Category Archives: our furry overlords

Never Leave Just A Memory

Posted by Tata on

From my stepmom Darla:

This is a note to all of you who knew and loved Samantha. She died peacefully at home this afternoon. She was 18 years old.

She’d been losing a great deal of weight lately, and the vet said it was most likely cancer. That was a couple of weeks ago, so I spoiled her rotten for two weeks: she lived on wet food, cat treats and people food, and spent most of her time sleeping on my lap. She was eating until yesterday, and purring when I stroked her until yesterday evening, but after tottering to the litter box last night, she curled up on the electric blanket on my bed and didn’t move from there. I stayed with her until she died there, about an hour ago. She’ll be buried in the back yard.

Goodbye, quirky, bossy, loving friend. I’ll miss you.

If We’re In A Garden Or On

Posted by Tata on

Drusy's secret love: a feather pillow. They try to hide it but they only have eyes for each other.

In the Times Square Olive Garden, my sister Daria, Pete and I met two of our cousins from Guatemala. You may remember two years ago, my brilliant cousin swam around Manhattan, rendering me speechless. Thus, we were overjoyed to see our champion again, but this time she brought her mother.

More than thirty years ago, my grandfather Andy found her. She didn’t know she was missing. He was an only child of immigrant parents. Her grandfather Giovanni and my great-grandfather Carlo were brothers, and it meant everything to Andy that he had blood relatives besides his overly colorful children. He died a few years after he and my grandmother visited Guatemala, but his joy has remained impressed upon me all this time. When I saw her yesterday, she was tall, like he was. Her eyes were like his eyes. Her expressions were like his expressions. I can’t tell you how many times my heart skipped a beat because I’ve missed him so much. But she looked at me like she’d missed me, too, and maybe she did. She wants us to go to Guatemala.

It’s been awhile since I traveled. Plainly, I just heard the distant past describe a fantastic and once improbable future.

That Accident Left Everyone A Little

Posted by Tata on

Seriously. This is an unlikely development.

Friends in Atlanta sent a box of special, beautiful skeins of yarn. When I sorted by color and texture, patterns formed. The person who bought the yarn planned to make fuzzy winter scarves in rich jewel tones and baby blankets in pastel blue. We all have plans we might not get to see come to fruition.

So I asked my friends if they’d like me to make blankets out of the soft baby yarn and donate them to a shelter or agency. They said that’d be fine. A year ago, I worked up the nerve to knit baby blankets for complete strangers. I get stage fright. Sue me. This year, leading into the unnamed university’s anti-hunger project, I’m going to try to knit a baby blanket every few weeks, maybe one per month. In between, I’m going to race through half a dozen blankets for animal shelters. It’s a modest plan and not the first time during the cat blanket project a box of yarn drove home the fragility of our future.

They’re all just blankets. I’m just knitting. The world is spinning, spinning, spinning.