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March 24, 1999 |
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i've got those rainy day we're bombing serbia blues |
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March 23, 1999 March 24, 1999
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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I woke up every hour and a half last night. Every time I woke up I checked the BBC news on WBUR to find out if the bombing had started yet. One of the jillion times I woke up I heard some radio commentator or other discussing the possibility that Serbia would retaliate by attacking the NATO forces in Bosnia. This did not make me feel warm and happy. I stayed awake for awhile tossing and turning. Not that losing sleep over war does anything at all to stop it... By the time the radio came on of its own accord to notify me that it was time to go wash dishes and litter boxes, I was deep in sleep. It took me awhile to regain enough consciousness to actually drive - especially since I skipped breakfast and coffee. There seem to be more litter boxes to wash today. Have we gotten that many more cats? Cosmo is going around jumping on every cat he can catch. This is not going over well with the other cats. He's such a cute orange tabby with an adorable pink nose and long magnificent ringed tail, I just want to cuddle him but he's not the cuddling type yet. He hissed at me when I walked past him to pick up the cat toy. Sadie, who is usually into playing, was not interested in chasing the cat toy today. Jazzpurr, who's a new guy sort of ruined the whole game by pouncing on and making off with the plastic pole. He watched carefully from on top of the cat gym and I could see the recognition in his eyes that the movement was coming from my hand waving the pole - that the strip of Polartec was not alive and not moving on its own. Between the time I saw his eyes change and when he grabbed it out of my hand, which was only a second or two, the other cats scattered. Game over. It was raining when I left but I decided I had to go back to the refuge to look for the mysterious swans I saw yesterday. They were too far away to identify definitively and the sun was in my eyes yesterday. There were a dozen of them with straighter necks than mute swans and it looked to me like they didn't have those beak knobs that the mute swans have. I was even more convinced they were something different went they took off with a raucous chorus of barking and hooting worthy of geese. I kind of thought they might be tundra swans, but like I said, I couldn't be sure. And what would a flock of tundra swans be doing here anyway? Unless that big southwest wind we had on Monday blew them up here from the Carolinas... Anyway, I drove directly to the spot where I had seen them. There were swans there all right. Three perfectly ordinary mute swans: two adults and a juvenile - a nuclear family. I looked around in several likely swan places but didn't see any more. So I guess yesterday's swans, whatever they were, will have to remain a mystery. When I told Nancy about this tonight she said that of course the ones today were just wearing knobbed masks to pretend to be mute swans. After my failure to find the mystery swans I toted Waiting to Fly with me to Starbucks. I'm almost finished with it and thought I could finish it today. Tom was there eating his lunch after class so I ended up talking to him for about an hour about last Thursday's poetry event, the decline of the English language at the hands of academics who write long paragraphs full of big words which turn out not to mean anything at all, and the Kosovo situation. Tom asked if I was worried about Bobby in Bosnia, which I sort of am but I also realize it would be a big strategic mistake for the Serbs to retaliate against the SFOR forces in Bosnia. I did hear on the radio that NATO had declared an air exclusion zone over Bosnia. Is that the same thing as a "no fly zone"? I think the rain is giving me a headache. |
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