Author: bloomis

Freddie Mercury is about to learn something, we think, maybe.

It seems like a lot of people have moved on from Game of Thrones*, so having a direwolf is not as chic as I thought it was going to be when I first started wanting one, and dying my hair blonde and eating stallions’ hearts.

But our Freddie is 95 pounds of fur and love. She’s a little bit of a biter, if you count her feisty on-leash behavior, and both Tom and I have some sweet little teeth marks to show where she loved on us harder than she meant to when we couldn’t let her cross the street to lick a Yorkipoo.

It’s emotional for me to be away from her for a couple of weeks while she’s at obedience camp, since our souls are linked for eternity, and every morning I find myself going over to her bowl and filling it with water out of habit, and every night I find myself instinctively hunting down my siblings’ enemies, since she’s not here to do that sort of thing. I think it’s good that we’re sending her though, even if it changes her personality a little bit, which is Tom’s big fear. If she comes back in a couple of weeks able to control her impulses on a grade school level, and still able to relish ripping the squeaker out of her monthly shipment of plush flamingos and then flop over for a belly scratch, I will call it a success.


*another casualty of the global pandemic

Happy Birthday, David Loomis! Thank you for bringing me yogurt after school. I don’t like yogurt anymore, but I do like Scotch.

Today is my dad’s birthday, and it’s always hard to find the right gift for him. He likes (the?) great books, and some of the better pain medications, and products sold at Costco, but I’m never sure which of any of those things he already has. Some years I have opted for an assortment of farmy cheeses, to pair with any of the above. 

For my birthday parties, he used to make hats –at least, he made hats for one of my birthday parties, and there is a picture to prove it, so it became, in my mind, a tradition. My friends and I—or cousins, or neighbors, or anyone who could be rounded up for a summer birthday–would pose in our homemade hats, and then we would sing, and eat my grandmother’s buoyantly named Happy Day Cake. My birthday parties tended to end in hat-disfiguring tantrums when the cake part was over and everyone stopped focusing on me, but that is not his fault.

At the beginning of our current pandemic, my own children were sufficiently deprived of stimulation to allow themselves to be conscripted for several elaborate birthday projects for my friends. How my father, whose ingenuity inspires us all to be creative when we would rather play Smurf Atari [personal note: ask one of the children to update this reference] would love one of these birthday signs! We are still in negotiations with his condominium association about where such a sign would be allowed. In the meantime, I wonder if my mother would print this page and fold into a birthday hat.

Mother Insists They’re Called Power Animals

Adieu, Garp. We thought you and Freddie Mercury might overlap, but God didn’t want to give me more than I could handle. Or maybe God didn’t want the children to have to feel conflicted when Freddie ate you. If you are inside her now, thank goodness it is only in spirit. We have placed your ashes out of reach.

I am no cat apologist. Particularly before my children became blindingly allergic to them, Helen and Garp were two of my favorite members of the family. My motherly instinct to forgive destructive behaviors extended to them, and I replaced sofas and tolerated cat litter as if I never expected to live in a grown-up’s house. The cats were even allowed to pace around at dinner parties, inevitably jumping into laps or onto broad shoulders, until at last a hairball in a pool of beurre blanc convinced me cats should be heard and not seen.

Freddie’s arrival has, in a different way, returned the house to a nursery scene, with squeaky toys underfoot and a play yard in the family room. She is learning not to bite except when she is feeling playful or greeting a stranger, and if I offer her a very smelly treat, she comes when I call her name.

My daughter told me I have been even happier since she got here, which confirms for me that she (and not Lagavulin, which is what I think I told Facebook,) is my spirit animal*. I’m definitely happy I didn’t have to glue her ears to get them to stand up. Beyond that I don’t think it’s a very good idea to reflect on one’s happiness. That will only give your puppy more time to chew up your Fendi pumps.

*My mother’s spirit animal is a giraffe, but she never got to live with one, so I’m still going to assume hers is a liturgical clown.

Squishy Mice, ‪Van Morrison‬, The Third Eye, WWtBD?

I’m not a Buddhist, but Enlightenment was my favorite Van Morrison album for a little while, and I always rescue spiders in a jar and free them outside instead of squishing them with a paper towel. I rescued mice this way too until my cats were old and blind and the mouse that lived underneath my bed started chewing on my mattress. Still, I never squished a mouse with a paper towel. I lured them into traps with natural, GMO-free peanut butter, which is exactly what I hope to have stuck to the roof of my mouth when I am inevitably snapped in two by a swift metal clip.

That’s why I don’t get why my left leg is still bothering me so much when I run. I’m not saying I skipped the part of the Buddhism TED Talk about the inevitability of suffering, but there’s also supposedly an end to suffering, and–more to the point—there’s karma, so it was definitely my understanding that being kind to spiders plus wishing the best for all living beings would result in pain-free running and overall wellness. I also keep trying yoga, and when I look with my third eye, I believe what I feel for the people who are able to stick with a yoga practice is admiration, and not jealousy about their not having the same inner ear thing that causes me to be cynical and bored in class.

Van Morrison said he didn’t know what enlightenment meant, which was honest. I have always trusted him, even though I don’t think fantabulous is a real word. The Words of Enlightenment on my GT’s Kombucha bottle the other day were: “You already know what it is you desire, next you must focus on allowing yourself to receive.” Damn it, GT. I am still processing the news that kombucha doesn’t have any real health benefits. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to have desires if you want enlightenment. It’s not actually clear to me that you’re allowed to want enlightenment for yourself unless you can simultaneously want it for all the mice under the bed with equal wholeheartedness.

That’s why I don’t care in any particular, stand-out way, how the marathon I’m planning to run this weekend goes for me. I hope there won’t be suffering for any creatures on the planet that day, and if, by Sunday, around 7am PST I haven’t been snapped in two by a metal clip while eating GMO-free peanut butter, maybe I will be among the non-sufferers for a few hours.

Late Ambitions

When I turned forty, my friend Sharon told me it would be a good idea to stop acting like Chris Farley. I don’t know if those were her exact words, but I know what she meant. It was time to act less fratty, and to join a local cover band so I wouldn’t have so much time for shenanigans.

Chris Farley died when he was thirty-three, but I would like to think if he were alive today, that like me, he would be working on his mise en place, so that dinner guests wouldn’t have to watch him stumble around in tipsy confusion trying to reestablish the Sonos connection while they waited for a burned crab cake at 10:45.

Sharon’s dinner parties always begin on time, without a hint of chaos, and if they sometimes end in debauchery, I can only say I’ve seen that sort of thing happen at The French Laundry, where the food is less refined.

Sharon does not approve of this blog.

Feline Blindness, American Positivity, Otherwise German 

I closed my blind, seventeen year-old cat in the space underneath the freezer drawer recently. He has lost so much weight since his sister died that he fit without causing the door to catch. His meow, which guests routinely mistake for a baby’s whimper, sounded distant, the way it sounded on mornings I used to discover him outside the kitchen slider after a rogue night on the deck.
What is the word that means the same thing as widow, but refers instead to one left behind by a half-sibling? In German, of course, it’s Halbgeschwisterwitwe. Maybe it’s the same in English but just not very common here*.

If it’s true that emotions affect our physical well-being, I ache to think I may have contributed to Garp’s health problems as a sibling-widower by going on and on in front of him about getting a puppy. I wonder if he understands the power of positivity. 

A few weeks ago I added both good energy and electrolytes to my physical therapy regimen, and my leg has stopped hurting when I run uphill. For the purpose of running euphoria, I am tempted to have warm thoughts even more often–it seems to work for Kilian Jornet–but I guess I’m a little bit afraid of losing my edginess and my dirty Hendrick’s martinis. 

The German word for children-who-are-gradually-getting-more-allergic-to –their- seventeen-year-old-sibling-widowed-cat-while-they-wait-to-get-a-puppy is not used in English because we don’t like to admit the truth of it, just as we don’t read our children the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales. In either case, we hate to see our children teary and bloodshot. 

*e.g. Schadenfreude is in Webster’s Dictionary, but we don’t use it very much because the sentiment is so un-American. 

Happy Birthday Julia Dorsey (it’s a double first name–so there are four all together)!

My mother is 71 today. She can do the yoga thing where you stand all the way up, without support, from what used to be called Indian Style–I can say that because I’m Old Order of Chanco. She may also be able to bend a spoon with her mind, but most of the time she uses her powers for good, at least if you agree with her politics. 

I can’t help it, she has made me feel sorry for leftover food and used plastic bags, but I still throw a lot of things away because I’m young and that’s part of our culture. 

In turn, I’ve tried to teach her how to use, say, an iPhone, but she doesn’t want to believe she can understand even its most intuitive features, and she seems to think she has something on it called “minutes.” She signed a contract and she keeps her paperwork on file. 

Everything in her drawers is neatly folded and smells faintly of the bottles of Jean Naté she has saved since 1982, in case one of the grandchildren ever happens to ask what was for sale at the Woolworth store. I admire her intact clothing and I wonder if I will one day want my Ann Taylor sweater back from my first year of college. I always thought it made me look like Ali McGraw. She still looks a lot like Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music era, and, appropriately, she was up in a tree today–wearing curtains or salvaging something. 

Happy Birthday, Mother!

P.S. Please edit as you wish. 

Cat Hospice, Salmon Breakfast, Hashtag German Shepherd

The cats are 16 now, which makes me—well I must have been quite young when I got them. Garp, in particular, is really slowing down. I can remember when he used to scare a mouse so badly I’d have to climb up onto a barstool to rescue it from the top of a curtain rod. Now, if anything, he tends to stand droopily in front of the stove, nodding at the hole behind it where I already knew the mice were getting inside in the first place.

A year ago, when he took a sudden turn, I drove Garp to the vet and prepared myself. This was a cat with fifteen good years behind him of ravaging carpet, knocking glasses of water off counter tops in the middle of the night, and leaving puddles of bile in the path of my bare, uncaffeinated feet after waking me up at 5:30am to feed him. I tried to communicate to the vet the complexity of my feelings. I didn’t know, for example, if such a thing as hospice care existed for cats. As a gesture, I agreed to pay $287.00 to send some of his blood work to a lab in Michigan, and as a result, I have had to squeeze an expensive brown placebo gel onto his salmon guts feast every 5:30am since.

It’s true your relationship with your cats is a lot like the one you have with your children. You are always going to have one favorite, although sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other, depending, for instance, on which one has more recently cost you sleep, or resisted brushing, bathing, or nail clipping with more vigor. Isn’t there something in one of the main parenting books about children being welcome members of the family, but not the darn centers of it? Well, I’m definitely not letting the cats be in charge—is there a bumper sticker that says that, or only the one that says the opposite?

Civilization, Regretting Chocolate, Brain Fatigue

Children don’t understand what it means for your brain to be tired, so they ask complicated questions at bedtime, or when you are trying to daydream while driving. What is the next number in this series? Why is it important to be civilized? This is the point in the test at which I want to start bubbling in C for everything. Or is it B? I think it’s just important that you fill in all the bubbles, or was it one bubble per row? Will I be expected to show my work?

Usually I cool off at some point and give them the correct answers—both are logarithms—then remind them of the child’s mandate to read everyday, even better if you read something besides the names of Minecraft video clips on Youtube. My own parents must have felt just as strongly about reading, which is why they set limits by having only one TV and no TV reception. The house was full of books, and while my friends who had cable were out to dinner or on vacation with their families, I read several of them.

My dad must have noticed that I didn’t pack Die Odyssee when I left for college—I had discovered it was a translation, not a vampire book—and I think that’s when he started sending me clippings from The New York Times to encourage me to keep up my vocabulary and critical thinking skills. In fairness to UVA, Physics for Non-Majors, e.g., might have provided either of these, but I didn’t sink my teeth into it as I might have if I hadn’t had mono so much. After school I tested out a non-linear series of jobs and then got married, and he continued to send the clippings. I wonder if they still come now and then–I rarely open my paper mail. Come to think of it, when I was in my twenties, there were times I was in Las Vegas or Cuba or living with a mouse and a catalog model and a Swedish recluse in Gramercy and generally difficult to pin down. I might have missed some letters then too. I bet that’s when my dad sent the epic letter containing all his “life advice.” If I had read it, I might have had a better answer for my son to his question why be civilized? As it is, it sounds like what he has learned from me is to regret eating chocolate, a behavior I hope I have neither modeled nor promoted.

Every so often, I try to read one book to the two children. Recently it has been Rebecca. More than a page about the rose bushes of Manderley is enough to convince my daughter she wants to read something current, in solitude. Her brother falls asleep. When my brain is tired from making up answers all day, this works pretty well.

Storyboarding, Old-timey War, Legacy

Hmm. I hope I haven’t been confusing having strong opinions with saying everything I’m thinking, because according to “friends” I do a lot of the second thing. I do have some extremely strong opinions for a housewife, so after a month or so of reflection, meditation, and storyboarding Rosamunde Portsmouth—when you know you have a franchise on your hands you need to have a solid understanding of a character’s trajectory before you begin—I’ve decided to start writing down my thoughts again. And because it’s not the 70’s anymore, except in women’s denim, I’m doing it publicly.

I don’t want to say I’m a loose cannon, because I don’t want my mom to text me to correct my grammar and admonish me not to use the language of (old-timey) war. Funny I get so much advice from her now, because when I was trying to grow up, most of the guidance I got from my parents was probably too subtle. Certainly, there was plenty of theatrical gesturing across the dinner table whenever I slurped or slumped or used an index finger to push aspic onto my runcible spoon. And I think my bedtime stories were often parables, but there were so many names to keep track of that it could be hard to follow the subtext. I feel like I could have used a really practical directive now and then—something like “don’t shave your eyebrows” or “cutting bangs isn’t going to help.”

Is worldliness a good thing, or is that Weltschmerz? Anyway, I know I have those things now, but I still don’t feel the need to go advising everyone I meet, except when it comes to oven drying un-flavorful (or overripe) tomatoes, because there’s almost no tomato that can’t be rescued by seasoning it and putting it in a low oven with a little olive oil. I guess I also say things to my children that might come off as advice, but I think that’s because I want to be sure they will be able to form an outline of me in their memories after they have moved 5 hours away by car and our only communication is Words With Friends. I want to be sure they will be able to tell their spouses or live-in pets what their mom always used to say–for instance: “you realize that doesn’t match.”

Actually, kids—if you ever read this—and you ever read The Great Santini, I can only hope you’ll think of me as part Bull Meechum and part Maria Von Trapp, since I also taught you to sing in harmony.