freya

I like old things. Not really old things, like things from two centuries ago, but mostly things that are about as old as I am, or maybe about 10 years older, and maybe even some things that are 10 years younger. So. Not really very old at all, just "retro."

Two other categories of things I like: things that you put other things in (tins, boxes, jars, etc.); things that measure things.

Many years ago now, I bought the Cuistotmetric, or was perhaps given it. I still have the box, because it is a beautiful thing that you put other things into, but I do not display the box, I keep it in the basement and sometimes remember that I have this beautiful thing that you put other things into.

The Cuistotmetric itself, I put up. At first, it was kind of a joke. It was in my hallway, because who would ever use such a thing. It is a relic. But it is a relic that I use on a semi-regular basis. If you need to know how many grammes is 10 ounces, you should call me.

Everybody loves my Cuistotmetric.

It is a curiosity. And the dials are very satisfying to dial.

Last week, the garage saling was not all humiliation and heartbreak. I also found the Temperature Compensator of my dreams.

It has a dial too. Do you know, is this for me to make the weather do my bidding?

Not long after I took this picture, I turned it from "Dry" to "Change," just in case.

This, because I've already told you the story of my half-done tattoo. M-C was kind enough to take a picture for me for you.

And this because I need to remember how goddamn cute my cat is the next time she wakes me up with her demon yowling at 4 in the ante meridian. Besides which, I would just kill for markings like hers.

• Just because you think that Micachu, your New Fake Girlfriend is a brilliant songwriter and musician does not mean that you will enjoy writing to the music her brilliance produces.
• Checking how many words you've written does not count as writing.
• Always have a spare key tucked away in the cupboard of someone who lives on your street.
• If yoga postures that require you to spread your legs and bend forward make you want to alternately cry and punch something, you probably won't want to think very much about why.
• If you have believed that your cat is deathly ill, it will take three days after finding out she is not for her 4 am yowling to once more start annoying the fuck out of you.
• When another blogger and another blogger* end up sitting at the table beside you in the cafe, you might be jealous of their markers. You might also be too shy to ask what they're for.
• Roast beef is a fine Sunday meal, one that reminds you of some happy times with your family.

*Whose blog I inexplicably can't find in my reader and also can't find on the internet.

"Excuse me?"

"Yeah, the radiologist said it's totally normal for a cat of her age."

"So. She's fine."

"Well, there are still the episodes she had, so there's something going on with her heart. Could be heart disease. Could be vaso-vagal syndrome. A buddy of mine, when he sits back, you know - and he's an easy going guy - anyway, when he gets too relaxed he blacks out. Sometimes animals get that. Bring her back at the first sign of anything else."

"So. She's fine."

"Basically, yeah."

I hung up the phone and realized how goddamn tired I was from all this worrying. And she's fine!

Well, that's a stretch.

She may have some ridiculous ailment that will cause her to keep having seizures/strokes/fainting episodes. She definitely does have a slightly rotated heart with a thickened aortal arch.

Still though. Phew.

And now we're back to the yowling problem. I fed her at 5 am this morning, though instead of sitting at the bottom of the stairs and screaming, she walked politely up to the side of my bed and let out a small meow. But that can't happen every night. I'll give the automatic feeder a try and see how that works.

At any rate, I expect you'll be hearing far less about my cat from now on.

Harold Hoefle will be launching his first novel, The Mountain Clinic, published by Oberon Press.

Saturday, February 21st, 5 p.m.
The Manx Pub, 370 Elgin (@ Frank)

++

Harold and I met years ago now, just after my ex and I broke up. He seemed like a nice guy, and I thought he was vibing me, though I found out this summer that he hadn't been, and that I probably shouldn't have blogged about it, even if he had.

This past summer, out of the blue, he dropped me a line, he was going to be in town, did I want to go for a beer?

No vibes.

Why not, I thought. He'd seemed like a nice sort, and he writes good emails. If it's a bad time, I figured, it's likely to be a good story.

It wasn't a bad time at all. We got on like a house afire, as it turns out. I found him easy to talk to, easy to share really personal stuff with. He gave me one of my favourite compliments ever, though I've forgotten the exact words. Something about not having travelled much in terms of geography, but having spent my time instead quite thoroughly exploring the sometimes rocky terrain of relationships.

He was working on the book then, a draft just returned by our mutual friend Dave O'Meara.

This is what it's about:

++

The Mountain Clinic
Harold Hoefle

Harold Hoefle has published both fiction and non-fiction in literary
journals all over the country. This new novel traces the life of Walter
Schwende, a Scarborough boy who seeks out his past in travel. He lives with
Czech refugees in a Vancouver rooming-house, then works in a northern
mining town, later settling on a Nicaraguan coffee farm. He ends up as a
college teacher in Montreal, where he tries to imagine what life in his
family’s native home of Austria might have been like. This becomes an
obsession that finally takes him back to Europe.

Harold Hoefle teaches at the University of Victoria. His work has been
published in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Antigonish
Review, Exile, Front&Centre, Grain, Kiss Machine, Matrix, The Windsor
Review and Telling Stories (New English Stories from Québec), as well as
in Spray Job, a four-story chapbook. Hoefle’s non-fiction received an
Honourable Mention at the 2006 National Magazine Awards. The Mountain
Clinic is his first book.

++

When he wrote me to tell me about the launch, I said I wouldn't miss it for anything. Turns out I was lying.

If I've had to put my cat down just a few hours before, that will probably make me miss it.

But you shouldn't.

++

Speaking of: not much news on the Freya front. She's home with me now while we wait for the radiologist's report. We spent most of the evening on the couch, her curled up and purring, me reaching for the keyboard over her body. She seems fine, so everything else seems very far away.

By the end of the conversation with the vet earlier this evening, I was openly bawling.

The poor woman. She'd stayed late at work to talk to me, even, and there I was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, having stopped listening to her options minutes ago. Wads of snot-soaked toilet paper piled up in the diamond of my legs.

The best case scenario now is that the mass in Freya's chest is lymphoma, and that once the chemo has made her better, she will be one of the 10% of cats who live for two more happy years.

That, my friends, is a shitty best case.

I take it all back. I really do. Every groan I've let out after a yowl, every time I've cursed under my breath when I've tripped over her while I'm trying to feed her.

Last night was a bad night for pets on Some Street. Freya is in the hospital.

Around 7:30, maybe 8 pm last night, I was upstairs on Skype with CT. There was a huge crash from downstairs. I ran down, and there was Freya, limping from the living room to the kitchen, her right hind leg stiff and stuck out behind her, her tongue protruding. She was gagging and drooling.

Not breathing.

I looked in her throat. Nothing.

I scanned the room to look for the phone, in case I needed to take her to the emergency vet.

I picked her up and held her until she started breathing again. It didn't take long.

A few moments more, and her tongue retracted, her leg relaxed and curled back in. She tucked her head under my chin and held onto my shoulders, as she is wont to do.

I didn't go to the emergency vet.

She acted weird for the rest of the night. At one point, she jumped up, sniffed the air like she was hunting, got her hackles up and her tail puffed and slunk downstairs. I grabbed the mop, holding it by the business end in case I needed to use the handle as a weapon, and followed her. There was nothing amiss down there, though she'd hidden herself in the very back corner away from whatever it was.

By feeding time, she'd come back upstairs again, weirdly sprawled out in the middle of the kitchen floor instead of curled up on her favourite afghan. I got her can out of the fridge, squished up the food in the bowl, and put it down in the regular spot. Not a movement. I put it in front of her. She ate it all, and quickly, meowing for more when she was done.

This morning, I woke up to silence, after a full night's sleep. It was eerie and awful, as it turns out, not blissful.

She didn't eat her breakfast.

We were at the vet's by 2 pm. Steve drove us.

Hard to say what it is. Could be thyroid, could be diabetes again, could be kidneys. Could be all three. Could be her heart, instead or on top of.

Feels obvious to me it's the beginning of the end. It might be a slow end - she could last for years, even - but it's pretty clear she's past the best years and into decline, slow or not. I've known this for a while about my poor bony-backed stink-drooling tooth-losing cat. Doesn't make it any easier to know, which is probably why I've been putting off taking her to the vet.

Too bad it took a seizure to kick my ass into gear.

We'll know better what's wrong tomorrow, after the results of the battery of tests they're running are back. Best case scenario is that her diabetes has returned with a side dish thyroid.

As CT put it today, when diabetes is your best case scenario, things are not happy.

The vets at the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital are all lovely, though I had one of my favourites today, since she reminds me of my Aunt Marilyn. Her hands were kind on Freya, and she listened patiently as I relayed the minute details of what's been happening for the last few weeks, including imitations of Freya's different kinds of yowls.

When the vet left the room to do the estimate I picked Freya up off the table. She put a paw on each of my collar bones and tucked her head under my chin. I held on tighter.

+One+

Grace and I quite handily beat Greg and Bobcia at 4 games of Sequencia, mostly, we decided, because of the Polish Diagonal Sight Disorder with which both are afflicted. This, you will have to trust me, is hilarious, and I would explain why, except that by the time I finished explaining, complete with diagrams and flow chart and game plans, it would not be amusing in the slightest.

I love this game, though. I'm not a huge board game fan, having been turned off them at an early age by a childhood friend who cheated like mad, lied about it, and then made fun of me for losing. But I find Sequence - "It's part card game, part board game!" - thoroughly enjoyable. It's enough to keep your hands busy while you're chatting, and not so difficult that you have to pay much actual attention.

Bobcia also called me a boozer all night, as in "Get a load of this boozer here!" because it took me an hour to drink my one and only beer of the evening. I found this also to be hilarious, for reasons that probably do not require flow charts.

+Two+

One of CT's pictures from his trip here in August has been chosen by Schmap for the Downtown Neighbourhood section of their Ottawa site. I'm very excited about this. I was standing right. There. Swear to god.

+Three+

Does anyone want a yowling cat? I've just about had enough.

I've heard her through the earplugs, the past two nights.

If I thought it would make it better, I'd get her one of those automatic feeders. But it would have to have multiple compartments so that she could get fed at 3 am and 5:30 am, and probably 4 pm too, so I didn't have to generally listen to an hour's worth of yowling when I got home.

And sure, I could feed her earlier, but at what point does it stop, yknow? She's on a pretty strict schedule. Between 6:30 and 8 am, 5:30 and 7 pm, and 11 pm and 12:30.

If I fed her every time she started yowling, she'd go through a case of cans in a couple days.

Basically, if you are in the house and she hasn't just been fed, she's either yowling or I'm hunched up waiting for her to yowl.

At 5:45 this morning, I took my earplugs out, wrapped myself in a robe, stomped down the stairs and shut her in the basement. Then I stomped back up again, shut my door, plugged my plugs back in and slept, solidly and deeply, for about 90 minutes.

You know what I want?

I want my pre-diabetic cat back. I want the cat who ate dry food 5 kibbles at a time, who slept with me at night and put me to sleep by purring. Right now, I do not want the wet-food eating, stink-drooling, demon-infested yowl monster that my formerly sweet natured lovely cat has become.

Not much of a salesperson, am I?

+Four+

I didn't go to the Slow Dance Party tonight because the thought of strangers touching me made me want to back slowly out of the room instead.

+Five+

I think my post yesterday came across as less hopeful than I meant it.

It's really quite a relief to have stopped looking, and all in all, I'm pretty happy about it.

I don't really think I'm going to be alone forever, not necessarily, at any rate. Hence the wry half-smile and the murmur.

Maybe I'll find someone, maybe I'll find someones. Maybe I won't find anyone.

But what's the worst that can happen? Most of the women in my family who are over 50 - all but two of them - are single, either through divorce or death. And those are just the ones who are alive. All my great aunts were either spinsters, or widowed young enough I never met their husbands.

I come from a long line of women who have ended up without a partner, though not alone, not by a long shot. They've all lived full and happy lives.

What I need to do is fight against what pop culture tries to shove down my throat as the one true way. Difficult to do, because being coupled in some form or another feels right to me in many ways. But wrong in many others.

So I'll write and I'll knit and I'll run and skate and lift weights and practice yoga. I'll play board-and-card games with my friends while drinking one beer. I'll put on short skirts and go dancing with other friends while drinking several. I'll go to California to visit hot boys. I'll travel. I'll go back to therapy. I'll laugh at good jokes, read good books, eat good food.

And happily, mostly, I'll warrant.

Does anyone want a cat?

I swear to god, most of the time she's great. But since I fed her by accident at 3:30 am after Shelley's party, she's been making me crazy. Off my nut effing crazy.

For two nights after that fateful night, she started demanding food at 4:30. Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, calling loudly up to any creature with opposable thumbs who might save her from her empty bowl plight.

Last night, however, she started the yowling an hour earlier. That is in the ante meridiem, my friends. Though it was black as pitch outside; well, beyond the streetlight that makes my room glow like a sitcom bedroom after the lights go out.

She didn't yowl the entire time, not a constant mrooowlwrwowlrllwrowwel or anything. But often enough that I didn't get more than a few minutes sleep until 7, when I finally relented and stomped downstairs.

Worse yet, mostly it's a normal yowl, but occasionally it's this otherworldly garble, deep in her throat, some kitten demon demanding payment. It is uncanny.

I don't know what to do. Her schedule, which was working pretty well, was a feed at 7 or 8 am, a feed around 5:30 pm, and another feed, a bigger one, as late as I could push it. At least 11 pm, preferably closer to midnight.

Besides that one night, her schedule hasn't changed. I don't want it to change, because I'll be damned if I'm going to feed her at 4 every morning. I've tried calling her up to my bedroom, and that sometimes works, at least for a few minutes of purring. I've tried going downstairs and getting her and shutting her in my room, which worked the first night, but since then has only led to her pawing the bottom of the door and meowing in my room instead of at the foot of the stairs.

Tonight, I'm trying earplugs. I've warned M-C that there'll be no relief. I'm hoping that a lack of response on my part will send Freya back to whatever soft thing she was curled up on before she decided it was breakfast.

Shelley's theory is that as pets get older, they get crankier/stinkier/messier so that we miss them less when they're gone. Seems as good a theory as any to me, because if the earplugs don't work, I may have to throw the cat out with the kitty litter.

Unless you have any other suggestions for me and my demonic cat?

A cat's bicuspid looks remarkably like a bit of lost pretzel when it's on your floor.

I looked in at the fish on my way by, on Saturday, and then looked down at the floor. It confused me, since I haven't eaten pretzels in years, and I've never seen M-C with a bag. Maybe she goes crazy for the dessicated bread when I'm not around, I thought. Ah well.

I picked it up.

In my hand, it didn't actually look much different from a bit of pretzel. But enough different. Different enough that I looked closer than I generally do at bits of garbage I pick up off the floor. The colour was a bit light, one end was kind of...

Pointy?

Without checking her mouth, I knew it was a tooth, though I called her to the main floor and confirmed in short order.

And then picked her up and held her tight.

She's showing her age, badly, these days. Her spine is bony, her skin is dry, the lost teeth make her drool, she's stiff getting up and down. Her trek up the stairs this morning took longer than it should have. Would have, even a few months ago.

In many ways, she makes me crazy. Wanting my hands for petting when I need them for typing. The silver fur everywhere. Yowling for food at 6 am. The hives and itchy eyes I get if I'm not careful petting her.

But such a lovely purrer. She is calm and sweet, and I have fallen asleep crying into her fur more times than I would like to say. She has taken better care of me than I probably have of her.

I don't want her to get old, and I don't want her to die.