EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

I went back to my old friend the chiropractor this week because my main doctor practically screamed when she walked around to my back to have a listen to my lungs. I had a johnnie on of course so the little keyboard of my spinal column was exposed.

“Oh! Your scoliosis is SO much WORSE!” she gasped.

See I didn’t KNOW I had scoliosis until a year or two ago. I took an exercise class in a room full of mirrors where it became clear that though what we were doing looked like Yoga’s Child’s Pose on everyone ELSE, on me it looked like a mound of ice cream slowly melting down to the left.

The good thing is nobody seems to care very much if you have scoliosis when you’re old. They do screen for it when you’re young though because it can be serious then, compressing internal organs and so on. The screening process is a mere eyeball test: the school nurse has you bend at the waist and hang your arms down toward the floor. The rib cages of straight-backed people look symmetrical side to side. The rest of us well, it’s another thing.

A website I looked at just now says a person with scoliosis might also have OTHER UNDERLYING diseases, signaled by such things as “colored markings, a hairy patch on the skin or a deformity of the foot.”

Well I HAVE colored marking on the skin but it’s because I draw on myself by mistake. My underwear too is covered with multi-colored inks. I take no notice. And hmmm, looking down at my feet here I see nothing amiss; just the vestiges of my first and only pedicure obtained on an island off the coast of Charleston SC sometime last summer but since the girl used a pearly white polish I just let it stay there, growing out as my toenails grow. Because my feet are just so far away, you know? (Hello feet! How was your Christmas? Did you do your taxes yet? )

As for the hairy patch of skin well I have to surprise that PCP with SOMETHING the next time I see her or she’ll be all out of gasps . I’m thinkin’ now a little Rogaine applied to sole of one foot. Or maybe my chin. Or how about my beautiful girlish CHEST Doc?

I’m not worried generally. I know a good tailor for the twisty clothes. And my chiropractor himself was very sweet. I just have to see him once a week for the rest of my life.

I’m skipping my Weight Watcher meeting today even though I love going. Going to Weight Watcher is like going to AA: you can fall off the wagon and skip meetings for like six months and STILL when you go back they’re nice to you.

I stayed away for one long time over the holidays so I know. In the final days of that particular binge I got to where I was standing at the open fridge drinking heavy cream straight from the carton, POURING IT ON MY ICE CREAM even, which hey don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

I’ve been on every kind of diet because when I was a child I was pudgy. My big sister loved it when our mother put me in this certain little homemade sweater. “The Pinch Sweater” she called it because she just couldn’t NOT take between her fingers the little kielbasas that were my baby arms and squ-e-e-e-eze. Later, she settled for telling me that if I REALLY wanted to be thin I should peel down a stick of butter every day and eat it like a banana.

Strange, right? But the actual weight-loss regimens I began following a short decade later weren’t much less strange. I did the Grapefruit Diet in high school which was punitive but what could I do? I was getting so I looked like the late Anna Nicole Smith at her chubbiest. Only not blonde of course. Only not, you know, pretty in any way.

Then in the college years they were serving us Yorkshire pudding and hot fudge sundaes every time you turned around so I really packed on the pounds and the next thing I knew it was real-world time and I began teaching high school and believe me you don’t want to be feeling vulnerable about your appearance with 200 teenagers a day studying you instead of their books which is what they do during class time. I remember the September day my fifth period class filed in for the first time. “She’s fa-a-a-t,” one girl mouthed to another, a look of glee on her face.

It was at that point that I joined Weight Watcher and went from 155 lbs to 130. Then seven years later I started having babies and soon my rear end looked like a big old sanitation truck lumbering down the street. This time I tried the Scarsdale Diet which on Day Three makes the inside of your head start buzzing. The pounds come off but they only stay off for like a week and a half after you stop. THEN, lucky for me, an au pair came to live with us, started going to Weight Watcher, dropped 60 big ones and looked so changed when she flew back to Austria at the end of her year with us that her very parents walked right past her at the airport. With her inspiration – and may we say her special Weight Watcher recipes – the fat fell off these little bones of mine and I went down to 118 and looked like Flat Stanley.

Life being what it is of course I inched up again during my 40s and so Zone-dieted. And so Suzanne Somered. And so I did everything but slap at my thighs with leather belts – oh but wait I DID that too back in the 70s at a salon-like weight-loss emporium called Gloria Stevens which was ALL ABOUT leather belts and jiggling machines.

But finally finally FINALLY a year ago I went back to Weight Watcher where they’re so sensible they TURN YOU AWAY if they think you don’t need them, which is why I stuffed little two- and three-pound weights into my pants the first time I went there, the idea being I could start high enough for ‘admission’ and then kinda progress no matter what heh heh, take a weight out here this week, take a weight out there next week and get praised at the weigh-in!

And sure it made me walk a little funny but I had to do it since you might look at me and SAY I’m not overweight. Maybe you Weight Watcher police really might NOT have let me join but hey, I’ll say hey, I’ll say hey again: you guys don’t see my in my underpants.

All week what a sad grumpy girl I was. The day I stopped in at the frame shop the nice man there told me “Happy Easter” when we got done with our business. Oh I’m not much on Easter I said back nobody seems to care about Easter anymore except to give their kids two-foot-tall Easter baskets filled with crap, and anyway it’s too early, the ground looks like a dry old scab….. Not that I have anything against Jesus, I’m actually I’m a fan of Jesus! “I’ll be sure to tell him that next time I see him,” came his mild retort.

What a burden I often am to myself. It’s like having this embarrassing relative around all the time only I’m him. Her. She. I’m the relative.

I cheered up by degrees as the week went on. Sitting in the cemetery in the rain Wednesday night helped some since I do love a cemetery. Then I went to the  Holy Thursday Service that I hadn’t been to in like million years and I’d forgotten how it moves me to see the way the church gets darker and darker the deeper into the readings we go with Judas nervously fingering his prayer beads and the fellas telling Jesus how they’re with him all the way Man only then they’re all passed out and it’s the big moment when the soldier gets his ear cut off and Jesus sticks it back on and then the scene with Peter saying he didn’t know him when somebody asked him after the arrest. I tried that once when my doctor told me I had to find out what my father died of. “Nah,” I said. “I don’t have to really. I mean I didn’t even know the guy!” Which I thought was pretty funny though the doctor didn’t. he STILL made me go digging back 50 years through a world of painful old papers until I finally did find a copy of the death certificate which some saint sent to my mom when he died in ’73 not having laid eyed on her since the day I was born. I liked saying that I didn’t even know the guy. It felt good to deny him. “You did it to me,” I remember thinking at the time.

And then Good Friday and I went to my favorite little pond and looked out at the water and the wind was so strong it was refreezing the wave as they splashed against the overhanging twigs and breaches, making this kind of beaded fringe like you used to see on lampshades in the 1920s and 1930s and the fringe clicked as the wind blew and I kept falling sleep trying to read my book about the Civil War dead and how nobody thought to mark the poor soldier’s uniforms with their names and there were no ambulances or hearses, no system for carrying away the wounded or burying the dead. (Cheerful reading I know.)

And then yesterday we had the wind again but a crazy bright sun too and I bought enough flowers for a mobster’s funeral and brought then home and mad ea giant mess in the kitchen with the vases and the stems and the scissors and the greens . A mess! But I began to get really happy and then I made a salad with cumin and artichoke hearts and these really fat oranges, and then we went out and saw a production of The Tempest and I cried when the mean old bastard of a brother who years before snatched the Dukedom away from the rightful ruler Prospero and then washes up on Prospero’s island ha HA after the big storm that Prospero made using his magic…. When he sees his boy and realizes he hadn’t drowned but was actually just fine and more than fine because here he is sitting cozily with this lovely girl Prospero’s daughter and he weeps with joy and is a mean old bastard no longer……

And then it was today. Then it was Easter Sunday and our little boy cat who was hours from death just 20 days back sashayed into our bedroom and hopped light and quick the tub edge while I was in the bath and I saw that his sutures were clean gone and the wound was healed and he looked at me with his bright green eyes and lifted his chin as of to say Hey momma and I just started to smile and my smile got wider and wider and wider and wider as the day went on and we got all dressed and went to church and had a meal together and the sun shone down all day.

 

 

Today I gave a talk to 30 lovely church women at the venerable old First Baptist Church of Lexington MA and the weather was again terrible only this time it was raining little needles and the day had dawned snowy so the walking was awful.

But the second I walked into the basement of that old church I felt happy.

Church basements all have that same great smell and the Sunday school rooms looked so dear with their wee tables and chairs and some old hooked rugs and bright yellow walls.

When I found the main gathering place the ladies were just tucking into a hot lunch that one of them had put together all on her own: pans of ravioli with sausage and broccoli; Caesar salad; baskets of bread; and home-made carrot cake. I had said I wouldn’t eat the latter but it smelled so much like childhood and a school cafeteria I thought How can I not? and so sat down.

I was the only outsider of course and they did the nicest thing they could have done while smiling warmly at me from time to time: they went on with their regular conversations which let me see right into their lives. This one was having trouble with her dog. That one was going crazy because her husband is always saying she doesn’t talk loud enough. A third one leans forward to say that she was born in this town made famous by a Revolution and still lives on what remains of the family farm. Her mother, in her late 90s, lives there too.

She and the woman beside her described exactly how this town still seemed even just 60 or 70 years ago: pastoral. Quiet. Like the farm town it was before 1775.

The talk and the rain outside took me back I think and when it was time for me to rise and talk for 40 minutes I talked about that past too and these great women laughed and sighed and remembered back too.

I told them what was next for me; how three hours after I got done with them I would be unpacking a picnic in a cemetery as night fell. The picnic was my romantic notion and I’d invited to it a lady 60 and a lady 80.

I’m writing this at 3pm. I have made a beef stew and a salad of Boston lettuce with almonds and berries for this picnic. I have sourdough bread and some cookies, wee little oranges and two kinds of wine, a straw picnic basket and some elegant stemware, fresh-brewed coffee and two thermoses that between them cost 50 whole bucks because they’re guaranteed to keep hot things hot for 24 hours.

We’ll see I guess. But the cemetery we are going to is Mt. Auburn, such a beautiful place rain or shine that  I’ve been thinking lately it’s the place where my man and I will one day go for keeps,  where all day and all night we can look up at its wonderful trees and imagine that we too can still feel the rain on our faces, steely-needled or soft, and the snow when it snows and the strengthening vernal sun.

Once you get used to high drama you begin creating it all around you, ever notice? I’m noticing it today and wondering if in fussing over this poor post-operative cat of mine I didn’t start turning into someone really odd like this little person you can see by double clicking on these words. Or like that old Bouvier lady who lived with her crazy daughter and a million cats in that tumbledown house in the Hamptons. (You’ve heard of Grey Gardens right? and the two of them spending day and night in this one messy bedroom eating ice cream right from the carton while the cats ate their cat food right from the can and circled and stank and wove in and out like snakes?

I’m thinking now that I maybe HAVE gone a wee bit OVERBOARD with worry over my poor kitty with his stitches.

I got him home from his second trip to the world’s most elaborate quadruped cat hospital and 24 hours later he still hadn’t wet for me, which I knew very well because the doctors had said in no uncertain terms to mind his comings goings, as it were. “Put him in the bathroom for these three weeks, where he won’t be tempted to jump up and hurt his stitches,” they said. “ And keep an eye on him at all times. “

“So what, I should sleep in the tub” I asked.

“Ha ha, well ya, kind of.”

Instead I put him in a back room here in a special doggy bed with a hot water bottle and this worked fine after the first hospitalization. After this second visit though things took a downturn. I crept into his sickroom at 7am today and he was up on the brand new ottoman, and gave me that look, you know the one? “Yeah I’m on the furniture and sure I bled on it a little but fuck you, know what I ‘m sayin’?

Naturally it’s a shock when you’re cat swears at you but the worse news was that he hadn’t gone to the bathroom AT all. His litterbox was dry as a bone.

And when I lifted him oh so gently and placed him in there, he got right out again.

Then, when I carried him to our, bathroom normally a palace of beauty and order now crowded with tuna-flavored cat meds and a food dish and a SECOND litterbox and tried putting him in that, he lay right down in it as if to say “I will sleep in this thing and I will DIE in this thing before I use it the way you want me to use it.”

That’s when I panicked and called the hospital. “He’s blocked again!” I said. “Even with a giant stoma in place of his little garden hose, he can’t pee !”

“Someone will call you right back,” they said

But could I wait? I could not. I put him right in the car and started for the place so when they did call back and say “Bring him in, Mrs. Marotta, by all means bring him right in,” I’d be in the door like a flash. I was literally in the parking lot and on the actual brink of hustling him inside when I suddenly thought Wait a minute T. This is gonna be 200 bucks more. JUST IN CASE why don’t you drive over to Target and buy YET ANOTHER kitty toilet and even more paper towels on account of how he absolutely can’t let regular litter touch his little underside. Let’s so this and just see if he’ll go to the bathroom that way, right in the back of my nice little minivan.

So I turned around and headed for Target and ten minutes later was back in the car with the goods . I let Abe out of his cage and placed him in this newest rest room. And gain I got the look. And then … and then …he noted a little spilled litter from a week ago when I’d bought a 400 pound sack of the stuff because nobody told me he wasn’t going to be able to use it…. A teensy dusting was spilled on the rug in the way-back…. And this he saw. And this he took a sniff of , scratched. Took another sniff; scratched some more- and then went to the bathroom both ways right on the rug.

And the scary thing is I was thrilled. I’ll worry tomorrow about the fact that I’ve invited two elegant older ladies to enjoy a kind of indoor picnic at the country’ oldest cemetery with me right in this very car on Thursday.

Because you know it as well I do: cucumber sandwiches and sherry under the sheltering trees in a gorgeous historic venue are all very well. And I know we will have a lovely lovely time. But having a pet who can find relief when relief has long eluded him – well that’s even better. So crack open a can of tuna and bring on the Mocha Almond, Aby babe. Tonight in our porcelain palace we are CELBRATING !

It was a hell of a week between hosting all those Shakespeare enthusiasts and giving First Aid to our little boycat Abe – and then 30 minutes before that big soiree began I got told I had to bring him BACK to the hospital for some critical care. He just had no interest in eating and drinking. He just sat in his doggy bed looking resigned. Abe HAS a doggy bed instead of a kitty bed for two reasons. Because (a) are you kidding, cats don’t have kitty beds, they have YOUR bed; and (b) he’s such a wild man ordinarily that we had to buy the bigger, doggy-style bed and then stick it inside a giant metal rabbit hutch because it’s the only way we can transport him without having him undergo a total freak-out. And sure we feel like crazy peopled  carrying around something the size of a doghouse but it’s the only way  we can keep from going stark raving mad with a cat yowling on the seat beside us. In this cage he can see where he’s going and that calms him down some. Here in his sickroom I’ve taken the cage part off and put a fate up at the door. I figure it gives him something soft to sit on instead of just having a bare floor in his solitary confinement.

The next morning when it was time to go back to the animal ER I couldn’t face that gigantic contraption. It was just too big and me alone with the chore. Instead I put him in soft sided gym-bag of a cat carrier, the kind cat-owners use, the kind his meek sister Charlotte rides in without complaint but we weren’t half a mile into the journey when he started fighting his way out. First, his head nose emerged. Then his head popped up like a jack in the box head. When his shoulders began emerging it seemed to me like childbirth all over again and he with him struggling so mightily I just started laughing. “Abe I’m going to lose control of the car and we’re BOTH going to die! “My blood is on your head Abraham!” I was yelling as I pressed on that small stubborn head.

But we didn’t die. We got to the hospital where the lovely internist spoke gravely of steroids and feeding tubes, of possible bone marrow investigations and I don’t know WHAT else, all because Abe’s red blood cell count was still dropping. I was there for four hours while they went back and forth with the tests and the deliberation, four hours as they finally took me into the back room to clue me in as to the actual dollars involved.

So Abe stayed another two nights and God bless him began making his way back to relative health with just a blood transfusion and an appetite stimulant.

As I drove away without him Wednesday I felt guilty relief.  15 minutes before the Shakespeare lovers has arrived the night I was in my nastiest clothes and covered with cat hair. Luckily our girl Annie came to do her magic with the food. While we read the play she squeezed heavenly substances out of a pastry cone and dragged bits if roast lamb through a trail of gorgonzola melt.  Then when the reading was done, her dad appeared and started opening wine bottles. The Shakespeareans loved the wines and the foods and positively inhaled the traditional hot chocolate and at evening’s end announced they were coming to this house every month, never mind once a year.

I had a great time talking with them all, these men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s but the nicest moment came when I had a minute with the one named Max who did such a great job reading Falstaff last year I remember it every time I see him. Tonight he had also read his part with such expressiveness and verve that I just had to say something.

I love to hear you read Max. In fact I love just seeing you! And you look so great.”

“I’m 97 years old!” he said with merry amazement and I thought to myself this is they way to be! Live to a hundred and go to every party!” And isn’t that what Abe’s trying to do, just a month shy of his 13th birthday in a world that seems to have ‘torn him a new one’ as the saying goes?

He’s home again as if 2 o’clock this afternoon and eating and drinking to beat the band. He has a shaved crotch of course and the fur on his legs where they attached the IV and the catheter are bare still too. And then of course there’s that crazy satellite dish he has around his neck so he won’t bite out his stitches but never mind all that. He’s here. He’s right here next to me on this double-wide chair, curled around a hot water bottle and watching me write.

David‘s in the other room reading the latest New Yorker and I can hear the girl cat Charlotte padding around wondering where the supper is.

Guess I’m starting to wonder that too. Guess it’s time to pull a little food out of the fridge, make a fire in the fireplace and let the weekend settle about us. Here in this house we’re feeling pretty good. Even though our purse is even lighter today than it was on Tuesday that’s OK I think. These two casts are part of our family, same as everyone else.

 I feel grateful to both Dr. Haber who sure does know her Internal Medicine, and to Dr. Corti who can whisk off a whole penis like a magician whisks off that special tablecloth, and STILL leave enough in the way of “utensils” for a kitty to process the daily intake.

I’m grateful to Old Dave for opening all those wine bottles, for mixing it up so generally with a bunch of people he’d never laid on eyes before, and just generally for being a man outstanding in his field.

The doctors initially said “Put Abe alone in a small room with a paper-towel-lined litter box and a food source.” But now today they told me “Actually put him in YOUR room so you can watch him.”

So I guess that’s what we’ll try to do here in a couple of hours. But even if he’s loudly at work all night long trying to get around that cone bib and dig at his stitches, still: I’m pretty sure I’m going to sleep like a baby. 

Sure it all SEEMS very funny to write about a cat who’s having a penisectomy until you go to the hospital to bring him home and there he is looking so thin and compromised, wearing one of those ridiculous-looking satellite dishes around his neck so he won’t use his little exacto-knife/tweezer teeth to pull out every last one of his stitches.

My junior high history teacher was always telling me to wipe that smile off our faces and helped me do it too, with a hard wooden paddle he used freely, even on us girls, swinging the thing fast to come down hard on the tips of my fingers where even just the one blow stung like you wouldn’t believe.

Well, life wiped that smile of my face 36 hours ago when after six days of IVS and ultrasounds and dips down into the Land of Anesthesia poor Abraham was released at last to my care . Even as I write this he huddles some in isolation some 30 feet away in a back bedroom where he must remain for another 14 days. He cries from time to time but that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is going in there and seeing him: his expression of pained resignation; the way he can’t set his head down or stretch out on his side because of that foolish cone; the way he can’t seem to pee much; how when I lift him ever so gently into my lap to give him some water, which I can only seem to get into him using the syringes his pain meds came in and we have now used up the last of the pain meds. I may have to use my mother’s universal remedy straight from the Emerald Isle and give him whiskey.

I’m kidding about the whiskey, but all my kidding falls flat now. It’s not funny what we have done to save his life. Is it wrong of us to order up these heroic rescues for our animals just because we can’t imagine doing without their sweet company while we shine our shoes or pay the bills or watch TV?

David saw where the surgeons were getting at before I did. He saw our oldest girl on Friday and said to her “I’m not sure but I think Abe is having a sex change operation today.” I thought it was going to just be a couple of catheterizations to drain the bladder then boom he’d be fine and home, trotting through the yard and snacking on his favorite foods.

Tonight because I promised the use my house some 10 months ago, 30 Shakespeare enthusiasts are coming here. We spend three hours reading the play that has been chosen and carefully cast. Then at 10:30 or so the is we adjourn to the dining room of the hosting house to enjoy the collation as has been the custom since the group’s founding in the 19^th century when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s brother, and daughter, and grandson were enthusiastic members.

Lucky for me our girl Annie who is a professional chef is coming over after her other, more mainstream 9 to 5  job, to prepare the rest of the food which she began upon over the weekend. This means that in the next several hours all I have to do is go back to the animal hospital to ask them how the HELL to get the cone off just for meals since Abe can’t even get NEAR  his food dish without knocking it over. Then I need to get five bags of ice and a little more wine, try to see to it that the whole HOUSE doesn’t smell like animal illness and then have another look at the living room whose furniture we shoved all around last night so that the Shakespeareans can see one another as they read the play aloud.

Then, until around 6 tonight when I have to jump into my pantyhose and start setting out the salted nuts I can sit with the patient, my pal from his babycat days in 1995 when he was a small grey ball of fluff who when he came down our big stairs one a time looked like nothing so much as a Slinky toy. I’ll sit with him and MAYBE try to write a little, but mostly just try be with him I think, as he makes his way through this moment and the next and the next one following, even as we all must do until day comes quick or fast when for us all both time and moments are forever done.

I had to rest for a couple of days. All that jauntiness about our cat that I was trying to maintain didn’t match my real feelings and I would have written lugubrious sentimental things about Pets and All They Do For Us which is true; they do do a lot God knows, God knows, but less is more in the old expression-of-feelings department and I didn’t want to be emoting all over the blogosphere. But he’s coming home today finally after six days in the hospital so I thought maybe I could screw my courage to the sticking point (that’s from Macbeth) and carry on.

We drove up to our place at the lake for the weekend. We brought Abe’s sister here so we could examine our consciences and ask ourselves if we knew how to take care of cats at all. Here is Charlotte now, sitting in her favorite chair under the charcoal portrait of Bob Dylan that our boy Michael did as a junior in high school.

(I know, it looks like a photograph huh? His work is all like that. Only problem: it takes him like three months to finish one drawing.) It was just snowing a minute ago – a quick squall but now that seems to have stopped and the sun is coming out. We have to leave soon but I’m trying to hold back the time. I wanted to go up to my other favorite room here:

and read This Republic of Suffering which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s book new about death and the Civil War, and also write in my poor forgotten paper diary which is getting short shrift lately.

But in five hours I can got get Abe who has had a one prett-y prett-y hard time (say that the way Larry David does on Curb Your Enthusiasm.) They catheterized him as we know but when they took the tube out at midnight one night and watched him the next day he still couldn’t empty his bladder completely. Also, he appears to be anemic but no one knows why. Was it Kitty AIDS? Feline Leukemia? Should they work him up for both? By all mean, yes. Hmmmm, but then the news came that he’s OK in that department so what was the deal? The hours passed; they called twice daily. Now they had to catheterize him again… Finally on Friday they called and said “Let’s do an abdominal ultrasound, because he has to have surgery and we should know what’s in there. It’s the only thing now: a Perineal urethrostomy or PU – which, in fairness, they had told us about the first night Mary and I brought him in.

“With a PU they just reroute the urethra” I thought the young doctor said that first night. “They create a new opening in the perineal area.”( This, in case your mother told you never never to look down there, is the smooth shiny stretch of real estate we all have between the Department of Waste Management and what Shakespeare (Shakespeare again, that show-off!) called the Organs of Increase..)

But I must’ve understood wrong because this time they gave a different explanation. Friday’s doctor said, “Think of it like a garden hose that used to be nine feet long and now we’re gonna make it six feet long, that’s all – because the part of the urethra that gets jammed up is the narrowest part, at the end….

“So we’re going to basically cut off his penis.”

Poor Abe. “First they came for my scrotum when I was too young to measure the loss and now this!” he’d have thought he’d overhead them.

Well it’s history now. They operated and he came through. Except for the worsening anemia which is probably just from loss of blood and should we transfuse him? We think so? Of course by all means, is it complicated? Not at all. Costly? Mmmmm yes…

But just two weeks ago I heard a re-broadcast of that wonderful program about penises that Ira Glass did on This American Life. OK, OK it was really about testosterone. And don’t we all know what testosterone has done to the world! With my own estrogen levels ebbing daily the see-saw of hormones has caused testosterone to come into new prominence. (Ask my oldest girl who when she sees me nowadays says “Hi Mum you look great! You only have this One Whisker!”)

Thus little grey Abe won’t be fighting anyone, not that he ever did. He was always meek and self-effacing as anyone can see.

He won’t spray anyone, not that he ever did that either, his cruel owners having nipped that urge in the bud when he was a baby. He won’t even get to stand up to go to the bathroom. “He’ll pee like a girl” the vet had said and so he shall I suppose. The important thing is that he’ll be home with us soon.

Soooo initial sleepover bladder emptying and work-up: $1400; added evaluations $2000 more. Transfusion, morphine cocktail, enemas: a grand total of 4500 balloons. But Abe eating and peeing and trotting around with the enjoyment we all know? Priceless! So hang on old friend we’ll be there soon. And they say the drugs are great!

ABE AMONG THE FLOWERS

Is it OK to whine in a blog? I swore off whining in my diaries out of pity for my poor kids who’ll have to go through them all some day and who wants to find out their mother was so petty, writing down how misunderstood she felt all the time or else primly recorded every time her husband looked at her cross-eyed?

No I’ll not burden them. I’ll burden you instead.

On Monday our nice crazy cat Abe disappeared – just vanished into thin air. I noticed it at suppertime when he didn’t come downstairs talking his little black gums off. (He’s one of those really chatty animals.) I asked his sister Charlotte where he was but she wasn’t talkin’. David went out to play tennis and drink Scotch with his pals so I made a fire in living room fireplace thinking “this is the center of the house; if Abe is anywhere in here I will hear him.”

I didn’t though and when David came home and heard he was gone we searched the whole house twice; then he went back outside with a flashlight and looked and listened, even drove around hoping Abe would pop out of the bushes since he loves nothing so much as a ride in your car so long as you’re just going around the block.

No luck though. “He’s in the house,” I told David. “I can feel him; so for the third time that night we searched all three floors and even the cellar. Nada. We slept with our bedroom door open for the first time in 20 years the way we used to do when the kids were babies. “What’s this about?” I asked Dave when he swung it wide. “So he can find us if he comes looking.”

He didn’t though. So the NEXT day I looked for him all over the town and every old newspaper, every piece of tree-limb looked to me like a little grey cat huddled in the gutter, killed by some ruthless fool in a car.

Finally I called my pal Mary, school nurse, veteran of the Oncology Department and the AIDS ward at Mass General Hospital. She’s the one who helped me through my last cat crisis which, when I made it into a column, brought in more letters than any other thing I have written in 27 years. (You can see it – hell you can HEAR me tell it in my own voice but you have to buy my $30 audio-plus-read-it book first ha ha.) Mary said she’d come after supper that night and help me look. She brought her lovely 13-year old Rachel and not eight minutes after they got here we found him – in the skinniest little space behind the door of my son’s third floor bedroom, empty now with Michael off in New York subsisting on a diet of beer and Ramen noodles.

He just stared at us, listless. Mary touched him, studied his face and said “renal failure?” We went right to the all-night animal ER, this gorgeous well-lighted temple of wellness and they operated on him within the hour.

All this was yesterday and I felt OK; I felt as if we were making progress. Because he wasn’t lost anymore, see. I felt as good as you do when you HAVE the baby and then the nurses suggest you let them take it down the hall to the nursery so you can rest and you say yes sure because you’re no fool you know it’s gonna be a LONG 20 years.

So yesterday I was happy. But today when the vet called at 6am she said he was no better really. His bladder didn’t burst and kill him but the catheter in his little neutered pee-pee set up some inflammation and his bloodwork looked iffy and he just couldn’t go home today forget about it and we’re now heading past the $2000 mark billwise but that was OK, right?

So at 6:30am I made my way down to the kitchen and opened up the cabinet with the flower vases, thinking to bring a bouquet to Mary and Rachel and out fell the one thing I have from my mother’s wedding day: a low chunky water glass saved as a souvenir. She used to keep one of the napkins in it from the reception hall. “Longwood Towers” it says in blue embroidery. The napkin was fine but the glass smashed in a million pieces.

Then, not six hours later I was thinking about the 20 Shakespeare enthusiasts who are coming here Tuesday night so we can all read Henry VIII aloud in my living room . I went to the dining room and was vaguely pawing some nice china service pieces when Smash! there went the fine china platter from my mother’s wedding in 1903 and you wouldn’t mind but this poor lady died at age 31 and what kind of a thing was THAT to do to her memory?

So I felt like hell all day and began thinking what were they doing to my baby down the hall in that nursery? I want him back! So I went to visit him. He has his leg in a sort of cast to support his IV tube and he seems to have dandruff or something all of a sudden and at first he tried to say some things about how sore his pee-pee was but in the end settled for purring like mad while I held him.

And now I’m home again and the column is due tomorrow and still has a zillion mistakes in it. But Dave’s got his bridge pals over and they’re drinking MORE Scotch and watching the Celtics so that’s good. That means I can iron and watch my new DVD of Eastern Promises, way too scary a move for David to even see a single scene of. I didn’t eat any dinner so maybe I’ll take that up with me too, then when I’m done put my sorry self to bed, asking forgivingness of my mum and her poor young mum and pulling up the covers to hide my head just like Abe did when we brought him in to the Catheter Cathedral.

Flying home from my little vacation I had a chance to check out billboards and posters in what seemed like dozens of eateries and I have to say: Some of them are wicked lame.

Take the fuel that “America runs on” for example: the poster I saw for that shows a big white Styrofoam cup imprinted with the familiar orange and pink colors and the phrase “Readin’ Emails!” That was it, that was the whole ad, as if there could be no higher kind of fun than readin’ emails while sippin’ your Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. “OH yeah,” we’re supposed to say to ourselves. “I’m a cool person now!

Still, the Dunkin’ posters are better than the ones Starbucks comes up with. Up until this past week my favorite has been this misty-looking painting-like poster showing a path (from coffee grower to coffee drinker) that looks exactly like somebody’s colon, right down to the little off-ramp at the bottom. Where it starts there are happy cartoon peasants driving cartoon tractors; where it ends, happy cartoon people holding coffee cups the size of their heads while the words wind up down and around like ant tracks, set off in odd little sentences, like Buddhist koans perhaps, pearls of wisdom for you to ponder while you’re waiting in line for your $5 fix. Also some are capitalized, and some not, and for no apparent reason which I find incredibly annoying. See?

“Of the earth but heaven sent, coffee starts out as a CHERRY.” (OK, now here imagine a gong sounding: whaaaaang.) “Within the cherry you have the taste of the PLACE it was grown.” (Another gong-dong, bwaaaaaang.) Fire is the magical element for it is in the ROAST that it truly becomes coffee upon the SECOND POP” (Double bwaaaang.) And now here you sit with a cup in front of you, ready to ENJOY. A sip leads to an EPIPHANY. INSPIRATION and IMAGINATION await. The journey goes ever ON …”

Is it me or is this NOT ONLY AMAZINGLY STILTED AND NON-CLEVER BUT OBSCURE IN ITS MESSAGE? It’s as if it was written by people who speak a whole other language than English, who, like, use a different alphabet.

I just thought that was the dumbest Starbucks poster I ever saw – until Monday morning when I caught sight of the brand-new March poster for the a mint-flavored drink. “Leprechaun Latte” it says over the image of a capering member of the wee people, and then “I looked into my literacy-loving soul and AIEEE! there was a latte!”

“Aieee there was a latte”? Why don’t these people just become accountants?

You want to see some good example of advertising go to the site where you can see all of this year’s Superbowl Ads. My favorite shows a real baby sitting at a seeming keyboard in his nursery and talking in a deep male voice. What’s great is this ironic and laid back voice coming out of a real baby’s mouth. Also the fact that it has a little throwing-up in it of the kind that a person comes right back from, the way my godmother did as a young woman in the 1930s. This lady, born in 1909 if you please, had had a few, sure, but no more than anyone else at the party. She was playing sing-along tunes on the piano for a gang of tipsy revelers and singing herself – then glanced down to see that oops! she had thrown up all over her dress without knowing it and c’mon, what’s funnier than that?

Well let’s close this high-minded post by looked at that great ad right now.It has a sister ad that came on later in the game so we’ll put that in here too.

Babies, man: you can’t beat babies for funny. Maybe some of these corporations should hire THEM to write their ads.