Category Archives: slice of NYC life

Reminder: this too shall pass

This is the view from my desk, out the window of the room where I am tapping out these words. Our bodies were just about recovered from the last strenuous session of countless lifts of shovels heaped with snow, a few days ago. Woke up a few days later to Groundhog’s Day, the movie. Got to say this for the snow, it’s beautiful this time. The last batch did not sit so perfectly on the branches of the trees.

It’s easy to forget, when you are faced with the forced lifting of something heavy, that this is not your life, or your fate. It’s a few hours, a day, a week, a month, a season. In the case of 2020, a year. In the case of the last four years, a few decades. Everything passes.

It’s easy to forget how odd and disorienting it is living through a deadly, airborne plague. It’s actually hard to remember once common things, like sitting in a room with a bunch of people you like but don’t see often, somebody cracking wise and everybody laughing. It used to happen all the time, the odds say it will happen again before too long.

It is not easy to remain philosophical during catastrophic times, though remaining philosophical is always a good thing to do. Yes, we are living in an age of worldwide insecurity, terror and rage — an age of terrible suffering on a massive scale. Yes, many millions around the world are freaking out, getting unreasonable, desperate, violent, authoritarian. The terror and rage is somewhat understandable, given the circumstances. This is a challenging epoch we are in, a bad patch, historically bad times. Unreasonableness has become the rule in many places. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but the reasons for it are pretty plain to see.

I usually chalk it up to the insatiable desire of a few entitled people, with the means and the power, to have, literally, everything. Pursuing this urge to have everything requires convincing millions that this arrangement — 1,000 for me, 1 for the rest of you suckers to share — is what nature intended. This convincing has never been easier to do than during this age of mass, instant “social media”. It may seem like a simplistic premise, but the unsatisfiable greed of those few in position to do either great good or terrible bad, explains much of the misery in the world.

I think of it like the old story of the fisherman’s wife and the magic fish, a parable about the inevitable misery that comes from an irrational, insatiable desire to have everything. A former girlfriend’s guru compared this unquenchable urge for ever more to a deer chasing a mirage of water as it dies of thirst.

The fisherman, a poor man, catches a remarkable looking fish. The fish speaks to him, telling him that if he shows mercy and throws him back that he will grant the poor fisherman any wish. The fisherman puts him back in the water, telling him this wish is too important to make by himself, that he must consult the wife. The fish tells him to go talk to his wife, promises to wait.

The fisherman talks to the wife, goes back to the fish. Tells the fish they want a beautiful house, with indoor plumbing and heat. The fish says fine and when the fisherman returns to the hovel there is a beautiful house, with indoor plumbing and heat. The fisherman and his wife celebrate.

Of course, it’s not long before the wife becomes dissatisfied with what now seems like a modest wish. “Go back to the fish,” she tells her husband.

When he returns it is drizzling. The fish agrees to turn the beautiful house into a magnificent castle. The fisherman returns to find the beautiful home is now a majestic castle.

It soon dawns on the wife that a castle without servants is not a very good deal. “Go back to the fish,” she says. Now it is raining hard as the fisherman conveys his wife’s request to the fish. The fish seems a little impatient but provides the servants.

You can see where this story is going, and where my analogy is going to go right after. Each request for more — soon it is power the wife wants, she needs to be a duchess, then a queen — is accompanied by worse and worse weather. In the end the fisherman is standing at the end of the dock in a raging hurricane, waves splashing around his legs, telling the fish sheepishly that his wife is no longer happy being the queen, she wants to be God. “Go back to your wife,” thunders the fish.

When the fisherman finally gets back home the wife is furious, dressed in her old rags in the original hovel.

We have people among us who are the fisherman’s insane fucking wife. Their voices are much louder, their breath much worse, than the rest of us. Depending on your prejudices you know who these people are. I am thinking of particular people, or corporate “persons,” owners of vast wealth who literally feel they are entitled to all the wealth in the world. This is a long discussion, perhaps, and this post, about remaining philosophical during challenging times, is not the place to make my case. If $100,000,000 is not enough to allow you to enjoy your life to the fullest, is $100,000,000,000 going to somehow help you in that regard? Just asking.

We have a certain amount of choice about certain things that torment us. We can exercise this choice to reduce the irrational urges we are all subject to sometimes. An undisciplined boy millionaire who craves respect and attention grows up to be a young adult “playboy” who brags in the media, like a comic book hero, about being the greatest winner in Gotham City. Then he needs to be at the top of the Forbes wealthiest list. Being rich and famous is not enough to fill his bottomless emptiness, of course. “Go back to the fucking fish, you fucking fucks,” he tells his lackeys. Being the president, of course, is not quite the same as being the king, or God. “Go back to the fucking fish, you worthless pieces of shit!” he thunders, as he sends a mob to decapitate the government he is about to lose control of.

It’s not just him, of course. There are a few thousand just like him. There’s a genius who makes $70,000,000,000 during a pandemic and tells his workers (and the independent contractors whose tips he steals) to suck it up and get back to work and if they don’t like the conditions — fuck off and die. There’s another guy who makes a similar bundle, stubbornly (and counter-factually) arguing that Americans are smart enough to decide for themselves whether one of the two major political parties is run by a cabal of Satan worshipping child raping cannibals. Just because millions of people hear this arguably extreme claim hundreds of times a day, on his platform, it is not, legally or morally, his concern. While literally billions of people live in desperate poverty, a shitload of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a fairly small group of super-wealthy guys who are unaccountable to anyone but the shareholders. We live in a hyper-competitive society that has only one true value — the bottom line.

People of good faith can argue both sides of this proposition about systemic unfairness, I guess. There is nothing inherently wrong, perhaps, with one person having more wealth than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes while millions of others live precarious lives, bundling ragged, hungry kids into their outdoor beds, while tens of thousands die deaths every year that could have been prevented, if only they could have seen a doctor, in the wealthiest nation in history. It is an abstract question of morality, perhaps, whether we just have to accept injustice as the way it is and has always been, no matter how vicious it sometimes is.

Those are arguments for another day. Discussions, really. If we are arguing about these general principles of fairness and mutual responsibility, the day is already lost. If Reason cannot guide us to be reasonable, it’s set and match. It may be set and match already, only time will tell, though the odds at the moment say that we won’t be meeting in a death camp (worst case scenario) but rather in a room full of people we like where someone will crack wise and we’ll all be laughing again (one of the better case scenarios).

To the extent you can, be of good cheer. Remember, this too shall pass. Here, it’s almost time to gear up and get to shoveling again, if only to dig out a couple of our feral cats trapped out back in this winter wonderland.

Bonus Track

One of my favorite Frank Burrows tunes, The Place, very much a song for our current tight spot. The sublime C part of this rocker, for my money, is about the greatest — and most heartbreaking — I’ve ever heard.

As Frank emailed back in September 2009 (I’m looking for his lead sheet for I Wish in old emails):

 I keep sending it because I keep feeling it.

“I thought today was Monday, I’ve not been keeping up. The TV says it’s Friday, and everyone’s in love. I’m trying not to listen, just staring at the door. But when I grab that doorknob, I’m headed there once more. Bumping into people, I really do not care. It’s not that I am evil, just slightly worse for wear. Frayed around the edges, and sick inside my gut. But I know where I’m going, and soon I’ve walked enough.”

Merry Christmas, Ivanka-style

Hell of a rain last night, on Christmas Eve, along with 60 mph winds. Today is just gray, 60 degrees in New York City (a week after a substantial snowfall) and predicted to go down 30 degrees tonight. Christmas time is here again, and for me and Sekhnet, sad to say, not easy to find a Chinese restaurant open, certainly not one where you can sit down, have a good meal and crack open a fortune cookie after eating a slice of orange. In New York City we are paralyzed by fear of a fake and easily defeatable so-called pandemic. So just a quick one, before I go downstairs to play Christmas tunes, clunkily, on the piano.

If you’re going to get a pardon from daddy, for alleged financial crimes it is quite likely you were part of, it is best to lay the groundwork for why that pardon is righteous and not part of a large, corrupt cover-up attempt by your scofflaw father. The NY State tax evasion charges, brought by the Manhattan DA, will be impossible for daddy to protect you from, but as for that vicious, partisan fuck in D.C. — that little district is not a state, it’s under federal law, hah! So tweet something like this about that:

“This is harassment, pure and simple. This ‘inquiry’ by NYC Democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”

Motivated by politics, publicity and rage. Rage and a babyish desire for attention! Motivated by rage, a base emotion which is by its nature irrational and vindictive.

Ah, yes, here we go:

$5,000 is a fair market rate for rental of the ballroom that week, as paid by the conservative Christian group who rented D.C.’s most elegant ballroom to celebrate the miraculous election of God’s historically flawed vessel. So is the $175,000 paid by the Trump Inaugural Committee for that same room, that same week. You see? Nothing to see here, you villainous Democrat scallawag [1]!

As Boof Kavanaugh put it so passionately, fighting back tearfully after he got up off the canvas to knock out outside left-wing opposition stooge Dr. Christina Blasey-Ford and her ugly accusation in a stunning final round comeback victory:

A calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with pent-up anger about president Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is how you do it. If your enemy is fueled by pent-up rage, well, not only does it prove they are quite wrong, you can use that violent emotion against them, ju-jitsu style. That D.C. politician who is bringing the suit against Ivanka and the other dignitaries of the Trump Inaugural Committee over grossly inflated rental fees paid to the Trump Hotel that went into the Trump family portfolio? Fueled with pent-up anger about president Trump and the 2016 election. Typical slime “investigation” from a ruthless politician! Isn’t that right, daddy?

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good afternoon.

[1]

In United States history, the term scalawag referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War. As with the term carpetbagger, the word has a long history of use as a slur in Southern partisan debates. Wikipedia

More nuance from the New York Times, and an exoneration of Amy Coney Barrett for her evasion of a direct legal question

Count on the New York Times for nuance on so many questions. In an election where a wildly unpopular incumbent has brought literally hundreds of lawsuits across the country to make voting during a raging pandemic harder — every vote not cast against him is a little victory, bringing him closer to successfully contesting the results of the election. Even a judicially rigged election can only be stolen if it is fairly close.

The president claims to have trained 50,000 staunch supporters to act as poll watchers, doing everything that needs to be done to prevent the massive Socialist, Democrat, Anarchist, Antifa voter fraud that he predicts. Today the NYT brought a little nuance to the question of what constitutes voter intimidation under our laws. I read this stuff and my blood boils a little — partly because of what the paper reports and partly because of the maniacally reasonable, scrupulously non-judgmental manner in which they report it.

Trump’s latest nominee, current Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was rushed onto the court to counterbalance fellow former Bush v. Gore attorney John Roberts’s sometimes swing vote (usually to preserve an appearance of court integrity). If Trump can contest the election results in the nation’s highest court, he wants to be assured that the outcome will go the right way. He’s said as much, that why he uses the Federalist Society list to choose his carefully vetted extreme right-wing corporatist justices from. Coney Barrett refused to answer most questions posed to her, including a question about voter intimidation at the polls. She dodged it by saying it would depend on the specific facts. The New York Times had the newest Justice’s back today.

It turns out, according to the Times, and the Department of Justice, that saying exactly what is or is not voter intimidation is notoriously hard to do — it varies so much from state to state, county to county. You can read the entire article here, but I’ll give you one of my favorite bits. See if you can detect what made my head start to explode a little:

In 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party, a racist Black separatist group [1], stood outside an overwhelmingly Black and Democratic polling place in Philadelphia wearing black outfits that were described as uniforms. One of them held a billy club and identified himself as “security.”

Though officials said no voters complained of intimidation, and no criminal charges were filed, the case became a celebrated cause among conservatives, who criticized the Justice Department for dropping most of a related civil lawsuit after President Barack Obama took office.

That case was handled by local authorities as most disturbances at the polls are across the country: on the spot. The man with the billy club was asked to leave, and he complied.

Other reports of voter intimidation have involved largely legal activity such as voter challenges. Virtually every state allows election observers, sometimes called poll watchers or challengers. Some permit voters to be challenged on Election Day on specific grounds, such as their residency, citizenship, lack of proper identification or because they are believed to have already voted.

In the past some groups have used methods including mass mailings to generate lists of potentially ineligible voters. To prevent the use of such lists, which are often riddled with errors, some states require that the challenger have personal knowledge of the voter’s ineligibility.

The Trump campaign has said it is training 50,000 volunteer poll watchers, which has raised concerns about voter intimidation. In Minneapolis, the police union put out a call on behalf of a Trump campaign official for retired officers to volunteer as challengers in “problem” areas, according to a report in The Star Tribune.

“Poll Challengers do not ‘stop’ people, per se, but act as our eyes and ears in the field and call our hotline to document fraud,” the official wrote in an email, according to the report. “‘We don’t necessarily want our Poll Challengers to look intimidating.’”

Read this article and you may agree with the author, the Times and Amy Coney Barrett — it’s very, very hard to tell which attempts to stop voters from casting a ballot are outright intimidation and which fall arguably within the law. Feelings of intimidation by the voters themselves, it appears, are not the most important consideration when deciding this highly technical legal issue — even if nobody at the polling place feels intimidated or makes a complaint — there can still, legally, be voter intimidation. Conversely, just because armed “poll watchers” might make a steely-eyed military style “I’m watching you, motherfucker” sign at you as you enter the polling place, and you are challenged as being an imposter about to commit felony fraud once inside, does not mean anyone is, necessarily, trying to intimidate you or that you have a legal leg to stand on making such a claim.

We live in America, a land of law. And law is complicated. The reason for that is we have one set of laws for everybody, or, rather, at least fifty sets of sometimes conflicting laws — since criminal, civil, civic and family law are largely matters of state law. This includes election laws. Luckily, in America we have many lawyers available for hire, to tell you what each law may mean for you personally.

Related, but unrelated, is the “American Rule” which states that each side pays its own legal fees in almost all non-criminal cases.   In many other countries, if you bring a lawsuit to harass or intimidate somebody, or to try to get out of paying them what you legally owe them, and you lose — you pay their lawyers and all court fees as well as paying what you owe them.   The American Rule ensures that the wealthy, and large corporations, have an immense advantage in all litigation since they can often simply bankrupt opponents by driving up legal fees (with multiple motions, depositions, discovery demands, etc.) and forcing them to drop the case, or settle for pennies on the dollar.

The American Rule on steroids is when an unprincipled, rich, litigious bastard is able to use the tax deductible donations of other unprincipled, rich, litigious bastards to pay for hundreds of simultaneous lawsuits nationwide to stop the counting of legally cast ballots, in preparation for a Supreme Court challenge in a court those same unprincipled, rich, litigious donor bastards have packed with loyal, ideologically committed supporters. Now, you tell me what is voter suppression, voter intimidation, in that scenario?

Wait, I know, I know.

“Your mother!”

Am I right?

[1]

My hackles were first raised by the seemingly gratuitous description of this party as “racist”. A two second google search showed that this party is not the successor to the Black Panther party but a new outfit founded in 1989, using the brand, but in a way many have called racist. Here’s the link to the google search. The Southern Poverty Law Center blurb, for example, reads: The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and antisemitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law …

Verdict– NY Times reporting on the nature of this outfit likely vindicated.

A Lesson in Death

A friend who knew a lot about cats told us it was a shame the wild little beauty who was sitting at our feet, just out of reach, had been untouched by humans for the first months of her life. Once they are feral you can’t really get too close to them, she told us. This kitten came to trust us and eventually love being petted by us (when she felt like it, of course). She became our outdoor pet.

One day, in the first spring of her life, before she was even six months old, she marched her first litter of tiny lookalikes out of the bushes, to show Sekhnet to them. She will feed you when I’m done, she told them, and it came to pass.

Sekhnet was horrified when Mama Kitten chased her first kittens out of the garden. They’d been weaned, and learned to get food from humans (and to hunt a bit as well) and suddenly Mama was driving them away, quite savagely. What a bitch! said Sekhnet. We started to learn about cats in nature, nature which is as cruel as it is kind.

Mama Kitten was tough. She had to be to survive out there. She gave birth to her next litter shortly after banishing her first.

Over the next three years she gave birth to many more, producing more than twenty beautiful little kittens in her first four years of life. Few survived very long — five that we know of.

We hesitated to give them names, because it would create more attachment and make their deaths more personal, somehow. Sekhnet began giving descriptive names only, so we had a way of referring to them as they had their adventures in the garden.

Of Mama’s second to last litter of four, two daughters, Little Girl and White Back, survived. They occupy the garden to this day. The girls stood together, refusing to be intimidated by their mother, the first to do that, and both survive.

Here is the dominant one, Little Girl (left), with her two brothers, Turtleback and Whitefoot, fine little cats who had very short lives.

In the end, with the help of an almost insanely dedicated cat rescuer, we were able to trap Mama Kitten and the others and have them spayed, and the father (we assume) neutered as well. For a year and a half we’ve had a stable little colony in the garden. It was disrupted briefly a couple of months ago by five adorable little ferals whose mother abandoned them by the best cat buffet in the neighborhood. We managed to catch, domesticate and find homes for all five.

One day, not long ago, Little Girl, who always stayed close to her mother (they were known as the Driveway Bitches for their ruthless shakedowns for treats) and had always deferred to her mother in all things, snatched some food from her. I instantly intervened, and Mama finished what she was eating, but the writing was on the wall.

A day or two later a friend noticed one of Mama’s eyes looked a little funny. A few days later she lost interest in food, even the favorites Sekhnet brought to her. She took to one of the houses we made, staying warm. Then, one rainy, miserable night a couple of days ago she disappeared. Little Girl was now sleeping in her house.

We figured Mama Kitten had crawled off to die somewhere, probably in the nearby strip of wooded area across the service road. She was not yet six years old, but feral cats live much shorter lives than pampered indoor cats.

I had intended to write about her death yesterday, but somehow I didn’t get to it. Last night, after we moved the car for the firs time in a few days, to do some shopping, we found out what happened to Mama Kitten. She’d made it as far as the narrow space behind the car, before breathing her last. I put her in a box, closed the flaps carefully, and carried her a short distance to a wooded area where Sekhnet covered her coffin with branches full of dry leaves.

We spent the next few hours looking for photos of this beautiful cat. Here is the hero shot:

I thought at first that the lesson of Mama Kitten’s death was the simple reminder that we all must die, that it is part of nature and that a creature who showed no signs of being sick (she could jump up on to her petting table until the end) knew when to accept the approach of Death and when to go gracefully with it.

During these fearful days when the possibility of our own deaths is closer than usual, I’ve been thinking about death a lot. Mama Kitten’s death was a reminder of the pain for those left behind. I feel it clutching at my chest as I try to conclude this post with some thoughtful words. The pain is great for this stray cat we cared for, who crawled off to die, and didn’t make it to the woods.

How much more immense is our pain for a human we have known, who has touched our lives, made us laugh, held us when we were afraid?

This long-dead poet says it best, as I recalled with tears when I found it among my emails last night, searching for pictures of Mama Kitten, in her prime.

NYC designated Anti-Christ Jurisdiction…

Just three quick things about this autocratic, in-your-fucking-face, unconstitutional, symbolic power play by Trump and ever-creative extreme right-wing religious fanatic Bagpiper Bill Barr, designating my home town (and two other Democrat [1] cities) an “anarchist jurisdiction” not entitled to federal funds lawfully provided by Congress. Talk about “triggering the libtard cucks!” (in places that clearly dislike Mr. Trump and his lurch toward autocracy).

First: what a great picture of di Blasio and the Bagpiper! (from a youTube come-on)

Second: this vilification of cities (and the illegal attempt to impose the president’s policies– and fiscal pain– on a city in an independent, sovereign state, during a pandemic) is an old chestnut from the modern totalitarian playbook (see, for example, the chapter on Vienna from Mein Kampf, a book a few years from its hundredth birthday).

A stock part of fascist propaganda is based on the myth of a pure folk, who live primarily in the unspoiled rural areas, constantly in danger from lazy degenerate mongrels who live in decadent cities. From Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

(me, summarizing his chapter SODOM AND GOMORRAH):

 Cities, which tend to be places where diverse populations live and work, and differences are tolerated, even embraced, are seen in fascist politics in stark contrast to the countryside, where the mythic national purity they extoll still prevails.   Stanley cites a few counter-factual lines from one of Donald Trump’s campaign speeches:

“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever.   You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”  And yet during this time, cities in the United States were enjoying their lowest rates of crime in generations and record low unemployment.  Trump’s rhetoric about cities makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence, containing squalid ghettos filled with despised minority groups living off the work of others.

Third: According to men like Bagpiper Bill Barr, and America’s Greatest Dealmaker and Winner — and the least racist, most stable genius ever to lead our great nation — these despised, parasitic minorities are enraged because they are inferior. Simple as that, their sorry genetic stock comes from shit hole countries, the poor bastards.

These people, in the reflexive racist mind, are born losers who are irrationally angry, people whose rage makes them self-destructively turn on the very people who risk their lives to protect them, authority-keepers who almost never kill them while they are not resisting — hardly ever even cripple them, though Christ knows they richly deserve it for being such vicious, stupid ingrates who constantly act against their own best interests and blame everyone else for their own problems.

Remind you of anyone?

Here is a more nuanced and detailed look at this desperate campaign stunt by the fervent Attorney General:

Today started off with Attorney General William Barr designating New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, as “Jurisdictions Permitting Violence and Destruction of Property.” His statement responded to Trump’s September 2 memorandum calling for a review of funding to “state and local governments that are permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction in American cities.”

The idea of defunding cities is vague and it is also odd, considering how many Americans actually live in cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote to Trump on September 7 to ask him to rescind his memorandum, noting that “attacks on America’s cities are attacks on America itself. America’s cities represent 86 percent of the Nation’s population and 91 percent of real gross domestic product (GDP)…. Cities are the Nation’s incubators of talent: people flock to cities to take advantage of their accessibility, diversity, inclusiveness, vibrancy, infrastructure and innovation,” they wrote. They warned that if he tried to enforce a restriction on funding, they would sue, and would almost certainly win. They reminded him: “This is a time our Nation needs unity, not division, among all levels of government.”

This new declaration is little more than a distraction, meant to try to resurrect the old “law and order” ploy and take our eyes off… what?

source

[1]

Let us make no mistake about this pejorative (and increasingly widely accepted) reference to the “Democrat Party” and “Democrat” cities— these are cities run by democratically elected Democratic mayors.

These mayors are Democrats, but their party is called the Democratic party and if you call their city by the name of their political party they, New York, Portland, Seattle, Washington D.C., are actually Democratic cities. HEY, WAIT!

“Well, you see, that’s another reason we call them ‘Democrat’ cities (pause to hit the spittoon square in the middle), run by the, heh ‘Democrat party’… whell, hell, you can’t really dog whistle any clearer than that, now can you? We all know what ‘Democrat mayor’ refers to, you can picture her, and it don’t take a damned oversensitive damn n-word to tell you what tune this dog whistle is whistling. We ain’t just whistling Dixie, son.”

New York City Subway Car

I’ve been lucky enough, during this pandemic, to be locked down with Sekhnet at her little farm, in a neighborhood of lower density than my place in Manhattan. It’s actually a short walk from here to where Fred Trump’s mansion was, where little Donald grew up to be the great man he is today.

Here, unlike in the more urban parts of New York City, you can walk on tree-lined streets and easily avoid contact with the few others also out walking. It seems a bit safer here, in this much lower density area, taking precautions and waiting for the Second Wave the experts predict for flu season. We’re taking all reasonable precautions — isolation, N95 masks when out in public, frequent hand washing — even though several speakers at the RNC made it clear– to their base, at least — that the Leader has eradicated the pandemic in the USA in an amazing and praiseworthy fashion that only the deranged can’t see.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I took the subway for the first time in months, to meet Sekhnet and a friend at one of our favorite vegetarian restaurants in Manhattan. We ate under a tent on lower First Avenue. The condition of the subway car (which I caught at the first stop) was amazing. It was actually gleaming.

Things Are Looking Good for the Feral Five

Sad as we felt the last few days, knowing we’d have to part with these beautiful, trusting, affectionate little souls, that sorrow is fading as we know they’re in good hands.    We brought them to a great cat shelter in Freeport yesterday, spent a sad night missing them, but today was much better.

A reminder that doing the right thing might sometimes hurt for a while, but it passes, the thing was worth doing and what remains is having done a good thing.  This case was the literal living out of the old saying  — if you love somebody set them free.  

The sudden withdrawal from that unlimited tender playfulness on demand that these little cats gave us whenever we spent time with them (when they weren’t napping) was painful, true, but our plan all along was to give them long lives of affection and safety we couldn’t provide them, much as we may have wanted to.

They are all being well cared for at an excellent shelter (where they’re all currently sleeping together and being treated for roundworm — they’ll be roaming the rooms with the others in a few days).   They will shortly become pets, sharing tenderness with humans who will fall for them quickly.

As they deserve.

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