Member-only story
New Life
In honor of Nina Simone
The cat is asking if she can get in my lap, and she most decidedly cannot.
She is getting old, and her meow is almost gone.
I just found myself meowing back at her in a mirror of her own meow-less meow. She liked that. She began purring immediately. And though I won’t let her into my lap, she is now stationed on the sofa back behind me, rumbling like a little motor. She just likes to be near me. That’s enough.
I often find myself thinking, isn’t it incredible that my dog, Daisy (and all dogs of course) has two eyes, like me. One nose, like me. One mouth, like me. Two ears, like me. A tongue. Like me. How can we be so alike? Isn’t it obvious we are, at bottom, the same creature?
Oh, the musings when you’re at home and alone.
Tonight, I listened to the inimitable jazz oasis while cooking, which is nothing unusual. In fact, I do it almost every night, and have for a couple of decades.
If nothing else, my kids got a good jazz education, through osmosis. I’m weirdly proud of this, actually, and have this secret belief it will somehow help them bigly, stand them in good stead, some day, in some unknown way.
The trick is to write, to simply write, what IS.
