July 12, 2006

• PATHETIC

  Breaking promises to myself — that’s pathetic.  I do a splendid
  job of not making promises to others that I can’t keep, and of keeping
  the ones I make.  It’s when I get to those little private
  commitments I make that I slip and fall.  I was going to keep this
  journal updated, or so I told myself.

  The dental wounds are healing.  Amy, the dentist’s assistant, told
  me that the tongue is a “sneaky, nasty, dirty little thing,” and that
  I’d be tempted to stick it in the newly emptied socket.  She was
  wrong, in my case.  I wasn’t tempted consciously to tongue that
  space, and there was no unconscious exploration, either.  A few
  days after the extraction, when it had healed, I checked it out and
  discovered that the best-case scenario I’d been warned about had
  occurred and I’d gotten a bonus.

  Part of the standard routine warnings and advisories concerned the
  possibility of an adjoining tooth being damaged during an
  extraction.  I had laughed at the time, and told them that one of
  the teeth next to the one that was set to come out was broken and I’d
  gladly have it come out, too.  It had been a snaggly, blackened
  stump that made me sometimes suppress a wide smile for fear of scaring
  someone.  Now, no visible trace remains.  It was four days
  before I noticed.

  ---

  CAT NEWS:

  Sweet orange Nemo died.  It was quiet and peaceful, and Doug found
  her in her favorite shelf of the hanging sweater organizer in his
  closet one morning when he awoke.

  Hilary, the mother of all our young cats had been staying away a lot,
  only coming around once a week or so to eat.  Her daughter Alice,
  the only female out of the seven kittens she had produced, had been
  gone for months.  Occasionally, one of us would see Alice perched
  on the edge of our roof, but she didn’t come into the house. 
  Around the time that Hilary began to make herself scarce, Alice moved
  back in.  I suppose that’s some sort of feline territorial thing
  between them.

  Now, both Alice and Hilary are in full-time residence here again. 
  Hilary was visibly pregnant when she returned.  Yesterday, her
  water broke and she may or may not have had a kitten or two. 
  There was no sign of kittens, no little mewling sounds, and I could
  still feel kittens moving in her abdomen.  She was lactating, and
  kept cozying up to the nearly-grown guys from her second litter,
  offering milk.

  I saw one of them, Buzz (Buzzy Truffle, formerly known as Fuzzy
  Trouble), give her a look like, “You must be kidding!” and scoot
  away.  Hilary had weaned her kittens and aggressively rejected
  them even before Nemo lost her litter and adopted them.  Finally,
  Sammich (whose name initially had been Pobo or Bo-in-a-Po-suit after
  his older brother Bobo and his father Potemkin) took her up on the
  offer and has been nursing since yesterday afternoon.  Apparently,
  she has re-bonded with him.  Ain’t oxytocin a marvelous
  thing?  That cat is all sweetness and affection when she’s
  nursing, and all teeth, claws, hisses, screeches and growls when she’s
  not.

  Early this morning, Hilary gave birth to two kits on the couch and
  dragged them under my bed.  They are inaccessible and out of
  visible range.  I heard some tiny mewling sounds earlier, and saw
  Hilary scamper under the bed immediately.  Then after a while she
  came back out and jumped up on the bed, where she has been nursing a
  gluttonous Sammich off and on ever since.  He sucks a while and
  falls asleep.  Then she starts grooming him and that wakes him up
  and he starts sucking again.  They’re quite a pair, just about the
  same size.

  

  • 5:17 pm
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