Stevie and Joey: A Tale of two kitties

When my old mother cat Camillia, daughter of Emily the original mother cat, gave birth to what would be two of her very last four kittens, I named them "Stevie" and "Joey." One, Stevie, was very sociable and the other, Joey, very independent. At first they were friends and played together as kittens will, but when they turned adolescent their fights became more and more intense. Joey would disappear for days; Stevie took over the yard. Then we had to go to Milwaukee and live with my daughter and son-in-law, which required neutering everybody. Stevie was around, Joey wasn't, so Stevie got neutered and Joey didn't. Joey never did turn up for our departure--he'd been gone for a week when we left for Milwaukee. I thought we would never see him again.

Over the next five months Stevie became an indoor cat. He lived in a house full of other dogs and cats and lost his shyness of strangers and became fully domesticated. When we returned March 30th, the snow still on the ground, there was Joey waiting for us! He had grown into an enormous, muscle-bound tomcat with a big head and a slowly swishing tail and yellow eyes that watched us all from a distance, ready to dart for cover. He must have lived in the empty house's cellar all winter. He looked very healthy and fit. I will not mention details of the ensuing encounters between the two brother cats and former litter-mates, only conclude Stevie became terrified of Joey, who was twice his size, and would go to any extent to avoid him, and Joey would go near nobody but me and Cheena, his dearly beloved and well remembered surrogate mother. Camillia eyed Stevie and Joey equally with the same cool eye of the eminently ordained matriarch and treated them both the same, with tolerant disdain. Cheena loved them both, but especially Joey.

Joey prowls around and lets me feed him now. He comes in through my window in the wee hours of the morning and eats the cat food I have there for him. He appears to be leading a very successful life (one can only imagine)for miles around, for he disappears for days at a time. I do celebrate his life. As for Stevie, he has the house and garden but he is always on the watch for his bigger, more muscly, more natural brother, and is cautious about where he goes at all times.

CHIMNEY-SWEEP

I forgot to tell you the chimney-sweep is coming.
He'll scrape the inside where the stuff accumulates,
And warn us not to burn a fire too slow and cold
When the weather's such and such,
And how every now and then we'd best to let it roar
And burn out chunks of stuff we'd best not have in there.
Let it be hot as hell now and then, he'll repeat
For it's the best thing of all he knows,
How the stuff builds up and ignites when you're least looking,
And there goes your chimney.
I called him up and he's coming over.
I'll let him put back the pipe I've had apart this year.

WELCOME MAT

I

There the limbs are spread to welcome in the light
But I'll not spread my arms for you, or wait
A single extra second for your face
To turn and look for one lost lingering trace
Of love on mine. Instead you'll find there hate
And loathing for a heart so cold and tight
And hard it never once would let me in;
But let my virtue languish into sin
Where courage, faith, forgiveness and their kin
Were locked inside the box beside my bed
To keep as souvenirs until I'm dead
And all the trees with light on them turn red.
You can keep your love, if you call it that,
This endless treading on my welcome mat.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning

"A King is supposed to have all that he needs without having to worry about anything in his late years. Yet King Lear, in Act 3, Scene 2, cried out pitifully: "I am a man / More sinned against than sinning." Although Lear has made a huge mistake in the first scene of the play in dividing up his kingdom and banishing his two dearest people, the sins his two other ungrateful daughters have done him is far greater than the extent of Lear's wrongs."

I don't know who wrote this, but I give full credit to the person on directessays.com who did because they put it well, King Lear's dilemma, which I have often related to my own. I once, or maybe twice, and possibly thrice have felt more sinned against than sinning. It is not the reason I picked this play as the one I love the best, but I do too have daughters, and though it was originally The Fool I identified with in this play (and he disappears in Act Three), there have been times I have identified with many more of the characters--Cordelia, Kent, even Goneril and Regan--especially when my aged, alienated and alienating father came to live with me--even the messengers. A mother is often the messenger.

Anyway, it is Lear himself I seemed to be echoing this morning as I explained to one daughter in reference to another, that there was a time when I too definitely felt "more sinned against than sinning." In my family the Stoic way, swallowing the drama of the emotional traumas that beset us all--see William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy, rather than "working it through," is often how we deal with disillusionment and hurt, and loss of innocence, rather than picking the scab of painful memory and keeping it current. Yes, surely I too did once feel much more the victim, the one more sinned against than sinning.

What is required of one who would move on, when one has been more sinned against than sinning, is to think of it as being beyond the realm of what one has control of, and not letting it concern you ("God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.") As the author of the above book cited, William Irvine, wrote me recently in a letter exchange, the AAA prayer is basically based on Stoic principles, accepting rather than continually regurgitating the fact that "I have been a man more sinned against than sinning." We are all victims in this life of that which we cannot control, and deciding those things which we cannot control (past, present, future trauma) are simply not of our concern may be our best way of all of viewing them. "Spun of pain and sorrow bought/Death is but an ugly thought" I wrote once in a poem when I was sixteen, trying to deal with the death of my grandmother. So too, perhaps, are the thoughts that we have been more sinned against than sinning--just thoughts that need not be beleaguered.

To commit or not: excerpt from a letter to a friend on inertia

I have found that the time after the struggle of keeping life and limb alive, my own and my children's, has been most difficult. Apparently I have needed that struggle as a context for creativity, and finding it gone has precluded to some extent new creations. So when I hear you say you are getting ready to or are in the process of or have indeed found a way to slough off commitments (as Julia might say), I think of King Lear and who loves me best, and wonder about the nature of commitments. I believe I do have mine still, and that creation itself is needed to feed commitment, and vise versa. I would love to read a new epic with Saladin and King Richard as CEOs by you, and even more find myself writing a new epic about the story of my ancestors--and finish the painting, and finish a half-dozen other projects mouldering about in their neatly filed dusty piles.