Hot time summer in the city

FROM THE DESK OF: Cats

ATT’N: Our human companions

For centuries, we have skulked about your yurts, clearing your grounds of delicious rodents. We have kept watch over your babies, disfiguring almost none of them. We have lived now for decades in your ranch houses and alcove studios, nightly battling those totally enormous and gross flying roaches — while doing our utmost not to wake you. We have even agreed not to ride your stupid dogs.

In exchange, you dole out food and let us poop inside.

But we have come to a frightening crossroads in our relationship. Recently, the disgruntled tabby lobby released confidential information that is damaging to our long partnership. And so The Atlantic, a pro-human magazine, compiled this scientific data into a blockbuster story under the hyperbolic Web headline “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.”

We cats are not immune to the allure of page views ourselves, as you know if you’ve ever seen Tumblr, so we forgive you this crude bit of packaging. And we appreciated the print magazine’s more tempered title: “Do Brain Parasites Shape Your Behavior?”

We now wish to apologize, because the answer is yes. In the interest of rebuilding the trust and cuddling behind our long-term alliance, we admit that we have withheld some facts from you.

Human scientists are beginning to grasp our feline findings that infection with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that we cats carry within us, can infect humans’ brains and result in a personality change, making — speaking quite generally — men more introverted and rule-breaking and women more extroverted and trusting.

We would try the “don’t blame us, we’re adorable!” routine. But now, apparently, the parasite is out of the bag. It will be obvious to even the least thorough reader that our little parasite is intended to fashion human civilization into an ever more cat-oriented society. Let it be known: We have trained, by means of this gentle biological warfare, your women to let us into your homes, and your men to stay home and scratch us in our difficult places.

Even the feeble human scientists The Atlantic quotes admit one thing quite clearly: You need not wake up facedown in a litter box after a rough “girls’ night out” to acquire our little friend. Toxoplasma lurks all about: “scrub vegetables thoroughly and avoid drinking water that has not been properly purified” is their best recommendation. And maybe freeze your delicious steaks before cooking them. As a gesture of friendship, we will tell you now: these defenses are futile.

We can, however, promise that as long as no humans become hysterical about their guaranteed eventual infection, and continue to do our bidding, we shall live in peace, as we have for so long. So do not panic. Take in more strays and no one gets scratched. The victory was decisive. Our will be done. Meowver and out.

**END CATMMUNICATION**

Choire Sicha is an editor of the Web site The Awl.

Finished with flute & picc practicing today. Slaving away over Peter & the Wolf for April 1.

Pictures from 28.Aug.2012. The day we had a huge storm, & most likely a "microburst" that downed some of the largest trees in the area. Since it's almost as hot as Aug. out there today, I thought it appropriate to post these neighborhood shots from last year. I seem to have already resized these for the web, so I hope I haven't already shared them.

Back in the days when pots and pans could talk

I was just listening to Krista Tippett's interview with Kevin Kling. I want to share part of that with you. It's a story he tells called Back in the days when pots and pans could talk:

Back in the days when pots and pans could talk, which indeed they still do, there lived a man. And in order to have water, every day he had to walk down the hill and fill two pots and walk them home. One day, it was discovered one of the pots had a crack, and as time went on, the crack widened. Finally, the pot turned to the man and said, "You know, every day you take me to the river, and by the time you get home, half of the water's leaked out. Please replace me with a better pot." And the man said, "You don't understand. As you spill, you water the wild flowers by the side of the path." And sure enough, on the side of the path where the cracked pot was carried, beautiful flowers grew, while other side was barren. "I think I'll keep you," said the man.

The story is particularly poignant when you know that Mr. Kling "was born with a birth defect — his left arm disabled and much shorter than his right. Then, in his early 40s, a motorcycle accident nearly killed him and paralyzed his healthy right arm." I think he means that we all, in our way, are cracked pots - flawed but, even unknowingly, providing the people in our lives with something that helps them to grow, or even flourish. As I thought about all the people in my life who are my cracked pots, nourishing me . . . well it moved me to tears.

Loss and laughter

I caught the last bit of Krista Tippett's interview with Kevin Kling, a man who "was born with a birth defect — his left arm disabled and much shorter than his right. Then, in his early 40s, a motorcycle accident nearly killed him and paralyzed his healthy right arm".

Here is the poem he read, called "Tickled pink":

"At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter. One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise, a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted, and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone. We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived. Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink."

The rest of the interview, transcript & podcast, and other poems & stories by Mr. Kling is here.

Working on Peter & the Wolf & the fist-ful of notes that is the May Pops concert in my future today. I'm going to wait to do any more work on the Wellesley groups until I hear from the vocal director to see which winds he plans to use. Makes no sense to cobble together groups only to have him yank someone out later & then redoing the whole thing.

Photos today from 25 & 26.Aug.2011. Yes, that's a sunflower - just shows how piss-poor our soil is. And that photo that looks like an expanse of lawn? Tons 'o sparrows camouflaged against the earth having their breakfast.

Isn't in pretty to think so?

Given these days of political turmoil and agitation, I thought you might enjoy the last paragraph of a review of Ben Lerner’s new (and apparently first) novel, “Leaving the the Atocha Station.” (The reviewer, Gary Sernovitz, compares it to another novel about an American living in Spain, The Sun Also Rises.)

“In the final scene of “The Sun Also Rises,” Jake Barnes, in Madrid, rides in a taxi with Lady Ashley, both more broken than when the novel began and both just as alone. The book ends with Barnes’s ironic, stoic, tragic response to Ashley’s wistful insistence that they could have had a good time together: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Eighty years later, in that same city, Adam Gordon concludes his story with more hope: “Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.” Whether it’s dangerously naïve or necessarily modest for Americans, in life, in foreign policy, to seek that skylit room is an open question. But as a dream that more collaborative days are ahead of us, well, isn’t it pretty to think so?” The entire review is here.