Saved by the cat: Remembering Zach

Our first cat was a grey tabby named Zach. His full name was Zachary Morris, after my daughter's favorite character on "Saved by the Bell," but we only called him by his full name when we yelled at him, which was quite often when he was a young ‘un.

Zach joined our family at a sad time. I was in the process of getting a divorce. My children were quite young, just four and six, and still recovering from all the calamitous events that necessitated the break in the marriage.  When my grandmother suggested that a kitty might be just the thing to help with the healing, I pounced on the idea. I didn’t know anything about cats then, but I knew my kids were hurting and I wanted the hurting to stop.  

My grandmother’s nephew, the owner of Zach’s gold tabby mama, was a sweet guy who knew a lot about cats. He told me transporting our new pet would be easy. All I needed was a box with a sturdy cover. I showed up at his house with my four-year-old and a laundry basket, because really, how could such a feeble tiny thing ever find its way out of a laundry basket?   

It was twenty years ago, but the memory of that first ride home still makes me laugh out loud. We were barely out of the driveway when Zach wormed himself out of the basket and onto the back seat. He sniffed around, then proceeded to climb up my daughter, who was buckled into her booster chair.  

  

My daughter screeched and screamed. She giggled so hard she cried. I couldn’t see anything from where I sat. I was glad the giggles outweighed the screams.  We were only a few miles from home. I was on the highway during the worst of it, probably doing more than sixty.  The louder she got, the harder I pressed on the gas. 

I prayed that the kitty wouldn’t make his way toward me. As soon as I started visualizing what could happen if he did – the tickling the swerving the crashing the plummeting off the bridge into Lake Quinsigamond  –  he jumped onto the nape of my neck and latched on good.  That was my first inkling that this strange four-legged tormentor was a mind reader.  He dug in his claws like a mountain climber on Everest, then began traversing my body: one shoulder blade then the other, under an armpit, down to my ample belly. He snuggled up a little bit there and I remember thinking maybe he’d quiet down and settle in for a nap.  

But no. I guess my shrieking and laughing and jerking around unsettled him. He made for my thighs and that’s when I remembered the strange hole in the floor of the car, near the gas pedal. It was about the size of a Hershey bar, as was this cat. I had no idea what purpose the hole served. But I was pretty sure it led to the engine. I pictured that innocent mewing baby weaving around my ankles and creeping into that gaping black maw and I knew I had to do something fast. 

I grabbed at the kitty. He swatted at my hand, cutting me for the first time. I grabbed again and again and each time he’d bob and weave like a prize fighter. Finally, I managed to get a grip around his middle, which wasn't much thicker than a cucumber. I tugged and tugged while his tiny talons plunged deeper and deeper into my thigh.  Finally, I broke his hold. He tried to twist himself out of my grasp, but I held tight. I reached back as far as I could and tried to drop him behind me, onto the floor of the back seat. But the jiggling critter wouldn’t let go. He started to work his way up my arm. 

What I did next is not something I am proud of, but I want to be honest. Plus, he survived. I loosened my grip and flung my arm back as hard as I could. He flew into the air and landed on the back seat. I heard the thud quite clearly. 

He was quiet after that and we all made it home more or less in one piece. When we got in the house, I let him attack the living room. While I scavenged in the medicine cabinet for bandages to cover up my tattered thighs, Zach explored under the couch, swiped at dust balls under the piano, swatted at dust motes. I found him curled up on the carpet sound asleep, right in the center of the room on a big square of sunlight.   

He nearly died one more time that day. 

It was late at night. The children were fast asleep. The house was quiet, except for the soft pad pad pad of tiny paws. I was sitting on the kitchen floor watching Zach.  I’d been sitting there for hours, mesmerized. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, this perfect new soul discovering his universe one sniff at a time.  He nosed at base boards and licked at crumby corners. He attempted to find a secret passage behind the refrigerator but got quite frightened when the motor kicked on. He scurried off, tripped over his own legs, and somersaulted across the floor.    

He found the telephone cord, a snarled mess several yards long that always got in the way. I watched, curious to see what kind of gymnastic feat  the  little goof would attempt next.  He swatted at the cord. The cord swatted back. He lunged at it and pulled on it. Within seconds the little guy had gotten himself severely tangled. He couldn’t move. He went limp. I realized he was strangling. I jumped into action. Even though it took no time at all to free him, it felt like ages. 

He stood there, dazed. I kneeled down on the floor and scooped him up. I cuddled him to my chest. His tiny heart hammered against my own. His body curled into my palm and soon he fell asleep.  I inched my way toward the cabinets, and leaned back carefully. I didn’t want to wake him. I held him the way you hold a sleeping baby, just tight enough. I was surprised that I hadn’t forgotten that hold, and I was glad too.  

Himself

Finish lines are starting lines in disguise

I started this blog, this little writing experiment, twenty-eight days ago in order to test myself. I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote every day and held myself accountable for that writing by publishing every day. 

Here’s what I learned. 

I do a better job when I write first thing in the morning. I get sloppier as the day goes on. I let clichés slide in. I don’t edit myself as well. My words just don’t come as easily.  I goof up. I get awkward. 

The writing took up a lot of time. I figured I’d need maybe an hour, ninety minutes tops, for each blog post.  I think ninety minutes was the least amount of time I spent. Most posts took about three hours, though a few took longer.

The thinking took up a lot of time. Sometimes, I sat down with just a fuzzy idea of what I would write. I’d start typing up the first thoughts that would come. I’d use the act of writing to work out what I wanted to write about.  By the time I got to the third, sixth or eighth paragraph, I’d see a common theme emerge, then I’d delete everything and start over. A few times, I wrote up entire pieces, then deleted them.

The thinking was constant. “What will I write about next?” popped into my head as often as “what should I have for lunch, dinner, dessert?” Often, one blog idea would lead to another. Sometimes, comments from some of you prompted certain blogs. 

I loved doing it. How do I know? Eating is my favorite thing in the world next to reading, running, Springsteen and Showtime. When I was writing, I forgot to eat.  For example, when I wrote in the morning, this is roughly what my routine would be like. I’d wake up around eight. Have some coffee, surf the net, skulk around on facebook, surf the net, have more coffee, and then I’d start to type around nine. I’d write, rewrite, add, delete, review.

Finally I’d notice my bottom was aching. Or maybe my knees would start cramping up. Or my throat was dry. I’d get up to stretch or get a glass  of water, and discover that it was after twelve, and I was still in my pajamas and I hadn’t eaten in a half a day and none of it bothered me.  

I’m not thrilled with everything I wrote, and sometimes I knew that I wasn’t even as I hit the publish button. Sometimes this was because of topic, but usually it was because of a clunkiness in the writing that I didn’t take the time to work out. There’s more. I could go on and on about redundancies, grammar errors, repetition.  But the thing is, I had fun and I learned a lot and I’m so glad I did this.    

So what I need to consider next is how to proceed. The next week is busy. Work starts up again and that will draw off all my time and energy for a little while until I adapt to my new schedule.  How do I keep the writing momentum going? Do I cut back to blogging once a week? Twice a week? I haven’t figured that out yet.

And then there’s the issue of the effect my real-world work has on me. As I’ve gotten closer and closer to the start of the school year, I find it harder to quiet my head and focus. I’m feeling off center and out of balance. I’ve misplaced my thoughtful center. I need to figure out how to find it when it goes missing.

Thanks for all your kind comments. Thanks for reading my writing.  I hope to be back soon. I need to be back soon.

A short history of today

Breakfast:  1 Lemon Zest Luna Bar, half a Nutz Over Chocolate Luna Bar.  

Location:  Front seat of speeding car, Route 128 north. 

  

Note:  In future, to avoid roller coaster stomach, do not eat Luna Bars right before engaging in strenuous activity, like rowing tiny plastic boat over rolling ocean for several hours.  

Lunch:  One boiled lobster, one raw oyster, two stuffed clams. 

Location:  Take-out restaurant, overlooking Motif #1 and lots of calm harbor. 

Note: Tearing apart lobster tail meat with your bare hands is savagely messy but satisfying too, and necessary at this particular restaurant because they don’t give you utensils.  

Dinner:  One cigar-sized pretzel dipped in white chocolate and sprinkled with jimmies; one nonpareil frisbee, 3,000 pieces saltwater taffy – vanilla, chocolate, chocolate raspberry, molasses, and one despicable peanut butter.  

Location: Front seat of slow-moving car, Route 1A south.  

Note:  Saltwater taffy is not dinner food, but who cares?  

Dessert:  One apologetic cup tomato soup, like that’s really going to atone for eating half a candy store.  

Location: Not in a vehicle, speeding or otherwise. Not at a picnic table on a sunny deck overlooking Rockport Harbor. 

Note: Squeeze in at least one more kayak trip before winter sets in.  Cut back on the taffy consumption, maybe. 

The S word

Today I set up my classroom. It was already close to 80 in the building when I arrived a little after nine. I tried to open the windows but couldn’t. They wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I pulled. I pretty much knew this would happen. School windows are always hard to open in the summer, but in the winter I never seem to have a problem. 

I’d brought plenty of water and was already hot. I took a big swig. The floor was shiny and sticky and smelled of polish. At the end of the year, when I knew I was moving to a new classroom, I’d brought everything I needed down from the third floor, and had made a neat little box fortress in one corner of the room so I could keep all my things together, about fifteen crates of books and teaching supplies. I’d covered the whole lumpy mess in garbage bags and duct tape, to keep everything clean and secure and keep out dust bunnies and other intruders. 

My cardboard and duct tape building no longer existed. I’m sure the custodians had to move everything around when they cleaned the floor. My stuff was scattered everywhere. The desks were in nice rows, but the reading and science tables were pushed randomly around the perimeter. Boxes were piled in corners and on tables. The room needed some hefty organizing.  

But first things first. Though the floor and student desks were clean, most of the work tables, computer tables and shelves were coated in thick dust. Fluffy lint balls the size of kittens had taken refuge in the spaces between the computer towers, monitors and keyboards. I’ve done this enough times now to know that the first day of setting up the classroom is not about putting up bulletin boards or getting lesson plans ready or going through student files. Nope. Day one you’re cleaning.  

I’d brought my own bucket, soap, and rags. I walked back down to the first floor where there’s a deep sink, and filled the bucket with soap and cold water. I’d have preferred hot water of course, but there was none. There never is. Then I trudged back upstairs and tried one more time to open the windows. Nope. They weren’t budging for me. 

I spent the next couple of hours washing scuzzy surfaces, dusting off books, and moving furniture displaced by the summer floor polishing. Moving long tables designed to seat four good-sized kids is not that easy, especially when the tables are stuck to shiny varnish. But when you’re as experienced as I am, you develop a technique. Here’s mine. Simply stand at one end and hoist the table until it shudders and goes thunk! Then stand at the other end and repeat. Then drag the table over the newly polished floor, leaving marks of course but what are you going to do? You can’t start school with the place looking like a used furniture warehouse. 

I carried cartons of books from one end of the room to shelves at the other end. When the cartons were too heavy to lift, I dragged them. When they were too heavy to drag, I emptied them first. I found the pencil sharpener – always a good thing – but discovered I had no waste basket. I scouted around the building and found a few garbage bags in a pile in the auditorium. I took them and filled them.   

As I was finishing up for today, the custodian popped in to ask if I’d seen the vacuum. I shook my head. I asked him about getting a waste basket and he laughed and said, “You and ten other teachers. We don’t know what happened to them all.” 

He was in a hurry to find that vacuum, but he kindly opened two windows for me. The first stayed up by itself. The second window kept sliding. Before I could stop him, he propped the second window open using a crate full of my books. Then he scooted out. 

The air was delicious. I was able to get all my teacher manuals organized. I found some supplies too. Now I’m all set for the first few days of school, though I still need to tackle the sea monster that is the tangle of cords behind the computer table. I didn’t have the patience to try to sort out that snarly bad boy today. 

Before I left, I went back and forth on closing the two windows. It would be nice to leave them open and let some fresh air dust out the place a little bit more. But all my books are near windows and I didn’t want to chance losing them to rain. It’s one thing to have my books get dog-eared and ripped because they’re old and well-loved by the kids. But losing books to stupid things like rain? That's a waste of my hard-earned cash. Plus, it's murdering books. 

Of course, closing the window propped up with the crate of my books, some really nice books, was risky. The windows are a good ten feet tall and quite heavy. Removing the crate frightened me a little. I kept thinking of last year, when a window just like this one crashed to the floor in the classroom next door. One minute it was in its casing, the next, without warning, down it came.  Thankfully, there were no injuries. No one was sitting near it or trying to pull a crate of books out from under it.  

I pushed the crate a little. It was definitely the only thing holding up that giant glass window. I would have to proceed quite carefully here. I thought about last August in my old classroom on the third floor. I’d had to trash about a thousand bucks worth of my own books, old books but good books. Books my own daughters had read night after night for years. Over the summer, there’d been a huge rodent problem in the building. Scores of paperbacks my daughters had loved and had given up so other kids could love too, were filthy with mouse droppings. I nudged the crate, and pulled on it ever so gently, slid it forward, to the left, to the right.   

In the end, I closed the windows.

It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with hotdogs

One book I’m getting a kick out of right now is John Dufresne’s Requiem, Mass, which is set in the late sixties in what has to be my hometown, Worcester, Mass. I chuckle as I read the story, not only because it’s a little absurd, but also because I recognize so many of the settings and people. It’s fun trying to match up Dufresne’s fiction with central Massachusetts reality. 

The narrator grew up in Requiem and is now a writer living in Florida. He tells the story of an important year or so in his life, back when he was in junior high. There are flash forwards and flashbacks. I don’t know how much of the story is really Dufresne’s life, but I’m having a lot of fun recognizing bits that relate to my own history. 

Here’s what I know about Dufresne: he’s a little older than I am, he was raised on Grafton Hill, he hasn’t yet lost his Woostah accent though it’s a little weaker than it probably once was. My book is loosely based on my life, very loosely.  So as I read his work, I try to figure out his thought process in renaming certain places and events . Of course, some stay the same and that’s cool too. 

Here are some of my notes on his book. 

They live off of three-decker –lined O’Connell Street. I’m guessing that’s Grafton Street. Reasoning?  He grew up off Grafton Street, plus that whole area is pretty Irish and O’Connell Street is the main drag in Dublin. 

Iandoli’s is where they shopped for birthday cakes. No name change there.  I still remember the excitement in the city when Iandoli’s expanded from being just a regular supermarket to a “Food Village” in the mid-seventies.  That was huge.  My family didn’t get our cakes from Iandoli’s back in the sixties. We preferred Ryan’s Bakery or Jordan Marsh. 

Johnny, the main character in the story, attends St. Simeon’s Stylites School, obviously St. Stephen’s, because of the alliteration. Plus, I know for a fact that Dufresne attended St. Stephen’s. So did my dad. 

Mechanic Hall is still Mechanics Hall. In the book it’s a site for wrestling matches. When my dad was little it was a roller skating rink, then a basketball gym. Now the building has been restored to its post-Civil Way concert and fancy dance glory. But it was a decaying pit for many years and has survived many incarnations. I recall reading that there were fights there at one time.  

I’m not sure where Four Crowned Martyrs Hospital is supposed to be. Saint Vincent’s maybe? I can’t tell. Bob Cousy High School throws me for a loop too. Maybe Doherty? 

Dick Larson ”serene and creamy voice on the WREQ Breakfast Club” I’m guessing is the same Larson we all listened to on WORC. 

Then there’s this plan for one random Saturday: “breakfast at the Broadway, shopping at Bradlees. . . pizza at the Wonder Bar.”  Sounds good. I’m in. We’ll just have to substitute Target for Bradlees. No biggie. 

The main character ends up at Requiem State. Of course that’s Worcester State College, Dufresne’s alma mater.  Adult Johnny is saddened to hear of the untimely death of his old prof, Dr. Walker. True story. Dr. Walker, a nice guy, died unexpectedly shortly before Requiem, Mass went to print. That was a sweet touch, putting in that little tribute to his old teacher.  

But before college, Johnny goes to Holy Martyrs Prep School, an all-male school with Xaverian brothers “rumored to be severe disciplinarians and discipline, I was told, builds character.”  Can’t be anything but St. John’s. 

Dufresne’s character talks about “sanctimonious buttinskis from the Bishop’s Fund” and I had to laugh because one year way back I canvassed my entire neighborhood and beyond for that charity. 

There are some places I’m not sure of. I couldn’t put my finger on Three Mile Pond in Old Furnace. Could it be Webster Lake? Nor did I know where the St. Charles Hotel and bar was, though I wondered if it was the Hotel Vernon at Kelley Square, because the Charles Restaurant was right down the street. Maybe there really was a St. Charles Hotel? Geez. It sounds familiar.

I’m guessing the town of Wheelock, right next door to Requiem, is Millbury, because Wheelock Ave in Millbury is pretty well known. 

Denholm’s gets mentioned. It’s downtown and fancy and nicknamed “the Boston store,”  all true. I was just reading about Denholm’s the other day: site of the first escalators in Wormtown. 

It seems like Dufresne has some fun throwing in bits about other parts of Worcester too.  His character all grown up, works for a painting contractor sometimes, and one of the places they paint is the Worcester Antiquarian Society. He and his dad like to visit Coney Island for hotdogs, though who doesn’t? 

Johnny, has some tough times and works out those tough times at various bars in the city. One of his favorites is Moynihan’s.  It was always one of my favorites too. You get a little sentimental about a place when it’s been in your family eighty or so years.

  

And that connection that Dufresne and I have makes what he says about Requiem/ Worcester all the more solid. It takes just seconds for us to turn strangers into old friends: maybe our dads went to school together, or our kids were on the same team, or maybe we lived on the same street, or even in the same house. Dufresne’s take on Requiem/ Worcester: It’s “the Kevin Bacon of cities.”

 Yup.

 So true.