Miles (of Ink) to Go Before I Rest

Having a goal to work toward in life is not optional. It is SO not optional that it is a requirement of every person experiencing homelessness that goes through the program where I work. We don't tell them what their goals have to be--it could be a goal to become a rock star or to own a vineyard in France or to go grocery shopping all alone--but they have to think up a goal of some sort. It isn't my place, even as a most eager and helpful helper, to tell them whether I think their goal is achievable or not. I'm no judge, and I'm no psychic. It's my job to dig at the meat of why they set their goals, find out and remind them of how much their goals mean to them, and help uncover avenues to achieve them.

Bella the Pseudo-Intellectual Puppy keeps me on my toes.

Everyone should have some kind of goal to work toward, and they should have support to help uncover those pesky achievement-avenues. I am a writer...or a person who writes...or whatever...so I have set my most beloved, juicy yearly goals around how many words I'm going to crank out and shove out my door. I'm lucky enough to have my husband and some fellow writers to kick me in the pants as needed to keep my eyes turned the right way.

Without boring you with the details (i.e. I'm too chicken to type out my goals and be held accountable by my own loud and pointy blog-words if I fail), I have managed to achieve one goal.

Okay, fine. I submitted a short story. My goal is to submit two before my (dread, fast-approaching) birthday. And I may or may not also have a goal of finishing at least one novel manuscript by the end of the year.

There. I said it. It is a true thing and it exists and now you know.

I can already hear the sound of one-third victory, like the tone in the episode of Bewitched that plays when they get a guy to do three ridiculous things to break a curse.  (1:04 in video)  One down, two to go.

I'm happy to have reached one goal, but if I'm being honest, it was a small goal, something that was simple and reachable and shouldn't have been nearly as difficult as it was. Ray Bradbury, one of my literary heroes, probably wrote two or three stories every day while waiting for his toast to pop up.

I can't blame time. I don't have a lot of extra, but what time I do have, I usually spend with a pen in hand. Who needs that much sleep, anyway?

I can't blame ideas. I have way too many of those, and I have more half-finished short stories spread out in my notebooks than there are marshmallows in Lucky Charms.

I can't blame lack of support. I have an army of writer-reader types who have been so helpful with shaping and editing the work I do crank out. Then there is Husband. They just don't come any better or more supportive. They just don't. I have the best one and you do not, so HA.

I can't blame the muses. Boo and Bella still do a mighty musing job and now I've added a third furry muse to my collection. (Of course, Boo and New Kitty still can't really be in the same room at the same time, but we're working on it.)

I guess I can just blame the pens. It has to be them. One pen or another is always there when I'm trying to write. Darn pens. Look how smug this one is, just laying there on a blank page, taunting me. That pen has been there that way for hours, and that page still doesn't have any words on it. I am never going to meet my goals at that rate! How lazy can you get?

It has to be the pen. If that isn't it, I'm out of options. If it isn't the pen, or the ink, or the paper, or the table, who or what is keeping me from reaching my goals?

It surely can't be me. I want this so much! I set the goals. I made the rules. I gritted my teeth and I wrote them down for you, just today, just now. It has to be that horrible, rude, lazy pen, and if I am ever going to reach my very important goals, I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands.

I'm going to pick UP the pen and WRITE with it.

Take THAT, stubborn pen.

Now nothing can stop me.

Captive Audience

Yesterday, while I was at the laundromat with one of my most vulnerable clients and everything she owns that could possibly fit into a washing machine, my back flipped me the bird and went on strike. No really, I could actually hear its little overworked cusses bumping up my spine to my ears as I lost all strength to my lower body and excruciating pain ripped me into tiny little pieces.

If your back has never gone out, do not let it.

Do NOT.

Not even if you are really curious.

Not even if you are writing a really important novel about someone whose back goes out.

Do NOT.

I didn't want to freak out my client--this is an easy thing to do and usually requires hours to undo--so I just played it nonchalant. I leaned my elbow on a triple-load washer that was almost my height and tried to pretend that I was still breathing. I sneaked a call to my supervisor and she came in like Social Work Superwoman and took over with my client and drove her home. Husband then arrived to take me home. Getting in the car was difficult.

(The italics mean that it was OH SO PAINFUL THAT I LOST MY RELIGION IN THAT PARKING LOT. ALL OF IT.)

Getting out of the car was worse, but I did not have anymore religion to lose, so I just yelled a lot. I'm sure the neighborhood association thinks my husband is a horrible murderer. (Horrible because he's not good at it because I am still intermittently yelling for someone to hurry up and finish killing me when I move the wrong way.)

Last night, Husband left the TV on for me since I was forced to sleep on the couch. I was in a lot of pain and woke up in the middle of the night to find this blaring proudly:

 Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II.

No. Too sleepy and groggy and uncomfortable even to laugh at Godzilla. I looked around for the remote--which I spotted across the room where I had no hope of getting to it.

I was stuck. I watched Godzilla tromp his way through Kyoto while Rodan received a life-force boost from a chorus of children singing a magical song they heard emanating from a prehistoric plant. Meanwhile, this hatched from an egg that glows red like a giant mood ring when it is grouchy:

No, that's not Barney with a skin condition. That is Baby Godzilla. Yes, that's a proper name because that is what they named him. Or her.

Because of Baby Godzilla, they were able to glean that they weren't able to defeat Godzilla because Godzillas have extra brains. In their HIPS.

Right about then, when they started plotting to shoot out poor Godzilla's extra hip-brains to paralyze him, I started feeling some kinship with the old boy. I mean, he can't help it that he has big feet and Kyoto was in his way. They have his Baby Godzilla, for crying out loud. He's just looking for his kid. Or something. Either way, they shouldn't give him lower back pain. It's INHUMANE.

But they did. And then Rodan came into the picture and zapped Godzilla with his special child-song powers and made his hips better and he went off into the sunset with Baby Godzilla to smash cities another day.

I dozed off somewhere in there and woke up this morning still dreaming of Barney smashing Japanese landmarks. I thought that surely, SURELY this movie was a dream because if it had been real, I would not have watched it. Then I moved and yelled and hurt and remembered.

Where's Rodan when you need him?

Anyway, since I've been splayed out on the couch, I have realized that being a captive audience has its perks. I will no longer think anything my imagination conjures is too bizarre because Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II makes anything I come up with look positively sobering (and I have an in-progress novel involving mind-controlling towels. Seriously). I have gotten some quality time with the animals:

Also, I have no excuses not to read and write. A lot. I'm going to make the best of this.

And when I can't, when I have to make that inevitable excruciating walk to the bathroom, pay no attention to the screeching and groaning. It's just Godzilla tromping through the Memphis suburbs, minding her own business.

Moment of Truth

This is Stray Cat #A. (Also known as Kitty Friend, Sweet Kitty, Honeybaby-Sugarmonkey-Kittypie-Darlingkins the First).

Thus sayeth the vet, thus goeth the rest of us.

Stray Cat #A came into my life about a month ago.

I was sitting outside my office in our little courtyard trying to gather my thoughts.

It was not easy. All my thoughts were broken into pieces and they did not want to fit back together. It had been a rough day.

Then, the heavens opened and God dropped a cat into my lap. Literally.

I sat there on the low wall alongside the building, trying to pretend I wasn't just counting ants, when I heard a cute little husky meow. I looked up right in time to see a sweet-faced fluffball of a cat jogging toward me. She jumped directly into my lap and rubbed her head into my chest. "Purr," she said. "Purr and coo and mew and purr again," she went on, more or less.

I forgot all about my ants and I melted into a syrupy puddle of instant cat-love.

Before I could drip and run all the way into the gutter, I had to pull myself together. This beautiful, friendly, polite (if a bit forward) creature had to be someone's beloved pet who had wandered away from home looking for a little adventure in the big city. I couldn't fall in love; it wasn't my place. Someone else had to already love this cat. They had to.

She stayed outside at my office for the next week. Every day I checked on her and played with her, gave her water in a paper coffee cup, and sneaked her food from the bag of cat food I hid in my trunk. I watched her lounging on the steps, ignoring the baby birds that were perched in a low nest practically on top of her head. I was grateful she didn't try to eat them, but still. She's a CAT. They're supposed to WANT to eat them anyway. She didn't. She didn't know she was supposed to. This was no outside cat, and she wasn't going to make it if she stayed out there much longer.

Husband and I did all of the things people told us we were supposed to do with a found pet. We did the found pet report, went through lost pet listings, put her all over the internet, slapped up some fliers. No calls. She was homeless.

Not a bad driver, if you don't count the pedals.

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I loaded her up in my car and decided she had to live somewhere, so she could visit with me. I wasn't committing, see. She might have still been someone else's kitty, and all I could think was that if something like this happened to Boo, my Teacup Panther, I would hope that someone would be kind to her and take care of her until I could track her down. (Of course, I'm fooling myself to think so. If anyone even tried to be kind to her, the poor sap would probably end up in the hospital for their trouble.)

I took her to the vet (or she took me, one or the other), to get checked out before I took her home. "What a great cat!" they all cooed as she tucked her head under my arm and purred, ignoring the beagle who was NOT ignoring her. "Are you going to keep her?" the receptionist asked.

"Umm, I don't know," I said. "She might be somebody's."

She made sad eyebrows. "Honey, I think she sounds like a drop-off. If you haven't found the owner yet, you probably won't. Don't you want to keep her?"

"I don't know," I said again, chewing on it a little longer this time. I didn't know. I wanted to, but she wasn't mine. Someone could swoop in and take her from me at any time and it would break my heart. But maybe, just maybe, it would be a little less if I didn't admit I wanted her to be mine. "I'm going to foster her," I said. "Then if nothing comes up, we'll see."

Stray Cat #A got the all clear to come home with me to be "fostered." By "fostering," I mean that I made desktop wallpapers of her cute face:

I took endless snaps of her doing mind-blowing things like yawning, drinking, sleeping, or not sleeping. I cuddled with her, bathed her, brushed her, and sweet talked her. I bought her a bed and toys and a little purple collar.

The one thing I didn't do was name her.

I tried. I thought of options, but I just couldn't do it. Somewhere deep inside, I knew that if I named this cat, she would be mine. Once I name a thing, it is mine forever and ever and I will love it down to its tiniest cells and walk to the ends of the earth for it. It's a big step, and try as I might, I kept tripping over it.

Then she got sick.

She stopped eating. At first we thought that she was depressed. Boo has been less than hospitable. She had been somebody's and now she was living in a house with new people, but she was nobody's. Maybe she knew it. Maybe she knew that I was hiding a secret behind all my sweet words. The secret was that I was afraid to let myself love her, at least not all the way. Maybe I had made her sick with my half-love which was not what she deserved, this good good cat.

She slept all the time. She wouldn't eat anything. She stopped hopping up to greet us with her goofy little cat-smile when we came in the room. Then she stopped bothering to put all four paws in the litterbox. Her bones poked through her skin like a cat suit on a hanger.

Husband and I took her back to the vet. They remembered her. "What'd you name her?" the friendly receptionist asked, happy I had apparently decided to keep the cat.

"I didn't," I said, guilty.

The cat specialist, heretofore known as Saint Vet, took two seconds with Stray Cat #A and said, "Looks like liver failure."

The heavens opened up again, but this time it rained bricks instead of kitties. "Liver failure?" I asked. "Like, her liver is failing liver failure?"

She nodded gravely. "Maybe," she said. "I just want to prepare you for the worst. It could be [some giant medical word that sounded like something from Harry Potter], but since she was negative for FIV and Feline Leukemia, that would be very unlikely."

She brought us an estimate of what it would cost to do all the tests necessary. If it was her liver, she would need hospitalization, a blood transfusion, several Harry Potter-sounding tests, fluid IV, and lots of expensive medicines. There was a lower priced option and a higher priced option, but for my social service worker budget, they were both astronomical. I looked at Husband and he made sad eyebrows.

"Don't do that," I told him. "Do not look at me with sad eyebrows. We have to take care of her. We do not let things die, not if we can help it. We can sell things, but we cannot let our cat die."

Because she was. Ours. I looked at her lying there, skinnier than a runt kitten, and I knew that I'd sell the shoes on my feet to keep her breathing because name or not, she was my cat. The moment of truth had come. I loved her. All the way.

No sooner than that poignant thought had crossed my mind and stung my eyes, Saint Vet came back in with a little more color in her own cheeks. "She has Harry Potter-itis. I can't believe it. She is eaten up with Harry Potter-itis, and it could have shut her liver down if it wasn't caught, but I think we caught it in time."

Words do not exist, even in Harry Potter, to tell you how relieved I was. She was going to be okay, I wouldn't have to sell my fillings, and she was my cat. She figured it out, too. She crawled in my purse and looked at me all like, "Let's go!"

She has to take a lot of yucky medicine that is NOT easy to give her. We follow her around with a Cat Buffet so that she can have a choice of what to eat as long as she is EATING (and she IS!), and she
has to go back in a week to see Saint Vet.

 

 She still isn't named, but it's because I have to find one worthy of My New Cat #A.