A Certain Point of View

Sandra Oh has been bothering me for a while. Didn't I know her from some place? What movie? And then, it hit me. Or, actually, my best friend told me, and she was right.

She looks exactly like James M., a kid I went to school with. If James was a girl, he'd look just like that. Hilarious. James was the dorkiest guy I knew in school.

(I hated the movie Sideways, but that's another opinion. The only good scene in the movie is when Sandra Oh broke Thomas Haden Church's nose.)

And then I thought about it some more. I was close to James' sister, Pier. Pier passed away when I was 12 and she was 14. I was going to go to Jr. high school with her for one year, but I never did. She overextended herself swimming one day one summer and went into heart failure and died. She was always terribly frail. I never forgave myself for helping to teach her how to really have fun swimming the previous two summers, but it seemed like she never had any fun. She always had piano lessons or ballet lessons or math tutoring. I never forgave Mrs. Y. for telling me she died, either, because she rather delighted in spreading bad news. James was dorky, and maybe Pier was too, but Pier was kind, and good. I was protective of Pier and always figured we'd all influence Pier to be undorky, kind and good. Maybe it's not that Sandra Oh looks like James, but maybe she looks like Pier. Or maybe what Pier would have looked like, if she had reached adulthood. I never even got to go to the funeral because my mom thought it would be damaging to me.

I like to think she would have been beautiful. Their mom was so damn strict; I would have supplied her with illicit lip gloss before school, curled her hair during lunch, or covered for her while she went on a date. She would be 38 now. I still miss her.

The waitress at lunch today told me I looked like Sandra Oh.I wasn't sure if I should be charmed or offended.

And then she added "Particularly from the nose up." And then I really wasn't sure if I should be really charmed or wildly offended.

And it wasn't like I had a motorcycle helmet to break her nose with, either.

I really like my house. I've got birds nesting in my porch that make a lot of noise. I've got strawberries in my front yard that get stolen by school kids occasionally and oranges in my backyardthat are ugly but taste pretty good. I've got lizards everywhere (that scare the school kids, and that's really good). I've got purple flowers crawling up my garden gate. I've got four cats inside that Todd is busily renaming Obi-Doca-Nobi, Darth Wyatt, C3-LBK, and Queen Jessie. And I've got a cat and two kittens outside.

Mother cat and the twins are finally out of their nest and cavorting around. Todd's rescued male is funny, skinny, and too curious. We are especially protective of (we've made assumptions) of him. The gray one, smaller and frailer, is more cautious and sticks closer to the Queen. I'm glad to see them both, having thought at one point or another that they were dead. Must catch them soon and neuter 'em all.

I really like my house.

It rocked. It's also incredibly sad. That's all I'm going to say. I was sad for a week after I read the book. I'm still a little blue today.

On a happier note, I've stopped bleeding.

I'm celebrating by spending the day watching all the Star Wars movies back to back. The director's voice-overs. Did you notice that during the Senate scene in Episode II, there are Spielberg's ETs in the lower left hand corner?

I can't believe Todd saw the movie without me today. After saying things like "it's not like the movie changes daily or anything." What irks me is that he wanted to talk about it during dinner. Well, I've already read the book, it's true.

My "Aunt Flo" began her visit May 1 and hasn't left yet. My GYN says it's no big deal. Sure. He gave me some iron pills and a pat on the back.

Personally, I think I've started menopause.

I got to meet and hold my newest nephew over the weekend. I've never held a 26-hour old human before. His ears are all crunched and misshapen. He yawned. He was perfect.

He was born Friday the 13. I know my sister in law is tired of jokes about naming him Jason or Freddy. But I wonder if they're going to name him soon?!

Kittens are terrifying. What miserable thing will befall them?

The weekend wore on. The cries got fainter and fainter and you’d think we’d be able to sleep better, but we didn’t. We started to snap at each other.

And so we got desperate. Suddenly, a 20 foot ladder didn’t seem so expensive, and we could use it to trim the palm tree out front, and wash the windows later. And we could always use 50 feet of rope, right? Todd climbed down into the wash, but just like Animal Control predicted, the kitten darted into its hole and wouldn’t come out. We left water and kitten chow down there, but it only ate a little, not being weaned. Or maybe it didn’t eat at all, and the pigeons ate the chow, we didn't know.

We worked on the mother, coaxing her to eat her meals in a traveling box. All weekend.

Monday morning at 8:00, Todd finally closed the gate on the travel box on her. She got real quiet. He took her in the travel box into the wash and faced the box toward the kitten’s hole and opened it flush against the wall. Queenie couldn’t escape into the hole because she was too big to fit, but the kitten could run into the case to its mother, which is what it did when she heard Mama crying. Todd slid the door shut, and Mama and the kitten were transported back to our safe backyard. Success! Up the 20 foot ladder they went, the three of them.

They whacked at each other a little. I guess they didn’t recognize each other? They smelled funny? Baby was wobbly and filthy. But kitten disappeared into the bushes behind mama, happy at last. I was late to work.

So, let’s see:

20 foot ladder, $110. 50 feet of rope, $8. Seeing two (ungrateful) cat butts disappear into the bushes, priceless.

We thought it was a bird. It cried all night. And all day. And all night. We'd never heard it before. It was an incredibly sad call. And then Todd spotted the little black kitten in the wash.

We live next to a wash. A canyon of cement, with walls 20 feet tall straight up. There are holes along the whole thing, for drainage. There was a kitten sitting in one of them. Our Queenie's kitten, no doubt, crying.

Queenie kept coming for her meals, but seemed more hostile than usual. What to do? She doesn't trust us.

Animal control said that there was nothing to do, since the kitten would duck into the holes when they saw us.

Great. No sleep for us.

My sister-in-law Lorene had her son this morning. 7 lbs. Welcome to the world, Noname! They still don't have a name yet.

My shrink says I can start tapering my meds and start thinking about having children. Apparently, this is as good as I get. I'm not sure if he thinks I'm cured, or if he's worried about my ovaries like I am. I just turned 36.

I just started a job where I work with artifacts dusted with arsenic, and my husband didn't get tenure. What a time to start thinking about having a child. I admit, though, that every time I get my period, I get a little sad these days.

You know you're grown up when the Star Wars saga ends.

Todd didn't get it.

Each year, the department votes to see which faculty they keep. Todd and his advisor always thought it was a formality to keep out pedophiles and psychopaths, but apparently this is not the case. His advisor feels terrible. Not that terrible, he's got tenure.

Todd hasn't been particularly happy there, so he'd been applying to various community colleges (wow, 30 grand more a year! like hazard pay) and so now he's doing this in earnest. Poor Todd, piling a collection of rejection letters on top of one big rejection.

Why must everything be so uncertain?

My friend Alan passed away. He was only 34. Once upon a time, when I knew him, we would have thought 34 was really really old. Alan and I played together when we were little, all the way until adolescence told us that we were too old to do the things we did together. I was born in the front apartment of his mother’s house, and when I was three, I moved next door.

Alan was lots of fun, easy to talk to, good at taking suggestions, good at taking turns and doing stupid things. Once, I got a box and we decided it would be fun to get into it and spend the afternoon throwing ourselves down the stairs in the box. We didn’t get into trouble, but Alan threw up after dinner and we couldn’t do that any more. Another time, his brother Eric, Alan and I decided to steal bedsheets off our beds and try parachuting off their toolshed. We got in trouble for that.

I moved away in 1989, the summer his brother died. In 1989, Eric died when he was just 20, playing basketball at the park. He just said he was feeling sick, lay down on a park bench and closed his eyes. Alan died when he lost control of his motorcycle on the corner of Barrington and Sunset. Did he think, since they’d already lost one sibling, they couldn’t possibly lose another? Lightning can strike twice. Alan, you dope. The greatest sin a child can commit is to die before your parents.

Alan came off as something of a twit in the eulogy. There was an awful lot of emphasis in how much fun he liked to have. Fishing, biking, cooking, even mowing the lawn. Having died wiping out on a street corner, it seems that a more serious eulogy might have been in order; he DID have a serious side, right? I like to have fun, and I think I have a good sense of humor, but If I die, please, please, don’t use the word “Dude” in my eulogy. But all the important stuff was still there, about how kind and good, and willing to share his toys he was.

I ran into Alan’s older brother just a while ago and since I did, felt I needed to go to this funeral even more strongly than if I hadn’t talked to anyone in the family at all. I had missed Eric’s funeral, I was away at college. I didn’t recognize a soul, even though I recognized all the names in the program. “Well,” my mother sniffed, “You’re not a part of this community anymore, you left as soon as you could.” (Ouch!) Like anybody could afford living in West L.A. Like what could one accomplish in a hometown, left to one’s devices, with no money, no looks and no connections?

But I was struck how many people stayed around, living with their parents or in apartments nearby, having finishing community college or just barely a bachelor’s degree. (These were the people my mother wanted me to be friends with? Just because they were good kids that finished Japanese school?!) I suppose I needed to find communities elsewhere. There were other things to see besides Santa Monica beach. What did I miss? What did Alan see that I missed by moving away? So maybe art conservation really isn't the end all and be all. Now that I have a job, I discover, it's just a job. Does it matter if I'm an "important" conservator or not? Might I have been happy being something else? Hey, who'd come to my funeral, 2000 miles away from the east coast anyway?

None of that matters. Alan’s funeral was standing room only because he was a good guy. He chose to live his life happily, picked his responsibilities and didn’t much care what other people thought. So what, if he didn’t go to college, he could go back whenever he wanted; now is now. Alan taught me a lot of things as a kid, I should learn from him that last lesson. The Reverend called his a successful life because he affected so many people, as evidenced by the people in the room. I don’t know if that many people would come to my funeral, that’s true. I don’t know if Alan’s life was successful, cut so short by an incident so trivial as a motorcycle accident. His fiancée cried through the whole funeral, which was touching and hard to take at the same time –evidence that someone loved him strongly, terribly, achingly. Now the decisions are made and can’t be undone. Now is now.

Odo has become fully acclimated to living with myparents, and has begun administering 'love bites.' My mother finds them alarming. She has gone from bragging that "He never bites me, he only bites your father." to "He has never drawn blood from me, only your father." He also nips people if he is annoyed. Once, a while ago, and now several times, Odo has met my mother at the door and made clear that there was no food in his bowl. My mother petted him and apologized and said I'll be right back then, dearie, I have to pee, and I'll feed you then. She turned to go to the bathroom and felt a tug on her pants, looked down and there was Odo with a mouthful of her pantleg in his mouth. "No. Feed me now." I know some people would think that he's a very bad cat, but he really is a good cat. He worships my mother and puts up with my father, and the nips and bites actually foster a sort of mutual respect. Sortof. Well, they need the stimulation and he likes the attention. Hey, it works.

The other thing about Odo is, boy, has he gotten handsome. Flowing orange fur, white paws, big bushy tail, and those tufted ears! But he sheds like crazy, and my father vacuums daily (good exercise for him!) but the sofa and the bed look like they own sheep. Odo likes to sleep on my mother's shoulder or by my father's feet and that makes both of them nuts. My father is convinced he's going to die of gray lung. Whenever they talk about "neko, neko," Odo has figured out they're talking about him and he stands taller and brushes sweetly against my dad. It's cute. Old people, I've discovered, working at Kinko's, like soft things. Odo is very soft. With fangs.

The last thing that's really funny is Dad was convinced Odo didn't purr. But Odo's purr is very sweet and faint. And both of them finally heard it,when he got into that hated habit of sleeping at their shoulder. There is no great loss without some small gain.

Don't feed the stray cat within sight of your own cat.

Park downtown after 4:oo, not 3:00, for reduced rates.

Do not announce a German Pope on Adolph Hitler's birthday.

Never run away from a fight, even if it's your wedding.

Always overestimate the amount of tape you'll need.