Day 377…
The cat caught a mouse.
Michael was on a zoom call when suddenly the cat was fully engaged. He flattened himself out and crawled under the long low metal cabinet that our television sits on. After some thrashing around, a mouse ran out from underneath it and scurried along the wall to the other corner of the room where it got into a bag with some empty binders in it.
I’m not quite sure how, but some combination of the cat and Michael dislodged the mouse from there and the cat ended up with it in his mouth. He carried it into the bathroom and Michael shut the door on the two of them so that he could finish his call. When he later opened the bathroom door, the mouse was nowhere to be seen and the cat just wandered back into the living room as if nothing had happened.
I slept through the whole thing. The after-effects of my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Saturday had kicked in and I could have slept through anything.
Neither of us are at all sure where the mouse could have come from and, perhaps, more importantly, where it could have gone. We fully renovated the entire apartment before we moved in and there were no holes when we were done. The one room that we didn’t touch was the bathroom so I am guessing that maybe the mouse must have escaped through the grate under the tub. It must have come in from somewhere behind one of the radiators in the living room.
As far as I know, the cat has never laid eyes on a mouse before, let alone caught one. Cats that we had growing up would catch and kill any number of creatures and then often lay their carcasses outside the back door as a gift to the house. We had a Maine coon cat who caught everything from blue jays to baby rabbits. He was lethal. Other of our cats would catch things and then let them go without killing them, but not him.
I suppose that this is the year for all of us to scratch a few things off of our bucket lists so I’m glad that the cat had the opportunity to check one off of his too. I’m also glad that the mouse seems to have gotten away.
The aftereffects of the vaccine left me a little achy and tired, but not so seriously so as to keep me from going out. After a full year of not feeling anything but fully healthy, it was actually interesting to feel a little ill. I headed to the MET thinking that it was close enough that I could always just turn around and come home if I started to feel worse. The more I walked, though, the better I felt, so I just kept going.
Alice Neel was a painter who lived about ten blocks from where we live now. She was born in 1900 and passed away in her apartment surrounded by her family in 1984. The MET has a new retrospective of her work that has just opened up.
She started to gain some attention in the 1930’s with her frank and honest portraits of people. As time went on, she became known for her nudes, particularly of women.
Instead of glorifying them, she painted women as they were and how she saw them. Their bodies, imperfect with bulges and wrinkles, look nothing like the pre-Raphaelite images of the idealized female form. She painted pregnant women and women who were nursing. She included their veins and stretch marks and bruises. Mothering was hard work, she felt, and worthy of respect.
Rather than exploiting their sexuality, she portrayed their strength by simply showing who they were. “A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale,” is how she responded to an interviewer’s question about why she chose the subjects that she did.
She became somewhat of a feminist icon and her painting of another feminist activist, Germaine Greer, ended up on the cover of Time magazine.
The day before yesterday, Michael and I watched the film Nomadland. In it, Frances McDormand plays a woman from the nation’s heartland, who finds herself adrift and living in her van. It is possibly a performance that will get her a well-deserved third Oscar. Most of the people in the film with her are not actors but rather actual people living as her character did. They move from place to place, untethered, following the work.
Chloé Zhao, the director, along with Frances McDormand, do much the same thing that Alice Neel did. The women and men in this film are not glamorized in anyway. They are presented as they are. Not worse than they are - as they are. The cinematography is beautiful and relies a great deal of the time on natural lighting. It is a film of sunsets and sunrises. Frances McDormand’s face has no makeup and clearly has had no work done to it. She is as she is, and we can take it or leave it.
The film, in large part, is about seeing life clearly for what it is and learning to love what we see.
This year, we have all been given the distance to look at what our lives are and how we are living them. That we are all doing this at exactly the same time is beyond remarkable.
It requires outside observation to fully appreciate something. The view from within lacks scope. The cliché of not being able to see the forest for the trees has a great deal of truth to it.
In recent days, I’ve realized that I don’t particularly feel any sense of loss for my pre-pandemic life. There are certainly things that I want to be able to do again moving forward but I am not all that interested in just picking up where we left off. I see that those things are probably going to be possible in the future, but for now, I’m not in a desperate rush to get there
I think I’ve largely worked through the anxiety and grief of the loss of our so-called normal lives and what I find myself left with now is a sense of… anticipation.
Over this past year, some former employers have stayed in contact and sent out regular updates and some have just vanished. Where I work, and who I work for and maybe even what I do moving forward is probably going to be different from what it was that I did before. A year ago, that made me anxious. A year later, I find myself feeling excited about what might be on the horizon ahead.
More than anything, though, I am looking forward to integrating the new work into what I have created this year. I don’t want to leave this year and the lives we’ve created completely behind. I want whatever work lies ahead of me to add to the lives we have found, not replace it.
As I write this, I’m looking at the news conference from the law enforcement officials in Colorado who are discussing the latest mass shooting.
It is a tragic event but a completely predictable one and it won’t be the last. Yet another disgruntled white man got his hands on a gun and took his frustrations out on ten completely innocent people in a grocery store.
Until there are real gun laws in this country, these shootings are just going to continue. Yes, it’s awful, but why is anyone at all surprised?
White supremacy in addition to harming those who are ‘other’ in some way, creates a false feeling of expectation in the people who believe in it. If they are better, shouldn’t their lives be better? I don’t know anything about the white man who is in custody, but his frustration is clear enough for the world to see. That frustration is very real even if its causes might not be.
While I certainly feel awful for the victims, what I really feel more than anything else is anger. I am angry at every lawmaker who has ever stood in the way of gun legislation. I am angry at every legislator who has ever supported white supremacy in any way.
They can investigate this guy as much as they want. They aren’t going to find anything different with him that they found in any one of the countless perpetrators of similar incidents that happen around this country every single day. All of this is fixable, but until we start dealing with the base issues, none of it is going to change an iota.
The shooter in Colorado has likely been told his entire life that he is better than his neighbors, but nothing in his life reflects that, so he bought a gun and killed some people to feel better about himself. I am sure there will be some sort of other reason that investigators find. Maybe he got dumped or maybe he was fired or slighted in some way, but eventually it will all boil down to the fact that he feels that he is better than everyone else.
Our former President along with his supporters spent four years telling this guy that he was right.
So, I don’t need to watch any more of this news conference. I don’t need to watch any more Colorado officials express their sympathy for the victims. I’ll be happy to start watching again when they actually start fixing it.
More and more, signs are cropping up that this fall is when we will start to see Broadway begin to reopen. That feels right. By the fall, everyone who wants a vaccination should be able to have gotten one.
The work I thought I had in spring has been cancelled or pushed off. I cannot say that I am surprised. I think that some things will begin to happen in mid to late summer. If there is one thing that I’ve learned this year is that what seems to be impossibly far away simply isn’t. Time shoots forward like an arrow after it’s left the bow.
Rather than keeping my eye on where we might be going, I am more than happy to keep it here, looking at what we have. What I’m seeing isn’t always pretty, but it’s real and wonderful in its own way.
Two songbirds just had a tuneful argument out on the air conditioner in the living room. The cat was here at the first scratch of their claws on the metal and he was ready to pounce. Sadly for him, they flew off.
Seeing that in addition to being the purring furry hot water bottle who curls up in my lap every night, that the cat is also a ruthless predator makes him more than in my eyes, rather than less. If he gets the mouse again, I will certainly do everything that I can to save the little thing and release it outside. If the mouse makes the mistake of coming into the apartment again and letting the cat catch him, though, there is very little that I can do about it if I’m not there. The cat is just being true to what he is. Sorry mouse.
Every morning as I look in the mirror as I am brushing my teeth, I see a guy looking back at me with grey hair and some wrinkles. I used to say that my hair only started to turn grey after I worked with Elaine Stritch. Whether or not that’s true, I can’t honestly remember, but at any rate, I’ve earned all of it.
If I look into his eyes, though, I can usually see who he actually is a bit clearer.
Our bodies and our faces are the scrapbooks of our lives and, god willing we keep adding to them. We are who we are, and we shouldn’t feel the need to hide it.
I will say, however, that I am long overdue for a good beard trimming.
Great post Richard. I’ve just finished a conversation with my hairdresser who revealed so much about how the last year has made it clear to her and partner that they’re not leading the life they really want here in Australia. Think I’ll be looking for a new hairdresser by year’s end! Back to Italy for good reasons and the clarity brought about by this pandemic.
Things are very much back to normal here. I’m going to see Hamilton tonight with some friends and can’t wait
Jx
Loved reading that from Ireland where I feel useful to my mother but utterly lost in the severe lockdown and missing my New York life and cats! Oh Ziggy dear, you’ve got personality! Glad I got my vaccines too!