It’s my last full day on the island, my least favorite day in the weeks I spend here. It’s the day I clean the Buddha House. That’s part of the deal, leaving it as clean as you found it. In my case, it’s usually cleaner than I found it because I have the standards of an earth type, not the air and fires who come to meditate and don’t seem to notice rice crusted to plates and soy sauce smeared on the table. When I got here a week ago, I told Tommie that I had never seen the Buddha House this clean. She said no one had stayed in it since I was last there.

Windhorse, the retreat center and the Buddha House in particular, feel like a second home. For the past three years I have come for a week four times a year. The drive is familiar, the routine comforting. The sounds and smells evoke a quiet joy.

The sounds are principally the wind and the birds with occasional barking of dogs and braying of goats across the road as well as the sound of piano and singing. I contribute to the singing because I usually take two voice lessons in the weeks I am here and because I sing to the deer. I sing “V’adoro pupille” from Handel’s Julius Caesar. I want the deer to recognize me as the being who sings and doesn’t frighten. (Except for the time I tried to take a pan of water to the fawn I thought was wounded.) (Or when I get fixated on wanting to make friends with them and end up behaving like a stalker.)

I haven’t seen much of the deer. Four very young deer have made their home here. These would be the four fawns from last September, including the one I frightened with a pan of water. The retreat is pretty much their oyster.

I had one sighting of a tiny new fawn the day Tommie and I drove into Freeland for groceries. We were still in the woods a mile or so from the highway when we startled the doe and fawn by the side of the road. We stopped and watched the little one take off down the middle of the road, staggering like the toddler he was while the mother divided her attention between him and us. The fawn—not more than a foot high—finally crashed into the brush and the doe joined him.

The goats win the aroma competition, acing out the fragrance of incense and Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day lavender dish soap. Two new kids bring the number of babies across the road to seven. They bring me across the road several times a day. I have designated goat clothes this trip since after my last visit, every piece of clothing I owned had goat poop on it.(I should explain how this happens: the goats poop in their straw. They go about their lives without discrimination as to where they put their hooves. Then they jump on me.)

Family Photo

The five kids born in March have doubled in size but they still jump on me. I notice the weight difference because they would knock me off my feet if the one in back wasn’t a force against the one in front. I grab their legs when they jump on me and sing “Dance with me, I want my arms around you” and add my favorite part of the song:

Heaven, I’m in heaven
And the cares that hang around me through the week
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak
When we’re out together, dancing cheek to cheek.

I believe I’m on firm ground in stating that goats weren’t what Irving Berlin had in mind with that song.

The two new kids are about three weeks old but are already so big it takes a minute to sort them out from the pack. A male and a female, they both have white spots on brown and black hair like dog markings. The spotted bull in another pen is clearly the sire. The long-suffering nanny with the wondrous udder impeding her every move and seven kids pestering her is the mother.

The new kids

The loveys

This nanny in a yard full of adorable babies is surprisingly the first animal I think of when I get up in the morning, maybe even more than the staggering toddler of a faun. She and I have forged a bond that touches me deeply. It started the day I was trying to get a decent picture of the fast moving kids with a slow moving camera shutter. I felt something rubbing my back, up and down, over and over. When I finally gave this sensation my attention, I found the nanny wanting to put her long neck on my breast, push her face close to mine and gaze into my eyes. Every time I visit, she and I have the intimate exchange of two old souls.

Mama

The goats have stripped every tree limb they can reach—they like alder and maple leaves—so I pull down the higher branches and let them munch. They climb all over each other, the nanny and me to get as much as they can for as long as I am willing to stand there. I noticed the first time I did this, the two littlest kids wanted to join in but weren’t quite sure what we were doing. When they figured out they could eat these green things, they held their own with their older siblings.

I’ll miss them.

Now I need to clean the Buddha House.

Following the Leader

Looking for greens

Up, up, up

Where’s the leaf?

Here they come

I want to tell you what Jesus has done for me. We’ll have to wait a moment until those who know me regain consciousness. Now say “hay-soos” or for the linguists among us: “xe.sus.” I know I am being juvenile about this but I love it that I have a gardener named Jesus. He has cause my yard to be born again, creating something between a labyrinth and a London park.

It all started when my electric lawnmower died and did not resurrect. At the time I couldn’t afford a new one and after a season or two without one, decided I didn’t want a lawnmower. I liked the wild field design, otherwise known as the lazy homeowner look. One of its drawbacks was having to tromp through wet grass a foot high to get across the yard. Over the years however, paths formed like ancient elephant thoroughfares. Last fall I covered the paths with cardboard to make it easier come spring to scoop out the turf.

Easier for whom was the question. It was too hard for me in any case. Tim my friend whose presence in my garden is chronicled in Burn Before Weeding could have scooped out the paths but he had other things to do in the garden and the paths were really my project.

Jesus came into my life just when I needed him most. He shoveled slowly but steadily and the ancient paths are now reified until a developer buys my property over my dead body and builds a condo unit. The heaps of sod formed mounds that my neighbor Bill said made the yard look like a burial ground. But I planted wildflower and butternut squash seeds in them and eventually it won’t look as though something nefarious is going down in the garden. Jesus emptied six huge garbage bags of sawdust, another contribution from Bill who is a woodworker, into the paths, smoothing out a four inch padding of orange chippy dust which now gets tracked into the house by people and elephants.

My students love the paths. A few of them make a regular pilgrimage to Winston’s grave, now marked with a trillium. My resident crows, Bert and Zelda, strut along the paths and climb onto the mounds to rob me of earthworms and the occasional butternut squash seed. Neighborhood cats wander the ancient ways. Artemis, of course, poses.

Jesus has showered me with blessings. He has made straight the narrow paths that lead to green pastures. He healed the crab grass and weeds under the camellia and the tree peony. He cleaned up the mess around the mock orange. This is critical because this is the part of the garden I stare at when I am teaching and need to take a deep breath and not say something ugly like “Two counts, for fuck’s sake, how many times do I have to say it, can’t you see that note is not colored in?” That sort of thing.

I saved Jesus’ number to my phone so when he calls I can tell anyone in ear shot that Jesus is calling. If my mother were alive, I could tell her “Jesus is coming,” she would happily agree and we could have a conversation about religion without yelling at each other.

The spring usually brings me a surge of energy and this year I am more than grateful. It has been such an awful winter what with the cold and the rain here in Seattle, the darkness of the season, our precarious political situation and probably more than anything, the death of my kittens. After months of trudging through the dark, I feel restless and ambitious.

I was in the garden seven days in a row. After the second day, I was in a semi-permanent condition of being able to hold different positions: standing, sitting, kneeling etc. but the getting to and from those positions was enough to make me scream, certainly enough to make me curse.

I’ve been thinking about travel.

I’ve been thinking about the next 25 years of life. The same day the kittens died, the roof leaked. These two events converged into my considering the certainty of my own death and where I wanted to be living when that happened.

May I free associate to an exciting conversation I had with the caretaker of the cemetery behind me? Beyond a disreputable old common fence in my back yard is the cemetery yard and garage, which houses mowers, gravediggers and old headstones. My cats crawl under the fence and jump onto a stack of slabs; from there they jump to the roof where they like to hang out during warm summer evenings. I asked Philip at the cemetery office if they were doing anything with those headstones?

“I would love to get rid of them. And what you see is only the tip of the ice berg.”

By the time we finished discussing it, Philip had decided this would be a good time to replace the fence. When they took the old one down, they could slide all the headstones over onto my property. I, well not, I personally, but someone can bust them into smaller pieces and I’ll have flagstones for all the paths I want all over my yard. Stay tuned.

Garden Paths Phase 2
(Phase one was smothering them in cardboard all winter. Hideous.)

Back to my restlessness. There not being any immediate plans to pack for a trip, re-roof or sell the house, and having used up my back’s allotted hour per day in the garden but still wanting something new to do, I went to Target. Two people, independently of each other, have told me recently about something available at Target. I wandered around Target for 45 minutes, trying to think why I was there, before I remembered the store they had referenced was T.J. Max. I related this to Nancy when we walked around Green Lake.

“You wanted to do something new so you went to Target?”

Put like that it sounds pathetic. I’m not saying it wasn’t. There’s more:

I took some forms to a bank to be notarized. I haven’t been in a bank in fifteen years. It was odd. I remember being in banks with desks buzzing, tellers busy, the line five deep and the complimentary coffee fragrance making me start to percolate when I opened the door. I counted ten empty desks in the bank the other day. One teller was on the phone with someone named Bernard who sounded like he needed reassurances beyond what the teller could give him about an account that wasn’t at that bank. She mouthed apologies to me. The other employee was helping an elderly woman with her safety deposit box. Of course, I thought, the only people who go into banks anymore are the elderly.

Once the elderly woman got settled in her private room with her box, the second employee (Bernard was still gamely on the phone with the first) asked if she could help. I told her what I needed.

“Oh, that’ll be Dustin and he’s around here somewhere. I just saw him.” She shot out of the room texting and scouting all at once. Then she shot back in. “Do you mind waiting? He should be back any second.”

“I’ll just get my book out of the car,” I said.

A book. That locates me with Bernard who has the wrong bank and the elderly woman who was probably there to retrieve a library card from her safety deposit box. I sat down and read until a second elderly woman arrived with the help of a cane at the same time as the recalcitrant Dustin. The full trio of bank employees greeted her as though she were their grandmother. They asked about her arthritis and hugged her.

And there I was. I was uncharacteristically patient because I was kind of in awe that a trip down memory lane (and I want to travel!) was to be had right off the street like that. There was something soothing about the whole experience.

I’ve seen a lot of springs in my life. Spring is still a miracle.

I should never have named them Hamlet and Laertes after two literary characters who died young. I thought those were clever names. But one shouldn’t mess around with archetypes. Archetypes are serious stuff. Both Hamlet and Laertes died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. They were nine months old.

Hamlet had been sickly from the start. He had come to me skinny and underfed and scared of everyone and everything except Laertes. I fed him off my finger those first couple of weeks, moving my other hand closer and closer until he let it touch him while he ate. The entire process had to be repeated whenever trust was shattered as it was when I tried to pick him up and later after every tortured trip to the vet.

Laertes came around after the first few weeks. He stopped running from me. He let me pet him. He let me pick him up for a few seconds. He let me pick him up and hold him. He purred. Hamlet watched the progression of intimacy with Laertes for months until the day came that he tentatively curled up on my lap and dared me to push it any further.

Meanwhile Artemis glowered from afar.

A few weeks before they died, Hamlet started losing weight. I bought baby kitten food and fed him off my finger again. Both Laertes and Artemis gained weight. Then both kittens stopped eating while Artemis remained in caloric heaven. I made the awful decision to not treat Hamlet but see if his little body would heal although he was so weak he was finally letting me hold him. I took Laertes to the vet.

The news was a shock. Laertes had a liver disease not uncommon in feral cats for which there was no known treatment. The vet recommended euthanasia and in a fog, I agreed. I whispered goodbye to Laertes.

That night I put Hamlet alongside me in bed. Through the night, whenever I awoke, I reached for him and felt his purr. He had rarely purred in his whole life. Occasionally I felt him move and re-position himself against me. He was so light he was barely a wrinkle on the sheets. Finally I felt his little body spasm and emit a piteous cry. I felt him. He was gone.  I put him in a little bed that had been his safe space when he first joined the household. By morning rigor had set in.

During the awful next day I imagined Hamlet and Laertes sauntering across a bridge. Waiting on the other side were Freudy, Winston, Eugene and Edith, other cats who are still a part of me. The kittens are in good paws now.

Here’s my eulogy for the boys of Elsinore:

Laertes the sunny orange kitten, often slept on the back of the sofa. When I was on the sofa, he would wake, yawn and reach his paws towards me. I’d pull him onto my lap. He would rub his face against mine. I’d tuck his head under my chin. He would purr. We could sit like that for fifteen minutes at a stretch, both of us in a state of bliss. His purr was a song.

Little Hamlet I can see walking through the hall into the kitchen. Cats don’t move in a straight line unless they are charging at something. They saunter: a little bit to this side, a little bit to that side. Hamlet was a long-legged, long-tailed but exceptionally skinny black kitten, a miniature of Artemis, my big black 14 year old cat. Frightened of everything, he had learned to move with embryonic bravado through the house as if his name was on the mortgage in imitation of Artemis who actually does own the house.

Since the disease was not treatable, they were going to die anyway. They might have died on the streets of Yakima, cold and scared. They might have died in the shelter after being kenneled for five months. Instead they got to have brief, bright lives with me.

I know that is worth something. It is worth life. It’s what life is. Brief.

I am still sad.

Hamlet and Laertes

I’ve got a Shakespearean drama going on over here that’s only appreciable to a cat lover. I’ve got this kitten I called Hamlet because Hamlet is one of my favorite characters in literature even though or maybe because he is a load of trouble. So is the kitten. He’s seven months old and still gives me suspicious looks that ask, “Did you kill my father and marry my mother?” In fact he looks at everyone who comes in the house that way.  Except men. He seems to trust men.

He spends a lot of time behind a curtain. The baseboard heat is below this particular window so he sits in a little warmth shadow. I can see his outline. Occasionally he peeks cautiously out. For those who don’t know the play, Hamlet, there is a fair amount of hiding behind curtains—arras—and listening to soliloquies and conversations. It gets everyone into trouble.

So far he gets along beautifully with the kitten who came with him: Laertes. In the play, Hamlet and Laertes are great friends until they kill each other. That has yet to happen and I’m hoping it doesn’t.

If it does, it’s more likely Artemis, the 14 year old goddess of the hunt cat, will be the perpetrator. She’s been quite hostile in the six months I’ve had the kittens but she’s coming round. I came home the other day and all three were curled up together on the couch. As soon as they saw me they shot apart like shrapnel and Artemis hissed at Laertes. I need to start hiding behind curtains to learn the inside story. Also something only appreciable to a cat lover.

Hamlet came to me with an auto-immune condition called stomatitis, which is expensive to treat. The vet suggested we keep him comfortable and see if his immune system caught up to him as he grew. I have hopes that a nurturing environment and good food will be better for his immune system than the streets of Yakima where he had been trapped.

His first few trips to the vet have been documented in this blog. We made our fourth trip a week ago and a merry dance it was.  Tricking him into the cat carrier was now completely out of the question. This time I lured him into the bathroom with his favorite cat treat (Churu, which I think is Thai for “tube of goo”) and closed the door so it was just the two of us. I let him lick the creamy stuff off my finger until he’d eaten the entire tube.

I put on gloves and got hold of his scruff. He twisted away and dove into a cat bed that had been his safe space when he first became part of the household.  I reached in and pulled him out. I was stuffing him into the cat carrier when he wrenched himself away, clawed my face, took out the ceramic soap dish and a glass tea light holder and went back to what is now his ironic space. I pulled him out again and succeeded in getting him into the car carrier. We were both breathing hard and one of us was hissing. I’m not sure which one.

Once I got the cat carrier zipped up I tended to the blood dripping down both sides of my face. The scratches were still wet and red when we got to the vet. Hamlet glowered and hissed from the carrier and I was the hero of the waiting room. Well, sort of. Maybe it was pity.

It was a good appointment. His gums looked better. But he had lost weight. He’s a skinny little thing to start with and didn’t have any weight he could afford to lose. I stopped at All the Best Pet Care on the way home and asked for recommendations for never-fail cat food for finicky eaters. I bought small cans of four different meals and more tubes of Churu.

Nope. Not this either.

Ceding the ground

He tucked right into Tiki After Dark chicken and quail egg. It really had a small cooked egg in it.  A little later he went for BFF chicken and turkey in gravy. The next day he ate Lotus chicken stew and BFF chicken and lamb in gravy. My main concern was making sure Hamlet got most of whatever was being served. The other two will eat anything anywhere anytime. They tend to pace like street thugs around Hamlet when he trying to eat. He gets nervous and cedes his ground.

By the third day, Monday, he was turning away from everything. He wouldn’t eat AvoDerm chicken chunks entrée in gravy, an early favorite. He wouldn’t eat tuna water. He wouldn’t eat Gerber Baby No 2 chicken and chicken gravy which used to be my secret weapon. All he would eat was Churu so I fed him Churu off my finger every two hours while Laertes wasn’t looking or smelling and that was a difficult op to pull off.

My friend Susan brought me some Royal Canin kitten food. I asked her to give it to Hamlet. Susan ooed and gooed and put a pinch of kibble on the floor. Hamlet scarfed it up and Susan gave him another pinch. She fed him all morning while we water painted. That afternoon I bought a bag of Royal Canin kitten kibble. Hamlet wouldn’t eat it.

I bought a few cans of “kitten instinctive small chicken slices in gravy.” They were a huge hit on Tuesday but by Wednesday Hamlet was refusing everything again. Back to the Churu with which I started dolloping some of the expensive chicken dinners he was pushing away. He licked off the Churu and walked contemptuously away from the meal.

Now during the day all over my house– anywhere Hamlet once previously ate– sit little tapas bowl with spoonful’s of different gelatinous looking goulashes. After a certain point even the other two won’t eat the stuff. In the evening I scoop money down the garbage disposal. This is my life now. For the time being, small chicken slices in gravy and Churu are in charge.

I’ve just come through a spate of losing things. At least I hope I’ve come through it because it’s been disorienting. I have always had a sharp memory and bloodhound’s talent for finding things, particularly if those things have sugar in them.

The first casualty was a music book. It’s a collection of songs, many of them introduced to me by students, that I have come to love. “Along the Road” (Anna D), “Home” (Eileen), “Why They Call it Falling (Deborah), “Lay Down Your Head” (Jennie), “Jubilee” (Can’t Remember). I have “Desperado” written out in two different keys and “Dimming of the Day” in three. Twenty-one songs, at last count, in a book I bound on a Comb-bind. It has a black plastic spine, which was what I was looking for the day I couldn’t find it.

Another of my admirable qualities besides my memory and ability to suss out sugar is that I always return things to the same place. There’s a place for my comb-bound book of favorite songs and when I’m not using it, it’s always there. In the second drawer of a file cabinet of music under Popular. When I couldn’t find it one day, I kept going back to the second drawer of the file cabinet, relentlessly looking under Popular. It didn’t materialize. I looked through the entire filing cabinet of music. I pulled out every comb-bound book from my two book cases of music. Nothing.

I e-mailed my voice students to see if one of them had walked off with it by mistake. I wouldn’t have loaned it. Nothing.

I checked my files for individual students—what I call their dossiers—half a dozen times and finally found the music book filed backwards. I couldn’t see the spiral binding. The book was where it shouldn’t have been because I have the admirable if tedious quality of returning things to their allotted place.

I blame the cat.

Next was the Case of the Missing Keys: My neighbor Bill has been gone a lot in the past several months. He went for one of his impossibly outdoorsy, athletic trips in November and I tended to his cat, Suli. On the day he came home, I couldn’t find his house key, the one I have safely kept and guarded for five years. I had already served and abased myself before the cat so there was no immediate urgency with the keys.

Before Bill went to Tasmania at Christmas to visit his daughter, he made me a new key. I put it on a bright red key chain and managed to hold onto it. Two and a half weeks ago he went to Tanzania. (Try to keep up.) A week into this trip, I lost the bright red key chain which was holding not only the house key but the mailbox key and I had yet to pick up any of his mail.

I searched for the keys even as I imagined mail overflowing the box and Suli in the house clawing open Doritos. I turned my house and car upside down. I went through the garbage and the recycle. I turned over layers of mulch in the garden by my front door. Finally I texted Bill’s son Christoph in Walla Walla (Go, Whitman) to ask where the hidden key was. Once inside Bill’s house, I sorted through a kitchen drawer for small keys. I took seven of them down the alley to the mailbox and tried them until I got the mail box open.

I felt it my duty to replace the keys I had lost so I took the spare mail key and the hidden key to a lock and key place where I casually passed them across the counter and asked for duplicates even though the house key has DO NOT DUPLICATE on it. The locksmith asked me if it was my house key. I said yes. As I left with two new keys I mused that I am in a demographic that’s considered harmless, not to say invisible: a white woman and middle-aged with gray hair. I could get away with so much more than I do.

Shortly after I calmed down from the key freak-out, my college roommate Debi came for a few days. Her sojourn warrants a whole other blog post because having a house guest is the height of distraction for an introvert who lives alone. I might have expected to lose any number of things during her visit. Yet in the middle of an evening of whisky, reminiscences and laughter, I glimpsed my red key chain hanging with the laser pointer in the place where only the laser pointer should be. The keys, the keys, oh beautiful keys!

The down side being that I feel crazy. Why would I hang the keys where I have never put them before and not remember? Or even more damning, how could a week and a half go by without my entertaining the cats with the laser pointer? Bad human.

Debi is now home in Walla Walla. Bill has returned from his world travels. My music is where I can find it. The key on the red key chain is back in the key drawer. All’s right with the world for now.

Even though I can barely take the news any longer, I’ve gotten into a self-perpetuating loop of being unable to look away; I keep checking the headlines. It’s trauma. It’s the kid (me) who didn’t want to leave the house because she was afraid of what might happen in her absence. It’s the cat who won’t go in the other room and chase a bug when the vacuum is on. It has to crouch in a doorway and watch. I am in a world that I don’t understand anymore. It’s hard to read the signs.

I’ve been thinking about signs. Not like signs of the End Times, though god knows they bear some watching. Signs like the one I see every time I walk by a house on the other side of the cemetery. It’s one of those Hooterville homes with disabled cars and old toilets on the parking strip. Junk everywhere. They run a yard sale all summer long, trying to get rid of their greasy stuff.

They also have cats. Quite a lot of them if the sampling visible from the street is a marker. Anyway most days they put out a hand-lettered sandwich board: Honk if cats don’t move. I muse about that when I walk past. What does it mean?   Honk and the cats will then move? Honk so we’ll come out and make the cats move? Honk means the cats can’t move and we’ll come out and scrape them off the road? I don’t feel like asking.

My neighborhood branch library has a genius for unintelligible signs. For months I walked past a sign near the front door that read “Strollers block our counter.” Strollers were grouped next to the sign. The counter, i.e. the reference desk, was still a good 20 feet away.

I asked a librarian what the sign meant. It turns out that near the front door and occasionally blocked by strollers is a device that detects and counts people as they walk into the library. I asked if their sign was accomplishing their intended ends. The next time I walked into the library the sign read: “Don’t leave strollers in this area.”

Emboldened by that accomplishment, I took on the enigmatic sign in the women’s rest room: “Please use paper towels appropriately.” Full marks for politeness but what on earth were women doing with paper towels that weren’t “appropriate?” Turns out they were teenage girls and they were plastering the walls and sinks with wet paper towels undeterred by a sign about appropriateness. I commented on that at the front desk. I don’t know what happened but the sign came down and I use the women’s room at my own house.

They appreciate my helpful suggestions at my branch library.

The Four Spoons Café usually has something clever and entertaining on their marquee. The month before the 2016 election it read “Vote for Trump Nov 28.” For those a little slow on the uptake and/or to insult your intelligence, I’ll point out that the election was Nov 8. After the election the sign read “Have an unpresidented year.” I’ll second that in so far as I’m capable.

In December All Present hosted a singalong at the Alzheimer’s Café, which meets once a month at Taproot Theater’s Stage Door Café.  As we were getting assembled I noticed a poster on a table. It looked like 18 candles glowing in different colored bowls.

Up close, I saw that the candle lights were actually faces of people, many of whom I know, who were living with dementia. The colored bowls were handmade signs they held against their bodies. The title of the poster was Living with memory loss in our own words. The faces were beaming. The signs were colorful:

It is frightening.

I can’t remember.

Please be patient with us.

We’re still here.

Don’t we laugh a lot!

I now have one of those posters on my front door. The faces still glow like lit candles. My friends with dementia will never understand how much wisdom and meaning and pleasure they give to me and to this crazy world. Maybe just enough to keep us all in balance.

A couple of feral kittens came to stay with me in September. Let me rephrase that in a more responsible way: I adopted a couple of feral kittens and while in full control of my faculties, brought them into the nice geriatric climate of my home where I live with Artemis, a 13 year old cat. After four months I can state that I have ruined Artemis’ golden years and I have several times wanted to check myself into a cage at Seattle Area Feline Rescue and let the kittens have run of the house.

It actually hasn’t been that bad. Laertes, after a month, became a joyful, leaping, affectionate and purring ball of orange fur. He fetches and brings back little fuzzy balls, drops them near me and sits politely, waiting for me to flick them across the room. Periodically I get a yardstick and scoop 15 or 20 of them from under the stove and the couch. He thinks the yardstick is great fun, too. He’s easily picked up, likes to be petted and cossetted, licks (me) a little more than I enjoy, and likes to put his face close to mine. He actually reaches for me, which I find utterly endearing. So I’m keeping him.

Hamlet has been more of a challenge but it should be stated at once that I am keeping him, too, if for no other reason than I named him Hamlet. I cannot return a kitten named after one of my favorite characters in literature. He continues to be a Hamlet: suspicious and fearful. He watches me cuddle Laertes and Artemis as though he might be interested in joining but experience has taught him otherwise—not unlike me and cruise ships. He looks at visitors as if silently suspecting: “Did you kill my father and marry my mother?”

We’ve made some progress. I got him to the vet for his first appointment in early December. This turned out to be quite a production. Weeks before, I brought the cat carrier into the front room and left it sitting open. After a few days I tossed in a cat treat. After a week, I tossed treats all the way to the back. When it was time to betray him by closing the cage door, he was taken completely by surprise and I felt like a Judas, which I was.

At the vet I learned Hamlet had a condition called stomatitis, which is like gingivitis, only on steroids. His poor little gums were red and inflamed. The gold standard treatment for stomatitis is to have all the teeth pulled. Yikes! And it’s expensive. Yikes on steroids!

There are other less extreme things to do but they involve stringent home dental care, something that isn’t happening any time soon unless you count Greenies. For those who don’t know, Greenies are a popular cat treat touted as having dental benefits–I guess they do scrub away at the plaque—and Hamlet loves them. The vet gave Hamlet a steroid and an antibiotic shot to temporarily calm things down and we were on our way.

Once home and I let Hamlet out of the carrier, I actually never expected to see him again. I thought he might hide behind an arras, only emerging at night to eat whatever food was left in a dish. But within a few hours he was doing something he had never done: pushing against my hand and letting me pet him.

A week before Christmas, I heard him sucking on something and noticed a foul-smelling saliva. When he wasn’t worrying it, a tooth hung outside his mouth. I made a vet appointment for the day after Christmas. Time for Operation Quisling: tricking him back in the carrier.

It was more complicated this time. I threw in the cat treat. Ooh, salmon chunks. Hamlet sat at the door to the carrier and watched me until I disappeared around a corner. He nipped in, grabbed the treat and nipped out. After a few days of this practice, I threw in the treat and retreated to where he could see me but was reassured that he could move in and out faster than I could get to the carrier and close the door. We progressed to my tossing in the treat and walking nonchalantly past the carrier while he was inside. During the week before Christmas it seems like entire days were taken up with this activity.

Come time to leave for the vet appointment I knew I had only one chance to close the door on Hamlet. I flubbed it. He dashed out, I grabbed him, he slipped away. Then I did something quite ill-advised: I chased him. I chased him up the stairs into the loft, closing the door behind me. I chased him into every corner of the loft, down the stairs, up the stairs, back down the stairs where I cornered the terrified little guy who won the battle by biting, clawing and drawing a great deal of blood.

I left him cowering behind the drier while I retreated, hysterical, into the bathroom for alcohol, Neosporin and Band-Aids. I was upset with myself, crying so that I couldn’t see the Band-Aids and dripping blood all over the bathroom.

During this time I also had charge of my neighbor Bill’s cat, Suli. I had let her out earlier in the day and I chose this vulnerable moment to go across the street and let her back inside and maybe get a little cat love for myself. The long and the short of it—and generally speaking Suli never needs much provocation—was that she bit me quite hard, bruising my arm and leaving little teeth marks.

For the next 24 hours I didn’t talk to or look at a cat. I fed them perfunctorily and otherwise ignored them. I hated them all. They were all dead to me. By the next day, Hamlet was pushing up against me again, wanting me to pet him, even reaching for me like Laertes does.

The errant tooth had by now fallen out and was probably down the side of the couch but Hamlet still needed a booster and his rabies shot. Time to launch Operation Benedict Arnold.

I resumed lobbing treats into the cat carrier. Surprisingly this was the easiest Op. We made our appointment and the outlook on Hamlet’s gums is perhaps a little better than first thought. By the end of the day he was curled up on my lap for the first time. I am in the running for Cat Owner of the Year, even if I am a three-time traitor.

On this last day of a moody year, I think it would be a good exercise for me to review all the good things about the spin cycle of the last month, otherwise known as the holiday season.

The holidays begin in October when I start the fall quarter of the OK Chorale and All Present. We’re singing “Deck the Hall” before Halloween.

October is the month I finish making the liqueur I sell at the Dibble House Holiday Sale. I drag out my big jars of raspberry and currant infused vodka. I strain my patience and the berries at the same time. I make a sugar syrup, stir everything together and pour most of the liquid into bottles I have been collecting all year. The remainder of sticky, red liqueur I wipe off the floor, the counters, the walls, my fingers, the soles of my shoes and door knobs as far away as the house across the street.

If that isn’t enough trouble, I used to make a different label for each jar, writing on old scraps of watercolor paintings: “Northwest Berry Liqueur. organic raspberries, organic currants, organic sugar, cheap vodka.” But this year I made a label from a favorite watercolor and had my guy Vince at Fed-Ex make me a bunch of gummed labels. That gave me more time to wipe up excess liqueur that had belatedly and mysteriously gotten smeared on the mirror in the bedroom and inside the medicine cabinet.

Artemis contemplates her existence (One of my favorite watercolors)

But I digress. Back to all the good things of the past season: The holiday is fully airborne the day after Thanksgiving with the Dibble House Holiday Sale. This tradition is about 25 years old and a lot of us do it year after year so it’s always a reunion. We set up during the day and the “preview” is that evening. The sale runs all weekend but what makes the preview different is the wine. Also I play the piano amidst effusive thanks and very few tips. There’s a warm and festive atmosphere and lots of memories from years past.

The day after the preview, the OK Chorale sang at what I refer to as the Monkey Lighting at the Phinney Neighborhood Center but I believe its official name is the Glow Cone lighting. The PNA is just down the street from the Woodland Park Zoo, which was the inspiration to light the long stretch from Phinney and 50^th all the way to Greenwood and 87^th with lighted monkey figures. The big light-off happens at the Phinney Air Raid tower (yes, you read that correctly) on Thanksgiving weekend.  The Chorale has been the entertainment for the past four years. By the Monkey Lighting we are still in rehearsals so we sing whatever we can manage without dropping our music. Four years ago at out debut gig, it was 13 degrees outside. The next two years it poured rain. This year it was a beautiful clear cold night on which to die happy.

Two weeks later we sang at the Green Lake Pathway of Lights, which we called The Luminaries until it was pointed out (by my friend Nina, rhymes with Dinah) that luminaries are people and the pathway of 3000 lighted candles are luminarias. For at least fifteen years we have sung at the aqua theater at the south west corner of the lake but this year, for some reason, we were scheduled outside the Community Center.  The parking was even more insane than across the lake when they open up the soccer field parking. I always hate the getting there but once we are on stage and singing, it is magical, especially on another cold, bright evening.

The week before Christmas, The OK Chorale and All Present, my song circle for people with memory loss, join forces and sing a concert. By this time in the season I would much prefer to stay home in my pajamas, eat potato chips and watch stupid television for a week straight but as with the Luminarias, once I get to the concert and get past everyone needing to tell me about their experience in high school glee club and the time they sang with Dickens carolers in Duluth, I thoroughly enjoy myself. We had a huge audience. When everyone joined in the singing at the end, it sounded like I had a whole cathedral of people behind me.

Of all the warm, nostalgic and happy experiences, the one that shines most brightly was what happened after this particular concert. One of our long-time altos did not sing this quarter because she was heavily into chemo therapy for a particularly vicious cancer. A dozen of us (and a quorum, thanks to Chris who held the tenor section) planted ourselves in her living room, gave her a music book and together we sang our program.

When I set up this engagement, Shelley had at first declined, saying, “I would probably cry all the way through.”

“And what would be the problem with that?” I asked. “We’ll all be doing the same thing.”

I know I cried. Shelley has a magnificent grand piano and I love playing it but I could hardly see the music through my tears. At the end when we sang “Auld Lang Syne,” I put my arms around one of our sopranos who is in a difficult patch and very nearly sobbed down her back.

It’s been such a difficult year for so many of us. The holiday as it approached seemed like just another difficult thing to get through. (And quite often for musicians, it is. We work hard so you can have nostalgic experiences. Sorry, I had to say it.) But singing at Shelley’s house, a little private audience for someone we love, whose absence doesn’t bear thinking of, was the center that still holds.

Has a Windows Help Desk notification ever interrupted your computer work and/or game of Solitaire? It descends like the Second Coming with beeps and sirens and flashes. It tells you your identity has been stolen and your bank account is in the process of being emptied. It’s alarming and to one whose mind has been numbed by political news and compulsive games of Mahjongg, it’s seductive.

Why am I using second person present? I should be using first person past because I got thoroughly snookered the other night. I will now lead you into the virtual darkness and tell you what happened.

First there were the bells and whistles, the dire notification and the directive to call an 800 number. I know this is not how Microsoft operates but maybe it was a little too subtle for me at that hour of the evening. I called the number.

I got a voice with a thick middle-eastern accent that said he was Joel Lambert. He gave me an address in Virginia and an employee number. I wrote it all down. “Joel” told me that he could correct the damage that had been done to my computer and my identity. I was hyperventilating at the point I went with “Joel” to a conferencing website where I summarily handed him my computer hard drive.

I watched my computer flash before me while we proceeded to the next phase of the scam: the payment. It was going to cost me $500 for him to get my identity back not to mention all the money that was even now being drained from my bank accounts. I balked at this. Why was Microsoft charging me? After all it was their firewall that was breached. He answered with a flurry of obfuscation and repetitions of the words Windows and Help Desk.

Then he wanted my bank information. I said I wasn’t comfortable with that and furthermore I wasn’t sure about him. (All this while my files were being rifled.) He put an elaborate directory of Help Desk employees on the screen and found his listing. I wouldn’t give him my bank information but I said I would send a check the next day to the address in Virginia. Finally he said to leave the computer on for the next few hours and to not do any on-line banking or pay any bills for the next 24 hours.

As I write this I see about ten markers that should have tipped me off. I have to say it looked very Micro-softy. That’s probably all I have to say in my defense except that in the spirit of the current political climate of irresponsibility, it’s the fault of the Cheeto in the White House.

I left my computer wide open and running and went over to talk to Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything. By the time I finished, she was curled up in fetal position in a corner of the sofa in her plaid room. She came out of her swoon, walked me back to my house and turned off the computer. Fifteen minutes later my phone rang. A number in Virginia. “Joel.” I put the phone on speaker.

“You turned off your computer.”

“Yes, you’re not legitimate.”

“But you turned off your computer.”

“You’re a scam.”

“Did you notice that I gave you a Virginia address and I am calling you from Virginia?”

Gwen and I looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same time. I don’t think Joel was amused. I wished I had thought to tell him that Virginia was in Tampa.

“You turned off your computer. There’s a problem.”

I hung up.

The next day I took my computer to my guys at Seattle Laptop and let them open it. When I told them I felt like idiot, they said this happens all the time.

Dan, the reigning angel at Seattle Laptop, told me that his wife once got a call from someone who told her that her computer was infected. She handed the phone to Dan who responded with vexation.

“Oh no. You’re probably right, tho. I haven’t been paying enough attention. I’ve been spending all my time at your house doing your wife!”

Another story involved a response to a scammer who called with an alert about Microsoft Windows.

“Your windows have a virus.” (Or some such garbled syntax)

“I don’t think so. I just got new windows. You’re too late”

Long pause. “This is about Windows.” (That’s always the way. When stumped, consult the checklist and start over.)

“Maybe you’d be willing to come out and clean my new windows.”

“Your computer! Your computer Windows!”

It would be a kind of fun party game to take turns being the frustrated scammer and the obtuse customer.

The end of the story is that I got my computer all scrubbed and re-set to factory conditions and that was a month ago and I am still unpacking and putting things away. And if you are ever such an idiot as I was, Seattle Laptop is the place to go.