Bearding the Beast

I stopped shaving near the middle of December. It was something that I'd been considering off and on for some time, and whichever day it was that I chose seems to have been the right one.

There are two sorts of pelt in my family. My grandfather Adam, and my brother Jim got the Diack gorilla gene, while my father Alex, my brother Don and I inherited the MacPherson coat, which looks a good deal more like a frozen chicken.

I've thought about doing this before, and have even avoided my razor for a couple of consecutive days, but I've never liked the result...or the itch. This time, however, I thought that I saw possibilities. After all, hair can cover a multitude of chins.

I never considered putting it to a plebiscite - there are only two people whose opinion matters - but for some reason, there were votes on the subject, and for awhile, they seemed evenly divided. My beard was blond, sparse and scruffy. For the first few weeks, it was hellishly uncomfortable. I went to one of my Mood Disorder Association meetings with about fourteen days growth, and managed to alarm the entire group. I had calls from seventeen people that evening, all seeking reassurance that I hadn't taken too many pills or opened a vein.

In time, the itching stopped, the whiskers evened out, and I began to look a little bit less like an abandoned Chia Pet. I still looked into the mirror while holding my neglected double-edge razor and thought maybe just a little trim. One thing, though, has stilled my hand.

Brie, our little, odd cat has come to love my beard, and she will sit for hours on my lap rubbing her hard, flat little head against my chin, eschewing all prior cat-brushes in its preference. Sometimes, I'm hard pressed to say how much of the fur on my chin is hers, and how much is my own. Last Thursday evening, there was another complication.

While I was out, the Tall Lady took a drive to VOKRA Command Central. When I returned, I discovered that our family had yet another addition. Schroeder, the Rafter Kitten is about twelve weeks old, tiny, proud and handsome. We believe that there is some British Short-Hair in his family, and as a consequence, his head occupies about one-third of his total continental mass. The rest of him  resembles a number thirteen billiard ball. In sum, he looks like a tiny snowman with a few orange patches. The picture is completed by two perfect, little triangular ears and a small, stripey toothpick of a tail. When you look for the definition of "cute" in your dictionary, you may find Schroeder's picture there.

He has not yet been accepted into the Inner Circle of the Flying Fellini Sisters and la Bella Bianca. In fact, if he hadn't already had a name when we met him, we were going to call him "Cuffy". He gets thumped a lot. He was lonely. It was just a short time since he'd been trapped, and he missed his mom terribly. On his first night in his new home, Schroeder was thrilled to be invited to share the big bed with us.

At about three o'clock Friday morning, I was awakened by loud cheerful purrs as the new guy wrapped himself around my neck and snuggled into my beard. I was only a little surprised when he started trying to nurse on the whiskers.

To donate to

the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association

please click here

Fostering Communication

After all these months, if my buddy Lemon were to call me from Montreal, there's a chance that I wouldn't recognise his voice immediately. It has probably changed in the year and a half that he's been living with Merripaul. There will be differences in tone and inflection that he's developed with them, and he will have learned new expressions with which I am not familiar...oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that all of the cats who've lived with us can talk?

None of them has actually learned to speak English, but all of them have spoken to the Tall Lady and me, and common courtesy demands that we reply. Some of them are shy or laconic, while others have been chatty - even a bit long-winded. Each of them speaks in his or her own individual voice, from Xena's enthusiastic "good morning" meow, as she leaps to the top of her laundry basket, and raises her right paw for a high five, to her sister Brie's long, mournful train-whistle moan, as she descends deeper into the insane, hormonal, raving babble of her monthly false heat.

Sometimes, I think that they speak to us simply because they enjoy our conversation. Other times, their sounds have a specific purpose. They seem most vocal when I'm holding the can-opener. Brie and the littlest ones run rings around my ankles, Blossom with her impatient accusations of premeditated delay on my part, while Sachi and Shisan sing me songs of praise and celebration. Xena and Bianca wait confidently where they have always seen their dishes alight, quiet, serene and beautiful.

Bianca is not a great talker. She is our big, quiet black shadow. On the occasions that she has something to say, it will come out in a soft, gentle, apologetic kitten's mew. Remember, for all of her regal, impressive stature, at ten months, Bianca is still just a kitten.

We have had three adoptions in the past three weeks, and I have to admit that our little girls have sometimes used impolite language during our exchange procedures. Blossom and Sachi were the first to leave us, and they were adopted by the same people. After fifteen minutes of classic Marx Brothers buffoonery, including stuffing the wrong kitten into two different carriers, to the accompaniment of her sisters' jeers, growls and hisses, the exchange was completed, and our good babies were on their way to their permanent home to meet their new big brother, Chewbacca, and Ella, the Big Bitch Bunny.

Shisan went to the vet on Friday morning. It was nothing serious; she came home that evening with a shaved arm, a bare tummy, a little zipper and a new tattoo. She was horribly, horribly embarrassed, and her crabby aunties did nothing to improve her low mood. Xena growled at her and ran away; Brie hissed and slapped her on the ear. The poor, wounded kitten stretched out on the carpet, solemn and sorrowful as a kitten can be. Bianca walked over, slowly and carefully, lay down beside her, and enfolded her in a consoling big sister hug. Shisan has always been her favourite kitten.

On Saturday morning, Shisan had important visitors. The came to meet her to decide if she would be a good addition to their family. Shisan was not exactly rude to them, but she was still tired, sore and sluggish. She didn't feel very sociable, and she didn't care about making a good impression. Later that evening, we got a message that Shisan had been adopted. They came to pick her up last night.

This time, all went according to plan - kitten into carrier, carrier to adopter, adopter out the door - no more finger puppets...

The Tall Lady and I were both very quiet last night. Our apartment always seems hollow and empty after the last kitten of one of our batches has been adopted, and in spite of knowing that it's for the best, we grieve for awhile. We lay in our bed, not talking, but each knowing exactly what the other was thinking. Xena and Brie may be glad to see the last of each and every one of them, but for Sheral and me, this is the hardest part of being cats' foster parents.

Out in the living room, in the still and silent darkness, a small sound began, and it continued all night long. It was the soft, gentle, apologetic kitten mew of a big, quiet, black shadow searching for her baby sister.

The Greatest Story Endlessly Retold

The Tall Lady and I stayed home for Christmas this year. Because the holiday was so far off, we didn't bother planning anything. We kept putting things off and putting things off until suddenly, it was December 23, and we still didn't have a single decoration unpacked. Having four cats, two of them kittens and the others simply loopy, the Christmas tree was out of the question again. We tried it for about fifteen minutes two years ago, but our tree was packed up again after we caught Raja nibbling on the electrical cords, Darcy eating the sparkly songbirds and the Flying Fellini Sisters up at the top, trying to peek up the angel's dress.


This year, Sheral's family have gone up to The Cabin for a few days, and we have volunteered to feed a friend's cats while she is out of town. Our plan for the day finally comes down to roasting a chicken, popping the cap on a bottle of sparkling cider and spending a quiet day at home with our four little furry girls.

Shisan and Bianca, as the elected spokescats for the sorority, woke me at six o'clock to get their breakfast ready. All of our cats have a tendency to the workaholic, and have never taken a day off in their lives. The Tall Lady doesn't take many days off either, so the girls and I agreed that she had earned a bit of a lie-in this morning.

Sunday mornings, silence and I don't do terribly well together as a rule, so it wasn't too long before I'd turned on the TV, and was flipping through the higher channels. I stopped when I reached Turner Classic Movies. Today, they were showing a selection of big, epic, widescreen spectaculars featuring Birthday Boy, Jesus Christ. By the time Sheral had finished her shower, she discovered her five movie buffs well into the chariot race sequence of Ben Hur.

Next up was the magnificent, star-studded, technicolor theology of The Greatest Story Ever Told, starring Max von Sydow as a messiah who is only marginally less wooden, upright and rigid than his cross. We amused ourselves for three more hours, making up new dialogue that was just slightly sillier that the screenwriters themselves had written for the movie.

We had only made it through half of King of Kings when Sheral snapped. It may have been something that I said. It was just after my commentary about star Jeffery Hunter's sparse, blond beard which went something like: "It's Jesus the Nazarene, fer gawd's sake - not Jesus the Nectarine!"

"These are EASTER movies", she protested, "they're not Christmas films!" She pointed out that every single one of these pictures concluded with a pretty graphic and gory crucifixion. These were hardly an invitation to a Holly, Jolly Christmas, she harrumphed!

I realised that we were long past the point at which I could remind her that most of the movies that TCM airs on Lincoln's Birthday end with Honest Abe getting shot in the box seat. No, the moment, or rather, the nine hours had gone, and she prised the remote from my still warm hand to change channels to the Doctor Who marathon on Space.

Hollywood has been making biblical epics for as long as there has been a Hollywood. Ben Hur was first filmed in 1925 with Ramon Novarro in the title role, and King of Kings was made in 1927 with HB Warner as Jesus, the Christ. After all this time, you'd think they'd hit the mark just once.

Maybe next year, we'll just just watch The Life of Brian again.

Have a wonderful Christmas, and remember - the book is always better.

Sometimes Silent Be a Crime

I consider myself lucky to have Ayda Aly as one of my FaceBook buddies. Because of the distance between our homes and our cultural differences, it's unlikely that she and I could have any other sort of contact. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, and Ayda lives in Alexandria, Egypt.

She is a young, devout, muslim woman, and I am none of those things. I have never met her, and I don't ever recall seeing her photograph, but she is my friend.

Ayda rescues cats. I don't know if she is the Egyptian Maria Soroski, or if Maria is the Canadian Ayda Aly, but I don't think that either would be offended by comparison with the other.

Yesterday, Ayda posted a photograph of the painting shown at the right of this post. She found it hanging in the window of a shop in Alexandria. It is by a renowned Lebanese artist, and Ayda was certainly impressed with its price tag. "How much?", she challenged her readers before answering her own question. It would be enough, she said, to spay, neuter and feed about two hundred of her street cats.

I like her priorities.

Mostly, Ayda posts stories and pictures of her rescued cats. Some of them have made me laugh until the tears run down my cheeks. Sometimes, her stories bring only the tears. She rescues sick cats as well as healthy ones, and lately, a number of her little ones have died in her care. She forgets that they would have died sooner without her, and is devastated by their loss.

Every day, she takes a long walk to feed her street cats, and she shares photos of them, some crowding close to her, hungry and grateful; others still keeping their distance, starving and suspicious. On her way, she takes pictures of her beautiful Alexandria, and she likes to share those too.

Egypt is unsettled these days. Demonstrators march in the streets, demanding that people have more say in the running of their country. That happens in Canada too, but here the police don't shoot them. The Egyptian government claims that forty people have died by violence in these protests; Ayda believes that it's over a thousand. She shares that news as well.

"Some times silent...", she explains, "be a crime..."

People are much the same the world over. I've never met anyone who is entirely good, and I don't think that anybody is completely evil. Most of us exist in the uneasy twilight between the two.We live our lives as best we can, and hope that we've made a difference.

People like Ayda are the difference. Thank you, my friend.

أنت نعمة.

To donate to Ayda's street cats

please click here.

Submission Hold

I received some exciting emails from several of my VOKRA friends earlier in the week. It seems that the Animal Rescue Site has a story contest running now, and a number of them suggested that I submit my blog post about Kenny Pawgers to be published on their page.

If there is enough positive response, the story could win VOKRA a grant of as much as five thousand dollars. It seemed like an easy task. I'd already written the piece, after all. It would simply be a matter of cut, paste and publish.

Nothing at all to it...right?

I followed their links to the entry page, read through the rules and stopped cold when I got to the part that said:  

"We recommend that you write and save your story of up to 300 words in a document on your own computer before copying and pasting it onto our site."

Those of you who have visited here before already know that I'm sometimes profligate with my words. I doubt that I could put three hundred or fewer onto a Post-It Note. Kenny's story weighed in at a respectable five hundred and eighty-four words - and, no, it's not fat, it's just big-boned!

Another thing that you may have noticed is this - I HATE EDITING! - and I do it badly. Editing has no flow, no essence, no soul. You simply chop, count, chop, count, chop, count, until finally, all of your feckin' adjectives have disappeared, like the Anasazi or corporate responsibility, and your beloved piece reads like Fun With Dick and Jane.

Notwithstanding this, I had made the pact, and was prepared to do the bloody deed. The first thing to go was the paragraph I had lifted from Maria's FaceBook posts, heartbreaking really. She had given me some fine material to work with, and I loved the flow of her narrative. After that, I found places where I thought that my prose sagged, so I spent some time tightening it up and trimming my excesses away. Fine, but still too long. I was into the muscle now, but surely a little of that could be spared. Fortunately, the edit was finished before I had to justify amputating appendages.

I was done in the wee hours of the morning, the Tall Lady and the cats long since abed. I pasted my story into the text field, chose my photo and submitted the whole lot to the contest. The site sent me a link, which I shared with my friends on FaceBook, and in two days we had scored over a hundred "likes".

On the third day, however, the story had vanished. It seems that I had left in a plea for the reader to donate to the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association, and this was a clear violation of the rules which I thought I'd read. In my defense, it was two o'clock in the morning when I finished.

So, back to the heavy hand and the bloody broad-axe. I submitted the new post today, and I'm delighted to say that it hasn't been pulled yet. Forty-three people have "liked" it so far, including Karen Duncan, Maria Soroski and me. Of course, I'm biased, and they might be lying to spare my feelings.

Kenny himself remains silent on the issue, accepting this too, with his usual serenity. He seems well, happy and unspoiled by his sudden celebrity. Perhaps his is the best perspective at all. In a world of chicken breast, goat's milk and wet, sloppy kisses, what could possibly be amiss?

FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT WORDS? It can't be!

Ah well, goodnight, all.

To "Like" Kenny's Story

Please click here

Fostering Community

There is a morning ritual among the bipedal hominids in our house that we refer to as making the bed. Our cats are of two opinions regarding this practice, and the schools of thought on the matter seem evenly divided.

On the one hand, there are those who see the exercise as an interruption of their morning routine; even vandalism of a sort. They have just settled into the warm, comfortable nest of bedding that their silly humans have vacated, and now those same foolish creatures return to rearrange the comfortable jumble which they themselves were no longer enjoying. In the process of doing so, they disturb the tranquility of any and all felines invested therein. This is the assessment of the older cats, who abhor the making of the bed.

  

On the other side of the argument are the kittens, who have infiltrated the same tangled pile of linen, but do not sleep. Bright-eyed and quivering, like children on Christmas Morning, fur bristling and tails a-wag, they slip crazily into the hollows and out of the caverns formed of the sheets, throws and comforters. Their excitement and anticipation are electric. They are waiting for the Blanket Ride.

Cats are not pack animals like dogs, but neither are they solitary, hermetic creatures. When food, safety and reproduction are not in dispute, they are quite sociable, and they will form into colonies. In a territory as small and crowded as our two-bedroom apartment, they have no choice. Here, community is imposed upon them.

Of course, there is the matter of hierarchy. When kittens are born, their mother's will is their law. As they grow, they play and squabble until they have established their own proper stations. So it is in the homes that they will come to share with us monkeys. We too have rules, doctrines and practices that the sensible cat or kitten must learn to respect, or, at least, to violate surreptitiously.

The Tall Lady and I would like to believe that the hierarchy in our home issues from us, but in point of fact, it begins with our four year-old adopted cats, the Flying Fellini Sisters. Xena is our big, perfect cat and her sister Gabrielle is the little, odd one. They accept the burden of foster kittens under the strongest of protests, and have become notorious as the kittens' grumpy aunties. They have despised and terrorized every kitten we have brought into our home. Surprisingly enough, all of the kittens love Brie - she of the snarl, the hiss and the heavy paw - but they worship Xena. They will follow her everywhere, braving her haughty disdain and trying to prove themselves worthy to learn her secrets.

This time, though, the balance is shifted. Our new foster cats do not live merely in the terrible shadow of Aunt Nasty and Auntie Grouchy. Sumi and her babies are learning about community under the gentle, kind and patient tutelage of seven month-old Bianca. All four have come to love and trust her, and she adores all of them. She is Sumi's little sister, and the smaller kittens' other mother.

Still, the kittens are little, and mistakes are made. After she had enjoyed the Blanket Ride yesterday morning, Bianca settled down at the foot of our newly-made bed for her early nap. Little, sleepy Sachi, with eyes hardly open yet, stumbled down to join her and nuzzled into the long, silky fur of the bigger kitten's neck.

As I left the bedroom, there was a loud, surprised squawk behind me. I turned to see poor, shocked Bianca struggling to pry loose the four month-old foster sister, who had latched on to one of her nipples, and was trying in vain to pull a pint.

Another lesson learned, I suppose. You get to choose your friends, but with family, y'gotta take what you're given.

To donate to

the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association

please click here