Thankful for:

Although I’m not a fan of Thanksgiving (see last year’s post), I think that our world would be a better place if we more frequently focused on that for which we are thankful instead of nearly constantly complaining about the irksome, hateful and horrid things in our lives.  Granted when there are things in our life that are bad, we should do our best to change them.  The occasional grief and/or sadness in our life cannot always be “fixed”.  Only time and new priorities can help lessen the grief and sadness.  
 

So to avoid another day of complaints on my part, here’s a list of those things for which I am thankful.

1. I am so very grateful that I am a woman. 
2.  No turkey has been killed for my taste buds in over 23 years. 
3.  I have today and tomorrow off…….with pay. 
4.  My cats and dog. 
5.  A relatively pain free day, even though I’ve taken 2 prescription pain pills and 2 over the counter pain pills since 4 AM. 
6.  I have 4 clean litter boxes, with just 5 more to go. 
7.  I have decided not to cook today and, instead, doing that on Saturday. 
8.  I am thankful to have shared my life with numerous cats and dogs over the years.  I still miss those who have died, most especially the greatest cat ever born, my one and only soulmate, Casey Anansi.  The love and understanding I received from Casey forever changed my life for the better.  RIP my darling – gone, but never forgotten.  He has been gone since January 10, 1990. 
9.  Each day brings me closer to retirement.  I just hope I can hang on for another 2 years and 3 months.
10. My diabetes is under control. 
11.  I am able to take care of myself.
12. Although I broke a nail, I didn’t fall today when Tessa came running across the living room and nearly knocked me down.   
13. Joss Whedon and all of his work, especially Buffy the Vampire Slayer, followed closely by Firefly.
14. Aaron Sorkin and especially The West Wing. 

I’m going to leave it there.  I don’t want to push my luck.  So, what are you thankful for today?

 

A Cat Like No Other

I took a slight hiatus in college and went to work, driving a catering truck, in 1972/73.  As I was pulling off the lot in my truck one morning, I spotted a white cat near the office.  It was apparent he was beat up, with injuries that made him walk with great difficulty.  Throughout the day, he was on my mind.  I feared another truck would return to the lot and he wouldn’t be able to get out of the way, and would get run over and killed.  When I pulled in at the end of the day, I saw he was still there and was greatly relieved. 

At the end of the day, it was necessary to pack up any of the sandwiches and other items that needed refrigeration and take them up to the office.  We’d also turn in our money for the day.  As I turned to head up to the office I saw the kitty had managed to drag himself all the way down to my truck.  Needless to say, I knew he’d be going home with me. 

I turned in my stuff, picked him up and put him into my car with me.  Of course, I had no cat carrier in the car, and he proceeded to lie down on my thigh.  Off we went to the vet’s office to see what could be done to fix him up.  For the entire trip, he calmly slept on my leg.  The vet determined he had been hit by a car some time ago and the bones in both his back legs and his tail had healed, but not in their proper positions.  He felt that if the cat wasn’t able to get around that the best solution would be to amputate one of his legs.  He said it would be easier for him to get around on 3 good legs. 

I named him Chester, after Dennis Weaver’s character on Gunsmoke.  Chester was a blacksmith who walked with a severe limp.  My Chester’s tail was bent at a 90 degree angle and both of his back legs were bowed, so that he looked like Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp from the rear.  He immediately got along with my other cats and soon regained his strength, thanks to regular meals and plenty of love. 

Chester came into my life when my other cats included Casey (the beloved), Cerulea, Cinnamon, Cricket and Corky.  Casey preferred to be held and would jump into my arms from the floor or anywhere he happened to be.  Chester wanted to do the same, but his back legs weren’t strong enough.  He learned to jump into my arms from counter tops.  And, a college friend taught him to climb up our legs.  That was fine when we were wearing those old fashioned Levi men’s jeans that were heavy duty denim – nothing like today’s jeans.  Of course, Chester didn’t discriminate.  It didn’t matter whether you were wearing jeans, or shorts, or a nightgown with bare legs.  If he wanted UP, he was going to get there. 

Chester was the most laid back, trusting cat that I’ve ever had.  I could hold my arms in front of me, and he would fall asleep on them.  I would grab both his back legs with one hand and his front legs with my other and put him around my neck, where he would also fall asleep.  He could sleep anywhere.  After spending at least 30 minutes putting together our artificial Christmas tree one year, making sure all of the branches were just perfect, I left the room for about 15 minutes.  When I came back into the room, I noticed that the tree looked a bit lopsided, with one branch hanging low right in the middle of the tree.  I didn’t understand how I could have missed that branch.  But, I didn’t.  While I was gone, Chester had climbed into the tree, straddled the branch and fallen asleep.

Chester gave me one of the biggest scares of my life.  We had a phone installed in our kitchen and I didn’t discover that the technician had left our back door standing open when he left.  It never occurred to me that someone would simply leave a door to the outside wide open, especially when there were cats and dogs in the house.  After counting noses, I discovered that Chester was missing.  At the time we lived a block off U.S. 441, a major highway in Miami.  My mother, a neighbor and I walked the neighborhood calling Chester to no avail.  I feared he would either get killed by a car or a dog.  Our dog, Cody, loved Chester.  She would “mouth” him, up and down his back.  Chester loved it.  Maybe he thought he was getting a massage.  But Cody would leave him with wet, spiked hair running down his spine.  He had no fear of dogs because of Cody and if he encountered a dog while outside, he wouldn’t run or even defend himself.  It wasn’t until hours later that I found him, across the street lying in the grass.  Fortunately, he was fine. 

I called Chester my football cat.  Many years ago, I was a big Miami Dolphins football fan.  I had a tendency to get a bit excited when watching the game and would yell quite a bit.  Once the screaming started, Chester would dash into the room from wherever he had been, and jump into my lap.  Seeing that I wasn’t in danger and didn’t need him to rescue me from an attacker, he would curl up in my lap and go to sleep.  I don’t know how he slept through my hollering, but he slept contentedly throughout the game and commotion.  I lost him to kidney disease when he wasn’t much older than 10 years old.  Football watching was never the same and not as much fun, once he was gone.  He was certainly one of a kind and a true delight.  It’s been about 30 years since his death and I still miss him to this day. 

Values & Morals, Part 1

Unless you make a concerted effort to avoid television, radio and serious discussions you know that the discussion in the U.S. for the past few months has been dominated by the topics of morals, morality and values.  The majority of the talk has involved women’s behavior and the consequences thereof.  Most of this rhetoric has been coming from the Right, primarily due to the Republican presidential primaries and Rush Limbaugh.  These players have dominated the conversation. 

Unlike the political shows that I regularly watch and blogs that I regularly read, I want to talk about the values that I hold dear and my take on morals and morality.  Why?  Well a friend recently directed me to the latest post by George Lakoff, a linguist and professor whose work I greatly admire.  To check out the inspiration for this post, go here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/santorum-strategy_b_1338708.html

First a disclaimer:  these are my beliefs and are not a part of a tradition, codified ideology, religious doctrine or political party.  While as a self-described ecofeminist, my point of view is what I arrived at after evaluating my life experiences and the books that I have chosen to read.  I haven’t had any formal training, taken any women’s studies classes in college, nor undergone any sort of indoctrination process.  Feel free to identify with one from Column A, two from Column B or any distribution you want, including rejecting all of the following.  For the time being, at least, this is a relatively free country. 

In my formative years I attended the local Lutheran church.  In preparation for confirmation in the faith, I attended a 2 year long, weekly Bible study program with others my age.  Because of my affinity for animals, most likely from birth, I frequently questioned some of what is in the Bible.  Animal sacrifices bothered me immensely.  Additionally, the absence of women in the many lineages (a man begat this man, who begat that man and so on), I was disturbed by this omission of half of the human race’s participation in populating the world.  Where were the mothers?  Even at a very young age, it seemed to me that the chronicles recorded in the Bible were weighted heavily toward men.  The inequities visited upon women were apparent to me at a very early age, long before the second wave of feminism.  And, incidentally as a Lutheran, I was taught a distrust of and opposition to the Catholic Church, which remains with me to this day. 

Also at an early age I became interested in witches and witchcraft.  Maybe it was because I was an avid fan of the afternoon soap opera, Dark Shadows.  I certainly can attribute my fascination with vampires to that show and Barnabas Collins/Jonathan Frid.  I read whatever I could find on the Inquisition (conducted by the dreaded Catholic Church) and the persecution of so-called witches.  The primary targets of the Church were women, especially women who served as mid-wives and healers in their communities.  Most were widows with valuable property.  And, of course, many of them had cats.  When these women were found guilty of witchcraft, they were either burned alive at the stake or drowned.  Their cats faced the same fates because it was believed that the cats were the Devil who had transformed himself into a cat, which was most often a black cat.  Where do you think all of those myths about black cats actually came from?  Why are black cats singled out as bad luck?  Why do cats, in general, elicit such hatred even today?  The witch burnings also succeeded in destroying Women’s Wisdom, which many of these women possessed.  And, of course, their horrible deaths served as a way to keep women “in their place”, submissive, subjugated and compliant to men.  This is probably the beginning of my foreshadowing of my fate as well – I could envision a burning stake in my future. 

VALUE #1:  A woman is as much of a person as a man.  Women are as smart as men, women are as capable and competent as men. 

For the first 40 years of my life, I loved animals.  It wasn’t until my best friend and very first cat, Casey, died that I came to respect animals and their inherent worth.  My circle of compassion widened to include all living things.  I came across a quote that sums up my feelings better than I ever could.  The following was written by Henry Beston in his book The Outermost House:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

VALUE #2:  All living things – be they non-human animals or plants – have as much of a right to live and as much of a value as humans.  We, as humans, have no right to question their purpose for being.  They exist and therefore they have purpose and value.  Their lives, their very survival, are as important to them as ours are to each of us.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here.  I am talking about living things who exist, not fetuses who may or may not have the potential to be born alive.  I personally find it disgusting that there are those people who place a higher value on the potential life of a fetus than they do on living, breathing, already born children and women.  To ignore the health and well-being of a child, a woman or a non-human animal and dedicate one’s time, money and passion on a potential life is beyond cruel, it’s evil. 

VALUE #3:  Humans are part of, not apart from, the animal kingdom and the rest of Nature.

Do you remember the childhood game, animal/vegetable/mineral?  You would be given the name of something and have to determine which category it fell into.  Humans are neither a vegetable nor a mineral therefore, at least, in this scenario they are an animal.  Much of our behavior can be understood by a better understanding of the behavior of those non-human animals to whom we are most closely related – other mammals. 

I plan to make this an ongoing series of posts.  I’m going to sign off for today and try to get some things done around the house.  There are dishes to wash, laundry to do and litter boxes to scoop.  Wish me success in getting my To Do list for today completed.  Hopefully, I’ll also get my potato soup made as well.  I’ll end with the recipe, in the event you’re interested in giving this vegan version a try.

POTATO SOUP

Ingredients:

Russet potatoes – number depend on how much soup you want to make or the size of your stock pot

16 oz bag of frozen peas & carrots

Unsweetened soy milk

Smart Balance vegan margarine spread (equivalent to half a stick of butter)

Salt & pepper to taste

Peel & slice potatoes.  Put them in a steamer inside a stock pot.  Cook until tender.  Drain the water from the stock pot and transfer the potatoes into the stock pot.  Fill the pot with the unsweetened soy milk until the potatoes are nearly covered.  Add margarine and the frozen peas and carrots.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Cook on low until the peas and carrots are fully cooked, stirring frequently.  Note:  I have never tried freezing this.  It’s too yummy and gone in no time at all.

Casey

In 1971, I turned 21 and was old enough to drink and vote.  Not at the same time, mind you, but for people of my age, 2 of the most important things ever to happen in our lives.  Little did I know that in June of that year something that would forever change my life would happen.

From the day I was born my family always had animals -a dog, a parakeet, a turtle, a bunny and even fish.  I never had a cat because my father DID NOT like cats.  He considered them “dirty animals.”  When I was 14 my mother took our boxer Cherie, who was 2 years younger than me, to the vet and had her put to sleep.  Cherie had cancer.  When I arrived home from school, the deed had already been done.  I never got a chance to say goodbye to her.  I was devastated.  On February 16^th, 1965 I went into the bedroom to wake up my father to take me to school and found him dead.  My father had been the center of my universe and he was gone.  My mother and older brother fell apart.  I was forced to be the adult in the home.  The loss of my father was a pivotal moment in my young life.  But, unbelievably to me,  something and someone even more pivotal  would be entering my life.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1968 that my mother got me a cat.  Chara Amani was a beautiful seal point Siamese kitten.  In October of that year, I left for college in Orlando.  By the time I returned for Christmas break, Chara was obviously my mother’s cat.  I lived on campus and couldn’t have “a pet”.  By the summer of 1971, home from college, I desperately wanted a blue point Siamese cat of my own.  One of my mother’s co-workers had rescued a blue point Siamese from outside a restaurant she and her husband visited.  This kitty was pregnant when rescued and in early May she gave birth to 2 kittens.  We went to her home to see the kittens.  I was so disappointed because neither of the kittens was Siamese.  Despite that fact, I chose the 5 week old boy, a gray and white tuxedo.  I named him Casey.  He rode home on my lap. 

Chara and our white boxer, Clipper, accepted Casey immediately.  Casey was a delight and so very smart and loving from the very beginning.  When not much more than 3 months old he decided he wanted to be held.  He leaped up to me, only making it as far as my stomach as I stood in front of him.  I looked down and he was hanging by one claw from my stomach.  Once bigger and stronger, he would leap from the floor into my arms.  He did this all his life, and amazed everyone who saw him do it.  He was fearless and like no other animal I had ever had in my life.  He had a mind of his own.  From him I learned what it was like to have a relationship with an animal that overcame the species barrier.  I wasn’t his “master” and he my “pet.”  He viewed me as his equal, a peer. 

When I went back to school, I lived off campus and took him with me.  He astounded me by opening any closed door.  It didn’t matter whether it opened away from him or toward him.  He would leap up, wrap his paws around the door knob (he knew that it required the door knob to be turned to open the door) and shift his weight backwards to cause the door to open toward him.  He’d then drop to the floor and use his paw to open the door wide enough to go inside.  He taught himself to fetch, just like a dog.  Unfortunately, he preferred the more expensive natural bristle makeup brushes to the cheaper sponge applicators.  And, I tried repeatedly to substitute the sponge brushes.  He finally got me trained – I let him have the brushes he wanted.  He would also fetch Hartz Mountain balls with bells inside.  Of course, they could only be the ones that were like a small cage all the way around.  He wouldn’t fetch the ones that were solid plastic on one half and “caged” on the other.  He would pick up the ball in his mouth and carry it back to me to throw over and over again.  I can’t tell you how many friends he would entertain by fetching.  The friends didn’t believe me until they witnessed it for themselves.  I never had to rely on an alarm clock to wake up.  Shortly before the alarm was set to go off, he would lie on my chest and stare at me.  If that didn’t work, he’d nip my nose.  If that didn’t work, he would repeatedly jump back and forth through the Venetian blinds until the annoying sound finally made me get out of bed. 

The biggest impact Casey had on my life was in 1988.  That was the year that South Korea hosted the Summer Olympics.  At that time ABC was the official U.S. network to televise the Olympic Games.  As a lead up to the games, ABC ran a special about Korea.  I was so disturbed as they showed the markets where cats and dogs were sold as food.  Live dogs and cats were shown with wires tying their legs behind their backs.  The dogs had empty aluminum cans fitted over their muzzles, likely to keep them from crying, barking or biting the vendors.  I could not believe that anyone would eat “pets.”  I was enraged, especially when the narrator told that cats were boiled alive.  Cats?  The most wonderful animals on the planet?  That someone could possibly do something like that to my Casey, to any cat?  I was enraged.  It was the first time in my life that I felt hatred for an entire group of people.  But, hatred just wasn’t in me.  What came next to mind was an epiphany for me.

The Korean culture views dogs and cats as food.  That certainly was foreign to me as an American.  We shared our homes, our beds, our lives with these beings.  We loved them.  They were family, friends.   Our culture, on the other hand, viewed cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, lambs, fish, even rabbits as food.  How could I, in good conscience, object to the culture of another country without examining our culture.  In that moment, I became a vegetarian.  To be able to criticize the customs of one culture without being a hypocrite I would have to reject our culture of eating the flesh of any animal.  The thought of anyone eating Casey or any of his relatives appalled me.  But weren’t the lives of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, lambs, fish and rabbits just as valuable?  Of course they were and are.  Casey and the love that I had for him opened my eyes and changed my view of the world and transformed my lifetime love of animals into a respect for the lives of all non-human animals. 

On January 10, 2012, Casey will have been gone for 22 years.  I have lost numerous cats and dogs since that time.  Both of my parents are gone, as is my older brother.  Despite that, the loss of my beloved Casey was the greatest loss I have ever suffered.  I miss him as much today as I did the day that I had to euthanize him.  He was 18 ½ years old.  Not only did I stop eating the flesh of animals, but I have rescued many, many cats and dogs since 1990.  Casey helped me realize just how precious each life is and every animal deserves to live in an optimal environment and to realize the full potential of their own individual personality.  Each of them has a distinct personality, no different from each human.  They deserve a chance to experience joy and share joy with another who loves them, someone who will care for them, will protect them and make them a part of their life.  Although Casey is gone, he remains a part of me and I am forever grateful to have had him in my life.  I am a better person because of his love.