Thursday, February 15, 2007

Cityscapes

Okay, so Valentine’s Day is just another opportunity for companies to make money feeding on human sentimentality—right?

Okay, so it’s Valentine’s Day and my love is out of town. I’m missing her something fierce. A few hours ago I got tired of listening to classical music on our cable, and switched channels to something called Cityscapes. Turns out it’s all music from my youth (yeah, a long time ago). “Moon River,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?” and “Look For The Silver Lining.” Music you forgot years ago, or never heard of, and glad of it. Right?

Okay, so the Michigan Theater—our hometown version of NPR or PBS, a non-profit dedicated to the past and to the local, an old movie theater that is now owned by the city of Ann Arbor (or a nonprofit supported by the city)—is putting on a Valentine’s Day Special Event for its members, including free sparkling wine and locally made chocolates and an old Audrey Hepburn-Humphrey Bogart-William Holden movie called “Sabrina.” Encouraged (sort of) by Judith, before she left for Florida, to attend this Event with our mutual friend Marjorie, I’m getting ready to drive through single-digits weather to Ann Arbor, and figure I need some bolstering.

Okay, so I mix a martini in one of our new elegant martini glasses, and look through my retiree’s clothing, and decide to wear black slacks, almost-black blazer, and an almost-white knit turtleneck that I’ve had in a drawer for about—what?—thirty years?

Another old song plays on the stereo a tune that I can’t remember the title but will never forget the melody. I’m fitting in, right? It’s the kind of music that we used to play very softly when we had a girl over and the lights out but a fire going in the fireplace and there weren’t any complications that we’d admit to. A nice buzz going in my head—but nobody close to flirt with. I’m swept up in nostalgia.

Romance, like sex, is wasted on the young. Probably all those romantic songs playing on the stereo were written by guys almost as old as I am, letting booze take them back to their days when all of us were beautiful and had a lot of stamina.

Did I feel like this when I was twenty? What I remember was more like yearning for what I’d never had than nostalgia for what I did. Other guys might have been luckier than I was. But I do remember—vividly—standing, one time, at the edge of an overlook on Twin Peaks at night watching the lights of airplanes lined up in the sky for miles on final approach to San Francisco International with a good friend at my side and soft music playing in the car, and wishing the moment would go on and on. And wishing that I could afford a house on that same mountainside with a big picture window overlooking the fog-wrapped city a thousand feet below us.

It’s the gin, obviously. Why else would I be listening to “Among my Souvenirs,” or “Blue Moon,” or “I’ll Be Seeing You?”

I suppose in forty or fifty years other codgers this old will be looking back to their years of discovery and listening to things like “Irreplaceable” by Beyonce (whoever she is) with the same feeling of nostalgia.

Cityscapes, or its latter-day counterpart, will be playing music that gives the elders of the day a break from the “infernal noise” (as my father used to call Harry James’s great “Cherry”). And some doddering but incurable romantic will mix up a martini or its counterpart and get lost in memories for a while.

And then, if they’re lucky, they will go over and sit on the sofa next to their love and pick up a book and read.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Sleeping Cat

Sitting at my computer in the middle of one of my projects, I feel at home. I think it’s like maybe a farmer, out in the field on his tractor, doing what a farmer does, and feeling at home and in control of his life. I know my life is only marginally under my control—even I am only marginally under my control, but for the moment my back isn’t hurting and the sun is shining outside (in Michigan in February, that’s a biggie) and I’m focused on some content inside this machine. One of our cats, Shawna, is curled up on top of a heap of papers on my desk, sleeping.

I never cared much about cats. I was never attracted to them, nor they to me. But after a few years in daily contact, I come to notice even a cat. She’s beautiful, of course, and her fur is soft. She’s ultra curious about everything, being only about a year old, and that and her energy give us a lot of entertainment. Except at 5:30 in the morning when she’s noisily exploring something under our bed, like this morning. I finally enticed her out of the bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t start complaining until almost seven, so I got my sleep. You can ignore a cat only when they concur, or when they are asleep.

Shawna has an interesting face, white with gray-brown markings around her eyes and up her forehead that give the effect of frown lines. Sometimes she strikes me as sinister-looking, the way her eyes slant just a little. In dim light, or when she’s aroused, her pupils dilate into two enormous black globes. She watches us—watches our eyes in particular, alert to whatever we might be thinking about doing. I sometimes play peek-a-boo with her when she does that, moving just out of her line of vision around a corner; she almost always has to move to where she can see my eyes again. She’s taught me a lot of little games like that.

It’s when she’s asleep close by, like now, where I can watch her and marvel, that I feel the connection between us. I know, it’s an anthropomorphic feeling. Still, she does find places close by me to sleep, particularly when Judith isn’t around. So does her adopted brother, Comanchi. He’s eight years old and is a lot less energetic. But I don’t have the same feelings, watching him sleep. He’s just a sleeping cat. Maybe it’s because she’s female; I don’t know. I used to feel a strong connection with our old retriever, Tasha, who died last year. She showed a lot more affection toward us than either of the cats, but that’s what dogs do.

Judith frequently picks up the cats to hug them and stroke them. It’s a woman thing, I guess, or maybe a grandmother thing. I’ve seen her do the same thing to babies. Never mind whether or not they are interested at that moment. I tell myself that I try to respect them and what they want. Like right now, I’m tempted to reach over and stroke Shawna’s coat, but I won’t. She’d just get annoyed, and probably leave.

A sleeping cat, like a sleeping woman, is rather wonderful to watch. They are not doing anything, just lying there with the slightest rhythmic movement revealing that they are alive. And yet I know that inside their heads there is a whole world going on. They aren’t like this computer when I shut it down, totally stopped, holding its breath, not dreaming or anything, not even waiting for me to turn it back on. Inert. All its memory still holds whatever nonsense I’ve put into it, but when it’s off it’s totally off. Not the cat. She is still there. I suppose that’s what is so wonderful.

We take for granted our need for sleep, as much as a third of our lives, spent unresponsive to outside events (up to a point), but inside our brains and our bodies, everything else is busy, busy, busy, being—whatever it is. A cat sleeps a lot more than a third of its life. Any time there is nothing going on in the house, she curls up and goes to sleep. A sudden but light sound will cause her ears to perk up and rotate without any other part of her body moving at all. Some part of her brain is awake, monitoring the environment. If anything important happens, the officer of the day is roused, and she stands, stretches, and goes off to investigate.

Cognitive scientists have guessed lately that there are a few species besides ours that might possess the kind of self-consciousness that we do. They probably don’t include cats. Shawna doesn’t think about the future. She almost certainly doesn’t think about thinking. Our dreaming, they say, probably serves the function of organizing all the experiences we have while we are awake, helping us make sense of our world and our lives. Cats don’t need to make sense of their world. Their responses are all hard-wired. They don’t need to anticipate things that aren’t impinging on their senses at the moment, for their instincts are designed to let them live moment to moment. When Shawna is lying here under the warm lamp, half asleep, half awake, and I put my face close to hers and make some kind of cat-sound (I think), she lowers her eyelids slowly and opens them again, she’s acknowledging me without feeling the necessity to respond in kind. That’s different from old Tasha, who would go out of her way to come to me and nuzzle me or lick the air between us (she knew that licking my face would not be welcomed).

Shawna is a good lesson for me in accepting other creatures as they are, without expecting to have my needs met by them. So I’m satisfied to just watch this sleeping cat and wonder what marvelous things are going on inside her, without making our relationship be only about me. If only I could get to that point with other people.