One of my students (Jackson) recently inspired me to learn Brahms’ Intermezzo Opus 118 No. 2 in A.  It’s one of the most difficult pieces I have worked on in some time.  In recent years, I have done more sight reading than I have dug into juicy classical pieces.

Another of my students (Jenni) singlehandedly improved my sight reading skills by about 300% simply because she came in week after week with new Broadway music she had already learned; she didn’t need me to go over and over the vocal line with her, a process which allows me to pick up the accompaniment more or less at my leisure.  She had already saddled up and was ready to ride.  I read through piles of music with her and got to where I was no longer intimidated by any musical comedy composer except Stephen Sondheim.

This Brahms Intermezzo was compelling.  It has achingly beautiful melodic lines.  I got lost in them, happily playing the first two pages slowly over and over for weeks before I moved on to the middle section which featured one of those patches that snorts at whatever technique one brings to the music: in this case, massive chords that change with every beat and handfuls of accidental sharps including the annoying ones that fall on white keys.

In playing the piano, there is a compulsion to keep looking at the fingers as though we aren’t sure they are in the same place they were one beat ago.  Sometimes they’re not: after all there are 88 keys and we have only ten fingers and they do have a way of migrating. With some students, the hands spasm, as though the brain tells them a move is imminent, updated information to follow.  Some students hover over the keys, staying in perpetual motion so they are ready to move to wherever they eventually want to be.

In the Brahms, it was hard to move from chord to chord without looking at my fingers to remind myself where they were even though I knew they hadn’t moved anywhere in the last half a second.  It was humbling to watch me fumble through those eight measures because it reminded me of my students whose tiny pieces are a full eight measures long but who do the same thing.  This is how it feels, Teacher.

One of the reasons the piano is such a good first instrument is because the keys stay where they are. If the notes sound out of tune, it’s not your problem; it’s your piano tuner’s problem.  Neither the piano keys nor my fingers had gone anywhere when I was working on the Brahms but for a while, my mind couldn’t rest in that.  It was disorienting to feel over and over and over that I didn’t know where I was.  I worked at moving one finger at a time without looking at my hands; gradually my mind was able to let my fingers think as I moved through the chords and I was free to listen to what Brahms was up to.

My experience in psychoanalysis and in meditation has taught me to slow down and to pay attention to every moment; to let the moments unfold, one finger at a time.  I am not suggesting that I do this all the time even though it’s always an option.  Occasionally something compels me to this state. The glory of a complex piece like the Brahms where the melodies ache and the harmonies heave with passion is that if you pay attention, it’s a pleasure to play slowly and laboriously as much as to master it entirely.  One can get happily lost in it, one note at a time.

I was on my way to Traffic Court this morning when I thought, “I feel a blog coming on.”  When I got the speeding ticket, I didn’t get to talk enough about it because everyone had a story about their own ticket.  My friend Joan, the one with the theological chops, was 8 months pregnant; she asked the officer if he would time her contraction when he finished writing the ticket.  He tore it up.  Joan’s sister, Terry, had a hilarious ticket story involving an upset beet truck.  Other people’s stories were so much more interesting than mine.  But I have a blog, they don’t.

The first thing I have to say is that I got the ticket on my birthday, and two days after I had switched insurance companies. So that was awful.  The ticket was for $154.  That was a shock.  I was busted while zipping along Aurora on the east side of Queen Anne Hill.  That was just plain stupid since I see the speed traps every time I drive that road.  I was going 14 mph over the limit.  That’s full disclosure.  Never mind that a quarter of a mile later, I would have been only 4 mph over the speed limit.  That’s dissembling.

I pulled up the hill on Ward Street.  The policeman threw the ticket at me.  I was in enough shock to feel a little sorry for him.  What a job.  Everyone hates him.  “When constabulary duty’s to be done (to be done), a police man’s lot is not an happy one (nappy one).”

By the time I was back on the road, driving down the viaduct, I was sobbing.  I have been self-employed for 28 years.  I like to forget there is such a thing as Authority or that I would ever be subject to it.  I can’t remember what it feels like to have a supervisor.

I have gotten 4 tickets in my life.  Except for the time I was caught speeding through the Hanford nuclear site on my way to Walla Walla, I have gone to court.  My court date was this morning, three months after the incident.  I was coached by someone whose visits to Traffic Court are as routine as visits to the dry cleaners but who has never seen his insurance go up: dress well, don’t wear pity clothes; don’t make excuses, they have heard them all and they don’t care; be contrite, they never see contrition.

I said I didn’t think I could pull off contrition.  I could say I was ashamed with verisimilitude, not because I was, particularly, but because I am so familiar with that state that I can reproduce it easily.  I flush Shame Red when I get a notice for an overdue library book.  He suggested I apologize for wasting the court’s time.  That struck me as fatuous.  If  I felt apologetic for wasting the court’s time, I wouldn’t be there at all.

In the end, I dressed well.   Since I tend to blather away and make inappropriate jokes when I am nervous, I wrote the following on a piece of paper and practiced saying it: “I was going too fast.  I was not paying attention.  I have been driving carefully since the ticket and will continue to do so.”  I was going to write it on my hand but I thought that might look teenagery and we all know what kind of drivers they are.  When my name was called, I read it one last time and crammed it in my purse.

The Authority Figure was polite and easy-going.  I got a “deferred finding for infraction,” which means I did not have to pay the $154 for the ticket and my insurance company does not need to hear about it unless I get another ticket in the next year.  Then there will be hell to pay.  I did have to pay the “court fee” which he upped to $122.  The Court colludes with citizens to get insurance companies to pay city expenses.  That works for me.

I love getting comments on this web site but please don’t tell me your ticket stories.  This is my blog.

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 of jungle law in our domestic arrangements.

Freud chooses the menu. He has a urinary tract situation and needs special food; so in order to avoid fatal ingestions, everyone eats the same PH balanced, low magnesium food.   Freud sits at his bowl and looks piteous while his classic meow gets more insistent.  “I am ravenous.  How can you starve me like this?”  He asks.  I remember how he almost died from a blocked urethra, I look at his sweet face, and I give him a few more bites.

Winston, whose whine is loud and demanding, eats most of the food.  For the first eight weeks of his life, he was interested in only two things: nursing and sleeping.  He was the first of his litter to find Mom’s food dish and help himself. His little kitten stomach was so tight he could hardly toddle to bed where he fell over like, Liberty, the wooden dog.  Neutering didn’t help with these proclivities.  I mean, really, what else does a neutered male have? Winston still spends his life sleeping, eating, and instead of watching football, he watches for food.

Artemis, whose little “freep” sound becomes a scream any time her will is crossed, determines the nosebag schedule in the household.  Freud and Winston are fierce and fast eaters, well able to guard their bowls from each other.  But Artemis won’t eat with Neanderthals at her back, inching closer, hoping to score from her bowl.  She runs away and leaves them to it.

Artemis is a grazer.  She likes a little bit now, a little bit later.  Her food bowl travels around the house with me all day so it’s close to hand whenever she wants a nosh.  When I read in the morning, the bowl hides underneath a book where the other two can’t smell it if I leave my post for a minute.  There’s an eating station on the floor next to the computer.  There’s another next to my chair at the piano.  At 3:30, daily, Artemis appears next to the piano when I am teaching.

“You have a customer.”  One of my students said one day.  There was Artemis, her eyes boring through me, daring me to ignore her.

Sometimes I feel those eyes boring through walls.  I can be sitting quietly, minding my own business, when I feel unaccountably uncomfortable; feel something gnaw at me.  A small reconnaissance through the house will reveal Artemis sitting reproachfully where at this time yesterday, I gave her something to eat.  She says, “What the hell? Do we have to keep going over this?”

She likes to go outside after her late afternoon nibble and not come in until my bedtime.  Then she wants to eat.  She rattles the kibble as she extracts one piece after another, crunching them.  I put a pillow over my ears and then fall sleep before she finishes.   Winston and Freud are both onto the fact that there’s often food to be had on the east side of the bed.  Sometimes in the morning Artemis seems suspiciously hungry and Winston not hungry enough.

I go to elaborate lengths to make sure Artemis gets enough to eat.  She knows the drill: I close myself into the bathroom, turn on the fan, run some water, and flush the toilet.  Undercover of all the noise, I pop open a can of food.  (If you aren’t a cat owner, you might not know that cats can hear from two blocks away a can being opened in their kitchen.) When I emerge from the bathroom, she nails me with eyes that do not thank me for going to such great lengths on her behalf.  “I’ll eat that now,” she says. “But I would have liked it earlier.”

I worried about how another person would negotiate the politics of the family when I traveled for six weeks one summer.   I was two weeks into the trip, and checking my e-mail at Sterling Memorial Library on the Yale University Campus, right under a Research Only sign, when I read an e-mail from Barb, the live-in cat sitter.  “All is well,” she re-assured me.  “But the cats certainly seem to be hungry all the time.”

I sat back, laughing and relieved. “They aren’t hungry.”  I wrote back.  “They’ve gotten comfortable with, and are now ruthlessly exploiting you.”  I scarcely thought about the cats for the rest of the trip.  When I got home, they looked at me and said, “You’re home.  What’s there to eat?”

I’m on my second hour of Free Cell solitaire.  Ok, my third, maybe.  I really don’t keep track.  But here’s the thing: there are Life Lessons in Free Cell solitaire.  I’m not saying I play it to find them;  but I do think about brain wiring when I play, especially since I figured out that you can backtrack by hitting Control Z and take another path.

So there’s that Life Lesson: we can always try things differently even if we can’t delete life choices by backtracking.  Wouldn’t that be something?  Actually I think there are belief systems that say this is possible and I know people who think they have deleted their choices by pretending that they never did the things they did, and expect me to play along.  I suppose we all function that way to a degree.  Some modalities call it denial.  (Reference the first three sentences of this post.)

It may be more fruitful to recognize mistakes and disappointments; regret them and cry with vexation; then work our way down to the bottom of the box and scoop out the hope.  Did you ever think about why hope is at the bottom of Pandora’s Box?  All the difficult things in life fly right out in your face, there’s no need to mine for them.   Hope just lays there at the bottom.  It doesn’t pressure you.  It’s there waiting once you get quiet enough to allow it in.

In Free Cell Solitaire, I get intrigued by the way the most counter-intuitive routes seem to be what win the game.  All the aces and most of the two’s are up one column but the way through this game is to dismantle the column over to the side which is packed with a bunch of middle cards.

So many things fall into place when we stop insisting things have to work a certain way.  When we imagine we know how it’s supposed to be.  Does anyone remember the days before there were self-help books?  However did we manage before there were human beings just like ourselves, grubbing along just like we were, who decided they were experts?  One of Adam Phillip’s titles is Terrors and Experts. The title is almost all you need.  Where there are “experts,” there is terror that you might be living your own life wrong;  and that out there is someone who can give you the correct answers.

You are reading the writing of someone who filled in all the blanks and thought through all the questions of Finding a Job You Can Love, closed the book, decided to be a private music teacher and never looked back in 28 years except for the occasional fantasy of working in a used book store with no children’s section and no sound system. Aside from the anomaly of that one book, I have found that self-help books miss the point.

As did William F Buckley in a little quibble with me that made my Republican father proud.   Buckley had some kind of eye-hand visual difficulty that made reading music challenging so he devised a little system of colors, codes and symbols that helped him when he played the piano.  I read about it in an issue of Sheet Music magazine and thought it clever.  He ended his article by asking music teachers if they thought his was a viable method that we might want to use in teaching.

I responded by saying no.  If his method were to be published, it would languish amongst all the other methods that are out there.   The important thing, I wrote, was his ingenuity in custom designing a method for his own particular learning patterns.  I suggested that its value was its congruency with his own mind although I regret to say I actually used the phrase “in touch with yourself.”  The notion of students creating their own peculiar methods that followed their own idiosyncratic ways of conceptualizing music was what needed to be promoted.  Now that would be different.

So Buckley sent me a private note saying that he wished to quibble with me over my comment about being in touch with himself.  Rather than understand his own mind better, he said his method helped him “know the mind of Bach.”  Hmmm.  If you say so.

So in conclusion, the Queens and Kings are never going to line up logically, this little essay does not justify all the Free Cell Solitaire I play, and a while back, I saw Buckley’s piano method book languishing on a shelf at Capitol Music.

When did everyone start talking about Core Muscles?  Was it around the same time everything we put on our bodies became Product?  I only ask because my back problems became intolerable in the late1980’s, but it was twenty years before someone told me that I needed to suck up my gut—only the terminology was “engage your core.”   By then everyone I knew had been raving for some time about Pilates and I had only just gotten clear that Product referred to pretty much anything for the hair or face that was expensive.   Suave is still just shampoo.

An earnest young beauty operator once told me in all sincerity that the Product she had put in my hair had Memory.  I thought that was rather a weighty concept to ascribe to hair gel.  But I don’t argue with the girls at the beauty school or at the spa.   I already feel like the Pity Client because I wash my face with soap and water.

Another young woman asked me if I had been on the pill when I was younger because her aunt was about my age, she had used the pill; and she had that same fuzz on her cheeks.  I was alarmed because I had never noticed fuzz on my face.

“How old is your aunt?”

“Oh like you—in her 30’s.”

“Is it that obvious, this. . . fuzz?”

“Oh no, not really, It’s not like you can see it at all from far away.”

That was a relief.  But the larger point she was trying to make is that she could recommend Product.  Not a product.  Product.  It sounds like there is only one Product, like those belief systems that tell you there is only one God.  And Product purports to do just about anything God can do on top of which, it probably smells better.

I rather enjoy being older.  The more interesting aspects of life now are the ones that Product can’t fix.  And I wouldn’t want to.  I love the wrinkles and crinkles around my eyes; they remind me that through a lot of difficult times, I have never forgotten how to laugh.

There’s a richness to life I was too busy to notice back when I first bought a Lady Schick.  And nowadays there isn’t much leg hair to shave anymore.  Of course some of the leg hair seems to have gravitated to my face and I am not talking about fuzz.  They are what my friend with the theological chops, Joan, calls stray eyebrows.  Or as she might put it, except of course she didn’t, I did:  Hair that strayed from the flock of the perfectly coiffed eyebrow devoid of the one true Product.

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 a few others, in the category of great minds whose ideas have so permeated western thinking that we don’t even realize much of what we call conventional wisdom began with their ideas.  They are like those prolific songwriters we’ve barely heard of who have written our favorite songs.

Sigmund Freud was a courageous thinker and the originator of theories and methods that were just a starting point for where we are today with everyone and the gate post being in one of hundreds of therapy modalities at one time or another.  I happen to love looking at the world psychoanalytically.

That’s my gratuitous rave about psychoanalysis when what I started to write about is my cat.

Freud, the cat, lives up to his name in many ways.  The word Freude means “joy” and this bright orange tabby is one sunny, relentlessly optimistic cat.  He nearly died of a blocked urethra when he was a year old; though I was a complete wreck, Freud purred and charmed his way through five nights at the animal hospital.

Freud, the cat, actually has an analytic practice in the neighborhood.  When it’s time for him to go to work, I let him out the side door.  He trots across the yard and disappears under the raspberry bushes and through the fence.  Shortly thereafter I start hearing primal screams.   The times I have gone to investigate, I have seen Freud sitting quietly on the edge of the neighbor’s yard, calmly watching BooBoo, the cat with the eating disorder, in the throes of transference.  She hisses and spits, her back fur grows three inches; she twists herself into a parenthesis and walks sideways, never coming any closer than three feet—just about the right boundary for a consulting room.  Freud sits motionless, watching and listening with great attention and curiosity.  Once I interrupted the session but after the repressive look I got from Herr Doktor, I never tried that again.

Cats in a multiple cat household are rather good at group therapy.   When one of mine comes in with an enormous rat hanging out of his mouth, the other two are right there, full of attention and support.  Together they work through their rivalry and competition while losing the rat behind the refrigerator and finding him a week later.  When one of the cats is hurt or frightened, the others rally round with alert concern.  When one goes on a binge, eats too fast and subsequently tosses his breakfast, the others clean it up.

Cats are masters of the dream work.  Or at any rate, one can make that supposition, seeing that they sleep the better part of every 24 hours.  Freud sleeps alone at night while my other two cats, Winston and Artemis, wedge up against me in bed, pinning me in place for the duration.  In the morning, when Winston is having his post prandial gin and cigar and Artemis is outside on the hunt, Freud curls up on me, purring, and interprets his dreams from the night before.

I was in the middle of a project when I ran out of those little tab thingys for hanging files so I buzzed over to Office Depot for supplies.  The place looked like a storm had blown through it.  Of course. Tomorrow is the first day of school for kids in the Seattle School district.  I am a teacher but my work life isn’t organized around the school year.  I am one of that I hope not dying breed, the neighborhood piano/voice teacher.  My teaching studio is in the tax deductible part of my home.

I love teaching because I am fascinated with Learning.  We are always learning something; it’s a question of what.  I did well in school because I was bright but this is what I learned: to survive and do well in school.  That’s not the kind of learning I want to promote.  I want my students to find some thread of interest and excitement in music that captures them in such a way they can’t get enough of it. A piano student gets excited about Latin rhythms or jazz and this (finally) provides him with a compelling reason to learn to count.   Or somehow a voice student stumbles onto the richness available in one single tone, and comes into an awareness of the mystery of the human voice; and the warm up becomes magical, not just something you get through so you can sing a song.

It has been my experience and my observation that learning begins with desire.  A lot of what passes for Teaching is what I call Interfering.  Interfering with Desire. Desire is the engine that fuels learning.  People’s natural desires get folded away in a closet because the desire to please or to survive supplants it.   We memorize a bunch of stuff in order to pass a test, to get a grade, to graduate, to get a job, to get a promotion, to make more money, to have more prestige.  Each step removes us further from the little kernel of desire that defines us as persons.

I am not suggesting that if we pay attention to the little kernel of desire that we might not take a similar route as outlined above.  My point is that we won’t lose track of ourselves along the way.  We won’t be like that guy in the Talking Heads song, looking at his life and asking, “How do I work this? How did I get here?”

I pay attention to my students’ desires.  I think of their minds as maps showing me places I haven’t been.  But I have been down a lot of roads and I have an idea about the terrain of the tentative new roads we will travel together.  I am fascinated by the many different ways there are to conceptualize something, and by the many ways that we all express what we want and who we are.  None of those ways are Right, but any of them are worth thinking about, worth exploring and experiencing.

I start most voice lessons by saying, “Sing a note that’s comfortable and easy, any pitch, and any vowel.”  That note, that kernel, becomes the launch pad for the rest of the lesson.  One effortless note that starts with who you are, where you are, and what you want.  I start my own practicing that way and I never found singing this rapturous when I was a student trying to please a teacher.

Where’s your note right now?

I am an Anglophile.  It started early in my life and was enhanced by finding an address for my Cornish relations in my great Aunt Ann’s address book after she died in the 1970’s.  I wrote to my distant cousin Hazel, then 68 years old, and we began to correspond.  Since then I have made half a dozen trips to England, met Hazel, and the next two generations of family, and have been personally escorted all over Cornwall and Devon.

My most recent trip to England was made the old fashioned way: by transatlantic crossing.  I sailed on the Queen Mary 2 from Brooklyn to Southampton.  Hazel died many years ago and the next generation, Pamela and Mervyn, had recently left not just Cornwall, but the village my family has lived in since before anyone can remember; and moved to England, settling in Somerset.  (When the Cornish cross the River Tamar into Devon, they say they are going to England.) So I went to visit them in Burnham on Sea.  For two weeks they ran me all over Somerset and environs.

I have longed to see Hay-On-Wye, The Town of Books, ever since I first read about their annual literary festival.   Pamela planned a two day excursion into Wales and Herefordshire to accommodate my desire.  It was raining when we arrived and every book in the town smelled damp.  The literary festival had ended a month earlier and the town was still exhausted.  The shop keepers in the 30 some bookshops looked like they hated the sight of tourists.

“Do you see a lot of famous people at the festival?” I asked in one shop.

“Yeah, some.” She paused. “A lot who think they are famous.”

When I travel with Pamela and Mervyn, I generally go off on my own and buzz around according to my peculiar interests while they amble about at a much slower pace and generally end up in a Marks and Spencers.  Then we meet for tea.  But on this rainy, dismal day in Hay, they were nowhere to be found when I decided I needed cake.

Hay is full of little passageways that have been promoted to streets.  I followed one of these to The Old Stables Tea Room (Hay’s Best Kept Secret, Award Winning Everything.) It was a low-ceilinged, damp little place with one side taken up by a fireplace.  Old photos, paintings, railroad timetables, telegrams, and kitchen and farm equipment hung on the walls.  Visually it was overwhelming.  Physically it was a bit challenging.  I didn’t want to drop all my damp possessions on someone’s tea while trying to read an attribution.  Only an American would want to know what absolutely everything in the place was.  I sat in an old  chair at a white clothed table, smelled the fresh flowers, and ordered a pot of muddy Welsh tea and a piece of coffee walnut cake.

The slice of cake was both overwhelming and challenging.  It came, festooned, on a charger.  Someone had gone nuts with the chocolate and walnut syrup and had done curls and swoops all over the plate, followed by a thick dusting of powdered sugar, and fancy cuts of orange and strawberries along the edges.  In the center of the plate were two thick slabs of frosting with an inch of cake in between.  A large flowering pod of some kind –a walnut?—perched atop the entire presentation.

At first I could only stare.  I would have been happy with a piece of cake on a small plate.  Maybe a paper doily.  In any case, the frosting was worth it all.  And I dried off.  They thanked me for my custom; I went away smiling, trying to work out what that meant.  I brought the pod home to Seattle and still don’t know what it is.

The surprise of the day was the Grafton Travel Lodge.  Pamela had merely been trying to find something inexpensive and she found something delightful: an exquisitely clean, minimalist hostelry with charming pub next door.  My room had a bed, with duvet and sheet, one chair, one desk, a clotheshorse, two dustbins, and a flat screen TV with seven channels.  There were three pillows, two towels, one bathmat, one tiny bar of soap, two plastic glasses, a hot water heater, two porcelain mugs, two spoons, tea and coffee bags, and a two little tubs of  Moo juice—that non-dairy stuff that, ominously, does not need to be refrigerated.

The sheets were crisp, the kettle worked superbly, and the chair was more comfortable than the ones at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.   I thought, well, what more do I really need?  It turns out that I had forgotten to pack shampoo and as horrid as the Moo juice was, there still wasn’t enough of it for my tea.

The fellow at Reception did not look like, but sounded exactly like, Hugh Grant.  I manufactured reasons to engage him in conversation just to hear his voice.  Our first conversation went like this:

“Do you happen to have any little shampoos?”

“No, so sorry, it’s how we keep costs down, you see.”

“Oh, that’s fine, I’ll manage.”

“I can give you as many of those little soaps as you could possibly want.”   They do so want to please, the British.

“Thanks, I’ll be just fine.  But do you suppose I could possibly have a couple more of those milk thingys?”  I get very polite around the British.

He brightened. “Now that I can do!”

He disappeared into a side room but came out on the back swing of the door. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but when you said ‘a couple,’ did you mean just two or were you wanting a whole handful?”

Busted. I laughed, “Yes, actually, I was hoping for a whole handful!”

He grinned, “Yes, I thought so.  When I say ‘a couple,’ it means ‘all I can possibly get!’”

He disappeared and came back with cupped hands full.

This story involves two rodents if you count opossums as rodents which they aren’t; they’re marsupials.   That they are related to kangaroos doesn’t make me love them.  They still look like giant rats.

I found the aforementioned opossum, dead, under my apple tree on the morning I was leaving for a long weekend at a friend’s ranch in Montana.   My friend Joan was coming to cat sit.  All I wanted was to get out of town.  I decided to pretend that Joan wouldn’t be bothered by a dead marsupial in plain view out the big picture window of my front room.  I went to Montana, and didn’t think about home for four days.   But in the Billings airport, I started to have conscience nibbles.   Joan is my friend with Theological Chops; she could have told me that I was nibbling a sin of omission.

Back home, Seattle was sweating out a string of days in the 90’s.   There’s a joke that when the sun shines in Seattle, we all wonder what we’ve done to be punished like this.  It’s an old, stupid joke but it has some relevance to my story.  Joan had left a note saying that she had disposed of a dead opossum she had found under the apple tree.  She had scooped it into a plastic bag and put it in the garbage in time for that same day’s collection.  I smiled.  Good old Joan, what a great friend.

Then Freud came in with a welcome home gift for me. With such heat, it was unusual for one of my cats to have found the energy to bring a rat into the house; unusual for him to have found a rat at all at high noon.  Freud was still a young cat and up til then he had only brought in moles which he also manages to find in broad daylight.  I don’t mind the moles because they don’t have icky long tails.  Plus they are singers: little vocalists with jazz hands.  In any case, this was Freud’s first rat and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it so he let it loose to crawl under the LazyBoy chair while I was sitting in it. I jumped up, flipped the chair over and watched the rat scurry into the kitchen and wriggle behind the oven.  Freud was delighted.  His little friend was entertaining.  What would he do next?

Here’s what his little friend did next: he spent the next five days eluding me and my three cats.  The evidence suggests that he scuttled back and forth from behind the oven to behind the bathroom sink, helping himself to the bits of peanut butter in the traps I had set, but without springing the traps.

On the fifth night as I was getting ready for bed, I saw Artemis agitating in the bathroom, frantically trying to get under the sink.   Artemis lives up to her name, the goddess of the hunt.  When she’s on the hunt, she’s relentless, and she always gets her man.  I went to sleep that night with confidence that the rat would be dead in the morning.

So I knew instantly what my bare feet had stepped on when I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.  There was the obligatory shriek, but truly, I was mostly relieved that the rat was no longer operative.  I picked it up with double plastic bags, and took it to the outdoor cans.

There was a breathtakingly foul odor by the cans.  I thought it might have to do with the evolution of normal garbage in the abnormal heat, but a bit of exploration revealed a decomposing opossum in the yard waste container.

My thoughts came in no particular order:  Oh my god.  She put it in the wrong can. The garbage isn’t collected again for three days.  Oh god.  It’s 4 in the morning.  We’re having a heat wave. I’ll have to tip it into the right can.  Ah geez.

In reviewing all these events and thinking about my sin of omission, I came up with a penance:  Do ten “Hail Marys” with jazz hands and write 100 times: “When I leave my home to house-sitters,  I will label my garbage cans.”

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.  In any case, they have a lot of freedom during the summer.

In the autumn, however, the house goes into lockdown and the cats have to go through security in order to come inside.  This usually goes into effect after the first rodent incident.  I won’t tell you how I developed what might just reach the level of a rat phobia; I want money for that story.  But I have several junior stories.

I had been asleep for several hours one night when a growl from the hall woke me.  I fumbled for the light.  There in the door were the three cats.  Artemis and Freud were dancing with interest around Winston, the 18 lb tabby, who had an enormous rat dangling from his mouth.  He had it by its middle so it was drooping on either side of his mouth, a surreal moustache.   I recognized the peculiar quality of his Proprietary Growl.  Every cat owner knows it.  It’s the one that says, “I caught this; it’s mine. Back off Whisker Boy!”

I slowly and tentatively put my feet on the floor.  Winston and entourage moved out of sight, heading toward the living room where there’s a piano to crawl into, a closet with a file cabinet to hide behind, a couch to gnaw into the heart of, and a Lazy Boy chair from whose mechanical workings I have expelled any number of mice by nudging them along with a chopstick.  I put on shoes and bravely advanced to the edge of the living room.  The posse was crowded around the Lazy Boy.

I thought, “I hate this. I really do.  I need my sleep.”  I backed up, went into the bathroom, found a half a Xanax, and went back to bed, closing the bedroom door firmly behind me.  At 4:00, Freud and Winston were keeping watch at the opening between the refrigerator and the wall.  I took the rest of the Xanax and went back to bed.

When I finally got up at 7, the house was quiet; the cats were snoozing in their various approved sleeping quarters.  I woke them up and made them walk around with me while I tried to get a reading on where they might have left last night’s reluctant guest.  They were completely uncooperative and in addition, did not seem hungry.  I tentatively went about my morning routine, thinking that I should be on the lookout for uneaten body parts rather than an entire animal.

My house has a circular floor plan and what’s called a Pullman bathroom.  There are two doors on either end– like on a train car.  I end up using the bathroom as a thoroughfare for just about any journey I take in the house.  So by 10:30 that morning, I had gone in and out of the bathroom dozens of time.  It was around then that I started thinking something smelled a little ripe.  Then I noticed blood on the shower curtain.

I slowly pulled back the curtain to reveal the rat lying in fetal position in the middle of the tub.   I froze.  My heart was the first body part to move again and it started to race.

“You can do this,” I told myself in between deep breaths.

I dragged a garbage can into the bathroom.   I put on a pair of latex gloves.  I put a pair of leather workman gloves over the latex ones.   I covered my right hand with two plastic grocery bags.  My plan was to rip open the shower curtain as fast as I could, reach down, grab the rodent, and wrap the bags over him, chuck him in the garbage and haul the garbage out to the curb all without thinking about it too much.

I ripped open the shower curtain.  The rat leapt up!  It scuttled frantically down the length of the tub.  My scream caused the shower curtain hooks to rattle.  I pulled one door closed, exited the bathroom and slammed the other door shut and groped my way to the telephone.

I called my neighbors who have rescued me from any number of rat invasions over the years.  Usually David comes over.  It’s like a scene from Rear Window:  I dial the number.  Through my front window I see David answer the phone, then he looks across the street and waves at me.  We converse, hang up.  I stand by the phone, wringing my hands, hardly breathing, and watch him walk through his house, and go out his back door, all the while putting on gloves.  He comes across the street and picks up the offenders.  I never see them again.   He’s a one man Rat Mafia.

On this particular occasion Grace came over with a bucket.  She went into the bathroom as calm as a surgeon and emerged 20 seconds later.

“Wasn’t it there?” I asked wildly.

“No, it was there,” she said.

“Did you get it?”

“Oh yes, it’s right here.  It’s a little worse for wear.  But there’s some blood and a few tracks in the tub,” she sounded almost apologetic for leaving me with such a mess.

“Oh, Grace, thank you.  It’s okay; I can clean it up as long as I don’t actually look at it.”

She laughed kindly.  She’s a saint.

I threw out the tub rug.  I laundered the shower curtain, the liner, the floor rug.  I wiped down not only the tub and shower, but every inch of the bathroom, floor to ceiling; first with bleach, then hot water and soap and did a final finish of rubbing alcohol.

And I closed the cat doors for the season.