These pictures were in a little folder from the first months Pete and I were seeing each other, when Topaz perched on the highest surfaces she could find and played Bagheera. The kittens loved the wooden ladder as a scratching post and indoor tree, which I had forgotten until I saw these pictures again. What possessed me to put that ladder in the basement where the pussycats cannot climb it and fly through the air?

I don’t believe in God, but I see ghosts. I don’t believe people are inherently good, but almost everyone deserves a second chance. This week, I decided I firmly believe that good people work for the common good and people who work against that common good are not just apolitical or differently motivated or whatever euphemism you please, but actually bad people. As starter beliefs go in this corrupt and deeply selfish time, it’s not going to make me a lot of friends who aren’t covered with fur, but there my popularity is wildly secure.

Look, I do three stupid things before breakfast and the day I don’t shoot my mouth off has not yet come, so I’m far from a paragon of any virtue but the easy kind, but I am saying we all have to do better. The disastrous gas and oil leak in the Gulf is weeks from being capped and already our representatives are saying no energy bill will make it through Congress with or without expanded offshore drilling – which is to say no energy bill will pass without offshore drilling, because the Democrats will cave to their corporate masters before we have even assessed the spill’s true damage to our planet. That is not good enough.

Sweetpea, who has become a fourteen pound handful, developed a new habit last week: while I am eating dinner, she leaps on the table’s other end and sits next to my water glass. She wants nothing more than my undivided attention, so I bump foreheads with her. In the Pussycat Lexicon, this means we love each other. You’ve seen lions bump foreheads affectionately on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I’m scared of lions, and I want to finish my dinner.

Today’s WikiHow was How To Thicken Soup. Perhaps it is because I am 900 years old, an age at which smokin’ hotness assumes new meaning, that simple solutions to common problems appeal to me. Children, I say, toss a couple of starchy diced potatoes into that watery soup and simmer. Or make a slurry by adding a few tablespoons of cold water to a few teaspoons of cornstarch, stir, then simmer in your soup. Or get some arrowroot and follow directions on the package. Or start with a roux in the first place and what’s the matter with you? You’re grounded.

Last summer, a friend asked how we would find each other in a convention center in Pittsburgh. Obviously, I said, you’ll listen for me to Wimoweh at the top of my lungs and follow the sound of people calling for Security. I didn’t end up in Pittsburgh, but it turns out I’d Wimowehed in public before. Sweetpea licks my hand, testing me for doneness and unsatisfied with the results.