How We Got Our Speckled Furniture

Annie Cat is old. No one knows how old she is--not even she--because, at the shelter where we got her, they guessed she was "about six". And that was about ten years ago. So she is "about" sixteen.

A few months ago she suddenly lost a lot of weight, and since it was my turn to guess, I guessed that Annie might be nearing her demise. All of our cats, over the years, have eaten dry cat food, and I wondered whether I ought to see if that was a problem. A vet advised me to give her food intended for young, growing cats.

Fooling around in that ultra-scientific, somewhat hearsay way, we have come to this: Annie loves whole milk, with a little canned cat food containing krill. "Krill", I thought. "Why not? It is a staple in the food chain. Maybe it is working.

But milk is a problem. Sometimes Annie sits near her food dish, thinking about Kant and Descartes, not noticing that her tail is dipped into the milk dish. Eventually she notices, and waves it around, muttering something about being and nothingness and the cat-egorical imperative, and that is how we got all our speckled furniture.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon. I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was. I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise. I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom. It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars. It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally. Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog