I know where MY cat is at 4:30 am. It’s impossible NOT to know. Every morning at 4:30 am, she starts howling by the bathroom door down the hallway, with a shrieking, crone-like demand, to be lifted up on the counter to get a drink from one of the TWO sinks she requires to have on while she drinks. I’m pretty sure she is quite capable of jumping up by herself, despite the fact that she is over thirteen years old and growing frail, is a little senile and has a slight limp on her right side. She jumps up on the kitchen counter just fine after the dogs have done their morning outdoor walkabout to wail for her treat as though she were starving to death and at risk of being left out of the ritual that is NEVER skipped. But with her age comes privilege in our house: the matriarch of the animals here, so we all humor her. I call her Maybe on account of the fact that when my daughter asked if she could get a kitten, I would always answer “maybe”, but my husband calls her Kitten and the boys call her “Big Haus” for reasons that perplex me.
The cat with many names she is.
A few years ago, when we brought Bob the rescue kitten home, Maybe became slightly paralyzed on her bottom half and refused to do a lot of walking, sitting in the most inconvenient places for us to almost trip on her and notice that she ‘could not walk’ though she somehow managed to get downstairs to the litter box and get to her food and water source, which is how I know it was just her way of performing a “sit-in”, protesting the new kitten we had the audacity to bring into her castle. Cats are cunning, strategic and sometimes perplexing, in an exasperating manner.
On the topic of cats, I got into a controversial conversation with our two youngest sons and my husband a couple of days ago when I asked a ’what if question’, something we do a lot in our household: “If you were starving and there was no other food source in sight or means to go get food, would you be able to eat one of our cats?” Dave answered without skipping a beat: “Absolutely NOT, but I would not hesitate to feed someone else’s cat to MY cats and dogs if it came down to it.” I nodded in half-hearted agreement silently making plans to stock up on canned cat and dog food.
The world is changing: it’s clearly become a cat eat cat world out there. The dogs are just trying not to get in the middle of things and carve out a little peace where no one eats anyone and the snacks are plentiful.
And in preparation for a potential Armageddon, I have started making plans to grow a better garden next year, one that provides us with more than 25 cherry tomatoes and a perplexing array of plants that sprouted from the birdseed I fed the 40+ sparrows in the backyard all summer. I literally grew huge corn stalks, while with no corn inside, they also grew without any effort on my end! This glorious surprise reaffirmed my plan to try to surrender to the inadequacies I perceive in myself, and enjoy things as they are, not how they “should be” had I done a better job of whatever I thought I was supposed to do. I mean fuck. Sometimes you just have to throw the towel in and enjoy the pretty flowers that come from the weeds in your life.
Something else I find perplexing is that for three straight mornings I randomly started singing the chorus to “Yankee Doodle”:
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.
I have ZERO explanation as to why I would sing that of all the possible songs.
Many from my generation learned it as a kind of nursery rhyme jingle and some of us taught it to our kids. I remember giggling and wondering why anyone would want to think they have pasta on their hat but then visualized the beautiful macaroni chains I used to make for my mother and somehow felt satisfied with this explanation.
However! I just went down the rabbit hole on this one and it turns out the lyrics and tune have a very long history that predates the revolutionary war. But I’m not going to go into that. What I discovered is that the song was mockingly sung by the Brits about the Colonists during the revolutionary war.
The term Yankee has a long etymology but in America it started out as a derisive term for the Dutch speaking colonists. I’m not sure why the other colonists had scorn for the colonists who spoke Dutch, but the British threw this back in our American faces and adopted the term for ALL of the colonists.
The word doodle means simpleton. No further explanation needed.
The word dandy is a man who places great importance on physical appearance, refined language and leisurely hobbies.
The word macaroni is a rather contemptuous word used to describe a subculture of fellows in 18th-century Britain who dressed, spoke and behaved in a fancy, eccentric and somewhat scandalous manner, placing themselves in a higher class status by their high-end clothing, excessive behavior and glutinous food consumption. The joke was that the “Yankees’ were silly to think that they could be considered a member of the ‘elegant’ bourgeois simply by putting a feather in their cap.
Then of course the tables turned, the Brits lost the war and the Americans adopted the song. “Who’s mocking who now you fancy wig heads? Oh, and we’re taking your stupid song too.”
ANYHOW, I think the song came to me to help me start paying attention to so many things I have accepted in this world (like the lyrics to this song) without EVER ONCE questioning them. In other words: don’t be a doodle. Also, don’t be a dandy: vanity and excessiveness can get gross if one is not careful (look up Macaroni Art of the 1700’s). And when I want to complain about being broke I need to thank my lucky stars we can still afford to feed us AND the cats, dogs, backyard birds and the turtle, who all might look like damn good food to those who are in times of desperation. The song also reminds me that since the beginning of time humans have had beef with other humans and it’s never going to go away. And while cats might rule the world better than humans it would only be because the dogs chose to be their loyal and peaceful subjects-a yin/yang thing. But both need humans, because they don’t have thumbs to open up the canned food… and to lift them adoringly up to the faucet when they need us to, just like most of us would do for any being in need, as stewards of this crazy changing but really mostly staying the same, world.
peaceof8 