Premature Grieving Session
I know the end can’t be far away. She is seventeen years old and the signs of aging are there. Lately she has stopped jumping fences and her lizard kill count has dropped dramatically. She’s content now to simply lie in the garage with the door cracked so she can keep an eye on the neighborhood and occasionally patrol the perimeter at her leisure.
A few mornings ago I saw her have some sort of seizure. I have never seen a person have a seizure, much less a cat, but I guess I’ve watched enough television that I knew that’s what a feline seizure looked like. I burst into tears in an uncontrollable rush of emotion as I rushed to pet her after it was over. My dismay over the thought of her imminent demise sparked an impromptu memory replay of all the years we’ve spent together.
Kitty came to me in my senior year of college. My brand new, tiny kitten meewed all the way home as she clung to the top of my head in the car that night. I was instantly in love. She grew up too fast, living the college life, and wound up pregnant with her own litter of kittens 6 months later. Babies having babies! This was swiftly followed by a trip to the vet to get spayed. My parents still have two of her illegitimate daughters.
One time she saved my life… or at least she saved my floor. She woke me up by incessantly meowing in my face at 3 a.m. and wouldn’t leave me alone until I followed her down the hall to the living room where my roommate was sleeping with a carpet campfire starting just inches from her face. A lamp had tipped over causing the light bulb to burn a hole in the carpet. Thanks to Kitty’s persistence, no one was hurt and the only harm done was a black burn mark on our carpet, which was an orange monstrosity that looked to have been installed in the early 70′s. So actually, no harm done at all.
I thought I had lost her forever once before. Due to a hasty break-up with my live-in boyfriend, I opted to temporarily crash at my brother’s apartment while I looked for a new place. He and his wife had three cats of their own, so, realizing that an additional cat would be welcomed by theirs about as warmly as red ants at a picnic, I chose to leave Kitty at my former house until I found a new one. One day she just disappeared. I looked everywhere, even consulting with the slightly kooky lady across the street who claimed to be an animal psychic. I had little hope that someone would find and return her because I could never manage to keep a collar on her, she Houdini-ed right out of every one I had tried. Kitty was gone without a trace and I was heartbroken. But, miraculously, on the very day that I was moving in to my new place I got a call from the ex-boyfriend saying that Kitty had just sauntered up the driveway, at least he was pretty sure it was her, because she was much more plump than when she left. It was indeed her. I guess she just found a cushy place with an all-you-can-eat buffet to hang out at for a while until she knew I was able to keep her with me again. This cat has some serious intuition and survival skills, right?
Meanwhile, back in the present, I was kinda’ acting like a sobbing lunatic. Immediately after the seizure, she ate some food while I fussed over her and then headed back outside as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But after she was gone for awhile, I became convinced that she had just quietly slipped off to die in a private place. Animals tend to do that when they’re sick or dying and I was destroyed by the thought that this last encounter might have been the final one.
I sadly obsessed over the idea that I would no longer have the pleasure of seeing her pop out of the bushes to welcome me home/demand to be fed every day. How much would I miss seeing her little face and paws peeking out from under the garage door? Or her look of resigned annoyance as my dog excitedly whacked her in the face with her tail when they greeted me at the door? I would miss that terribly. I would even miss her near-constant need to be let either in or out of the house. (My fiance would definitely not miss that.)
With those sad thoughts swimming around in my head I did about a hundred laps between the front door and the garage, sobbing the day away and hoping she was okay, only to finally find her standing in the garage in the late afternoon. I was incredibly relieved of course. At the same time I felt more than a little foolish for all of the unfounded, hysterical grieving I had done.
I am willing to admit that wandering around the house weeping all day without any actual proof of her death might have been a slight overreaction on my part. I wish there was a way I could take all of the unduly-felt emotions from that day and put them in a bank to be used at a future time when they are actually appropriate to the situation. That way I wouldn’t have to feel them all over again when the time comes.
But maybe I was just subconsciously preparing myself for the inevitable. Human or not, this cat has been my pal and roommate for longer than anyone else, and I truly do not look forward to the day that she’s not around anymore. Until that day comes, I will try to squeeze in and appreciate as many moments with her as I can while we still have time. Also, I will attempt to not freak out unnecessarily about her death, but I can’t make any promises.
You won’t feel a thing
I had to get a root canal yesterday. I know what you’re thinking — “Lucky!”
I know, I know. Don’t be jealous. Root canals are a special treat. For this particular dental experience, I decided to go to a dentist who specializes in sedation dentistry. It was either that or just let the tooth rot out of my head. Honestly. I can no longer bring myself to volunteer for the waking torture of dental work. Not going to do it. Please just knock me out.
I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the dentist’s chair in my life and I just can’t take it anymore. I am one of those lucky few who had at least one new cavity every single time I went to the dentist. I don’t know why. My brother and sister didn’t. I brushed my teeth just as much as they did. I’m told that I was just genetically blessed with what the dentist referred to as “bad enamel.” What are you gonna do?
As a result of this bad enamel and the ensuing cavities, I have a mouthful of porcelain crowns, which are beautiful and a huge improvement over the big silver fillings and crowns I sported well into my 20′s. I paid a small fortune for my pretty white teeth and I paid even more in time spent in open-mouthed agony while a dentist took a power drill to my mouth. During one particularly long and gruesome appointment, I had to resort to repeatedly counting from 1 to 100 to keep from having an all-out panic attack. I have dental PTSD.
God’s extra little joke on me is that I also have a terrible habit of clenching and grinding my teeth when I sleep. So, night-by-night, I systematically destroy my pretty porcelain crowns. Which brings us to the root canal that I had yesterday. And to sedation dentistry, the most wonderful invention in the world.
The dentist gave me a little white pill to take an hour before I got to the office, so by the time my mom dropped me off I was already pleasantly woozy. I didn’t know if it was just the drugs distorting my take on things, but it seemed to me that the office staff finds their doped-up patients to be amusing. The receptionist seemed to chuckle conspiratorially when she advised me to, “Sign these papers now, because you won’t know what you’re signing when you leave here.”
A short while after taking my second little white pill, I drowsily inquired if the loud noise I heard coming from the next room was snoring.
“Yes, that’s another sedation patient,” the hygienist giggled and shook her head indulgently, as if we were all just silly overgrown babies, what with our snoring and drooling. But I wasn’t offended. I was feeling no pain.
The next thing I remember was the laughing gas tube being placed over my nose and then hearing the dentist say funny things like, “Nurse, hand me a strange event.” I thought, “He didn’t really say that. You are hallucinating. That’s funny.”
I heard a lot of funny things while I drifted in my drug-induced twilight and I really wanted to remember everything so I could write about it. But when it was over and I came to, my mouth was puffy and my lips were chapped but I couldn’t remember much of anything one way or another.
But that is the point of sedation dentistry in the first place, isn’t it? Mission accomplished.
We Did It!
Steph, Barack and Al
We did it. It actually happened. To be fair, when I say we did it, I’m using the “we” loosely, since the extent of my political involvement was to attempt to make my friends laugh by Photoshopping myself into a picture with Barack Obama and Al Sharpton (above). I didn’t do any campaigning, attend any rallies or wave any signs at people in cars. I didn’t buy a t-shirt. To tell the truth, I barely watched a debate.
But I did vote. And I did it with a sense that it was absolutely imperative that I vote and that it was possibly the most important vote I would ever cast. I did it even though I feared the other side would “steal the election” again.
I still have a bad taste in my mouth about the 2000 election with all the Kathryn Harris-shady recount-dangling chad shenanigans that went on in my home state of Florida. I was not alone in subscribing to the conspiracy theory that George Bush didn’t really win that election. And then the war that made us look like bullies to the rest of the world started and they lied to us about that, too. Our reputation is so bad internationally that people have told me that when they traveled abroad they claimed to be Canadian instead of American. How terrible to disagree with the actions of your country so much that you would deny your own nationality. But I couldn’t blame them. I felt ashamed of the face the USA was presenting to the world, too.
And then we were sentenced to four more years of the same and this Republican administration, while claiming to be financial “conservatives”, recklessly sent the economy down the crapper, taking my own job down the drain with it. And to top it off, we’re all going to be asked to bail out the very institutions that screwed us over in the first place. Awesome. Needless to say, my confidence in our country’s ability to “do the right thing” had been shaken to the core.
Until last night. People turned out in record numbers and they voted for change. People like me put aside their pessimism and apathy and believed that their vote could make a difference this time. I had heard talk that when it came down to it, some people in middle America just wouldn’t be able to get past their ingrained prejudices and vote for a black man. But they did. And it was a landslide! Yay for us!
I felt so proud of my country last night for doing what we did. I had tears in my eyes watching Barack Obama give his acceptance speech. It’s not that I feel he is some kind of deity, he’s just a man. But the majority of people in our country voted for him. I feel lucky to have had the chance to take part in such a historical election.
I’m happy for my four-year old daughter that she is going to come of age in a country that is becoming more open-minded by the day. I hope that when she is older, she will wonder why it was such a big deal to have a black president in the first place. Just like I find it hard to believe that when my parents were growing up there were segregated schools and even separate water fountains. At the risk of sounding trite, I have to say that I think her generation might actually get the chance to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of seeing people for who they are instead of for their skin color.
It is great to feel so proud of my country. Like they say, sometimes you don’t realize how much you appreciate something until you’ve lost it. Today I feel like I’ve got it back and I look forward to seeing what happens next.
Russian Spiced Tea
“Mom, you made spiced tea? Yum!” I would cheer when I walked in the door of our house on a fall afternoon. The smell of the Russian Spiced Tea was instantly recognizable, its sweet perfume infusing the house with a potpourri of autumnal smells. It was one of the official heralds that Fall had finally arrived.
Growing up in the central part of Florida, the first days of fall were long-awaited and I greeted them with enthusiasm. It was usually some time in early November before I actually felt like I needed a long-sleeve shirt and I looked forward to the first exhilarating walk to the bus stop in the morning when there was a nip in the air, the acorns were crunching underneath my feet and I was finally free of the heavy humidity of the summer.
I was no different from the rest of my fellow Floridians who tended to get over-excited at the prospect of finally getting to dig out the sweaters and boots that had spent so much time stored away. Also, I found it somewhat difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday season when it was 85 degrees and I was wearing shorts and flip-flops. So, forgetting for the time-being that in a few months the novelty of bundling up in heavy layers every time I left the house would have worn off, I delighted in my refreshed wardrobe, the occasion to pull on my corduroys and hear the familiar ffft, ffft when I walked and to finally get to dress the part for the holiday season.
In our house, the cooler weather meant that the row of sliding glass doors that ran the length of the back part of the house would be opened to allow a cool, salty breeze to whip in from the bay beyond our back yard. Even our miniature toy poodles sensed the change in season and would race up and down the hallways as fast as their 5-inch long legs could carry them in spasms of excitement, a behavior that someone in my family had aptly named “the zips”.
These were also the evenings when we would have dinner outside on the back patio, now made available for dining in comfort since we were finally free from the summer heat and the ever-present plague of mosquitos. I remember these nights with special fondness because on nights that we ate outside we took the time to sit and talk as a family after dinner. We were free from the television and other pressing issues like homework and laundry that had to be dealt with inside the house. Dinner outside was a rare and relaxed treat.
And when autumn arrived, my mom would make a big vat of Russian Spiced tea. This was my favorite Fall tradition. Aside from the obvious ingredient–tea–the recipe included orange juice, cinnamon sticks and cloves, as well as a generous serving of sugar. It had a heady aroma that right away made me want to pull on a sweater and curl up with a book. It even tasted like fall with its cinnamon and the cloves that had a sweet and slightly stinging, but not-unpleasant, aftertaste. So enjoyable and remarkable was the spiced tea to me, that today even a faint whiff of a clove cigarette can trigger my olfactory buds into a memory of these pleasant days.
A few years ago, when I was selling my first home, I made sure to always have a pot of the tea simmering on the stove when the house was being shown. I had read somewhere that baking bread or cookies could help set the mood and make your home stand out to prospective buyers and I couldn’t think of a more inviting scent than Russian Spiced Tea. I can’t say if it was even partially due to the tea, but the house did sell quickly.
I’ve carried on the tradition of making spiced tea in my own home. This year I gave my four-year old daughter a sip for the first time. She made a face and quickly spat it out. “Hot!” she said. Her young taste buds might still be too undeveloped to enjoy the warm and spicy drink, but I hope in the years to come she’ll like it as much as I do and that maybe the first pot made in Fall will hint to her about the promises and excitement of the holiday season. I hope someday the scent of my mom’s spiced tea will remind her of spending time with family and feeling warm and cozy and that, as it always did for me when I was a little girl, it will give her a sense that she is right where she belongs and that everything is as it should be.
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RUSSIAN TEA RECIPE
Make tea with 1 qt. water and 3 tea bags.
Boil 3 qts. Water, 2 cups sugar, 3 sticks cinnamon, 2 tsp. whole cloves for 45 minutes
Add 1 can (6 oz) concentrated orange juice and ½ c. lemon juice
Mix all together.
