Cat TV

It may say that it's February on the calendar, but my brain is telling me we're still stuck in January. So in the midst of this 10^th or 12^th week of January, I have taken to turning my TV on during the day. And while I was browsing the dregs of entertainment, I happened upon a new TV channel. It's called “Dog TV,” and I was invited to try it.

Figuring that some cute dogs romping around was just what I needed, I gave it a try. Then I gazed in confusion, tipping my head from one side to the other -- puppy-like -- trying to determine what exactly was going on. I eventually realized that Dog TV is not about dogs, it is for dogs. First there is a dog sitting on the floor, at camera level, and then, as the dog looks away, the camera becomes its eyes and we are seeing, presumably, what the dog is seeing. In the segment I was spacing out over, it happened to be a boat sailing on a pond.

Now I had to wonder if this was something that would really captivate a dog. It was certainly boring to me. And, unlike dogs, I'm pretty restricted to two senses when I'm watching TV and hence, more easily amused. I would think dogs would just totally ignore a boat on a pond where they couldn't feel the wind or smell the water or the shore. And if they couldn't run up and down and bark at it, what good would it be?

It occurs to me that whatever crackpot invented this, and those to whom he sold it as a good idea, had just assumed that we could corrupt dogs the way we have corrupted our babies.  Sit them in front of a TV and they will become hypnotized.  I've done it, and I'm pretty sure you've done it.  I did try to limit the number of times I did this to my children, but wasn't it great when you could plop that kid down and go get something done?  But do it even once and you've created a monster.  Turn a TV on anywhere and heads turn and conversation stops, as does a bunch of brain activity, and you all just sit there and watch the moving pictures.

This is like the movie Halloween III. The first time I saw Halloween III, my first baby was three days old. After her birth, I believed the world had just changed so dramatically that there would no longer be a need in my life for the common distraction of television. Until three days later when, honestly, the thrill of watching my newborn sleep had run its course. I hadn't ever seen Halloweens I and II, but if you don't know this, Halloween III for some strange reason doesn't have anything to do with the first two. The plot is that some dastardly geniuses develop a program to destroy all the children in the world. They convince all these children, through the usual means, that they have to watch TV at this particular time on this particular day because it will be really great. When they do, the evil program is run, and the children sit hypnotized until their brains burst.

I can't even begin to tell you how, as a psychologist, this plot has held me in thrall all these years.  And the fact that this movie happened to be on, and I shifted my attention from my infant daughter to watch it, myself hypnotized, well, it would take a book-length blog to give all those dynamics the attention they deserve.

My point being that sitting hypnotized in front of the TV is just something we do.  You can do this with kids, you can do this with adults, so I guess it stands to reason that you can do it with dogs. But my cat, Molly, would have none of it. She has only once in the over two years we have lived together been rapt with TV. She sat so immobile while the Winnie the Pooh movie was on that I was even able to take pictures while she remained oblivious to all but that chubby little cartoon bear.

At night when I usually do my TV watching, she sits on the arm of my recliner for awhile, but only for the purpose of getting scratched and petted, and when she has had enough of both the petting and the nonsense that I am watching, she jumps down and settles herself behind the chair where the TV lights won't annoy her and falls asleep until it's time to wake her up so we can go to bed. Because staring at this box of imperfect light and sound is really quite beneath her.  She would tell you if she could that she has far better options for entertainment.

Cat TV Channel 1

Cat TV Channel 2

Cheese of the Month

Way back when I was fourteen or fifteen, I joined the Doubleday Book Club.  I sent in the postcard, which did not require an adult signature, and began to collect books.  You may not be surprised to hear that after I joined Doubleday, I received and accepted an invitation to join the Book of the Month Club.  It is heartening to know that the Doubleday Book Club still exists, and still offers five for 99 cents if you join.  Book of the Month Club is more upscale, and more expensive, so it's nice to know some things haven't changed.

My mother belonged to the Book of the Month Club when she was in her twenties.  I don't have much that belonged to my mother, but those old tattered books sit proudly on my bookshelf today,

sharing space with my first Doubleday treasures.

My mother's collection includes A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Clarence Day's Life with Father and Mother, James Hilton's Random Harvest and (my favorite), The Chastity of Gloria Boyd by Donald Henderson Clarke.  My titles were less diverse, all romantic mysteries by Daphne duMaurier, Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney.

I loved getting those books, Christmas every month.

Later, in my twenties, I was still on-again-off-again with book clubs, but I discovered a new monthly thrill.  I was in graduate school in Baltimore, and not just loving school for the first time in many years, but having a blast with a fellow student, who spent many hours "drinking and telling lies" as she so brilliantly put it.  Lots of laughs and great stories from those days, including the time we apparently set fire to my Christmas tree with a rum-soaked fruitcake.

Another of my fondest memories was her discovery of the "Cheese-of-the-Month Club."  It was run by a guy whose photo made him look absolutely delightful, and like someone who was absolutely delighted to share his new and delicious cheeses with us every month.  In fact, he was so enthusiastic about this, that he offered free gifts with every order.  So we joined, and we divided up the free gifts, which were different cool cheese knives (which I still own) and shared the cheeses.

It's been quite a number of years since those days.  Our particular cheese-of-the-month club doesn't appear to exist (yes, I would recognize it online in a minute), but there are many others.  They're pretty expensive now, and probably don't include such neat free gifts.  We had a lot of laughs at the expense of the sweet guy who ran the cheese-of-the-month club, and I'm sure he would be delighted at that as well.

A couple of weeks ago, in the thick of January, I received a small replacement part in the mail for my old grill.  With it was a coupon -- actually a very nice card -- offering $100 off a trial order of wines of over $160.  Usually I do have enough will power to toss such offers in the trash, but it was January, I had been dieting, and was cold, hungry and bored, so I explored the site online.

The offer turned out to be hard to refuse.  Order by the case or individual bottles, free shipping over $100, reviews which included one that raved about using her introductory coupon to buy a zillion bottles of wine for a pittance.  I looked at the wines.  I looked at the mixed cases.  I looked at the fine print.  I chose a case marked mixed American wines, white and red, priced at $259 and reduced to $159.99.  I tried to put it in my cart and learned that to get the lower price I had to be an "angel" which apparently meant that I would be "investing" in winemakers who were making new wines.  Now, that is really not me, but the fine print promised that every penny would go to future purchases, and was refundable any time I decided to quit.

What could I do?  I became an angel.  Then, back to my cart, I noticed that I still had to pay $259.  So I opened another window and without logging in I did the same shopping.  After finagling around a bit more, I came up with the $159, but a cheery notice that said I could redeem my $100 coupon with my next purchase.

Stay with me, because this has a happy ending.

I called the toll-free number and a delightful young man promised to help.  He assured me that I should be able to redeem my coupon with the order I had placed.  Ah-ha, he said, the problem was that the order total was $159.99, and before I could bitch about deceptive advertising and hang up, he added the penny and took off the $100.  Now I had a dozen wines originally marked at $259 for $60.00.

But wait! as the old Ronco ads used to say...

The young man asked me what kind of wines I liked, and then added three more, assuring me that I would really like them.

Then I asked if the first $40 monthly payment would be charged right away.  No, he said.  In fact, it would happen in March, and only after I would get an email notice, and the option of declining to be an Angel.

Well, if this was a scam it was such a good one that it didn't even occur to me that it might be a scam until the following week when I was wondering if I really would take delivery on my case of wine.

But it was not a scam.  Here came FedEx, with a friendly driver hauling my huge box and informing me that he had about a dozen of these deliveries today, but mine was the biggest.

My first taste comes tonight.  I have about as much of a discerning palate for wine as I did for books in 1966, or for cheese in 1978.  Which is to say, I'll probably enjoy it quite enough.  I'll let you know.

Ringing It In Alone

Imagine my surprise when my children grew up and no longer wanted to spend New Year's Eve with me.  I for one had great times with them on holidays, major and the most minor.  My daughter pulled the plug on that when she up and left for the midwest, although she does grace me with alternate Thanksgivings and Christmases.  In the latter case she always makes sure she is gone by New Year's Eve.

Can't say that I blame her.  I certainly wasn't home playing poker and watching Marx Brothers movies with my parents when I was in my twenties.  That was a custom that came into being through my husband's family.  When we visited his mother and Aunt Faye in Chicago, New Year's Eve was a dinner for the entire family, followed by hours of talking and laughing, which eventually got to a serious poker game.  Aunt Faye brought out the magnificent jar of pennies she had collected and divided them up, and we went at it.  The only family game of my childhood, which I remember fondly, was Keno with my sister and mother.  In Chicago, we played poker to the wee hours, adults and children.

Let me interrupt myself here.  The second time I visited Chicago with my not yet husband I instigated leaving after dinner to spend the night at a hotel, where we watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (my first time) and drank champagne to usher in the year.  I can only say that in the end a) I believe I have gotten what I deserve and b) I wouldn't have done it any other way.

This year my son, now 22 and late to his teenage rebellion, has asserted his desire to be anywhere but here, and after a couple of painful New Year's Eves when we tried to make the most of being together, I accepted that this year he would be with his friends.  So last night I was alone.

I do alone pretty well.  Back in the day on Long Island when we had stopped traveling during the holidays, we would begin early in the afternoon watching Marx Brothers and Fred Astaire movies with an all-day poker game accompaniment.  The eventual tradition became a humungous antipasto and red wine for dinner and champagne at midnight, with a lobster dinner on New Year's Day.  So yesterday I bought myself a lobster, opened up a bottle of prosecco, and began to watch a movie.

At dinner time, the reality of the night began to assert itself.  I had never, not ever, been alone on New Year's Eve.  So as the water heated up for the lobster, I thought about my entertainment options.  I do have a fairly full DVR and enough movies on DVD -- and VHS -- that something would leap out at me and scream Happy New Year.  And it did.

I had a few weeks ago recorded a public TV tribute to doo-wop and the oldies of my pre-teen and teenage years.  And although I had totally forgotten her name, I had sung along with Kathy Young countless times when I was but a naive, dreamy-eyed kid.






Yes, that is Bowzer of Sha Na Na doing the intro.

And lordy there was Jay Black still showing off hitting and holding that high note on Cara Mia.  My husband and I had seen him do an oldies show on Long Island in the 80's and back then he looked like he'd had a long hard-drinking, high-living life, and he hasn't changed a bit.

So I'm here to say that it's okay to be alone on New Year's Eve.  And it's okay for my kids to be doing what I was doing when I was young.

And I hope that someday I'll be around when they are looking for a home base where they can bring over their kids for a hot New Year's midnight poker game.  I've started filling the penny jar.

Nick-Names

When my daughter was born, naming her was easy.  Antoinette was my mother's name, pretty and unusual, the feminine for Anthony, unlike the guttural Agnes that I was saddled with.  Named after my father's mother, not only was Agnes an ugly name, but the things that rhyme with the abbreviated "Aggie" just scream out traumatic childhood.  Little did it matter that in Italian it has a beautiful sound and pretty damn lofty meaning.  While I was always Agnes, my mother was never called by her beautiful name; she was known as "Dora."  Who knows why.  My poor mom as a little girl, aeons before the days of Dora the Explorer, I'm sure had been hammered with clever and alliterative epithets like "dumb Dora."

So my sweet firstborn was Antoinette.  My father, who was eternally mourning my mother, whom he had tormented with complaints and criticism all her life, tried to call my baby "Dora" once when we were visiting, and when she was only a few months old.  In a rare display of unity, my two sisters and I shouted, "NO!" and informed my father that she was NOT going to be Dora.

Relatives on the other side began to call her Toni, which never stuck, I guess because she wasn't a Toni.  Not on my watch.  So Antoinette it was.

Of course, when she began to speak, her name was quite a mouthful.  So "Antoinette" became "Ettyouette" which of course we thought was adorable, and somehow it became shortened it to "Etty."  I have a scarf I knitted for my little girl, with "Etty" embroidered on it.

And then, when she went to school, we all gave up Etty.  Since then, Antoinette has occasionally been "Ant," most often by herself in her own writing, but not to her face by anyone else.  So, Antoinette it remains.

When my son came along, the agreement had been that since the first child had been my choice, from my side of the family, the second would be from my husband's side.  Had the second been a girl it most likely would have been Sophia, somehow after his sister Elaine?  Go figure.  More likely, it was the feminine of his own name, Stephan, which I think I was told was the Americanized version of Sophianos.  Which doesn't make any more sense than Dora from Antoinette, as the Greek name is Stefanos.  But I do have fond memories of Stephan's Aunt Faye tunefully calling out, "Oh, Sofionoulyi!"  Also interesting is that "Stephan," pronounced "Stefan" was further misspelled by his mother on the birth certificate, which reads, "Stephen."

But our second wasn't a girl, and Stephan has a family full of Johns and Williams, and we weren't interested in having a junior.  So we were thinking of Greek-sounding male alternatives and ended up with Alexander and Nicholas.  And somehow decided that Nicholas was the more unusual.

So my second child was named Nicholas.  And, although I only know this through our home videos, we began to call the boy "Nicky."

And then, one day in my son's infancy, we were shopping at the mall, and from many different directions, throughout the course of the afternoon, we heard the echo of my son's nickname.  Nicky/Nikki had apparently become the name of choice for pretty much most of the kids in our suburban neighborhood.

We were crestfallen.  We (honestly, it was probably me that was behind all this) had truly thought that we had come up with a rare and noble name for our unique second child.  I recall that we talked long and seriously about this quandary.  And eventually we came up with a solution:  Our son's nickname became "Nikko."  And it worked.  It is a name as rare and wonderful as "Antoinette."  He has tried to be called Nicholas at times, but I think in the end he just gave a philosophical shrug and accepted that he was, indeed, "Nikko."

Absence of Dad

I'm reading a hysterically funny book by Jim Gaffigan called Dad Is Fat.  As he described his dad and his determination not to be at all like him, I commiserated.  My father was not an alcoholic, he was miserable without the aid of an intoxicant.

He was born and raised in Italy, in Sardinia, he would have you know, which is better than Italy.  I believe he was hard of hearing, speaking very loud very broken English all his life.  Because he was loud, he also appeared to be constantly angry, even when he was joking.  And by the way, he had no sense of humor.  Joking amounted to making fun of someone.  He loved All In the Family, and began to fondly call my mother a dingbat after Edith Bunker.  Ha ha.

Because he slipped into the US illegally, when he was found out he had to go back to Italy.  Thanks to intervention by Senator John O. Pastore, forever after known as a saint, and because he was married with two children, he was allowed to go do whatever he had to do to make Italy and the US happy, and then come back.

I was three.  He had decided he wanted to take me with him, even got me a passport,

at which time my mother flipped out, assuming he would take me and never come back.  This was either due to my mother's pervasive fearfulness, understandable under the circumstances, or my father's inability to instill confidence in him, probably both.  Anyway, I lost my big chance to go to Italy.

When he left my mother, she had me, my infant sister, and my wheelchair-bound grandmother, no driver's license, and a farmhouse in the boonies.  She had a nervous breakdown, which back in the day meant she was anxious and depressed.  Back in the day she was prescribed sleeping pills, which added to the troubles.  Assorted uncles would drive her to get groceries and aunts would try to tell her everything was going to be all right.

He was gone for I believe three years.  That's a long time for a woman with I'm assuming no income, no means of transportation, an invalid mother and toddler, and a baby.

I have absolutely no recollection of those years.  My memories start back up again when I started first grade.  And because my mother had a huge dysfunctional family, and the dysfunction continued with my immediate family, and mostly involved poor communication, you now know as much as I know about those years.

I can only imagine the effects of the separation on each of us.  I was already chubby and too serious so I can't blame the separation on that.  But I do recall one Halloween night when my father was taking us around to visit a couple of aunts and uncles.  I believe I was somewhere around eight.  Shortly after we got to Aunt Vivian and Uncle Jim's my dad and my uncle left.  I doubt that he was gone long, but when he came back I was in tears, inconsolable, because I thought he'd been abducted.  Not that he took off, but was taken away.  In fact, he had gone to help my uncle change a tire.

I wonder if the separation when I was small and my sister newborn led to him feeling alienated from us.  Was he angrier when he got back than when he left?  No idea.

But the inhumanity of forcing a parent to leave a family to satisfy legal requirements of citizenship for god's sake.  You just need to put yourself in the shoes of the immigrant, who just wanted to come here to have a better life.

At least he got all those t's crossed and dotted those i's.

Ninja Cat on Cockroach Patrol

Learning to live with Palmetto bugs was quite the adjustment.  Was once a time if I spotted one when I was vacationing in the South, I would have to wake someone up to dispatch the critter.  Once, in Mexico, I upturned a wastebasket over one before I alerted my companion, just so it wouldn't scurry into hiding, only to come out again once I was asleep.

My son's cat, Blueberry, who I inherited when he left, was what they call a feral cat, which meant you wanted to be really careful when you picked him up.  We developed a ritual, after dinner, where I sat on the porch, and he hunted cockroaches, for dessert.  Apparently, he enjoyed the crunch.

My cat Molly is a cat of a whole different nature.  For one thing, she has no idea that there is an outdoors.  When I go outside, she assumes I have just vanished, and waits patiently until I reappear.  Happily, she has no clue that anything exists above the height of a chair, and has never attempted to explore the heights of the kitchen table.

She also is clueless about bugs.  Out here in the boonies, they frequently find their way inside, and she is astute in finding them.  But what to do with them once they are found, well, she has yet to figure that out.  If they are airborne, she will keep her eye on them, and will even chase them across a room most likely losing them in the process.  If it is scurrying on the floor, she is quick enough to catch it, but when she gets there, she just half-heartedly swats at it, till it foolishly tries to run away, and then she repeats the routine until either she or the bug lose their zest.

Molly lives in a jacuzzi-sized bathtub in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom.  Last night, as I was sitting there, I heard a large animal moving quickly, and of course saw that it was a Palmetto bug.  As Groucho might wonder, how it got in my bathtub I'll never know.  But fact is, in its panicked attempt to run up the side, it stupidly flipped itself over.  My cat, ever on the ready, jumped up on the side of the tub and watched it for a minute or so.  Then she leaped in and meandered over to it, saw what needed to be done, swatted at it a couple of times, and flipped it back over on its "feet."  And when it started to move, Molly took off.

Followed was me leaning into the tub, trying to get it to come out of hiding behind the litter.  Then I chose one of the number of books that I had sitting on the side of the tub, and unceremoniously dropped it on the roach.  The book I chose was one about battling cancer, which pretty much describes my feelings about the topic.

Molly, of course, was nowhere to be found.

On Death and Living

I've always been afraid of death, since I was a kid.  As I have gotten older, and then "old," I have recently tried to adapt in the least painful way possible to the fact that, hey, we all gotta go.  Albert Ellis, who had to go as well, would have been proud that I am thinking rationally about the fact that people die, and life goes on, and it's okay.  I especially like the way Richard Dawkins copes -- you weren't here before you were born and it was fine not to exist; when you die and no longer exist it will be the same thing.  And here is Dr. Dawkins, saying it far better himself:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” 
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Since my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April, there has been a new urgency to my need to accept the fact of dying.  In the wonderful movie Cloudburst, Olympia Dukakis' character says, "I'm 80, nothing lasts forever."  And according to Walter Isaacson, in Albert Einstein's last days at age 76, he consoled others, at one point saying, "I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn't really matter when."  He wrote formulas and bemoaned his lack of adequate mathematics to his last day.

I tackled with some dread Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and have basically come away from it thinking, "Well, all right then."  A bit impatient with her that she was so blind to the fact that her husband would die, where I have lived knowing loved ones would die and leave me, and that I would die and leave others, who would inevitably get along fine without me.  And yet, who am I who have not had to deal with the death of a loved one since my mother's death just thirty years ago to offer a critique her experience?

So where does this leave me?  It is a process, and one we go through like it or not.  As I write that I am aware of its triteness, and yet the fact that it is 100 percent true.

For right now, each of these has helped place me in the context of the world in which we all die.  I am trying to allow myself to feel sadness at the inevitable ending, and also to appreciate each day that I and my loved ones are here.