Category Archives: family

Saying Goodbye

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2015

Nov. 2021

Dickens said that life is about meetings and partings; that is the way of it.  Or maybe it was Kermit the Frog.  But the point remains the same:  those who come in to our lives eventually must leave, and we are left behind to somehow muddle on without them.  This week, we said goodbye to our 20-year-old cat TimToms. He was part of our family the moment my Mom showed up with him at our house, back in 2008.

I had just lost Snorky, who had been hit by a car in my neighborhood, and I was distraught without a cat. I did find Jenny, who was maybe 6 months old, left alone in the rain to wander, and I took her in.  That was right around Thanksgiving.  Meanwhile, my Mom’s friend, who was a veterinarian, said she had a 6 year old cat who lived on her porch and was henpecked to death by her other cats.  Would I like him?  I would.

When Mom drove to Atlanta for Christmas that year, she brought this big, fluffy, growling hot mess of a cat with green, human eyes.  He lived under the bathroom sink about two or three months.  We didn’t see him often; we had his box and his food in the bathroom and left him pretty much alone.  Sometimes, I would peer under the sink to see how Thomas (as he was then known) was doing.  He would growl, and I’d leave him alone again.  Meanwhile, Jenny ruled the roost.  After some time, he moved into our bedroom closet and lived there for a few more months.  And then one day, he just decided he no longer wanted to live by himself and came out and joined us.  After that, he never left us alone. He was always out and about and underfoot, looking for anyone to love.

March 2022

TimToms was the kind of cat who never met a stranger.  Sure, he would growl a little (it was a “love growl,”) when my Mom or my sister would come to visit, but after a minute or two, he’d decide that he liked them, and he would jump in their laps and be ready for pets. The same with other guests.  He’d be momentarily shy, but as soon as they showed a modicum of interest, he had found a new friend.

He loved any love that was a love.  Even when you’d push him off of you, he’d come right back, and you’d find yourself petting him despite yourself.  He loved to lick—especially people’s heads. And his purr was loud as a lawnmower.  He could quite happily sit next to you (or on you) as long as you let him.

TimToms & Jenny, March 2020

Initially Jenny wasn’t too keen with him, but he won her over with his persistent good humor (he never fought or bit or engaged in any typical scrabbling for dominance, despite being more than twice her size); he would groom her, and they’d curl up together on the bed or the couch and sleep. She liked him, she decided, and the two became good friends.  (I can tell she misses him, because it seems like she’s looking for him.  She’s also meowing a lot, which isn’t typical for her.)

When Wrigley joined us in 2014 (?), he was thrilled to have someone new to hang with.  Wrigley didn’t take to him as Jenny had, but she also didn’t seem to mind him, and they lived together, if not as friends, at least cordially.

TimToms & Jenny, Aug. 2020

He was our darling boy for 14 years.  He loved nachos and watching football with his Daddy.  He liked to sit on my shoulder when I was crocheting—even when I didn’t want him there!  He made every day better with his joie de vivre and his loving, generous, and forgiving heart.

This last year was hard for him; he’d gone deaf, he pooped everywhere except his box, and he was hungry all the time but losing weight.  But no matter his physical frailties, he stayed full of love and loyalty.  I’m afraid that I wasn’t nearly as patient as I could have been with him this last year, but I know he forgave me, because he followed me everywhere and wanted to be with me as much as I’d let him.

June 2019

And I’ m so brokenhearted that he’s gone.  I know he’s crossed the Rainbow Bridge and he’s happy and whole again—playing with Thad and Baby and The Kins and Snorky and Chubu and all the cats we  loved who’ve crossed before him—and I’m happy that he’s free of pain and limitations.  But I miss his funny personality, and the way he was more doglike than catlike, and the way he bonked and purred and drank water out of the bathroom cup and took his paw and would flick the water on the bathroom mirror with the perfect Harry Potter “swish and flick.”  I miss how he loved to eat, and would get catfood on his nose.  I miss how he would eat plastic bags and bite and chase our toes.  I even miss how he would sleep on my head at night, or sit on my head in the daytime when I was reading.  I just miss him, and while I’m grateful for the 14 years we had him with us, I wish it could have been longer.  Fourteen years doesn’t seem nearly enough.

Rest in peace, sweet TimToms.  Know we’ll always love you.

Here’s a little video with mostly photos of TimToms (and a few with Jenny). (Don’t listen with the sound on though…the soundtrack is annoying.)

Here’s another video with TimToms battling the Christmas tree.

Sea Change

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This weekend, I visited Tybee Island (off the coast of Savannah) for the first time, with my sister Kirsten and my poetically-named nephew, Whitman (whom I’ve written about before).  It was a late birthday gift to me, though I didn’t realize it at the time (until Kir told me so, as we were jumping some rather paltry waves at low tide).  I thought she had just gotten a wild hare to go to the beach and wanted me to tag along—because, despite my obnoxiously pale skin that practically burns even in the rain (I generally shun the sun like a vampire), I love the beach.  I love, love, love everything about the beach—sand, salt, water, bodies doing all kinds of things, umbrellas, fish, shell fragments, kelp, the smell of creosote pylons and sunscreen—and she knows that, that wonderful sister of mine.  Which is why this weekend really was the best birthday gift ever.

If I could live in the ocean, I could be quite content.  It would making writing poems a bit difficult of course (the soggy pages!), but the truth is, I think I was meant to be in the water.  Though I’m a Taurus, a fixed earth sign, and I’ve never had my astrological chart “done” (I mean, come on), I’m certain water signs must appear all over the different houses because I just adore the water so.  A lot of people will tell you that they feel “free” or “at peace” in the water—and of course, I feel those things too.  But it’s more than that.

To me, the ocean lets me lose time and fill in all the cracks and damage that every-day living levels at me.  Hours can pass in the water and you don’t even notice the changing position of the sun, or the fact the tide pulls so far out that you’re only in waist-high water, even though you’re far out past the end of pier near the Tybee Island Marine Science Center.  You just suddenly realize it’s 4 p.m., and you have no idea how that happened.  It’s more than “time flies when you’re having fun.”  The water has its own clock and rhythms, and it lets you forget anything as mundane as minutes and hours.

The ocean helps me feel whole again.  The water seeps in my pores (and less fortunately, sometimes my mouth and nose), and somehow heals me. When there are metallic shiny fish breaching for the joy of it or dozens of pinky-length tiny fish swimming in schools, and seagulls swooping down to catch these foot-long clear snaky fish all around you, and all you can hear is people laughing and splashing, how can anyone not feel rejuvenated?

Everything is light—I am light—and can be pushed around by waves as if I am nothing.  Blah blah power of nature blah blah—sure. But on land I don’t feel grounded like I should—or maybe, to look at it a different way, I am too grounded on land.  There is ease in the water—it’s my element—and I like the sway and swell of the water, the way moments there can’t be quantified.  Too much of life on land is about measuring and metrics and stasis.  Water erases all of that—and it’s a heady feeling, just to be.

Alas, despite my affinity for it, living in the ocean is not possible—and with real estate prices being what they are, living by the beach is also not possible.  So, what to do?

What I would like to do is spend a week down at the coast (or longer if I could afford it) and take my notebook out to the beach and write.  When you only have a few precious hours at the water, you have to spend every one of them playing in the waves with family and visiting with them (which is as it should be).  Writing must give way to experiencing.

If I had a longer stretch of time available to me, I could spend some of it “processing” the experience:  noticing the way the sand dries in ripples when the tide rolls out, watching the swoop of pelicans as they fly only inches above the water’s surface, counting the colors that appear as the waves crash, wondering about the origins of a knot of ropes and seaweed and a plastic spoon.  Figuring out what it all means—and how I as a person and writer fit in such an environment.  That’s the work of a writer, after all, to interpret experience and reveal meaning.

But you need time and a “fullness of attention” to consider all those sensory details that come together to create that writerly moment, I think—otherwise, your writing faces generic tropes and recycled metaphors (and nobody wants that–especially not about the beach).  A day and a half at the water will never be enough to see and taste and hear everything—oh, alright, perhaps it’s enough to squeeze out a poem or two, if I really try.  Honestly, I would like to write a suite of beach poems—the beach at different times of day, in different weather, in different moods—something to help me remember what “beach” and “waves” mean for those times when I’m stuck in my pedestrian, dry life.

(I guess I need to investigate how many week-long writers’ conferences are situated by the sea…I know Stonecoast is one… maybe I can work that in next summer. Hmm.)