Journal of a Sabbatical

April 4, 2001

sam small at the sink

Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society

Today's Bird Sightings:
Kevin's yard
white-throated sparrow (3)
black-capped chickadee (4)
eastern phoebe (heard but not seen)

Today's Reading: A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 by Bayard Taylor

Today's Starting Pitcher: Hideo Nomo (a.k.a. Tornado Boy) - Wow! A no-hitter in his Red Sox debut!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm listening to the Red Sox on the radio as I'm trying to write today's entry and getting more and more into the longer Hideo Nomo goes without a hit. I finally abandon the entry and stand next to my radio for the 8th and 9th innings. Woohoo! Hideo Nomo no-hits the Baltimore Orioles in his Red Sox debut. How cool is that? Cats, navy dudes, veggie subs, coffee, birds, and nieces pale in comparison. For a day that started out with oversleeping and skipping breakfast, it ended up pretty darn good.

The old salts were convinced I had been summoned by President Bush to get our guys and our plane back from China. Gee that's a much more interesting excuse for being late than sleeping through the alarm. Roy had the food dishes almost done when I got there. As I set to washing the remaining food dishes, I felt something suspicious moving under the sink near my right foot. There's a sheet hanging down to hide all the under sink junk so all I see when I look down is a ripple in the sheet. Again something swipes at me. I lift up the sheet. Savannah! Yikes. She's just lying in wait there for the next victim. Good thing she couldn't get her claws through my shoe. She takes off for some other place to hide and before I put the sheet back down I notice Bianca is hiding behind the vacuum cleaner.

I think Bianca has the right idea. The cats are hissy and antagonistic today. Seamus is going around bothering all the other cats and stirring up trouble until Kendra finally puts him back in his cage, which he of course immediately tries to break out of, rattling the doors and meowing to wake the dead. Lots of hissing and meowing. But as usual, Miss Newburyport is able to sleep through it all. I think that's how she copes with the fact that there are other cats in the world when she would dearly love to be the only one. She just tunes out.

Roy likes to memorize things and recite them to keep his mind young I guess. Oliver Wendell Holmes advised learning Greek to stave off the ravages of old age on the mind, but Roy's poems are much funnier. He's memorized a whole series of those Sam Small poems and today he's reciting the one about how Sam Small got separated from the British troops invading Boston (1775 and all that) because his boot lace came untied and unwittingly gave Paul Revere the info he needed to alert the minutemen at Lexington and helped spread the alarm. It's a good thing the litter boxes are unbreakable because I'm laughing so hard I keep dropping them. Roy gets to the most dramatic and silly line and suddenly forgets what comes next. He starts laughing so hard he can barely stand up. The whole place is waiting for the next line, all work has ceased, and he's leaning his head on my shoulder laughing. I swear even the cats are waiting. Roy finally remembers the line and finishes the recitation with a flourish and we all keep laughing like maniacs. There's nothing like a little Sam Small at the sink to liven up your day.

The community litter boxes are the dirtiest I've seen them in awhile. The one at the end of the credenza has about 25 pounds of litter in it and about 25 gallons of pee. Yuck. Louise went to pick it up and thought there was a cat in it, it was so heavy. And cats have managed to spray pee on the cover too so I have to wash the whole thing. Sounds like time for another Sam Small recitation.

Two new cats today. Reebok who has adorable blue eyes and looks a little bit like La Madre's former cat Crystal, and Shadow who was adopted awhile back and has been returned because her person moved and his new landlord suddenly ordered him to get rid of the cat by 11:00 AM. I kind of hope the guy finds a new apartment before Shadow gets adopted again. Curses on his landlord.

I haven't convinced the relevant pop server to surrender the cat shelter's mail to the dusty laptop yet and I need to allow enough time for a lunch and shower, not to mention coffee, all of which I skipped this morning, before I drive to Groton, so I don't even attempt to fiddle with it today. By the time I get my veggie sub at Angelina's I am so hungry that I fall upon it like an animal and devour every last shred of lettuce. Yup, guess I should've had breakfast. I can feel the caffeine withdrawal starting but have trouble finding a parking space on State Street because it seems like every business in town is getting a delivery from some major sized truck or other. By the time I get the coffee, State Street has returned to normal. Nary a delivery truck in sight. That was weird. Still not a whole lot of parking spaces, though. Someone follows me to my car and sits impatiently with the blinker on waiting for me to surrender my space. Gee, it's worse than the parking lot at the Burlington Mall.

I keep feeling a pull toward the empty shell of Olde Port Book Shop even though I know it's empty and I've just spent a pile of money on antiquated books last week anyway. Not to mention my impending poverty as my nest egg shrinks at like 11% a day. I wish high-tech employment beckoned me in the same way as antiquated books...

Lizzy claims she's rich today because some small number of shares of Texaco she was given for her fifth birthday are now worth something. "I''m not as rich as you, though, AJ" says she. To which I reply "I'm not as rich as I was yesterday or the day before or the day before that..." Lizzy's really hoarse, sounds like she's got a cold. She says she lost her voice in Social Studies class this afternoon. A couple of hours later her voice comes back to normal so probably it's not a cold but allergy to Social Studies. She's telling me how much she wants a dog. A dog? I point out that dogs are a lot of work. She claims that's what she wants, the work: to walk it twice a day, train it, clean up after it, feed it...

When Andrea gets home, she claims to want a dog too, though it's not the work that appeals to her. She also claims Grandma promised that AJ (that would be me) would finish typing her creative story for school. Oh good, just when my wrist is aching from using the dusty laptop and I don't have bifocals with me and I can barely follow the lines she's drawn marking the revisions and Grandma has also promised that I know how to fix some weirdness that Word is doing with capitalizing the first word of every line .... Where does Grandma get the notion I am a Word expert? I don't' use it. I pride myself on keeping my Mac Microsoft-free. The only time I use stuff from the beasts of Bellevue is on the Hungarians' computers or on the dusty laptop but even there I'm trying to replace as much as I can with better more reliable more comprehensible non-Microsoft stuff... and I've inexplicably, well semi-explicably, started pronouncing it "Meecrosoft" and "meecroscope" and "Meecronesia"... Gee, I wonder where that came from?

Lizzy wants to know if I've been anywhere exciting lately. In the last two weeks? Well, the cat shelter is pretty exciting. No, she wants to hear about my travels. I ask Andrea where I've been that's exciting. To my surprise she says China and then Antarctica. She changes her mind on Antarctica because, she says "You weren't really on land very much. You were on the boat." I vainly argue that I landed quite frequently on land but she's not buying it. She claims the picture I gave her of me standing on the Antarctic continent with penguins and whale bones and ice was really taken on the boat with a backdrop. I think she's kidding.

I start reading aloud the blurb from the arts camp brochure exaggerating how the arts improve one's life. Lizzy is vastly entertained by this and starts reminiscing about how I used to read aloud to Andrea in Mrs. Reed's living room while she was having her piano lesson in the other room and she'd hear my voice drifting out with tales of Snow White and Rose Red (and that nasty dwarf who called everybody a crack-brained sheep head). She suggests that I should make reading aloud tapes for money. I remind her that I made one of that very Snow White and Rose Red story for Andrea one time but neither of them remembers the tape. Andrea denies that she ever had such a tape but I tell her I know she did because she called me up and left a message on my voice mail "I heareded Wilbur on that tape!" She has no memory of this but she does remember my reading the story to her at Mrs. Reed's and several other places. And all three of us remember how terrified we were when I read The Red Shoes to them.

Three white-throated sparrows liven up the back yard, which still has a fair amount of snow left. More than mine. However, it's still light out when I go home so spring is really just around the corner. Or at least the corner where I photographed this window box in Newburyport. Egad, I feel like I've covered half the state in search of spring today.