EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Our nice old boy-cat Abe went missing again yesterday, and came home 20 hours later hot and listless and refusing all food and water. I kept him in our room last night, something I never do because generally he’s all over me, telling me in a thousand pink-tongued ways how much he likes me.

Not last night. Last night he stared straight into the darkness like a man bracing himself for the worst. And so this morning I brought him to the vet who has him still. An hour ago his staff called to say that he’s full of bacteria with two ear infections and a UTI and the last time he had the latter they cut off his penis so Gad what’s next? I am wondering.

Abe and his sister Charlotte came into this house as the big present our kids gave us for our 25th anniversary. Here below is the story of that day, from way back in the days we were all a lot younger and death and illness seemed a million miles away:

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When the plush velvety cat we all doted on was killed by a car, we almost felt we couldn’t get another one. What if the next one were killed too? How could we bear another such loss?

The kids, of course, wanted a new cat immediately. In fact, they wanted two, and campaigned unremittingly for them. We put them off.

“The house is so out of control!” we said. “Just let us get a little organized! Let me try to prioritize things for once and see if we can’t first sit down for meals together, without someone always standing at the sink like a stranger wolfing food at a hot dog stand.”

But still they wheedled. Until quite suddenly – almost overnight – they stopped.

Our anniversary was approaching and they began dropping the kind of hints that suggested they were planning something big.

What did they have in mind? A pool table in the basement? A 30-foot trampoline in the yard? It wasn’t until the actual anniversary that we found out, as the two of us approached the supper table, after an especially psyche-shredding day.

“Sit down, sit down!” cried the younger two excitedly. “OK, close your eyes and hold out your hands!”

The two little cats were fresh from a shelter so meticulous they had had to bring with them not only an in-the-flesh adult relative, but actual documents proving we owned our home and were therefore free to take on the care of two tiny apostrophes of fur. Dave and I just looked at each other over the heads of the softly treading creatures in our laps.

And so it was that instead of achieving an orderly household, or even dwelling on such a concept, we have spent the weary tag-end of this long long winter raising up a couple of newborns: Abe, the exact shade of pussywillows in March, and his sister Charlotte, all black and weighing not much more than your average candy bar.

They were so small trying to climb our big stairs, they looked like a couple of Slinkies, tumbling up instead of down. They ate too fast and got sick and harbored various little hosts of the mite-and-worm sort. But under our good vet’s care, they have grown to be clean as whistles and today eat with table manners nicer than ours. Having had their Leukemia, Rabies and General Plague shots, they now begin to taste the pleasures of a delicate tails-up stroll in the dews of morning.

And sure, one keeps sneaking into our room nights to sit on my head and scrabble wildly in my hair for 10 minutes, before falling asleep and waking to do it again so that not even our bed is organized. Yet I am content with my graying groom and my babies both old and new. Now I just close my eyes nights and pretend I am at the beauty shop – and that new girl, Charlotte, is doing Shampoos.

Charlotte in her baby days

Sorry about that last All-About-Me post. I’ll be returning periodically to the none-too-fascinating tale of my diet again I’m sure but for now but for now how about a little captioning contest like they have at the back of the New Yorker every week where you get to decide what the characters in the cartoon are saying to each other? strong>What would YOU call this spontaneous creation by the man on the left? All I can dream up is “Screw the baby jogger I’m takin’ the bus”  but I’m not good at this kind of thing. If not a name how about a What’s Happening in This Picture suggestion? One thing’s for sure: the little man on the right is pretty riveted!

Back on the diet. All it took was going up four pants sizes in 18 months. Oh and having a doctor say my stomach would never again be flat (you childbearing sow you) unless I had a hair-raising procedure whose recuperation involves not just the wearing of a corset with the squeeze-powers of a boa constrictor but also actual drains dangling down like a lady’s garters in the Naughty But Nice catalogs. S-o-o-o-o-o back on the diet.

But I’m hungry again now and frankly I’m turning a little mean. The diary has a place where you’re supposed to record Other Victories This Week I wrote “I didn’t kill anyone – yet” but tell ya what I make no promises.

I miss people’s real teeth now that everyone’s trying to go for the makeover-fakeovers.  People seem to feel so apologetic about their teeth and I I get that: I tried the Teeth Whitening Mouthwash, hoping for the best, like when my mom used to put white shoe polish on my sneakers but what  happened? My tongue turned black; scared the bejesus out of the young tech at my doctor’s office. Seems the stuff kills the algae or whatever all that flora is in there, so then the fungi have themselves a field day, amazing

I wrote about this nostalgia for people’s real teeth in a recent column and mentioned Ali McGraw, who has these two crooked teeth there along the center aisle of her upper jaw. I noticed this watching the last hour of the 1970 film “Love Story” in which nobody even tells poor Ali-as-Jennifer that she has cancer, even though her rich young husband knows it, as does the fancy Fifth Avenue doc they go to because they can’t seem to get a baby going.

The doc uses that favorite Old Hollywood method of delivering bad news, meaning by the slow-drip followed by the sudden fatal dose.  He’s having a secret meeting with Ali’s young groom  Oliver Barrett III, played by Ryan O’Neal.  “I’m afraid children won’t be possible,” he gravely intones.  “So we’ll adopt!” counters cheeky young Oliver. “I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.” “What do you mean?” “She’s dying.”

Then there’s more schmaltzy music, a feeble walk or two in the park, some exhausted-looking kissing and the next thing you know she’s telling him she wants to bring the troops home by Christmas which means she wants to  die. Now please. And she does it too.

Anyway if you read the column you’ll see that although Jennifer slipped away, Ali McGraw is still going strong at 71 with the same cute teeth God gave her.

Really though I’m thinking now of her co-star today.  The girl Ryan O’Neal has loved for 30 years is now dying in the hard old-fashioned way and was there ever a smile as bright as Farrah’s?  Every man in America loved her and every woman used her hairstyle to pay her tribute.  Here on this matchless spring day I am paying it still.

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Dateline, Brooklyn: Give me frank talk and a sense of humor. This is some wall art from the Prospect park-area apartment where our boy lives and keeps his studio just three steps from his little bedroom. He’s an artist himself or is trying to be – he keeps the books for a fancy Manhattan gallery to pay the bills.

Do New Yorkers tell the truth more than the rest of us or does it just seem that way? Cut in front of one of them on the subway platform say and they’ll tell you about it, not like us New Englanders who say nothing but seethe inwardly.

Here’s some more truth distilled on this little sign, seen in the restroom of Brooklyn restaurant, a sign I’ve been dying to make for years: (‘but really everybody’) is right! These various flu viruses would hold a lot less terror for us if we all just made sure we washed our hands like ten times a day!

I got back from Florida, that land of lizards in bed with you, and came right to Brooklyn with my ‘driver’ (what the old ball-‘n-chain calls himself these days.) It was hard to leave my sister still so laid up but maybe l’ll be back there soon since her groom is having major surgery at the end of June and who will help Nan while he’s in the hospital?  She’s not supposed to put any weight on that her foot full of busted bones each no thicker than the bamboo skewers that come with your shish kebab.  “You can walk in your cast that weighs 12 pounds,” they told her “but you have to keep your toes in the air at all times.” Try it. Try it for five minutes, your heel down and your toes in full foot-cramp salute and see how your back and your leg muscles feel. By 7:00 every night she had her head in her hands, just hanging on for bedtime.

7:00 was the hour I got the dinner on. It’s the hour that marked the arrival of  Nan’s daughter Grace, all legs and long blond hair and just the ghost of the freckles that made her look as a child like a female Tom Sawyer. She was the first baby I ever fell in love with.

Not much to say yet in old Crooklyn, to reference that awesome Spike Lee movie. We came here to see our boy who now lives in this borough so full of energy and a certain indescribable grace and a great day lies ahead for us I know; but right now my thoughts are still in Florida with Nan, and her Chuck, with the girl we once called Gracie, and the little lizard that kept me company on my breaks.

Here at the top?  Nan with Grace at 18 months, the latter an unstoppable force of nature even then, And below here they both are now below. Back tomorrow with all new adventures, less about me and more about the world. Happy Saturday, ya’ll!

I’m in Florida with my sister Nan who snapped all the metatarsals in her foot when she whanged it in a fall. She was always thin and delicate. Even as a grownup she’d be subjected to idiot waiters pinching her arm at the table and saying “SOMEONE needs dessert!” (“Someone’s not getting a tip!”  Nan would counter with a big smile.)

The mean boys in her Sixth Grade class used to hoot, “Sheehy! Go back to your toothpick factory! “ (Our maiden name was Sheehy.)

Nan was the resident expert on grownups secrets when we were kids. She was on to that whole birds-and-the-bees thing by Third Grade and used a fake name to send away for pamphlets about it. She held these Sex Ed seminars for me and my stuffed animals. “OK here’s the deal,” she would say to us all: “Girls get this thing called their periods at 12 or 13. Boys get theirs later, more like at l9 or 20…”

Well she was right about most of it anyway.

She let me come down here as soon as I heard about this new fracture. She’s had the awful ‘super-virus’ known as MRSA three times already and in 2008 got a cut on her foot that caused her tto spend four months in the special costly five-times-a week, three-hours-at-a-whack hyperbaric chamber. It saved her foot if not her life. This break is on the same foot so we’re crossing our fingers that surgery can be avoided since hospitals are real breeding grounds for MRSA these days.

I came to cook and keep her spirits up so we’re eating like mad and hitting the wine a little and talking about the fun we had when we were young. She composed a song about aging on her way to sleep last night and promises to write out the words for me. It’s to the tune of the Village People’s “YMCA” she says and if I know Nan it has a little swearing it but will be so funny you can’t help but laugh, like with that thing Mark Twain said when they asked him how he liked the opera. (Do you know it? Write in if so!)

In the meantime that’s Nan on the left in this goin‘-on-an-overnight-hike picture, the year she was 12, with her best friend and cousin Mary Lou beside her. It’s how I see her still, young and wiry with the same look in those blue eyes always a little naughty, a little sad.

I sure hope she gets better soon.

I’m at the Starbucks at the Tampa airport looking for some caffeine after getting up at 4am to make my crack-of-dawn flight out of Boston  when two women in front of me have this exchange:

Woman One: “Why don’t I get my enormous BUTT out of the way so you can get in here?”

Woman Two: “You! I just spent an hour in my underwear in front of the liposuction man who said really what I needed was abdominoplasty! He took my belly-fat in his two hands like it was a Big Mac with this barely-disguised expression of disgust. I felt completely humiliated!”

Woman One: “Hey, be like me, save the money. I step naked in front of the mirror and just humiliate myself!”

My first thought: God I love travel. My second: In a million years you’d never catch a man running himself down like this. Most men I know  pat their beer guts and give them affectionate nicknames. So what on earth is wrong  with us females?