Something is About to Happen

...somewhere...

The thing is -- something is *always* about to happen somewhere. Somebody is always on the brink of something.

Or maybe...

We are all always on the brink of something?

Falling into place? / Falling apart?

.......

When I found out that the doctors had induced labor for my daughter's birth mother, my world suddenly felt like it was spinning out of control. I decided to fast until Jaelyn was born. Both as a spiritual discipline to focus my attention to prayer and as an expression of solidarity with Jaelyn and her birth mom and the enormous strain upon both of them to help her enter the world.

And the growling emptiness in my stomach just exacerbated how loud and odd the world seemed to me that entire day. There were still papers to shuffle, phone calls to be made, student conferences to hold, graduate student admission committee meetings to attend. And it all seemed so ridiculous, so inconsequential, and yet illustrative of the fundamental nature of humanness. Waiting toward something. Working to bring about some new birth...

Our lawyer had suggested that we visit Jaelyn but have her sleep at a house with friends. At least for the three days until her birth mother could announce her intention in court. That way in case the adoption didn't work out we would have protected our emotions.

We had strategically only purchased the most essential elements for baby care, not wanting to live through another disappointment underlined by a million soft and pastel objects in every corner of the house.

All day we were wanting with our entire beings. Trying to hold our emotions in manageable ziploc bags, too, though. So we could zip them together and store them away for a different day if we needed to, if we had to...

.....

At five o'clock our lawyer called to announce that Jaelyn had been born. After asking him a million questions he couldn't answer, I made myself macaroni and cheese and a tunafish sandwhich. I ate in our little yellow dining room silently as I listened to Lynn asking the same questions and talking to her family on the phone.

If all went well, we would pick our daughter up at the hospital...

So while my ritual sacrificial food smoothly slid down my throat, I started to realize something about the nature of children. You only partly know what is going to happen next. You always expect that something is about to happen, and you're never sure what it is....

Still Not Cat People

So yesterday as I was sitting in the sunshine, Jaelyn and Addison happily digging to the bottom of the sandbox, and petting Liam, the formerly male cat, I thought to myself:

How does this happen?

How does someone who makes cheap jokes at the expense of cat lovers? Someone who says he's NOT a cat person? Someone who swears vows that he will not own a pet, not even a dog, which he loves, until his children NEEED a pet to survive...?

How does that guy end up with a purring pregnant, formerly male cat on his lap, petting the cat in the sunshine?

...

We named our first cat ( the first one that found us, that is ): Emma.

Because that is the name of Jaelyn's Beloved Cousin.


(this is Emma)

Jaelyn names all dolls Emma, all stuffed animals are Emma, there's a magical land named Emma somewhere over the rainbow, and she herself pretends to be called Emma sometimes.

Was there any surprise when the stubby-tailed cat who nuzzled and purred and loved to be picked up by over-eager five year old hands was named Emma? Not really.


(this is emma, the cat)

The only dark side of paradise was that Emma started to become Jaelyn's cat in the minds of everyone. Addison was a little bit scared to touch her. She was a she, and gender norming is a powerful thing in our culture. So Addison started to say each time Emma and Jaelyn embraced:

I wish *I* had a Liam.



(this is Liam)

This is Addison's cousin Liam who is the brother of Emma

and this...

...unexplicably as if an answer to Addison's informal prayer...

...is Liam, too.



(Liam the cat, that is)

...

There was a point at which I thought I was living in a nightmare populated by feline ill will. Not, mind you because these are mean cats. They're great cats. They treat you like a person, not an annoyance. They like to be petted and touched and they aren't too pushy. So why a nightmare?

Because not long after Emma and Liam arrived. Their MOTHER arrived. WE didn't take pictures, because we tried to discourage her arrival.

...

Now we get to the gender bending part of the story.

One night while I was holding Liam, I noticed that his ...er...equipment was a little off.

I came inside.

"You'll never guess what I just found out," I said, "Liam is a girl."

Addison looked at me confused.

"Our cousin?"



....

I imagine there will be a day someday in the future when parents send out gender re-assignment announcements, covered in a gentle transclucent paper, complete with a braided blue and pink ribbons tying the transcluscent veil over the ink jet printed digital photo,

but...just for the record ...this was not that day.

Liam our nephew has *not* become our niece.

*But* Liam our cat has since become Snowflake -- or more often -- Liam/Snowflake.

.....

Gender Bender Part Two

During the same week, Jaelyn Burst Into the house!

Mommy, Daddy! Liam's Mom keeps jumping on to his back and STEPPING on him. And She won't get off.

hmmm.

So Liam become Snowflake and his mommy became her daddy. And hopefully not even her daddy...or is that sort of thing acceptable amongst barn cats.

......

So how do people that are NOT cat people come to be so fond of a gender bending, profoundly preggers cat?

I suppose the same way that we live with all the rest of the contradictions that sew our lives together...

How do you continue to love the people whose annoying quirks you understand the best? How do you manage to hold onto your idealism once you realize that there are no niches of the world untouched by the corruption of politicking and bueracracy and power-hungry elitism?

......

hope you're at peace with the cats in your life~

Our Neighbors Do Not Exist

There have been times in our homeowner lives that we have wished that our neighbors did not exist....but right now -- there ARE NO neighbors. It's wierd. Our neighbors do NOT live next door.

I mean we do have *some* neighbors. Bob and Edith are fine, great, except for their perpetual surgeries. Karen-who-can't-believe-that-a-man-with-a-ponytail-bought-the-house-next-door and her family who live behind us seem fine. We see them pull into and out of their driveway each day like the suburban clockwork we all long to be. The multi-generational family squeezed miraculously into John & Brenda's old house seems to be thriving...based on the number of cars stretching down the driveway, they're ALL in there.

But its Tim & Pam's house that's the curious one. We immediately liked Tim and Pam when we moved in six years ago. Tim was a Harley dude who just happened to have a job working for Lear. (Tim was not one of these executives in midlife crisis who bought a bike as a way to "consume" the lifestyle. Tim was the REAL DEAL.) Every year they brought up Loud Chistmas present toys that included big engines and blaring country or metal music for the kids, and Tim confided to me on the day I moved in:

"I just want you to know, you don't need to worry about the gunshots when you hear them. I'm just gettin' them damn groundhogs. I always check real careful to make sure that the kids aren't playin' outside or anything."

"Great(?)" I said. "It'll be good to not have to worry about the groundhogs..."

And it was. Great, I mean.

Tim and Pam were very much who they were. They liked to tinker with their bikes. Smoke and drink a beer on the back patio. Ride their bikes any weekend that they could and they were intrigued by the odd professor-types who lived next door and found it so difficult to actually keep their grass mowed.

But they had to move away. Like John and Brenda. The good news is that someone bought the house right away. Tim and Pam heard just before they went that a guy had bought it for his mom, so we kept our eye out for them. Wanted to be sure to bring over a casserole once we met them. You know, chat about the groundhogs. What have you. The stuff neighbors talk about.

The bad news? They never arrived. They occasionally appear to mow the lawn, but i never, even when the lawn is being mowed see them emerge *from* the house. *Or* go back into the house. The lights in their windows are only erratically on and there are never cars in their driveway. Our neighbors do not exist.

We first started hypothesizing about our neighbors back when we were in college. We invented a game -- i don't know why we called it "Ygotaling" (seriously -- what a name!) -- but we walked through suburban streets and sat on pristine sidewalks inventing dark disturbing lives for the people we glimpsed through the windows. We didn't have a clear sense of how stalker-like we were being until a nice suburban golf-shirted man suggested that he could call the police and tell them about the four college studetns sitting on his front sidewalk. And we thought we had been so polite when he asked us what we were doing.

Turns out that you have to have a mortgage in the neighborhood to play Ygotaling safely.

In our first apartment Janine who lived in the apartment two floors above us quickly demonstrated how some people's entire lives became braided with such voyeuristic hypothesizing. I was a librarian / pastor-at-a-little-church and therefore stayed home mostly during the days trying to write the Great American Novel. Whenever I came out to get the mail (at random times during the day) Janine would appear at the mailboxes. She had to have been listening at the door? Poised outside in the hallway? Lying on the floor of her apartment with surveillance equipment waiting for the sound of the opening door below?

She would greet me with news about each of the apartment dwellers around us, and the pump me for information. I tried not to get sucked in -- being a little freaked about the surveillance, but on the other hand, I reasoned, she was a single lady in her early sixties, who, as far as we could tell, never left her apartment, and spent a good deal of her days (given the sounds that we didn't have to listen for) on an exercise bike or a rowing machine (loud rythmic but ambiguous thumping); she was lonely and needed a hobby. I didn't mind being a celebrity to somebody.

So one day I got drawn into her escapades:

JANINE: So do you know what happened to Michelle's job?

ME: Michelle?

(Janine was the only name I knew of all of our neighbors. Everyone was vaguely polite in an absent and removed way; we could tell just from the looks on their faces that one should not offer nor inquire about names. And, being midwestern folks, fresh to the big city, we were extra aware of big - city norms.)

Janine pointed to the apartment behind ours.

ME: Oh. That's Michelle? I never knew that was her name.

(I wondered did Janine have relationships with everyone in the building? Were they all premised upon these same kinds of conversations?)

JANINE: That's what's on her box anyway.

I glanced at the box that she pointed at. MICHELLE - in block type sticker tape.

JANINE: Her car has been leaving later and coming back earlier. Last week it didn't leave at all.

ME: Really? No. I don't know her.

JANINE: Well I just didn't know if she got fired or if she's moving or getting a new job.

Well, Janine, I thought, I'm glad you've narrowed the possibilities a little.

But later, sitting on the rust-coloured velour sofa in our apartment, a little notebook in hand, trying, unsuccessfully, to write anything past the first chapter of (what might have qualified as the worst ever attempt at the) Great American Novel, I became deeply convicted about NOT knowing about Michelle's life. Or her job. Or her name, for that matter.

What if she were just as lonely and new here as we were? What if she were getting eaten alive by some job she couldn't have predicted before she moved here from remote Iowa?

I looked out the screendoor at her car. It was still there.

I walked by it slowly "on my way to walk down to the office" and then again "as I went out to run" and again as I got in the huge black van I drove to pick Lynn up from her stable office job. Sure enough. There was a book on Michelle's back seat, you had to look closely to see it. It took all three passes to recognize the cover, but I knew that book well, What Color Is Your Parachute?. Poor Michelle!

That night I announced to Lynn that we should make cookies for her. Salvation on a bakers plate, offered to all the most desolate. Maybe, I thought out loud to Lynn, we could start a ministry to lonely apartment dwellers. We would start up an association for everyone in the hallway who wanted to join. Except the people across the hall who played that achingly loud metal music at inappropriate times, and thought that they had to yell when they had a fight. Maybe we would exclude them.

We made the cookies that evening and walked them over to her place. She wasn't in. Even though her car was there. I knocked again in the morning. Still nothing. Was she dead inside? How long til we went to the police?

On Friday we bumped into her as we all carried groceries in at the same time (a ritual of much awkwardness and frustration while living in an apartment). She had, indeed just come in from -- Iowa! (Did I have the gift of prophecy or what?) Iowa, that is, where she had a sales call as part of the new job she had taken at a different firm. Her old job had been fine. No, she hadn't lost it, she was just happy to find something better.

We ate the cookies that weekend alone in our apartment as we rented a movie to watch on our VCR.

So you can imagine my surprise when, two nights ago, I glanced down at the living room window next door and ! their Christmas Tree lights were on! I hadn't seen these lights all during Christmas. And it was almost exactly a month later? Are the lights over there on a timer? To try to convince us that people live there? Timers that go off at the wrong time are a sure signal that something shady is afoot.

When we bought our first house, Pat, our next door neighbor met us in the driveway as we moved our hodgepodge of borrowed and inherited furniture into the little bungalow. How nice, I thought, as she came out. Here's the part where our neighbors announce when our housewarming fete will take place. Where they give us a short history of the neighborhood association, share a few anecdotes about the old neighbors -- their foibles and strengths -- all laid out as clever, but polite hints about the priorities of neighborliness here on Bourdon Street.

"Hi, I'm Pat." She said. "Don't mind me. I'm terribly depressed, my daughter just committed suicide, and I just got out of rehab."

Seriously. That was her greeting. So much for a plate of cookies. On the other hand, she turned back toward us on her way back into the house --

"I have a tanning bed in here. Come over anytime to use it."

Well that explains the leathery skin.

The downside to having a neighbor like Pat is that our speculative fiction could barely keep up with the realities that she willingly unfolded for us in our shared driveway whenever we happened to be out at the same time. First, her nephew came to live with you. His name was Jim or Bob or Tom or Tim. We could never remember which three letters. Pat mumbled the name when she introduced him, and he seemed affable about any name you called him. No one else in the family will have him, she explained, as he smiled and listened. He's too much of a drunk. She looked over at him and he shrugged in a pleasantly detached manner. He's a good drunk, though, she assured us.

We finally had opportunity to flex our speculative fiction muscles though when Pat stopped appearing outside at all for almost a month in the summertime. Her gargantuan and ancient Lincoln Continental sat silent in her garage. The only movement in the house was JimBobTimTom (as we grew fond of privately calling him) coming and going by foot to and from the house with large budled up paper bags, and, if we happened to be up in the middle of the night -- 2 or 3 a.m., there was an ominous purple glow that eminated from the back bedroom. The tanning bed was fired up and full bore in the middle of the night.

We decided that probably, JimBobTimTom had killed Pat, affably smiling the whole time, as he was wont to do, and then was slowly removing her remains in paper bags that could be emptied down the street in local dumpsters or in the vast piles of lumber in the paper mill eight blocks away.

Turns out that Pat was on a long drunk, which, after a nice stint at another rehab center, rendered her as happy and energetic as we had ever seen her. She hired all the local affable drunks to come and earn their whiskey money fixing up her already well manicured lawn and front porch. The end result? Several concrete geese kept strict watch over the front lawn changing clothes every time a new holiday season arrived.

So when I saw the eerie lights of the Christmas tree next door two nights ago, I was reminded of everything sinister that a nice suburban property could hide. Who knows what's going on next door? Drug running? Money Laundering? Budding Terrorists? That's the problem with living in this century -- the dangerous ominous neighbors live closer and closer. It makes it hard to get a good nights sleep --with such ominous sinister Christmas Lights shining in the window.

Who is my neighbor anyway? Now I get what they were talking about. Surely these strangers next to me are not supposed to be my neighbors. Anyway, they probably don't exist at all...