People who have lived with a personality-disordered individual can recognize one a mile away. We are held hostage to the whims, moods, and tantrums of someone who brings chaos and alarm wherever she goes. She will forget (or deny) anything she says when it’s convenient to. The rest of us will still be reeling days  Read the Rest…

You all know my neighbor Gwen by now. My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything. When it comes to gossip and goings-on, Gwen and I have pretty much got the neighborhood covered.  In spite of her tall fence, she seems to know a lot about what goes on to the southeast while  Read the Rest…

Grief.  It’s a place I visit.  I’ve been there so many times it feels like a familiar cabin in the woods, a place where my heart hurts and I cry without warning.  A film runs over and over, playing out a story.  Occasionally my mind refuses the story and tries to make it not have  Read the Rest…

Meal time is an exciting event in the lives of my cats.  When they were kittens, they engaged in extended periods of play, exploration, and swinging on curtains followed by restorative naps, and eating for growth and strength.  Now that they are cats, they engage in extended naps, brief periods of play if I play  Read the Rest…

It’s been pouring rain here in Seattle for about a week.  Not the usual mild Seattle showers and mist, but a New York City kind of rain when you actually use an umbrella which a true Seattleite never does.  People think it rains all the time in Seattle- fine, you go ahead and think that  Read the Rest…

How are we all doing?  When it gets like this, I can’t decide if I feel like watching Dr. Zhivago or Body Heat. In any case, I’ve had a quiet 20 hours without phone, TV or internet connection.  Since I got rid of TV cable a month ago–by choice—I rather expected to still be without  Read the Rest…

People always comment on how huge my cats are.  They are rescue cats, mutts, hefty survivors.  Since I work at home, they know how to work me for food and I am the first to admit that I am intimidated by them.  While my cats may be the size of farm animals, there’s a hint  Read the Rest…

One of my cats is called Freud because I like to give weighty names to my cats and because I am completely enamored of psychoanalysis.  I have travelled all over the world, but the five years I spent in analysis was the most fascinating journey of all. I put Freud, along with Darwin, Nietzsche and  Read the Rest…

During the warm weather, my cats come and go as they please.  They prefer doorman services, but they have cat doors: one from the house into the sun room and another from the sunroom to the outdoors.  I sometimes prop a house door open to spare them the onerous inconvenience of pushing through two flaps.   Read the Rest…

I always knew that one day one of my cats would pee on the Great Books: that ponderous, pretentiously leather –bound set from Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents bought in the 1960’s.    The exclusively male writers, chosen by Mortimer J Adler, include Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Plutarch, Aquinas, Newton, Kant, James, Darwin.  There are 52  Read the Rest…