Music and Cats

Sasha has spent a lot of time recently on this radiator, making tiny sounds of yearning directed at the black stuffed puppydog on the bookshelf. (It’s the large black blob in the photo.) The puppy is on the shelf to prevent Sasha’s dragging it around by its fuzzy shearling ear. We give the cats lots of furry toys for their hunting games, but the pup is an order of magnitude larger than the largest of those. The bookshelf in question is overflowing with sheet music, architecture books and magazines, some random clutter… and one very attractive shearling puppy. I did not think that there was enough space on the shelves for a 13-lb. cat, nor did I think that Sasha (the clumsiest of our fur family) could make that leap.

I was wrong.

Despite some tugging on its ear, Sasha was unable to get the puppy off the shelf. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he was standing on its tail.

Sasha loves to watch birds, and seems to particularly like watching them with me. He lets me know when he wants to be picked up for bird viewing: he finds me, looks up at me and mews in his tiny voice, walks away when I reach for him, and stops next to the nearest window, arching his back fetchingly until I gather him up in my arms. He begins to purr when my hand reaches under his chest, then goes limp as a rag doll as I scoop up his hind legs. I clasp my hands together under his belly, and he lets his front legs and one hind leg drape over my arms. He keeps one hind paw on my arm, either for balance or some sense of control. He rests his large head in the crook of my elbow, and purrs. We’re ready to go.

I walk from window to window, stopping at each to see if any birds are visible. If, after a few moments, no bird has appeared, Sasha makes a half-hearted cackling sound, as if to ask where the damn birds are. We continue on to the next window, and the next. When Sasha spots birds, the commentary starts. He cackles, in that funny jerky-jawed way that cats have; his chin does not leave my elbow, so his cackling is for me as much physical sensation as sound. His long, bushy tail twitches, then beats a rhythm against my side, then slows to a lazy wave. And through all of this, he purrs. He is content to watch, and talk to me about the birds he sees, for minutes on end. I am quite content to oblige him, holding his warm, soft, rumbling body until my arms tire or the birds fly away.

Friday morning was cool, cloudy and damp. It looked and felt like rain. When I went down to the kitchen to make coffee, I looked out the window to see northern flickers, sparrows, robins, and a few others that I couldn’t identify. They were fluttering about, pecking at insects or seeds on the ground. Did I finish making my coffee, and take it back upstairs to drink while getting dressed? No, I did not. Instead, I went to find Sasha. I gently picked him up, and carried him, half asleep, to the window in the back door. “Look, Sasha. Birds,” I whispered against his fur. He caught sight of a bird; I felt the purring start in his chest. Cackackackackackack. Thwap, thwap, thwap. Cackackack. I smiled, and kissed the top of his furry head.

Of all of the cities in which I have lived, my favorite to fly into is Seattle. I love the views of mountain, forest, water and city that make up the approach into SeaTac. As a native of the wide, flat, barely-above-sea-level Texas Gulf Coast, I am fascinated by mountains. When I plan a plane trip, I carefully select seats for the flight back to Seattle on the side of the airplane with the best mountain views. On flights from Houston, seats on the left side of the airplane afford a spectacular eye-level reach-out-and-touch-it view of Mt. Rainier. Flights from the San Francisco Bay Area call for seats on the right side of the plane, from which one can count off the volcanic peaks - Shasta, Hood, St. Helens, Rainier, and others - that mark this edge of the Ring of Fire.

Yesterday, my late afternoon flight home to Seattle from Oakland was delayed. I was tired, so once on the plane I dozed, pillow against the window, for the first hour of the flight. When I woke, I looked out the window, hoping to see a recognizable peak. What I saw instead were scattered mounds of billowing cumulus clouds. The sun was low enough in the sky that only the tops of the clouds were illuminated; they glowed a warm, soft coral pink. The lower parts of the clouds were a soft silver gray. Far below was a town, surrounded by a dark, rolling patchwork of farmland and forest. The western windows of the buildings below reflected the sun’s orangey evening rays. Forehead resting against the glass, I stared out at the show. Mt. Hood came into view, a snowy peak in the clouds, bathed in a rosy glow. The ragged top of St. Helens was barely visible through the clouds, but caught a few of the setting sun’s rays. And then came Rainier, towering and craggy, shining in the low, warm light. As the sun continued to set, the color moved to the undersides of the clouds, then began to fade.

As we reached the south end of Puget Sound, the sky cleared; the trees and water below were distinguishable more as changes in texture than in color. The airplane banked to begin a large, looping descent. We briefly flew westward; the line of the horizon stretched across my field of view, shading from burning gold in the west to fuschia and blue-violet in the east. As we turned north again, Seattle came into view, and I picked out landmarks: SeaTac (our destination, after a final sightseeing jaunt), the Fauntleroy ferry, the container cranes on the docks, downtown buildings, the Space Needle. North of downtown, the plane banked in a tighter curve; I pressed my nose to the glass, looking down. As we flew south, I picked out Queen Anne Avenue, then followed it ahead to spot the old high school, the water towers, the apartment building next to our house. I couldn’t see the roof of our house in the dark, but knew when we were directly overheard. Hello, gatos, I thought. See you soon.

Half an hour later, I was on the ground, hugging Paul. An hour after that, the cats were gathered around us on our bed, sniffing all the scents of California and marking me as their own again. It’s good to be home.

On every project, I have weeks like this one, when all I do is get up, go to work, come home for dinner, go back to work, come home, sleep too little, get up and do it again. During these weeks, I sometimes have to remind myself why I love my work.

At those times, I look at photos like this one, of an affordable housing development in Tacoma. It was my baby for two years. I’m not going to overwork the creative endeavor as pregnancy and childbirth metaphor here; I’ll just say that this project did not come into being easily. But now, there are 67 families, some previously homeless, who are living in this place and its sibling a couple of blocks down the street. I was in this courtyard doing final building inspections the week that the first residents moved in. I remember the excitement on their faces. So when I look at this photo, I see not only the buildings that I helped to create, but the hope that those buildings represent for the families who live in then. And that’s worth a few late nights at work.

I was awakened at 4:45 this morning by the sound of a cat yowling in the house. Paul was getting out of bed as I woke up. The sounds continued, each yyeeoooowwrrr louder, more drawn out and more plaintive than the last. These were not it’s-morning-servants-you-shall-bring-me-food sounds; it sounded like someone was hurt.

I was a few steps behind Paul as he left our bedroom. We were calling to the cats; the horrible sounds continued. Paul reached the head of the stairs, then stopped short, laughing. On the landing halfway down the stairs was the cats’ newest toy, the hexapus. (It’s a rabbit fur toy, and would be an octopus but that it has only six arms. It came that way. Given some time with our cats, however, it will become a pentapus, then a quadrapus, etc.) A few inches away sat Lyra, pretty as a picture, staring intently at it and yowling her little head off. She wanted it to run, or play, or just do something! Naughty toy! she yowled. Bad, lazy, stupid hexapus! The boy cats were watching to see if her scolding could, perhaps, convince the damn toy to move already. The hexapus wasn’t going anywhere.

Our laughter startled the cats; they skittered down the rest of the stairs and out of sight. I picked up the very naughty hexapus, and found it a safe, quiet place for the rest of the night.