Yesterday, I heard today’s weather with great anticipation. Since the cold snap a month or so ago, I’ve felt cooped up and penned in; neither cooping nor penning suits me. Thus, when the meteorologists promised I could lace up the Adidases and walk to work, though not in so many words, I considered writing them love letters. Then I thought, ‘No, they’re the Doppler-assisted tools of the Man! Get up, stand up! And take a leopard print umbrella.’

I got no further than thirty feet from my front door, flush with victory over mid-winter sloth, when I realized the sidewalks were frozen over in transparent, invisible sheets and if I didn’t confine myself to visibly salted sidewalks or blacktop, I was skipping work and going directly to the Emergency Room. That was exciting. A few times, I nearly landed on my head, which would ordinarily be merely hilarious but yesterday, I put in a full day at the salon and bandages would interfere with my mission to beautify America one room at a time.

Anyway: hairstyle intact, I made it to work without lascerations and I can’t wait to walk home. Tomorrow, umbrella in hand, I can prowl the quads and sidewalks to take pictures of black snow and torpid tree limbs. They’ll perk up soon. I feel better already.

Having the internet phone service pays off.

Dad: Happy Valentine’s Day. You know how I’ve been seeing doctors and couldn’t get a diagnosis? Now I have one. I have cancer.
Tata: Cancer?
Dad: I have lesions on several of my internal organs. We begin chemo on Friday.
Tata: You do?
Dad: That terrible taste in my mouth the doctors should have been able to identify? Cancer.
Tata: It was? And the fever you’ve had since before Christmas?
Dad: Yep.
Tata: Phantom debilitating pain?
Dad: Yep.
Tata: How do you feel about this?
Dad: I could be dead in a year.
Tata: You could?
Dad: It’s within the range of possibility.
Tata: I am actually relieved that you finally have a diagnosis. I didn’t believe it for a minute when the doctor said you, you know, just had a fever. For two months.
Dad: Oh. Also: Happy Birthday. What are you doing to celebrate?
Tata: I was thinking of drowning myself in the Raritan.
Dad: Don’t be ridiculous. That river’s frozen and paramedics are tougher to please than Ukranian judges.

We hang up after exhanging tender words both of us would deny under oath. I immediately call Daria, who is still sobbing. Daria calms down and tells me to call Auntie InExcelsisDeo, who is also still sobbing. To distract her, I mention the braces came off and I can’t stop doing that ridiculous Pearl Drops Tooth Polish “It’s a great feeling!” gesture with my tongue, which will eventually make me very popular in town. Then I call Daria back. Daria asks if she should call our mom, who divorced Dad in the seventies. I say yes. Daria calls me back later. We do this again and again for five days. No way could I afford this with regular phone service.

Thursday was my birthday, which is usually a very big deal in my family because it has for the last decade kicked off a long series of birthdays. We have a season. Every two weeks, we go somewhere and celebrate. All that festivity can really suck the life out of a clan, plus now Anya’s husband Dan’s birthday is a week before mine, so we’re all receipts and wreckage. In any case, I could have been perfectly content to let go of any claim to birthday-based overeating but Mom insisted on taking me out to dinner.

Tata: We’re expecting snow and ice like nobody’s business. Are you sure?
Mom: I’m sure. Where would you like to go?
Tata: There’s an excellent Thai restaurant blocks from here.
Mom: I don’t love Thai.
Tata: …Or we could go to…um…
Mom: How about the new Greek restaurant? How about 6?
Tata: Terrific. I’ll be ready at 6.

At 6:30, Mom and Tom picked me up, which I knew would happen and for which I was totally prepared. It was just dinner, and ya gotta eat. They gave me a 16-quart stock pot with a glass lid and I was content to let it go, again. We keep trying to get as much of the whole family together before the next series of birthdays and it just isn’t working because Mom’s having her Annual Harvesting of the Melanomas. Our next proposed date is Tuesday, the 27th, and the proposed get-together is at a fondue place for cheese, meat, seafood and chocolate fondue. Last night, I told Daria if the date moves again, we’ll be celebrating Anya’s and Corinne’s birthdays, too, and everyone will have to eat twice as much. We should just suck it up and fondue.

On Saturday, Siobhan took me to a spa in Livingston, where we got facials and massages. I’d spent five weeks crying my eyes out and I looked like it. I’ll write about the facial and the massage some other time because…because. Another time. Suffice it to say that after two hours of soothing smells and gentle music and charming people saying nice things, the masseur whispered many times, “Let it go, Ta” and I couldn’t. I realized I was a giant, clenched, terrified knot, which is exactly what I don’t want to be, and what I know will not help. The result: I forced myself to calm down and consider a way forward.

In less than two months, my dear pussycat was terribly ill, then I put him to sleep. My best friend nearly died. My son-in-law and by extension my daughter suffered a career trauma. My father started cancer treatment. My mother’s post-cancer treatment regimen has become a little less low-key. A friend moved away. Daria keeps saying to me, “I’m fully cognizant that I have Tyler and you’re over there in your apartment alone.”

I am fine. I have no regrets about the pussycat, the career trauma will pass, I’ll get used to the missing friend. The treatment is being aggressively pursued by a family of Type-A fighting freaks with oncologist friends. And last night, I spoke with a woman who rescues stray and abandoned cats about my desire to have two feline companions. I have appointments with the dentist to get one of my teeth fixed, and this afternoon, I will see Carmello for a new coif. I’m drinking lots of broth, miso shiro soup, juice, water.

The future arrives, whether we fear it or not. I intend to greet it with composure and a healthy mix of ferocity and acceptance. My manicure will be perfect at all times. My hand will be open.

Tonight’s new moon wipes clean the slate. We begin again, rewriting creases in now-smooth palms. You don’t have to say anything. We have been here before, between breaths, the heartbeat drummed by the stylus from song to song. And I know you. I have always known you. This balance, this hunger, quiet inside first morning light. The blue light of centuries has been nothing but hazy dreaming, though I’ve said that a thousand times, in a thousand lives and in a thousand voices, and now, your itinerary is off. Write all of our names in the dust by the train station.

Come to me, while there is still time.

Sharks killed four people and bit 58 others around the world in 2006, a comparatively dull year for dangerous encounters between the two species, scientists said in their annual shark attack census Tuesday.

…As usual, the United States had more shark attacks than any other nation, with 38 last year. That was down from 40 the previous year and well below the 53 recorded in 2000.

I hate when sharks bite. It’s so tedious. “Oh,” I say, “Not again. Get your boring teeth off me. I’ve got dinner plans.”

I get annoyed when bloggers use pictures of people who aren’t, you know, them on their, you know, blogs. By this, I mean I dislike when a blogger I respect gets nervous and deploys sweet images of plastic strangers. Thus, I am a complete hypocrite this evening because that face is not my face. I am vain. Grief and stress have made me look and feel run down, so let’s not kid ourselves. If you think I’m taking pictures of myself wearing an herbal masque, sipping chardonnay through a bendy straw and watching General Hospital, you are mistaken. I found that green gal in Google Images; I like her quizzical What, me wrinkle? expression. She probably even likes chardonnay and kind of resembles Siobhan’s younger sister. Yahtzee!

Today, I was reading my email at my desk and heard myself laugh. I was so surprised I stopped laughing. But that’s silly, so I went back to reading what made me laugh, and it was still funny.

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA

Feel the glee! Depending upon one’s taste and peculiar education, one may find the funny in some entries and not so much in others.

“I know what you’re thinking, punk,” hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, “you’re thinking, ‘Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?’ – and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel loquacious?’ – well do you, punk?”

Stuart Vasepuru
Edinburgh, Scotland

Do I? I’m a damn blogger! The competition has interesting categories you might expect. In the category of Detective Fiction:

It was a dreary Monday in September when Constable Lightspeed came across the rotting corpse that resembled one of those zombies from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” except that it was lying down and not performing the electric slide.

Derek Fisher
Ottawa, ON

Fantasy Fiction:

It was within the great stony nostril of a statue of Landrick the Elfin Vicelord that Frodo’s great uncle, Jasper Baggins, happened to stumble upon the enchanted Bag of Holding, not to be confused with the Hag of Bolding, who was quite fond of leeks, most especially in a savory Hobbit knuckle stew.

Camille Barigar
Twin Falls, ID

Purple Prose:

Her angry accusations burned Clyde like that first bite of a double cheese pizza, when the toppings slide off and sear that small elevation of the oral mucosa, just behind the front teeth, known as the incisive papilla, which is linked to the discriminatory function of the taste buds except, where Clyde was concerned, when it came to women.

Pamela Patchet Hamilton
Beaconsfield, Quebec

Romance:

Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.

Dan Winters
Los Altos Hills, CA

And my favorite, Special Salute to Breasts Category. Is it hot in here?

As she sashayed out of the police station, her high heels clicking a staccato rhythm on the hard tile floor, like a one-armed castanet player in a very bad mariachi band, her ample bosom held in check only by a diaphanous blouse, and bouncing at each step like a 1959 tricked out Low-rider Chevy with very good hydraulics—she smiled to herself as she thought of the titillating interrogation from Detective Tipple about the Twin Peaks Melon Heist.

Wayne Spivey, Major, USAF Retired
Huntsville, Texas
When she sashayed across the room, her breasts swayed like two house trailers passing on a windy bridge.

Stan Higley
Fairport, NY
Although Brandi had been named Valedictorian and the outfit for her speech carefully chosen to prove that beauty and brains could indeed mix, she suddenly regretted her choice of attire, her rain-soaked T-shirt now valiantly engaging in the titanic struggle between the tensile strength of cotton and Newton’s first law of motion.

Mark Schweizer
Hopkinsville, KY

On Saturday, Siobhan and I have appointments at a spa for massages and facials. You may hear laughter from wherever you are.

This image came from the panda gallery on CNN.com, which credits Reuters. That’s three degrees of separation from fuzzy panda baby happiness, which I must have. Please know that I am not stealing. I just want to play with the adorable baby pandas. Really. I think the baby pandas would make excellent playmates for me, despite their sharp claws and limited conversation. We could go to restaurants and order off the kiddie menus together. “Please, waiter, we’d like bamboo tenders, bamboo fries and bamboo shakes. And no skimping on the bamboo!” Oh, how popular we would be! Later when my panda friends grew to three times my size and reached the pedals with ease, I could teach my panda friends to drive. If my panda friends wore baseball caps, I bet they could get a job in the food service industry, perhaps bussing tables in one of the many fine restaurants in town catering to the upwardly mobile. As we lumbered down the street together, my panda friends and I would certainly turn heads. I feel extra pretty just thinking about it.

I bake my own bread. This winter, I’ve learned to make a multi-grain loaf that I like. It’s rich and dense and I like it very much. This morning, I set up bread dough, brewed some coffee and dragged myself to Sears, where I walked around and around and around the paint section like I died and went to Martha Stewart Everyday. Since Sears had just opened, I had a tough time finding an employee to help me figure out what I needed for what I wanted to do. I found a couple of people at a bank of cash registers and one came to my rescue. She limped and most of her teeth were missing, yet she took one look at me and spoke to me quietly. I said I had a dark blue closet I wanted to paint the lightest green we could find. She limped to a spot and pulled out a card to test my resolve. I said that looked fine. She told me she couldn’t choose colors for customers. I said I picked it, and that happened to be the right one. She helped me find primer and painters tape. Emboldened by these successes, she asked if I wanted a plastic tray liner. I allowed as that might be an excellent idea and we added that to my merchandise pile.

Other customers appeared in the paint department, a married couple who spoke incessantly about how she was unable to keep from spending money without his help. This was supposed to be hilarious, I could tell. They were accustomed to an appreciative audience for this routine. I was busy with my welling emotions and the paint expert addressed them crisply and professionally. They bought laundry detergent while I looked away. I announced that I was off to find painters tape. The salesperson directed me without skipping a beat with the other customers. When I returned, the other customers had gone, and it was just about this time that I realized the paint expert had been treating me with extraordinary gentleness. She gave me the materials I needed, advice I needed, and told me a very funny story, which I desperately needed. When we finished wrapping up my paints – I had to keep this secret from watchful neighbors – I mentioned I needed a throw blanket. She directed me to a cart, the elevator and the basement. I thanked her. In the basement, I found a cocoa-colored throw and a small green rug for my kitchen to replace the one I recently discarded.

Tata: Guess what! I painted my bedroom closet.
Siobhan: That’s great.
Tata: I dumped everything on my bed and painted the closet a green indistiguishable from white unless it’s next to white.
Siobhan: That sounds…strange.
Tata: It was, but not like when I realized people at Sears were speaking to me gently. Apparently, I look really bad.
Siobhan: Remember I said you looked like you’d been punched in the face a whole lot? Well, you did.
Tata: That’s what happens when I cry my eyes out for a month. But now I have a new kitchen rug. And guess what else! It’s recycled!
Siobhan: Look at you, helping the environment by redecorating!
Tata: Yeah, if only I’d driven my solar-powered unicorn coach to buy latex paint.

Don’t let the scale fool you: this bag of clothing and shoes on the floor is about half my size. Out it goes with no regrets. The other bag is just junky stuff I no longer need. It’s a bit of a test of my relationship with the cosmos:do I believe what I say, that the lighter I travel the better? Yes. I believe that. Does it serve me well to hold onto material things I have outgrown? No, they weigh me down. They cause heartache. If I want a tranquil home, I must refuse to dwell on the sad weeks and remove evidence of suffering. If I want joy in my home, I must prepare a place in my heart for it first.

And that, friend, requires a lot more elbow grease than you might think.

I have little talks with Me about Us.

Tata: I am sad! Waaaaaaaah!
Tata: Listen, princess, how do you feel? Do you feel I Want To Die! bad?
Tata: …No…I don’t!
Tata: Do you feel It’s Hopeless! bad?
Tata: I don’t!
Tata: Right, then you’re not depressed. You’re appropriately sad.
Tata: I am sad! Waaaaaaaah!
Tata: Okay, so what do you want to do about it?
Tata: Blow my nose on Our sleeve?
Tata: Yecch. Listen, I’ve noticed we’re currently running up a flight of stairs. If you think back, this is how we’ve always gotten over the bad breaks. This stairwell, lap after lap of the stairs over the last twenty years.
Tata: Sniff! …I remember! Man, there ought to be a plaque!
Tata: And you know what else? Everyone who has ever shared an apartment with you knew that if they opened the door and smelled bleach, they should walk away – just walk away!
Tata: Yeah yeah, I used to throw furniture but polishing it is miles better!
Tata: And what else do you do to recover from something?
Tata: Start smoking?
Tata: Yeah…let’s skip that one, huh?
Tata: Oh. Okay. What then?
Tata: You’re an artist. Get off your ass and get to work. Your best work has always come out of surviving something awful.
Tata: Huh. So I could’ve spared myself the years of writing band reviews by –
Tata: Yep, one craptastic trip to a shark tank.

Siobhan, who nearly died a week ago Thursday, and whose doctor kept exclaiming like a broken cuckoo clock, “You almost bit it!” until she threatened to punch him in his mechanism, is at home, finally. Last night, I called her with a commission.

Tata: I have a job for you you will enjoy, oh Queen of All the Net Purveys.
Siobhan: I can’t fucking imagine but go ahead. Try me.
Tata: Larry, the little black cat once bent on stealing your soul, peed on the couch and told me he peed on the couch. I cleaned it but this couch came from Daria’s house, where children and a dog peed on it. It must go.
Siobhan: …Bored now…
Tata: Buy me a couch.
Siobhan: …Really bored now…
Tata: I will give you my credit card. These are the rules: it must be less than $400, it only needs to last a year, it must be delivered before St. Patrick’s Day, comfortable, stain-repellant and red.
Siobhan: Hmm. That challenge is worthy! Red, eh?
Tata: It’s the color of life. So said Isadora Duncan.

Even with the random bursting into tears, I feel pretty good. I’m out from under the weight all caregivers feel when a sick person or animal dies. I went as far as I could for as long as I could, and the outcome was exactly as it should have been. I loved him madly. We are free.

Every morning, someone I’ll never meet does a little creative writing project and emails it to me in the form of a daily horoscope. I have no idea what it means but I don’t take it seriously. The person, if there is a person, who writes these things may or may not consult the stars, the Magic 8 Ball or an Amtrak schedule. I can’t know. Even so, sometimes the horoscope is 100% right, in a non-Ta-specific manner. Today, for instance, it advises that making a symbolic gesture will lead to change in real life; clean up!

I have been cleaning my apartment with extreme prejudice. Last night, it dawned on me that I should paint the closet in which Larry hid out during the difficult last weeks of his life. Since I can hardly think at this point, that idea seems like genius, and if it’s not, I can blame any dumb thing I do on fumes.

Yesterday’s big irrational thought was What if he weren’t really dead and I left him with terrible people who would do who knew what to him? I spent most of yesterday trying to keep my hand off the phone and calculating odds. Would people who didn’t really put my cat to sleep tell me they hadn’t put my cat to sleep? No, of course not. Eventually, I had to remind myself over and over that they were good to him and to me, and since I trusted them while he was alive, he’s dead. I have not abandoned him to – say – medical experiments. These doubts are even funny; they had their honest start in the office, on Tuesday morning:

Tata: No. Let’s put him to sleep. No more tests for him.
Substitute Vet: Is there someone I can call for you?
Tata: What?
SV: Is there someone at home we can call? Someone you’d like to be here for moral support?
Tata: What?
Anya: That’s why she brought HER SISTER.

I was explaining this to my mother, who couldn’t stop saying, “What?” either, when it dawned on me what the substitute vet was saying.

Tata: So apparently he thought Anya was my lover and he wanted to call my husband.
Mom: Was he telling on you or caring for your cat?
Tata: Both?

A few weeks ago, a friend and I started tossing around ideas for an art project, which seemed hopeful. Georg is right: I need projects, and I’ve been avoiding people for about a year while I put everything into making a living and taking care of Larry. Once again: I’m not saying that was rational, but I did it. Anyway, I ordered supplies for this art project and didn’t expect them until later this week. An hour after Anya and I emptied the apartment of Larry-related objects, the UPS truck delivered those supplies.

I couldn’t have gotten the message more clearly if it’d come marked AQUARIUS.

This morning, we put Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, to sleep. I’ve been crying my eyes out for weeks, fearing this moment for myself and for him. The choice came down to putting him into a hospital to warm him up – his temperature was really low – then treatment. The substitute vet did not remember treating this self same pussycat twice, two weeks ago, and was deeply unhelpful. Anya came with me and spoke rationally and when I decided it was time, the clinic staff, which has grown attached to Our Cranky Hero, tried to talk me out of it. I wavered, then insisted. I loved him too much to hospitalize him.

This is the last picture I took of him yesterday.

My apartment feels empty. My heart aches. This person in cat form was more interesting than most people in human form. He went to sleep in my arms, then I handed him to the assistant for the last shot. I hope I forget this and just remember the fascinating, quirky character. Anya and I emptied my apartment of possibly infected cat reminders. I dragged everything to the dumpster, and it’s been awful, just awful, but so, so much better than trying to decide and the agony of waiting.

So ends the story of Larry, the little black cat, no longer bent on stealing your soul.