COLD RAINY MORNING
The “grasshopper” group of 4 kittens, 2 sets of twins, called “hoppers” for short, are wizened and tufty because evidently their mother took them out into the wilderness and then died. (I’ve never found her body.) They would have died, too, and nearly starved until Tuxie, the assistant Mamacat, found them and brought them into the house. Now they are the equivalent of teenagers, still tufty and fox-faced, and all are on this desk interfering with my typing. I keep a saucer of kibble near the keyboard because otherwise Gillespie, one of the two lesser tomcats, doesn’t get enough to eat because Tuxie considers him a hazard and beats him up.
It’s hard to concentrate on writing well when cats are screaming underfoot, but even harder when the screams are somewhere outside. Now Peaches, one of the two alpha kittens from each twinset who have formed a co-conspirator partnership, is perforating the paperback cover of my new book, “Meander, Spiral, Explode.” She knows how to do all those things already but didn’t learn them from reading the book.
At 2AM I woke with a wringing stomach — my new meds mean that I must eat at bedtime but I didn’t — and I stood in the kitchen window to settle, looking at the alley that runs behind the house. There was a small flickering light in the dirt tracks. Was it a reflection? A light? A fire? Many places in Montana have mysteriously burned down in the past month. Tuxie didn’t think I should stand here, so she ran up the furniture and stared in my face, getting in the way and making me impatient. I decided I didn’t care if there WAS a fire and went back to bed.
Given the news and the cold rain and despite wearing my winter nightgown with the floor length skirt that the kittens love because they hook onto the hem for rides and take shelter underneath like being in a balloon; despite the new meds and sleeping in late, my disposition is on a knife-edge and I could easily burst into tears. I don’t. But I could.
The two sets of twins ate all the kibble in the saucer on my desk, though there is a generous catfood dish full of the stuff about twenty feet away. Gillespie was trying to fill up, but they crowded him out. So I got another handful, and now the delinquents are scarfing up that. They are insatiable. Hunger is their middle name, yet they don’t get fat and when I pick them up, their bones are frail. At least now they begin to purr.
I hardly dare think about Kabul. Wasn’t Kandahar in “The Jewel in the Crown”? Most of what I know about that region is from that movie and the book and another book about how hard it was to write about that period in that place. It’s mostly about the English with the same stupid Empire mind-set that we have, though like all missionaries we pretend we are saving them. I wonder if the movie is streaming somewhere. I see the same actors in contemporary films and they are old, quite old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_in_the_Crown_(TV_series)
(The entire plot is outlined on Wikipeda, which needs money.) It includes the formation of Pakistan, torn bloodily out the side of India in 1947. That’s on Wikipedia as well.
The idea of fractals is that the big patterns of the world — geological, biological, or political — are formed by the accumulation of little fractals with the same pattern. I could say that the dynamics of this cat colony is similar to the Afghanistan dilemma. Individuals come and go, power structures come and go, but the same themes prevail. Cats “persist.”
Crowding my desktop, sticking their snouts in my coffee (it has cooled), peering into my face while I try to see past their heads with pointed ears, they are exasperating. Now they’ve turned their attention to the larger world, leaning on their elbows as though their front paws were thrust up kimono sleeves, their ears swiveling as they listen to the rain fall. If tomorrow is warm and bright, they’ll be outside.
