Annie Spayed

Annie had been in heat for about a week, writhing on the rug in front of Puss Merlin, our big king tom cat, who would look at her (like Elvis regarding an over-excited, underaged fan) as if to say, "Darlin,' don't you think you're a bit young for this?"

 

The smallest cat in the household, Annie is a tiny, Halloweenish-looking thing, dusty black, fluffy coat with splotches of orange all over, including an orange line running down her forehead, between her eyes, down her chin to her neck and chest.

 

She would follow Puss around the house, batting at him, rubbing against him, rolling around on the rug in his absence, half-mewing, half-moaning and clearly in immediate need of relief. No doubt she had no clue what had hit her, but it was pretty obvious to us, so we called the vet and booked the earliest date available for spaying.

 

Everything went fine. She came home groggy the same day and we put her in a big cage to keep her from being jumped on by Ritz, her over-affectionate and boisterous litter mate. Ritz ended up spending the night curled up on top of Annie's cage.

 

I used to think I was allergic to cats, before I married my wife and moved into this menagerie. We have two inside dogs, an outside cat, and five inside cats. Ritz and Annie we found abandoned in the woods on the road up to our place about four months ago; Puss Merlin and Mimi, the outside cat, also came to us more or less on their own.

 

I believe there's an emergency hotline for abandoned cats listing every easy-touch human within a 50-mile radius, and my wife is at the top of the list.

 

We keep the animals out of our bedroom and, while my head stops up periodically, the allergic reactions to cats and dogs that plagued me in my childhood, and that I imagined I would still suffer if living with indoor animals, did not materialize when I moved in with MaryElizabeth. All I can figure is that love trumps immune dysfunction.

 

The other revelation I experienced on moving in was what a community of unspoken connection and caring I had joined. My Aunt Ethel used to take in stray dogs. She had what seemed to be 40 of them, nearly all of them obviously mistreated in their former lives, trusting only my aunt and uncle, and snarling threateningly at all visitors to the household, including myself.

 

As a kid, I couldn't understand why anyone would surround themselves with these nutty, apparently dangerous animals, and I certainly couldn't understand how my aunt could relate to these snappish critters as a mother doting on wayward adopted children.

 

When I first met my wife, I reacted to her detailed descriptions of the pets' activities each day as I used to react to Aunt Ethel's—"Come on, these are only animals!"

 

But as I spent time in the household, I began to notice that the animals showed themselves remarkably sensitive to the ups and downs of my moods, gathering around me when I was upset, figuring out what was going on with me emotionally before I had even explained my mood to MaryElizabeth.

 

This was different than watching Lassie do doggie-charades to tell the humans that Timmy had fallen down the well. It wasn't that the animals could communicate as well as humans. It's that they are often better than humans in sensing my emotions, and more reliably responsive to them.

 

Even more interesting and moving is their sensitivity and responsiveness to each other's suffering. The way that Annie's brother Ritz keeps watch over her recuperating in her protective cage, the way that the cats gathered around one of the dogs when he was suffering from hot spots and licked his toes (even though this is the same dog that regularly growls at the cats if they get too close to him), those are the things that get my attention.

 

I'm not expecting them to take care of me in my old age, or pay for my prostate surgery. I'm the one getting them fixed and buying the cat litter, not the other way around. But I don't feel like I'm these animals' keeper or landlord, I feel like I've joined an interspecies community of kindred souls.

Toot Is Dying

Barack Obama's white grandmother, Toot, as he calls her, is seriously ill, so ill that Obama is taking a day and a half out of the home stretch of a two-year presidential run to go to Hawaii and be with her.

The man loves his grandmother, obviously, and so do a lot of us, but this man is universally regarded by traditional American standards (one drop of black blood makes you black), as African American, and his grandmother is white.

That fact has given rise to a number of complications in Obama's complicated personal history, including the now famous incident in which his grandmother was afraid to take the bus to work because of a panhandler who had accosted her at the bus stop. Her husband, Obama's grandfather, was furious with her, and the young Obama couldn't figure out why.

"'It's probably a little scary for her,'" Obama recalls telling his grandfather in the autobiography Dreams from My Father, "'seeing some big man block her way. It's really no big deal.'"

"'It is a big deal to me,'" the grandfather answers, "'You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.'"

"Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me," Obama writes. "Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad."

Such are the sad and complicated consequences of America's sad and complicated experience with race. But to our potentially great benefit, Obama turns out to have been the kind of person who, when handed a lemon, makes lemonade. 

Something about his own struggle with racial identity lit a fire in Obama that has driven him all the way to the door of the White House. He discovered that his own story had the power to give people in our sometimes hopeless country great reason to hope.

By personifying the real connections between people in an atmosphere in which people are constantly at each others' throats, by having a white grandmother that he loves enough to set aside his ambitions at a critical moment, he demonstrates the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and reconstruction in America at large. 

I think that's why he's surging in the polls right now.

People are realizing that he's not a "Muslim;" he's not a "terrorist;" he's not a "socialist;" he's not the feared Other, he's one of us. People are realizing that the boundary between "Real America" and that other frightening shadowland is not only completing open and porous, but that maybe it's OK that it is that way.

For 200 years we've whispered about Thomas Jefferson and his hidden half-black offspring; for the first time people are beginning to realize that the ties of blood and community that stick all of us together in the same teeming soup may not be a national shame or scandal or disaster, but one of our saving strengths.

Drowning the Cat

My wife tells me I have tickets to see Randy Newman next Wednesday, the 15th. I just realized that means I will miss the final debate between Obama and McCain.

The surprise is that I find myself relieved at the prospect. Right now this election has come down to drowning the cat, and it's not going to be a pleasant spectacle. The continuing market meltdown (minus three hundred points in the Dow Jones today) and the increasingly bad news in the economy in general (E-Bay is laying people off!) put the McCain campaign in terminal jeopardy.

You don't have to watch McCain too long to realize that gracious loser is not a role he will play comfortably. Mr. Anger clearly expected this to be his year and in the last debate seemed to be astonished that people were making him stand next to this weenie Negro for an hour and a half and actually have to explain why we should hand the War Hero the scepter that he'd earned in the North Vietnam prison.

Consider the fact that McCain wants this so badly he forced himself through the public humiliation of hugging the miserable draft dodger President who stole the office from him in 2000 by claiming he had fathered a black baby. That's how bad he wanted to win this thing.

Now all we can do is watch this bitter coot writhe, scream, spit, bite, and gasp for air as his ill-conceived and spastic campaign is mercifully held beneath the water in the toilet until it finally ceases to be.

It's not going to be pretty. So I'm going to see Randy Newman, for a helping of healthy bile.