Black Cat Escape

This is Spook, my buddy, whose portrait graces many of my enterprises. She's been with me since she was six months old, two and a half years. She's an indoor cat. She's always been an indoor cat. She's always been hostile toward this fact.

So while I was gardening, going in and out of the house a hundred times a day, one time she spotted an opportunity and dashed out behind me before I could close the door. I wasn't aware of her escape until I saw the tip of her tail disappearing under the shed. By the time I got there and got down on my hands and knees to look, no mean feat for one my age, she had slipped under the fence that separates our yard from a bit of waste land. And there she vanished from view.

Well, there's no way I could get under the fence. So I called my daughter, and she kept watch from the second story balcony and guided me while I ran around to the gate in the fence and started searching among the deadfall and the brambles, the thistles and poison ivy, the junk and garbage people always throw anywhere where they think they can get away with it. Some birds yelling their heads off and swooping around clued us in to where the fearless feline was crouching under a bush, utterly unnerved, hair all standing out on end. She looked like a furry football.

She bolted when I approached, ran about a hundred yards, and jumped up an enormous ash tree. About 30 feet up she stopped and finally looked back. Crashing through the brush, I tried to persuade her to remember who her friends were. Eventually, she came down. I picked her up and started for home. Tripped over some of the garbage. Fell and bashed my knee on a broken cement block because I didn't dare let go of the cat. She might not stop under a bush the next time.

Out the gate we went, and along the street. Big mistake. Our intrepid runaway is terrified of cars passing. She struggled to escape, but I hung on to her for dear life. She clawed hunks out of me. She did what all animals do when frightened; she peed. All over me. All over herself. She set up the most unholy yowling.

We met a neighbour, out walking with his baby. I don't know what he thought about the struggling cat, the wet, the stink, the blood, the noise. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't good.

Now you might think that after this adventure, Spook would be very happy to stay indoors. You'd be wrong. Then next time I went out, guess who was trying to slip out behind me.

Reason Is as Reason Does

I really wanted to like Al Gore's latest book, The Assault on Reason. I wanted to believe that someone with the ability to attract public attention was making sense of why the American dream has degenerated into the American pyschotic episode.
I don't think this is it. Too much of the book is a recitation of the harm George W. Bush has caused America. No argument, but no enlightenment either. Gore's statements are sometimes pretty loose. He talks about America inventing democracy (they didn't, Greeks did), and planting it carefully in the New World (someone else's garden--I don't remember ever hearing that Native Americans were consulted about having their own society replaced by a European transplant). He tends to leave out inconvenient truths. For example, though he says there are none, there are examples of very effective, long-lasting and efficient autocratic societies--the Roman empire, for one. Not that I would have liked to under its rule, which doesn't make it any less real.
Gore says the government of his country, set up by nearly Olympian Founding Fathers (always capitalized) and dependent upon the wisdom of the masses, has been corrupted because the average person no longer is part of the dialogue. I try to imagine at what time the average person was part of the dialogue. Gore says it was pre-TV, when most folk got their view of the world from newspapers. TV is all one-way, he says, so there is no dialogue. The average person doesn't have access. The rich guys that own TV control how the public sees policies and politicians, and they have their own agenda, and therefore make public policy.
Maybe. It seems to me newspapers were, and are, pretty much one way. A person can read the news, but not discuss it with the writers of the news. Newspapers then and now were/are owned by rich people with agendas and a desire to get richer. And many people were disenfranchised in those good old days and many couldn't read back then, even more of them than have that problem now.
The government lied to the people, Gores cries over and over again. Well, yeah. Governments lie. To quote Gregory House and Mark Twain, everybody lies. The pain and wonder of it is, so many people believe. Those masses upon whose wisdom we are urged to rely elected that government. Twice. Fool me once. . .

Waiting for Spring

What a difference a month makes. The garden that was buried in snow a short time ago is now visible and even has the first plantings in it, onions and leeks and a few early lettuce plants. It's hard to believe how fast the snow goes once it starts to melt. The biggest problem now seems to be keeping the varmints off the veggies. The winter lettuce, seeds sown in the fall to give us the first taste of green in the spring, was taken by starlings as soon as the first leaves appeared. The groundhog has been around, eyeing the spinach and who can blame her. In the urban landscape there's little enough for a ground hog to eat. I try to discourage her, however. As sympathetic as I am, it's my family I'm trying to feed here. I've got a kid's pinwheel, a nice shiny one, that turns in the wind, and the motion and the flashes of light seem to work somewhat to make her and the birds a little nervous about getting too close. I hope they don't get too accustomed to it before I get the netting up.