Zest

Our cat Poco is an older dude at 16 years, and he has become less tolerant of change as he ages (I have the same problem). Usually he is clingy when we return home after an absence of a few days, but this time he is positively like a furry tattoo on my leg. I am tripping over him constantly, trying to answer to his repeated fits of yapping without ever really knowing what it is that he wants, and these vexations are making me short-tempered. Here are some of the things I have said to him in the past couple of days.

Poco, go play in traffic.

Poco, remember you are adopted. We can send you back !

Poco, come over here and swallow this nice pill …

Poco, you see that tiny dark closet? How would you like to live there?

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With Robin being slightly incapacitated post-op, I have been temporarily promoted to the full-time home manager spot. I an earlier post I discussed how we recently acquired a new vacuum cleaner which only weighs about 8 pounds and is cordless. I have found that when using this mechanical wonder there is a learning curve.

• When you reach a baseboard, the thing will climb right up the wall, then leap backwards onto you. Somehow I can sense that it is ashamed of itself when this happens.
• Yesterday it made a grab at Poco and removed a half-bagful of his fur before I could get them apart. Poco will now not come down from his perch on the overhead fan in the living room. I may have to call the fire department, because it’s hard feeding him up there as the food bowls keep sliding off. And don’t get me started on the litter problem.
• When Willow saw what happened to Poco, she quickly packed a bag and tried to get herself adopted next door but was sent back to us by that neighbor after being encouraged to give us just one more chance.
• The machine was advertised as having 60 minutes of battery life per charge, and this is true. True as long as you only turn it on and don’t ask it to actually do any cleaning. Actually vacuuming with it on a smooth floor cuts that time to 30 minutes right off the bat, and trying to clean deep pile carpeting … well … you get to take a lot of breaks.*

*It is possible that none of the above points are true.

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We watched a Leonard Cohen documentary entitled, what else, Hallelujah! It’s just about two hours of examining his career through looking at this memorable song and the others who recorded it. If you are a Cohen junkie, the hours go by very quickly. There are interviews with all sorts of folks who knew him at different times, Judy Collins for one, and more surprisingly, Jeff Buckley.

I say surprisingly because although Buckley recorded perhaps the best version of them all (IMHO) the two men never met, and then Buckley was gone for good. What did come across to me forcefully while watching this film was the earthiness of the lyrics. It’s a song that if you don’t listen carefully sounds at first sacred while it it so solidly secular. It took Cohen five years to write the song, with many verses that came and went along the way, perhaps well over a hundred-twenty. Leonard was never accused of being a rapid-fire composer.

Robin and I have grown to love his music over the past thirty-odd years. To us he is a poet who happens to include music with his readings. Each composition opens a window on life for us to look through, with some of the views familiar and others quite foreign. But a guy who starts out his career with paragraphs like these to Suzanne … well … it brings out the hippie-folkie in a person for sure.

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

Now Robin and I are well seasoned, and there are no boats big enough for sleeping on the Uncompaghre River, but we each have our half-crazy moments and I’ll bet we can get a bit of tea and a few oranges if we try …

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