronly feline who would soon be named Point Blank (posthumously, I'm afraid), ran in front of a small red car and became in an instant nothing more than cooling meat on the asphalt covered brick pavers of Dumaine. I scooped her still limp facsimile of catness with a shovel into the dumpster across the street. I wrote a piece about it and ended it or nearly ended it with the sad sad imagery of Point Blank's recently born progeny lurking longingly by the dumpster.
Those cats begat and so on until there were three fairly identical balls of pitiful fluff begging for food at the back door here. This will be if nothing else a lesson: Don't feed the strays.
One lost half his tail, one got eaten by wild dogs, and one remained, with or without our care, feeding, or watering, she remained. I did occasionally entertain what now can be seen as fairy tale versions of how she survived.
Is that enough clue? Just twenty minutes ago now I'm looking for the paper which might have been thrown over the fence into the side alley (yard) and what I witnessed is what I'm telling you. The little cat, scrawny, no bigger than an adolescent kitten but truly an adult, bent over a sleepy newborn kitten, sucking it's fur. However the kitten is not sleepy but dead, and its mama is not sucking but chewing, and the kitten is not all kitten but half gone; the hind quarters are missing.
And I've toyed with the theme of kitten as metaphor for the urban reality here but the metaphors are not up to it, are not up to describing or enhancing a reality so severe as a scrawny feline you shoo away from rubbing against your leg because the vibrating neediness of it repels you, you suspect a con, you have good reason to suspect a setup, and the needs you don't provide for another are often met in ways you'd rather not suspect.
- jimlouis 5-01-2001 11:52 pm