Happy birthday, Mother

Had my mother not died in January of 2005 as a direct consequence of a hip and shoulder broken in a fall, she might have turned 97 today. Given that her last years were very painful ones, due mostly to severe osteoporosis and arthritis, and made more difficult by gradually diminishing hearing and other faculties, it may not be such a bad thing that her life finished when it did.

Middle age was difficult for her as well, but in other ways. Most of the years she was married to my father were unfulfilling at best, and very unpleasant at worst. But there was a period between her happy childhood in Puerto Rico, where she was raised, and the declines of old age, that I think were probably her best. The following is from my story of my own life, and reflects a recurring event of significant happiness for me as well: my regular annual Christmas trip to visit her in Puerto Rico, where she returned after divorcing my father in 1972.

"Each Christmas break we spent in Puerto Rico with Mother, who thrived there. She was teaching oral English at the University of Puerto Rico in the collegial Department of English. She easily resumed friendships with people she had known since childhood; these included Domitila (Tila) Belaval, the chair of the English department who had arranged her appointment; her friend from earliest childhood, Jean Knight Cheneaux, and Jean’s Swiss husband Georges Cheneaux (later murdered in his own back yard in front of his wife by burgling invaders); and the large Megwinoff-Mayoral clan, and their children and grandchildren, also hearkening back many, many years. She also quickly made new friends, some of whom became very close, among her fellow professors at the university. The students loved her and she regularly received teaching honors. She enjoyed her little rented apartment on Calle Ísabel la Católica in a pleasant neighborhood of single-family homes near the university called, of all things, Hyde Park (the same name as the Chicago neighborhood I have lived in since 1968). The apartment, with its private entrance, was on the ground floor of a larger house owned by a simpática widow, Raquel de la Torre. In Puerto Rico, outdoor space, which she had a little bit of inside her gate, makes life extremely sweet. It wasn’t long before one of the stray cats she fed had kittens underneath the drainage grate. One Christmas when [my former husband] and I arrived she asked us to fish the kitties out of their safe haven. I took advantage of their curiosity by irresistibly wiggling my fingers through the opening at the end. One by one they came to investigate. We grabbed them and their mama, and Mother took all but one to the shelter. The one she kept, a pretty calico, she named Misita (“little kitty”).
She’d also noticed that if she put cat food down after dark the bowls would fill with immensely fat toads that enjoyed the cheap generic canned food. Even after the stray cats were given up for adoption she continued to fill the toads’ bowl each night.
We loved sitting outside in her little patio, having a drink in the balmy evenings. She had a hanging fern that attracted the endemic Puerto Rican tree frog, the coquí. The coquí has a distinctive, very loud “bob-white” whistle at night, and anyone familiar with Puerto Rico is instantly transported there by its sound.
Mother cooked Puerto Rican food for us that we immensely enjoyed. She had always been a good cook, and we all liked the “cocina típica” with its rich garlic and sofrito flavors and delicious ingredients like pumpkin and plantain.
Mother also bought herself a little Datsun that we traveled in all around the island. Several years in a row, we crammed our three selves, luggage, lawn chairs, sheets and towels, a broom for sand control, the coffee maker, and a big cooler with Mother’s red potato salad, gorgeous boiled ham, her bottle of rum, and my bottle of J&B, and took off across the mountains to the southern coast and then west via Ponce to a cinder block cabaña in the tiny beach town on Bahía Boquerón. In the mid-1970’s, the area was barely developed. The government of Puerto Rico had organized the construction of the little cabañas using prison labor to provide very inexpensive recreational facilities for families. The cabins had a couple of bed rooms, one with a double bed and one with bunks; a living area, with a bare-bones kitchen consisting of a rusting refrigerator with a freezer that did at least produce some ice, cold running water, and a little gas stove. The bath had a cold-water shower and a flush toilet, so it was all very civilized. The indoor-outdoor table and chairs were picnic bench style, made of heavy lumber and not terribly comfortable, but highly serviceable. The cabins were literally steps from the warm, palm-fringed, gentle beach. We lived in our bathing suits, except when we went into town for freshly baked bread or to one of the little seafood dives (“Boquerón Seafood Rest.”) for fresh lobster dinners.
Because we were invariably there during the Christmas season we were always invited to parties, lunches, or coffees given by Mother’s oldest friends or her university colleagues. [My husband at the time] enjoyed the social life as much as Mother and I did. We drank, we ate, we sunned (and sunburned) ourselves, we went sight-seeing and shopping, and always had a lovely time.
These were, I believe, the happiest years of Mother’s entire life. She was in a place that was comfortable, beautiful, affordable on her modest salary as a respected professora, and surrounded by loving friends. Her health was good, and it looked like my future was safe and secure. These were the things Mother needed to thrive."

Sometimes one has to write things down and view them in a larger context—such as the narrative of one’s life—to understand how things fit together, and what things meant. Until I wrote about this period of my, and Mother’s, lives, I did had not seen how happy she was in those days, how things worked so well for her, and how calm and secure she felt in this interlude.

Nancy Drew was created by a committee!!

I received a major emotional blow this weekend: I found out that my favorite heroine (or at least she was my favorite from the time I was about 10 to 13 or 14), girl detective Nancy Drew, was created and perpetuated by a committee! The author Carolyn Keene was a composite of several writers and editors! I am crushed!

As happens to a lot of 10-year old girls, I became completely smitten by the adventures of this bold and brilliant teenager with the strong sense of ethics who stumbled upon mystery after mystery in her daily life, of which she took tenacious hold and didn’t let go until the ne’er-do-wells were revealed and brought to justice.

All my life—or all my life since I read my first Nancy Drew book —I thought there was a real author, nearly as brilliant, and certainly every bit as creative, as Miss Drew herself. Now I know that was not the case. The Wikipedia article neatly sums up the sorry truth, and a whole lot more. T.M.I.

Unfortunately the Wikipedia article and the rest of the internet are bereft of good images of the wonderful illustrations from the earlier editions. Much of the appeal of the Nancy Drew books for me was aesthetic. The books themselves—who knows where I got them, they somehow didn’t seem to be new—were intriguingly old fashioned. The paper was always a little yellow, the print a little rocky, the binding redolent with the smell of dust and old paper. And the dress and hair-dos of the characters in the pictures were appealingly retro, to use a term no one had thought of in the early 1960s.

As time went on, images of Nancy, and I would bet her language and her relationship with her boyfriend, at the very least, were progressively modernized, much to their detriment. I’m not the only one who feels this way. The market for beat up old Nancy Drew books on eBay is robust. I’m tempted to buy one for myself, just to feel, smell, and peruse it for a big, pleasant bolus of nostalgia.

If I get one I promise to scan in the images and post them here.

FABulous information

The last year that I commented in my annual Christmas newsletter to my friends that my cat Winston was still kittenish was 2005. At that time he was about 17 and a half years old. When I found him, in1988, he was so tiny he wasn’t able to jump up on the bed. Of course it was a only a matter of a day before he figured out how to clamber up by embedding his claws in the bedspread, always the clever guy able to get what he wants. In those days, what he wanted, if not to go to sleep in my arms, were vigorous cat-and-mouse games, in which I was the somewhat outsized mouse. Or sometimes he was the lion and I was the wildebeest…and I have scars to prove it.

I not long ago I noted in this blog that Winston has slowed considerably. Overall, for a cat approaching his 21^st birthday (I would guess from his size and development on August 18th of 1988 that his birth anniversary is in early July) he’s doing very well.

But there have been a lot of changes for him, most of which his veterinarians don’t have much to say about. I Googled terms like “domestic feline” + geriatric, and turned up little other than herbal remedies for cat arthritis. Being the academic groupie that I am, I had been hopeful of finding soundly designed, statistically analyzed, data-grounded publications of research in peer-reviewed veterinary journals. Perhaps I wasn’t using the ideal key words. Yesterday I was inspired to try again with the less snazzy “elderly cat” and that was much more fruitful. What I turned up near the top of the page was an on-target article by a British charitable organization felicitously called “fab” or the Feline Advisory Bureau.

The article, “Behaviour of the Older Cat,” though based on a survey of owners rather than scholarly studies, addresses all the pertinent issues. The information was extremely helpful, as from it I determined that what Winston, and we, are going through is in fact exactly typical. It made me feel good that among the 1,236 feline subjects of the survey (not a bad sample size) 6 percent were more than 20 years old. That means the vast majority of cats exhibiting symptoms of superannuation were between 12 and 20, so I got quite a bit more than the average number of pre-senile years with my beloved kitty. The great outlier was a verifiably 26 year cat! I can imagine that cat’s owners, at least if they are realistic, are grateful every single morning when their cat gets up and asks for breakfast, and every evening when they come home from work and he’s still there, inspirited by life. At his point, Winston sleeps extremely deeply – in the old days I would never have been able to sneak up on him to take this photo– and so on the days when I’m home, I sometimes go check to see that he’s still breathing. And he is.

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about Winston’s dotage is his noticeably increased lovingness. Or whatever it is that attention-seeking, staring into my eyes, lap-sitting, running to the door yowling at the top of his lungs when he realizes I’m home (so okay, maybe that’s hunger?) is. He was always interested in socializing with, and accepting affection in the form of discussion, play, brushing, scratching and massages, from the people he loves – me, KLK, his babysitter Alison (after the first few years of acting resentfully towards her) – but we’ve all seen how much more hugging he seeks now.

Another “behaviour” is not nearly so endearing. This cat was never talkative, but within the last two or three years, he’s developed a voice: an impossible-to-ignore voice so loud even the neighbors can hear, and that he especially loves to exercise between about midnight and 4:00 a.m.. According to fab’s survey, “Twenty eight per cent of cats called for attention at night and stopped only when they received attention or reassurance from their owners.” They surmise, “As a cats ability to protect itself declines there appears to be a higher dependency on their owners for security.” They go on to discuss this idea, and I think their consideration is reasonably convincing. But they fail to make a connection that we have made, which is that Winston’s yells and yowls can be calmed by feeding. All his life he had dry food available 24/7 and could eat in increments ad libitum. A year or two ago we noticed he was getting even skinnier (we would not have believed that was possible) and many more food crunchies were landing on the floor than in him. We successfully switched him to canned food that he gums pretty well, and that has enabled him to gain a little weight (but not meat on his bones – the weight is almost surely all better hydration, which in itself is a good thing). But it means we no longer leave food out for him to help himself. fab says, “Almost half of the owners surveyed had been ‘trained’ to feed their cat on demand” and we have been too, though we fought back in the middle of the night. If he starts to scream any time before 5:00 a.m. he gets locked out of the bedroom. So these days we rarely hear from him before 4:30 in the morning – a big improvement over 2:30!

Lest my readers point out that these, and the dry dandruffy fur apparent in the photo, are symptoms typical of the hyperthyroidism that affects many older cats, his last two sets of blood tests, from a couple of years ago but well after all this started, were absolutely normal in all dimensions: thyroid, kidney, liver, and glucose. He’s just an old, old guy, and we love him.

Carl Selby, Rest in Peace

Carl, I'm sorry you had to go. I just learned you were 86. You led a long life, and a full one, but you still left too soon. I'll miss you!

For Troutbirder, in memory of #6

Fruits of the Grocery

I've commented in the past about how much I enjoy fresh fruit, in the widest definition of the word; here's another small pleasure: instead of simply putting price stickers on each piece, American fruit distributors put colorful stickers on them with a 4-digit code for the checker that, when combined with the weight, yields the right price. Every apple, lemon, tomato and pear has its own; I especially like the one for Mexican "sweet" peppers from this Saturday's harvest at the Jewel (chain supermarket). Sweet indeed!

One of the great mysteries of the retail produce business, however, is why red peppers always have stickers and green bell peppers never do.

In the Dark

Last night, long after I turned out my lights and fell asleep, I became dimly aware that the toilet in the bath that adjoins my bedroom was “running.” I sort of woke up, shlumped into the bathroom, jiggled the handle, and went back to bed. Since I was sort-of-woke-up, I decided to listen to the radio for a few minutes but my remote didn’t work. I assumed it was a dead battery in the clicker and went back to sleep.
In the morning, when the alarm went off and I really woke up, I found out that the electricity had been off and come on again. With all my electronics flashing panicked messages about their urgent need to have the time inserted right now (each with its distinct algorithm of buttons and bleeps), I reset everything and went about my morning business as usual, except for the spurting, sputtering, grit-tinged water out of all the taps—in a high rise, water gets propelled up the stories via an electrical pump, so after an outage we have burps and squirts, sometimes for quite a while, until the system clears itself of air and junk and re-pressurizes with clean water.
When I went out for my constitutional, around 5:30, there were ComEd trucks galore, lights a’flashing, all around the intersection. A neighbor out walking his dog explained that in the middle of the night there had been a car accident two long city blocks away that somehow knocked out our power, and that of neighbors for blocks all around.
But by then everything was functioning fine (except my satellite TV, which brainlessly forgot the myriad tediously deprogrammed religious, home-shopping, southern hemisphere soccer, and Spanish language channels) so I went off to work without another thought about the little fiasco.
When I got home late this afternoon, ComEd was still all over the place, guys in hard hats with their diesel trucks idling and spewing greenhouse gasses, but the building lights were on and the elevators were working. I packed up three loads of wash and headed to the laundry room on the second floor, and shoved three quarters into each of three washing machines to start them filling. When I went back to add the soap and clothes, I found them filling with murky water. So the pipes weren’t yet clean of all the rust and gunk dislodged that morning. Instead of loading my clothes, I wrote off the $2.25 in quarters, hefted my bulging laundry basket and got back onto the elevator where another neighbor told me that the building engineer was about to turn off the power again to oblige ComEd’s workers.
It’s always an odd experience being at home with no power after dark. One can’t read, one can’t compute, nor listen to the radio or watch TV. It gets deadly quiet within when the building’s ventilation fans and the neighbors’ and one’s own TVs and radios are off. There’s nothing to do but to lie down and be contemplative and watch the reflected lights of the street below on the blinds.
My blinds are shiny and new and reflected what seemed like an unusual amount of movement below. Yes, indeed, my street was bumper-to-bumper northbound, meaning that all traffic was diverted from Lake Shore Drive, the north-south artery parallel to the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. And so it was, I looked out my dining room window from my dark apartment, and there was absolutely no movement on the Drive. The Obamas were on their way from O’Hare for their first weekend at their Hyde Park home, about a mile or so from where I live, since the inauguration.
It indeed seems like a very wise thing to stop all traffic in all directions for the motorcade. Those who hate Obama hate with as much passion as those of us who love him and everything he stands for, and I worry about his and his family’s vulnerability. I imagine some commuters were pretty irritated, though those of us who feel close to Obama—people in this neighborhood do—don’t begrudge him some safety and security, even on a Friday evening rush hour.
However, to my horror, I realized that the exit from Lake Shore Drive, more or less at my feet from the vantage of my 11th floor dining room window, was completely and entirely unprotected and unbarricaded. There is no northbound onramp to Lake Shore Drive at this location, but someone could have, with impunity, driven a car north on that exit ramp right onto the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive, and confronted the oncoming motorcade. That seems a frightful and frightening oversight.
The motorcade exits Lake Shore Drive one or two ramps north of the one below my building, so I didn’t get to see them fly by, but all of a sudden an official vehicle of some sort, with red gum-ball blazing, tore southbound along the drive, passing a similarly speeding northbound Chicago police car with its blue gum-ball flashing . There was the sound of helicopters—more security or the press—and then the normal pent-up rush-hour traffic resumed. The Obamas were safely home.
With no more excitement to watch out my window I went back to lie down and watch reflections on the blinds when I became aware of the sssshhhhhhhh of the bathroom ventilation fans. The power is back on.

Shock and Ouch, or, A Cautionary Tale

Last weekend I slid something from under the broiler and momentarily (very momentarily) encountered the red-glowing heating element with the top of my thumb. With a FFFFSSSST! and visible puff of vaporized skin I gave myself a second degree burn of a little more than a half inch by three-eighths of an inch. I ran it under very cold water for a couple of minutes, and like many burns thus tended, it quieted down within five minutes. At first. It turns out the top of your thumb gets in the way far more than you might imagine, but nonetheless I ignored the whole thing for several days, since keeping a band-aid on is next to impossible if you wash your hands once in a while, or do dishes, or clean stuff around the house, or pull up your socks, or use hand cream, or… To make a long story short, last night it was very irritated and painful. My KLK brought me a big, attractively promising bottle of aloe, long reputed to be “good for burns.”

I took passing note of the giant silly banner on the front of the bottle announcing the “100% GEL *” contents, and of the fact that burns (other than sun-induced ones) were not listed among the ideal uses. Methinks, “that’s not pure aloe” even though it looked appealingly like it, but it certainly never occurred to me that a dollop of the stuff would make my whole hand half way to my elbow go up in flames again. I squeezed on a glob and covered it with a band-aid, pressing it into the wound. Within seconds I was in tears and had to deconstruct the dressing and wash off all the goo— no wait, that would be gel—under lots of cold water.

Once it was dry and cooled down I put a plain band-aid on it and went to sleep. This morning it was a little better, a little dryer, not quite so red and oozy, though still mighty tender to the touch. I’m going to have the kind of scar that doesn’t go away for years, if ever. I’m not much concerned by that—it’ll be joining legions of others accrued over the years—but I swear I will carefully read the list of impurities on the back of the bottle next time (* note the asterisk) before administering soothing balms again anytime soon.

Click on the photo to enlarge it so you can read, for your edification, the list of “stabilizers and preservatives to insure potency and efficacy” this “pure” product: triethanolamine, tocopheryl acetate, carbomer 940, tetrasodium EDTA, DMDM hydantoin, and last, but not least, diazolidinyl urea. I wonder which of these ingredients’ job it is to induce pain?

A little saving grace on this gloriously warm and sunny winter day: I heard and saw a peregrine falcon outside my dining room window. That sure makes up for a lot of sore thumbs.

Now There Are Three

I love it when I learn a new word. Today I came across, and looked up (even though its meaning was clear from context), the word ambit. I especially like its reference to compass (as in encompass). It joins in the toolbox two other useful favorites, purview and bailiwick. Now there are three.

And today I made up a new one of my own, parkalicious, calculated to make my Yellowstone cronies laugh. It worked.

The Evil Netflix Faerie

KLK and I share a Netflix account. Whenever one of us learns of a movie we think we would enjoy watching together, we add it, along with anything we're interested in watching separately (he's not into chick flicks, do I need to explain?) That pretty much keeps the queue moving and makes our $18 subscription worthwhile.

So the other day, Michael Crichton's Looker emerges from within one of those ubiquitous little red envelopes. I say to KLK, "what's this? Something you wanted to watch, I assume?" And he says, "no, you put it in the queue." Which I categorically deny. I've never heard of this old, probably better forgotten, futuristic (such as futuristic was in 1981) movie written and directed by the master author of creepy sci-fi thrillers. Crichton was definitely a better writer than director, to wit, the movie stars James Coburn and Albert Finney. If the likes of those two do such a painfully bad job of acting, that really says something.

Not to disparage the dead (Crichton), but all we can figure is that THE EVIL NETFLIX FAERIE put it in our queue. On the other hand, we've seen a couple of really good movies lately, the most entertaining of which was In Bruge. We enjoyed it thoroughly, quite aside from the fact when we were in Brussels some years ago we didn't get to visit Bruge because of a train strike.

Winter Coyote

I've often mentioned how much enjoyment I get from watching various Web cams pointed at the Grand Tetons and different landmarks in and around Yellowstone National Park (turn on sound if you're interested in the narrative) sitting far away at my computer in Chicago. I may have neglected to mention that there is also a live real-time cam overlooking the Upper Geyser Basin in Yellowstone, where the still cam points at Old Faithful geyser. The nice thing about the live streaming cam is that it is occasionally attended by folks who are fascinated by the multitudinous activities taking place there. They can pan and zoom, and for my thermal feature-addicted friends, focus in on whatever geyser or hot spring within view (Old Faithful, Beehive, Lion, many others) happens to be doing something hydrothermally interesting at any given moment. Besides being enormous draws for two-legged animals, lots of wildlife spends the cold, snowy winter months in the thermal basins to benefit from the warmth and resulting thin snow cover; bison and elk often appear; on very, very rare occasions during the shoulder seasons when there are few people around, a grizzly will sashay past the camera. More often, we see coyotes. My thanks to David M for following and recording this guy, in his gorgeous winter pelt, a couple of days ago.