But the sneak thief had a good head start. Note the smug expression on the larcenous little rat’s face
Category Archives: slice of NYC life
Mama Kitten
The mother of at least twenty kittens, age about three and a half, shown here on the roof of the Sammymobile
Whitefoot
Note to those who have never known the love of an animal: substitute the image of a child in poverty for every mention of a kitten in the following.
Turtleback, who was found dead a week or two ago, shown here as a five week old kitten playing with his mother’s tail, had three siblings. Two girls and his brother Whitefoot.
Turtleback was interactive and very interested in humans, but did not let a human touch him. Once when he was lying close by, watching Whitefoot brush me with his tail, I put my hand close to him and he raised a soft paw, his claws retracted, and gently but firmly swatted my hand away. I thought this a very noble gesture on his part, since he had a fist full of claws as sharp as hypodermic syringes in that paw. I’ve never known a kitten to show this kind of restraint. It was touching and spoke well of his character.
His brother Whitefoot was that rare feral kitten who loves to be petted by humans. He was the dominant kitten of the litter, much bigger than the rest, and he was the most friendly. He was always ready to play, to roll over to have his belly scratched, he’d rub his face happily against Sekhnet and me, even if he didn’t want food. As a tiny kitten he was already adept at the tail caress. Naturally his affectionate nature endeared him to us. Turtleback often sat close by, clearly interested, but not yet ready to try this tenderness with another species.
Because these kittens depend on us for food, greet us happily when we bring their food, because they live in the garden and sit close by Sekhnet, watching her as she works, because they are beautiful, mysterious, playful little creatures seemingly doomed to live very short lives, it is easy to grow attached to them. We try our best not to, since they rarely live beyond five or six months and we can do little to get them adopted as pets. It is hardest to keep this detached view in the case of a kitten like Whitefoot, who so clearly wants our affection and so freely gives us his. He was born wanting to be a pet, ready to make the deal of his love for kindness, safety and a full cat’s life.
Those are Sekhnet’s legs and garden shoes. She captioned this recent photo “Handsome 4 1/2 month old cool cat seeking contact…” He is lying, as familiar cats often do, partially using a human as a pillow. One white foot is stretched out making contact with the human’s other leg.
Think now for a moment, not of a doomed kitten wanting love, but of a tiny human child doomed to die because people rich enough to prevent her misery cannot be bothered to look at her tiny hopeful face and do what any of them would want done for them. In defense of the world of self-serving competitive “winners”, that poor baby’s face is one tiny hopeful face among billions, after all.
A woman spraying organic insecticide on Sekhnet’s fruit trees was the one who called to tell us Turtleback was dead. She was very upset to find his little corpse and contacted her friend, a cat rescue person, about getting the other kittens adopted, or at the very least, spayed, neutered and given shots against the major diseases that kill cats who live outside. Her friend came by a few days later and gave us instructions. She would trap the kittens and take them to the vet.
On the appointed day she reported two captured: Whitefoot and his father, a strange, sharklike looking cat with wide shoulders and a massive head. His coat is mostly white, but he has a few large, ill-placed spots that do nothing for his looks. Sekhnet calls him Spot and chased him from her garden for a long time, until she saw him and Mother Kitten nuzzling one day and realized he was the father of all these kittens. He comes by once in a while for a feed, but is very wary, as any feral cat that grows to adulthood should be. Sekhnet noted that he has enormous balls. For all we know he rules a large area and has as many offspring as Genghis Khan.
Spot and Whitefoot were at the vet’s, their operations done. The woman was coming back soon to try to trap the females. The next day she reported that Spot was fine, eating well and almost ready to be released back to his former domain. I did some reading on cats and learned that his status would probably be very quickly challenged by a male cat with balls. Spot, castrated, would lose status and the aggressiveness necessary to defend his turf. Nature is cruel that way, or, at the very least, indifferent.
Whitefoot was not coming out of the anesthesia, we were told. They were keeping a close eye on him. The woman meanwhile dropped Spot off. He hasn’t been seen since. The two remaining sisters were suddenly staying much closer to Sekhnet. The bold little female who looks like Whitefoot, and faces off Mama Kitten when her mother gets aggressive, was now rubbing against Sekhnet and letting herself be petted. There are a few adorable little phone videos of this loving exchange.
Whitefoot, meanwhile, reportedly came groggily out of his comatose state and was showing affection to the people attending him. They all saw this handsome little feral had all the qualities to be quickly adopted as a pet. He was dehydrated, they gave him an IV. He was trying to eat a little but didn’t have much appetite (which made Sekhnet cry because he always ate with gusto, more like a dog than a cat in his eating habits). The cat rescue woman was beside herself with worry over Whitefoot and every detailed report from the vet she sent Sekhnet released a new wave of sorrow. The details were all horrifying.
It was possibly an error in the amount of anesthesia given the small kitten. Nobody at the vet’s was close to admitting a mistake could have been made. We don’t admit such things here in the USA, USA! An apology is an admission of liability here. It’s a tic, really, since no legal action can be brought against a veterinarian for accidentally killing a patient. The remedy at law, for the loss of a cat, is another cat of equal or greater value. The value of a soul? A trifle with which the law does not concern itself. Something I immediately realize is necessary to the speedy administration of justice, most of which revolves around actual, quantifiable economic harm.
The cat rescuer, a religious woman who takes a very different view of the value of each tiny soul, was inconsolable about the critical state her actions had seemingly put Whitefoot into. I am, for better and worse, a man– meaning I have been trained since my earliest days to show how little I give a shit about emotionally difficult things that I can’t control, while somehow not being a monster (if possible). I’d skim these long, agonized texts from the cat rescuer that Sekhnet would forward and I realized Whitefoot was a goner, no matter how you sliced it. It made me very sad, but my job was to console the inconsolable Sekhnet.
Over the next few days, Whitefoot in critical condition, in a cage, on life support, the texts and veterinary theories kept coming. Decreased liver function, increased bilirubin, a possible heart issue. The woman had already spent close to a thousand dollars on medical tests and life-saving treatments for Whitefoot. She had him “ambuvetted” to her own veterinarian, who held out some hope for the little cat’s survival.
It is worth noting here again that 95% of Mama Kitten’s more than twenty kittens do not survive beyond six months. We are going to have Mama Kitten “fixed” as soon as this latest newborn has been weaned.
A few more days, Whitefoot listless, enlarged heart, decreased lung capacity, only 25%, further tests. In the end the question was whether it was worth keeping him alive if he was suffering with no hope of recovering to lead a decent cat life. This was not a question, really, but the cat rescue woman was desperately trying not to give up hope.
Turtleback looking on as his little sister attacks Whitefoot, who does not take the attack lying down.
The vet and the cat rescue woman decided there was no hope for Whitefoot, and so, after almost a week trying to save him, they gave him a quick, peaceful death yesterday afternoon. The cat rescue woman arranged for a private cremation, so that the one ounce box of ashes would contain only the mortal remains of Whitefoot. She wanted to know if we wanted the ashes. She was praying over him and was prepared to bury the ashes in her own yard. We are sure she’ll give him a proper burial.
Sekhnet cried. I was very sad, but this news yesterday was not really news, and so my only tears are the metaphorical ones here, writing this poignant post. Poignant only to those who know the caress of a cat’s tail.
Sekhnet’s caption: The sweet, energetic 4 and a half month old semi stray who wrapped his little body around my leg seeking affection; now a stiff baby corpse and me, a terribly sad human…
This morning, as an exhausted Sekhnet slept late (she drove for hours yesterday on less than two hours’ sleep) , I went down to feed the kittens. Mama Kitten jumped up on to the rusty metal table where we petted each other a little and I gave her some food. The two girls had some food. The little one who looks like Whitefoot, who had always been wary of me, was suddenly rubbing against my legs. I sat down and she came over to be petted. I obliged her.
As I came back inside to finish this piece I heard the cries of a hawk and went downstairs to… I don’t know what. From the hawk’s point of view, he has his own problems, eating being one of the main ones. For all I know his cries were hunger pangs. My new friend popped out from her hiding place into the open and started toward me. I shooed her away. Go hide, I told her. Might as well have told her to stop being so delicious.
Historic photo from Sekhnet
which arrived above this caption:
April 5th 2017 group… Including the beautiful sole survivor.
The beautiful sole survivor is the now banished Paintjob, eating turkey off the paper near her mother (now her feared enemy) and her three doomed little siblings.
Paintjob continues to survive somehow, she was photographed eating yesterday by Sekhnet who sent the photo with the caption “Yay!”
Another kitten
Mama Kitten, who was pregnant again by the time her kittens were two or three months old, showed up a couple of weeks ago skinny again. Sekhnet and I concluded she must have had a miscarriage. Then this breaking news photo came across the Sekhnet news wire. Mama nursing a single mouse she had carried by the scruff of the neck to the area of the garden where Sekhnet was working.
The Awful Ease of Incoherence
I’ve been getting a bit of the incoherent narrative full-stink in my personal life lately, and, of course, we are all subjected it to it daily in the news. Here’s a quick illustration of the difference between a coherent story and an incoherent one, so we’re all on the same page.
Coherent: Humans and animals are in escalating danger of habitat loss and extinction, in large part due to massive, destructive, human activities. We don’t need science to tell us the earth herself is regularly screaming in alarm. The largest California wildfire in recorded history is raging at the moment, along with several other wildfires in the state. Climate disruption has increased the number of these catastrophic events every year: record hurricanes, monsoons, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes in regions that never had earthquakes, tornados in regions that have never had tornados, plus a new horror, never seen before: fire tornadoes. We regularly endure record heat waves, record cold streaks, new records for heat set year after year, “hundred year storms” coming along to devastate us every year or two.
The science only confirms the disastrous state of nature we are able to observe taking lives all over in the globe on a regular basis. Citizens of the entire world are aware of this perilous situation, only in America is there any controversy attached to this, and only because billionaire fossil fuel titans have invested countless millions to create armies of zombie-like deniers called, elegantly, “climate change skeptics”.
Incoherent version: Human liberty itself is under attack. Our government has become a tyranny. Scientists with an anti-freedom agenda have conspired to make it look like there’s a correlation, a cause and effect, if you will, between the millions of barrels of fossil fuel, and the tons of clean coal, burned every day, the lucrative, clean extraction of natural gas from deep inside the earth, and the supposed warming of the earth. The earth warms and cools in natural cycles. Humans have nothing to do with it. Government is the enemy, not humble servants of the people like us who want to make sure everyone has enough gas for their cars. Without gasoline the trucks can’t deliver food to the cities. Our very culture, our survival and our liberty, is under attack and those vicious partisans are weaponizing disputed science as the tip of the spear. The science is disputed, there is no consensus among the mere 98% of climate scientists, including at NASA, who say this is so.
We are treated to the weaponized tweets of an infantile, irrationally angry winner-in-chief every time we turn on the news. These tweets make no sense except in one way: they constantly shift the focus back to incoherence. If there is a focused discussion of some important issue being maintained in the media, there will be a nasty presidential tweet suddenly calling out son-of-a-bitch Lebron James, attempting to denigrate the NBA great with a strongly implied “nigger” thrown in there for good measure, because the people who love real winners don’t shrink from non-politically correct speech. Lebron James is overrated– not as good as MIKE! Lebron should shut his fucking mouth and stop being a loser. I could beat Lebron in a game of one on one, Lebron sucks. Etc.
Soon, that’s today’s story. “The President today attacked the NBA’s greatest player, LeBron James.” The president will double down by tweeting the name of another player, who played his last game fifteen years ago, who supposedly (incoherently) makes Lebron look like a pile of poop. Lebron will be interviewed about this, will respond with his characteristic aplomb, but seriously, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?
It is not a problem. The world we live in now is largely ruled by incoherence. Do not be fooled into thinking the facts matter, that the identical stories of fifty eye witnesses who are complete strangers to each other make any difference, same with recordings of actual conversations, videotapes of the hideous thing happening right in front of the camera phone, the world itself as you perceive it does not actually exist! WINNING exists, and LOSING. If you’re not winning, you’re losing. You’re all fucking losers, tweets the world’s greatest winner, only I WIN and you all can’t stand it, losers. Jealous, pathetic losers. SAD!
The fish rots from the head, they say. The only trickle down I’ve ever seen in my sixty-two years living in America is the trickle down of incivility, in-your-face hostility, hereditary entitlement, the corporate killer mentality coming home to roost in every argument everywhere. Never admit fault, that concedes liability. For the same reason, never apologize, unless with massive qualifications before, during and after the calculated apology. If confronted, hit back harder. If confronted with something you cannot counter, become indignant, completely change the conversation. If necessary, invent some inflammatory provocation to put the enemy on the back foot. If necessary, gather allies and threaten violence. Most people are cowards, outgunned ten to one they will usually give up like the pussies they are. People talk big, but a loaded gun talks much, much louder than any bigmouth, no matter how smart he thinks he is.
This is the only thing that trickles down, this psychopathic impulse to dominate at any cost. It’s the only game in town, yo. I note that most of us do not play this game, or that we try our best not to play it. Anyone who has whiffed this foul game full-stink will make every effort to not to replicate it. Still, it is pervasive. The values of our society come from what we see reflected in the public behavior of our elected officials, ambassadors, celebrities. The party of “I’ve got mine and fuck you, you fucking whining loser” has been prevailing the last few decades. It is America’s one truly bipartisan coalition.
I console myself by reading histories of fascism. There are always good people– on one side, on one side — who stand against the encroaching totalitarian incoherence. On the other side there are millions who go along with authoritarians out of a genuine desire to put their boots on the necks of the enemies of the people. There are also even more millions who have learned from birth to simply conform. You do what you are told, don’t make waves, and you will generally be OK. This is the tragic swing group, since they are the ones who, by doing nothing but obey, allow incoherent authoritarians to call all of the shots. The millions who hate your average Hitler type, an ill-tempered, oversensitive type who won’t hesitate to use as much violence as his enemies demand, have to tread very carefully until they can figure out the small acts they can do to put a finger on the other side of the scale. A scale that eventually, and always, tips against these ruthless authoritarians who must always rule by coercion and terror.
Yesterday I went to see the great Jose James play outdoors at Lincoln Center. I’ve had the pleasure to talk with Jose a few times at the home of my close friends. We made arrangements to get on the guest list for reserved seating on a day when the real feel temperature in NYC was 99 degrees. This was due to the high humidity which made a mere 90 degrees feel much hotter. I stayed hydrated and went to the show.
To sit in the reserved seats you had to have an orange wrist band. These were given out on the opposite side of the large venue from where the reserved seats were. It was hot, I was dripping, but walked over there on my painful knees to get my pass. The young woman who gave out the passes was there at her small table alone. There was an opening in the moveable barricade about six feet from her. I went to the opening.
A guard stepped into my path, pointed to an empty labyrinth of barricades and told me I had to go the long way around. I gestured toward the empty table, to the girl with the iPad and a bunch of wristbands, the completely empty labyrinth of barricades. I asked him to please let me pass, my knees were killing me, I’d walked a long way already, and that, please, since nobody else was waiting, might I just get my pass and go join my friends who were already seated?
The guard, a dark-skinned African man in a crisp, white uniform, told me that I had to go all the way around. That was the rule. He had no discretion to violate the rule or make exceptions no matter what, was apparently not even supposed to be discussing anything with anybody. I soon learned why, he was being watched intently by two of his bosses, who immediately made their sharklike way toward me to find out why I was giving their hired hand such a hard time.
The large man, who had a huge pallid head like an overinflated albino melon about to burst, advanced one step too far into my space and told me with a glare: “first of all, relax”. I told him to relax. One step behind him was a woman, a dead-ringer for Betsy DeVos (but with dark hair), probably from the same social class (we stood in the shadow of the David H. Koch wing of Lincoln Center, after all), and about to prove herself as brilliant as DeVos in the arts of persuasion and argumentation.
Pumpkinhead told me the rules are the rules, they’re there for crowd control and I had to walk. I told him my knees were killing me, my friends were waiting and I’d appreciate the small courtesy, which was only common decency, especially since nobody else was being inconvenienced and I was an easily controlled crowd of one person. His turd-like smile told me exactly how far this line of moral reasoning was going to take me.
At this moment DeVos’s cousin stepped forward with that famous well-bred idiot smile and said reasonably: “imagine if fifty people were here and they all asked us to just let them break that little rule, to give each of them special treatment?” You see, her smile said, just common sense, just like your’s! It’s a draw, so the rule wins!
I started asking her if this was really the kind of country she wanted to live in, where the Nuremberg Defense was the final word in any conversation, where unreasoning adherence to rules no matter what the circumstances trumped every other consideration? Neither of them, I saw, had any problem with the downside of anything I was saying. I was unwittingly describing exactly the country they want to live in, a place where people who don’t like the rules are kept strictly in line.
Before I could point out that while it might be a problem if there were fifty people simultaneously demanding preferential treatment, I was the only one in this actual, real-life non-hypothetical, and the favor I was asking could be considered a request for special treatment only by a rigid, rules-bound, unreasoningly authoritarian type, the girl with the iPad and the wrist bands came over from her table, where she had been waiting patiently for the next customer.
I thanked her and gave her my name, as Pumpkinhead said something I don’t recall. My name didn’t come up, to another eructation from the pallid Pumpkin. I gave Sekhnet’s name and that seemed to work, Pumpkinhead said something else I don’t recall. I told the girl “please, just give me the fucking wristband so I can get away from this asshole.”
This one two punch (“fucking” plus “asshole” equals “resisting arrest”) gave them all the moral ammunition they needed to leap into indignant defense of all that is decent. I’d said FUCKING, a Bozo-no no!! How dare I rape the ears of this innocent young black woman after assaulting the black hired guard with my offensive, nakedly racist insistence on my white privilege.
“That’s it!” said Pumpkinhead triumphantly, “don’t give him the wrist band. You’re not getting it!” I had one bit of restraint left, and I used it.
“Ah, not only an asshole but a vindictive asshole, nicely played.”
Just as I turned to storm off, muttering incoherently about letting him take me to court for slander where truth is an absolute defense to the charge, Sekhnet came up. Turned out DeVos and Pumpkinhead had given her some crap earlier, a variation on the same issue (she’d gone a few steps into the empty labyrinth and took a shortcut, hopping the barricades). They gave her quite a stern talking to about that, you can be sure. I walked a hundred yards, sat on a plastic chair in the sun, stewing a bit, letting the anger dissipate.
Someone I knew came up and said hi, when I gave him a 20 second capsule description of my recent confrontation his eyes turned into two ping-pong balls, lolled out of the sockets on to his cheeks. He waved a wan goodbye and I fluttered a few fingers.
Ten minutes later Sekhnet had my wrist band, texted me her location, and we sat in the “V.I.P” section to watch the show. Jose put on a great show, singing the songs of Bill Withers, songs he was born to sing. On Grandma’s Hands, a song about the love of a grandmother who always protected and comforted him when the world was kicking his ass, he did an inspired improvised section that blew me away.
It was brilliant, using the musician’s many arts to drive home the obscene incoherence of a violently angry caregiver. Grandma’s “Matty don’t you whip that boy” turned into a long, staccato, rhythmically complex, inventive reinvention of the morphing syllable that began with “whip”. Jose’s improvisation evoked the twitch of a grandmother’s pain to see her grandson mistreated, the violent idiocy of the mistreatment itself– well beyond words. [1] His singing and wild invention took me to another, far better world, and after the show I had hardly a thought of those two incoherent fascist disease carriers who’d tried to ruin my day.
[1] I described it in an email to a friend this way:
There’s a point in the song when Grandma is stopping the father from whipping the boy. Jose did a long improvisation here, where the words “what you want to whip him for?” turn into scratchy nonsense syllables, percussion, wordless hiphop, rhythmic, robotic, spastic, absurd, endless, obscenely ridiculous, the single syllable of “whip” turning into a million senseless acts of incoherent brutality. Man! Needless to say, I loved that shit, it was truly inspired and done with superb musicality. Turned to Sekhnet with a big smile and said “brilliant” and M turned, smiled and nodded. Then she looked at me one extra beat. Tears were falling out of my eyes.
The climbing sorrow of death
Death waits, in no particular hurry most of the time, since every living soul must go with Death in the end. Some beings get to live the full wink of an eye, eighty, ninety years. Many delightful winks are far briefer. It helps to think of the quality of a short life in these cases.
A tiny colony of feral cats coexist in Sekhnet’s garden, along with a couple of large, gingery raccoons and the occasional giant possum, who come by after dark to finish off whatever food the cats leave over. We get to witness the brutality of nature up close, its brutal cuteness and its seemingly random viciousness.
These two brothers, Whitefoot and Turtleback (foreground) were photographed hanging out in a flower pot on July 17, 2018. They were three months old at the time. I am lucky to have this photo, one of very few pictures I’ve shot in the last year or so that I’m still able to view on my phone. [1]
Their mother, the beautiful Mama Kitten, had her first litter two or three years ago, at six months old. Talk about babies giving birth to babies. Six months old and Mama Kitten. When they were big enough she dragged them from their hiding place and marched the adorable mice in front of Sekhnet.
“You see,” she told her kittens, “soon, when I stop giving you milk, you will come to her, act cute, and do just what I’m doing now, see?”. Mama Kitten would fix Sekhnet with a winsome look, make a quick cat move toward her and rub her head and her side along the human’s leg, using the tail to give a gentle caress as she makes her circle.
Sekhnet and I became familiar with the exquisitely gentle touch of a cat’s tail from my original cat Oinsketta, an affectionate cat who practiced the art delightfully. The late A.W. Skaynes was also a master of the tail caress. A few of these feral cats get pretty adept with their tails too, they’re generally the ones who like to be petted. Mama Kitten did not let a human touch her until she was several months old. She took to human affection cautiously, but she is now a very tactile cat who sometimes loves to have her sideburns scratched. And she uses her head and her tail very tenderly.
We had many great photos of those adorable kittens interacting with mom, playing with each other, eating food off of spoons. Suddenly it seemed Mama Kitten was in a hurry to wean her kittens and turn them over to Sekhnet for feeding. We didn’t understand the urgency. We soon realized she was pregnant again. Chemicals coursing through her body telling her to protect her turf, make it safe for her offspring who were about to be born.
Mama Kitten had her most recent litter, four beautiful kittens, two male, two female, in April. These four made the number of good-looking little cats Mama Kitten had given live birth to around twenty. She has been pregnant or taking care of a litter continuously since before she was six months old. When she is about to give birth to the next brood she drives her young kittens out to fend for themselves. Of course, they only know how to hunt by being cute to the humans who feed them, and there is only one other house on the block where feral cats are welcomed (see this here for that).
We once trapped three of her kittens who had lived to be five or six months old. We took them to a vet and had them all neutered. Each of them was dead within a very short time. There was no connection to the minor surgery, they were all fine after they got back from the vet’s. They simply disappeared, one after another, in the space of a couple of weeks.
Their lives tend to be short. The oldest so far was probably Grey Guy, who lived almost two years. There are hawks around that love a nice one or two pound kitten for lunch. We assume the hawks get most of them. A few have died from some kind of poisoning, we think they may have drank anti-freeze on a hot day. All four of those kittens died within a few hot early summer days one awful summer before Mama Kitten was born. A feral cat in this area that lives to be a year old is a survivor, an outlier.
It is a cruel thing to grow attached to these beautiful little creatures who have little hope of surviving more than a season or two. We try not to give them names, remembering the fate of oddly cute Dobbie, or Cathead (a playful, affectionate kitten I would have made a pet, if it was up to me, and we’d had her spayed, too) since the attachment makes their disappearance more painful.
Still, it turns out that just for reference you need to call each one something. Sekhnet takes care of that, keeping it simple. Whitefoot advances on a white foot, both of his front feet are white. Turtleback, mostly white but with nice markings, including a large beautifully painted section on his back that looks like a tortoise shell. Here is a picture of Turtleback taken two days ago. We were a little worried since we hadn’t seen the adventurous young male when his siblings were having dinner. I later found him relaxing on their favorite box, and snapped this to send Sekhnet to reassure her that Turtleback was alive and well.
Sekhnet has been furious at Mama Kitten since seeing how viciously she keeps attacking her almost year-old daughter, Paintjob (talk about a beautiful coat, that little cat was painted by a genius). Mama drove that poor soul Paintjob out of the yard two or three litters ago and somehow the timid Paintjob is still alive and, until recently, managing to get fed by me or Sekhnet every second or third day.
She eats fast, warily, wolfing her food and then stopping, tensing every muscle, marshaling all of her senses for threats. Then she will eat another can of food, using the same procedures. Paintjob is skinny but appears otherwise quite healthy.
Lately, even though she has lost her last pregnancy through some kind of natural miscarriage, Mama Kitten has been particularly vigilant and ruthless in violently chasing Paintjob off.
Sekhnet has seen this many times, how Mama Kitten discovers each secret place where Sekhnet has arranged with Paintjob to throw her a quick feed. Paintjob was quite adept at making Sekhnet know where she’d be for a fast secret feed. Mama keeps guard, watches Sekhnet like a hawk, peeks around every corner, pops out of nowhere and viciously attacks Paintjob who runs off at an amazing speed. Their screams are heart-rending.
I keep telling Sekhnet not to make such human judgments against Mama Kitten. I point out that Mama is, and has always been, in pure survival mode, plus she’s crazed with chemicals produced by her constant pregnancies. I point out that she’s programmed to survive and is by far the longest lived feral cat to live season after season in Sekhnet’s garden in the back. Sekhnet points out that Mama is a complete psycho bitch who savagely attacks her own daughter when there is plenty of food for everybody.
Yesterday as I fed the kittens, Mama Kitten came around to see what was on the menu. She was not impressed with the first offering, which her kids all ate quite happily. She tasted a bit of the tuna and found it not to her liking that day, though her kittens were quite pleased with that one too. As everyone seemed interested in having a bit more dinner, I opened a third can, and this one Mama Kitten found to her liking. I fed her some slime from the spoon, to test it before dividing it among her kittens, and this one she wanted. She ate a bit.
Then I saw, suddenly standing less than two feet away, an emaciated, haunted, desperate looking Paintjob, staring at the food, almost hypnotized. I was aware that as soon as Mama saw her the savage attack would occur and that there was nothing I could do to get any food to Paintjob, or to stop what was about to happen. A few seconds later Mama Kitten took off screaming in savage pursuit of a wailing Paintjob. The kittens scattered in terror.
This scene was truly heartbreaking. I understood why Sekhnet finds it so hard to forgive Mama Kitten for this seemingly heartless, irrational and murderous rage against her own kitten. True they’re now both adult females, we get that, but, it’s hard to understand why it has to be this way. Only a cruel god would design nature to feature this kind of nonchalant, horrible savagery.
After I told Sekhnet this story of witnessing the vicious attack on Paintjob she became morose. I had a text from her at 3:20 a.m. (we stay together half the week) and I called her right away. She was tearful, couldn’t stop thinking about the doomed Paintjob. “As she gets weaker and weaker from lack of food it will become impossible for her to escape her psycho mother,” she said, her voice cracking, and it planted an image in my mind I did not want to see either.
Sekhnet reported a bad night’s sleep. She dreamed of Paintjob, lying on her side, her paws cut off, crying for food. In the dream Sekhnet was unable to get any food to the helpless cat. I tried to reassure her that she had not made the world, that nature was cruel, we’d seen it first hand over and over, the short, brutal lives these beautiful little animals live in the extremely limited, ruthlessly competitive wild in that part of Queens. Then she got a call, there was a dead white kitten near the area where the backyard animals eat dinner.
It was one time when, being a man, all I could say is what a man should say at such a time. I told Sekhnet I’d go to the house, carry away the body, that I would take care of it. We arranged to go together. There was a real-feel of 99 degrees in New York City again today. We had images of the little cadaver getting ripe, covered with flies, possibly bloated.
Halfway to the house, the sky got dark and a deluge fell from the sky in a massive electrical storm. It rained as hard as I have ever seen rain fall, the traffic began to crawl along cautiously, and it continued to pour down in sheets for a long while. The windshield wipers, on their fastest speed, had a hard time keeping the windshield clear. There was flooding in places.
We killed some time, gassed up the car, sat in front of the house until the rain stopped. I went to the back of the house. It was Turtleback, on his side, feet stretched in a slightly grotesque final pose. His timid little white-faced sister, who looks like him but without the turtleback, looked sad. All of the kittens, and Mama Kitten, seemed determined to make sure I knew that their fellow was dead, was just lying there Before I fed them dinner they all made sure I noticed the dead Turtleback lying there on his side, skinny and soaked. Each one passed close to him as I went to get their food.
Sekhnet brought a sturdy box, just the right size, and handed me a shovel. It took a moment, but it was an easy operation once I got the shovel positioned the right way. He fit in the box perfectly. “Watch his tail,” said Sekhnet and I tucked it into the box before I closed the flaps.
I carried him a short distance, to a wooded place by the highway. The area was filthy, littered with plastic bags and plastic take-out containers and probably much worse. I did not venture far in the dark, placing his coffin behind the closest trees. I got back and Sekhnet and I agreed that Turtleback himself was not there in that squalid place, just an empty vessel that had been, briefly, the beautiful little cat.
I am aware that nature is cruel, even as it can be so generous. That severe thunderstorm struck me as a gratuitous, a mocking touch for a gentle God to interpose in the path of two people heading somewhere to try to do a decent thing. I had several thoughts about God as that rain pissed down, as we killed an hour in the car before I could go back and lay whichever poor devil had died so young to his or her rest.
Afterwards we hung around a bit hoping Paintjob would show up for a feed while I was there to distract Mama in the back, but no sign of her anywhere. It is hard to shake the thought that yesterday’s desperate move by Paintjob may have been her final one on this earth. I got back home and began writing this, my attempt to, as they say, process all these thoughts and feelings. Then a notification beep, a WhatsApp from Sekhnet.
Sekhnet, among her many talents, apparently also has the power the make me sob in loud, honking notes, my nose drowning in snot, alone in my apartment. My emotions all night had betrayed nothing but manly resolve, stoically placing the tiny cadaver in its carboard coffin, stilly carrying the dead kitten to his eternal resting place, manfully reassuring Sekhnet at every turn. I don’t know what my neighbors must have been thinking to hear me weeping that way, it is rare to hear a grown man sobbing, especially a grown man prone to angrily cursing.
[1] Naturally, of course, the format has been randomly dicked with, it is not displaying full frame as I shot it, it’s messed up. I never inserted those moronic blocks of black at the top and the bottom. I am not even sure how to edit those out with the programs and apps I have.
Background: I took dozens of photos of these beautiful cats. Yesterday my phone spontaneously deleted over 2,400 photographs. The girl at the T-Mobile store said there is no way T-Mobile can recover the photos and that they were probably deleted because I accidentally hit something. I told her I had hit “restart” after several days of being unable to move or delete photos. When the phone restarted, 3,000 photos were wiped out. She was a pretty girl, and friendly enough, but there was something about her reply “you must have accidentally hit something that deleted the photos: that made me want to ask her to come around the counter to take a nice, quick knee to the stomach.
“A Samsung problem,” she told me. She showed me how to find the randomly saved photos in something called Google photos that I never signed up for. Apparently Google randomly collects images from your phone, to show you how they provide this great cloud backup for all your data. If you pay them, they will save everything. If you take their free version, which you might not ever know you even are using, they will choose what to save and what to delete, probably by some brilliantly calibrated algorithm.
This was the only photo remaining of perhaps 100 shots of these great looking feral kittens and their beautiful mother.
Feral Neighbors
Public vs. Private
The organized Right has had a longtime campaign against the public sphere, continually selling the idea that dynamic private enterprise is always preferable to public program solutions. This is undoubtedly true from the point of view of maximizing profits for private businesses, although it is a dubious claim in many areas, like education, fairness, access to opportunity, good public policy, etc. You’d think the failure of the charter schools and the explosion of privatized for-profit prisons (along with mandatory sentences and vast increases in the number of incarcerated Americans — including, today, the confiscated children of asylum seekers) would put this zombie theory to rest. You’d be wrong. Private freedom trumps improving the public sphere every time. Winners vs. Losers, it doesn’t get any simpler than that, chumps.
I was talking to a friend last night who told me that the only reason he got a decent public education in NYC in the 1960s was because he went to schools with a lot of white kids. He was not a white kid, nor is he a white man today. The elementary school he’d attended in the Bronx was like the one I attended in Queens, outwardly integrated (in the case of the school I went to only after an ugly battle among the parents and teachers) but internally segregated. Each grade had classes ranked from one on down, the one class being the top students, down to two, three, and, in the case of most larger public schools, four, five, six, etc. As my friend reminded me, the further down you went, the more predominantly non-white the classes became.
In my friend’s case, he was in a class closer to the one class every year and as a result had mostly white kids as classmates. Because of that, he got the same education as the local white kids. Expectations were higher for them, and the level of teaching was higher and more challenging. He had the same experience in Junior High School and High School, both schools having populations approximately evenly distributed between “whites”, “blacks” and “Hispanics”. He said the schools he went to are no longer integrated, neighborhood patterns having changed, and we agreed that the schools had probably all declined along with the exodus of “white” kids and the general lowering of educational expectations.
At one point I mentioned that I ‘d grown up about a mile from the birthplace and childhood homes of our current president. I recall my mother telling me that small, intimate P.S. 178, my alma mater, was the top rated public school in New York City. That was one reason some of the parents and teachers were so adamant about not admitting black students from nearby Jamaica. Jamaica was a predominantly black area and the schools there were much lower rated than P.S. 178, obviously.
The neighborhood around the school was called Jamaica Estates, and its tree-lined streets contained mansions and the children of some very rich people. (I grew up in the adjacent, more modest neighborhood called “Flushing”). Many of the kids from Jamaica Estates attended 178. I figured our current president might well have attended the highest rated public school in the city ten years before I did. I’d figured wrong, as Jeeves informed me when I asked what elementary school The Man had attended:
Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and attended the Kew-Forest School from kindergarten through seventh grade. At age 13, he was enrolled in the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, after his parents discovered that he had made frequent trips into Manhattan without their permission.
Imagine my surprise to find out he’d grown up in Jamaica, among the blacks! Puts the man and his alleged racism in a whole new light, as they say. Then again, not surprising that his parents would raise him to be truly elite — a man of the right people. Good breeding and all that. No need for the best public school in the city, a ten minute walk from his home, when he could meet the children of the truly elite at a private school where his childish bullying could blossom unrestrained by the laws of the schoolyard.
If you go to public school, you never know what kind of ruffian you might encounter as you begin to intimidate your little classmates. In a private school, where the student is also the child of a customer (and the customer, if wealthy, is always right) a lot more leeway can be given for this kind of behavior. In the interest of curbing their son’s impulse to bully, to ignore rules, to put himself always first, the parents sent the young man to military academy. The results speak for themselves.
If you have a limousine waiting to take you wherever you want to go, and a helicopter, and a private jet for longer trips, you are much better off than the sad sack who has to wait for a public subway train at eleven pm and squeeze into a crowded car where he will stand for the long ride home. There is no question about this.
As a matter of public policy, even if only for purposes of reducing traffic and air pollution from millions of cars, it would be best to have a first rate public transportation system in New York City. This, sadly, is not a priority of the wealthy people who make these decisions. As for the people who ride the subways at night, standing room only, fuck ’em. Seriously. What are they going to do about it, no matter how intolerably bad the service gets? Spend $50 for an uber? A rich person need never even know about this situation, and it is certainly not remotely among their problems if a bunch of low-income losers have to stand on a late-night subway train.
Those people who stayed in New Orleans during that hundred year hurricane and flood a few years ago. The question was asked: what, are those motherfuckers stupid? Didn’t they hear the warnings? Couldn’t they have gotten out, moved temporarily to one of their summer homes until the shit blew over in New Orleans? What were they doing on the roofs of their houses, crying for help as alligators, snakes and dead cows floated by? They fully expected the rest of us to save them from their own bad life choices. What can you do with those kind of people?
That’s why many of the most wealthy are so devoted to reducing the size of government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. The public is dirty, overused, crowded, smelly. The private is clean, comfortable, plenty of space for everyone, smells nice. Why do poor motherfuckers keep acting like there is supposed to be a better choice? Who gets to choose? You, loser?
Feral Trio
In spite of the generally accepted idea that a feral cat, once it reaches a certain age, will not allow itself to be touched by humans, we have a feral cat, Mama Kitten, who at first would not be touched and now very much likes to be petted. On her terms, of course, being a cat, but nonetheless, quite affectionate when the mood is on her. She came by this gradually, sitting near us when we were outside, showing her newborn kittens to Sekhnet in the garden, coming closer, rubbing against us, eventually letting herself be touched. We fed many of her kittens off a spoon, once she weaned them.
She is a beautiful cat, and a prodigious survivor, who, starting at six month’s old, has given birth to perhaps twenty kittens. She is a good mother, until it is time to push the latest brood out of the nest, to attend to the next. She can be quite savage driving off the surviving kittens when the time comes. Sekhnet, applying human morality (oxymoron?) condemns the little survivor as a bitch when she turns savagely on her children. In a better world we’d adopt Mama Kitten, get her spayed, make her an indoor/outdoor cat, extend her life by years, etc. This is not, of course, a better world.
Here are three of the latest batch of four, lounging on the ramp outside the back door from which, periodically, human servants emerge, opening cans of food. There are a few such cans on the right side of this recent photo by Sekhnet.
We generally don’t give these beautiful little strays names because every time we get attached to a particular individual he or she disappears. Sometimes there is a bad smell in the garden and we find a tiny corpse under a bush. More usually the kittens are whisked off without a trace, to become meals for the local hawks.
Yesterday, strolling back from Cunningham Park just before sundown, I passed several groups of cats, a lounging mother and two or three kittens playing under a bush. The kittens watched me as I approached, scurrying for cover as I got close. Their mothers eyed me warily until I was a safe distance away. Their looks said “that’s right, motherfucker, continue to carry your ass on down the street and stop looking at my children, you sick bastard.”
I recalled the debate Jonathan Franzen was involved in at one time, about wiping out the colonies of feral cats that kill, as it turns out, not thousands but billions of local birds and rodents every year. Often for sport, it appears. Sekhnet once saw Mama Kitten take down a finch, leaped up and tore the little yellow bird out of the air. “I hope she’s teaching her children to hunt,” she sometimes says when she laments that we are not always around to feed them.
It’s a brutal world out there for animals in the wild. Even more brutal, I suppose, in areas where humans have remade the natural world, turning local species into cagey outlaws. This brutality has been escalated (like a consumer complaint to any corporation, only for real) by the needs of the world’s top predator, homo sapiens, until not that long ago another insignificant and desperate prey animal, living by guile, as ruthless as necessary to survive. I’d love to be able to live without making constant judgements, the way I don’t judge Mama Kitten, but, as you may have noticed, greedy, ruthless, ignorant, loud talking motherfuckers will not give it a rest.
These are three very cute kittens, though, no?
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