Saying Goodbye

I'm not an intimate person. I don't especially enjoy hugs, except from my "inner circle" of my mom, dad, and brother. I keep a solid bubble around me at all times, psychically and emotionally.

Some may say that's a sad way to live one's life. "You're missing so much, the wonderful roller coaster ride that is true love." "You're missing so many amazing experiences, all because you're afraid you'll get hurt!" I can barely get over the pain of losing my favorite ten-cent Bic pen, and I'm supposed to be okay with a man showing me love and then taking it away again?

To fill the void of "other-ness" in my life, I have pets. Lincoln is my little buffalo of a cat, Trumie is my little silly-monkey Dachshund, and Ellie Bean was my sweet, sweet black purr-bucket.

For the two years that our family was complete, I felt like Lincoln enjoyed me, Trumie needed me, and Ellie truly wanted me. Wherever I went, Ellie Bean was on my heels. She treasured our Mom-and-me time whenever I was in the restroom. She loved having alone time with me (neither of the other fur babies were hardy enough to follow me into the restroom). Whenever I took a bath, she sat on the edge of the tub and dangled her tail in the warm water. She occasionally slipped, giving her hind end a dousing. Despite being sopping wet and desperate to get out of the tub, she never scratched me, my vulnerable skin lying inches away from her frantic feet scrambling for purchase against the porcelin.

She had it tough in the beginning. For the first few months of her life, she lived as bribary with a young, single mother and her child who can only be described as a serial-murderer-in-the-making. To get the child to sleep in his own bed at night, she got him a kitten. The young mother fed Ellie (known simply as "Black Cat" to them) dry kibble from the dollar store. She had a plastic cat box full of litter that I wouldn't use to gain tire traction in a snow storm.

The young mother would tell her coworkers stories of the funny things the son did to the kitty - locked her in the toy box, put her in the toilet and closed the lid, pulled her tail...Finally I said, "I'll take her."

Those three words gave me two years of joy watching the kitty flourish into a sweet, gentle soul with a luxurious black coat that Lincoln occasionally helped clean.

We all know that life is a zero-sum game. You start with zero, you accrue, you lose, you build, you gamble, and no matter how successful you are, you will always end back at zero. So what do you have to show for your journey on Earth?

Feelings, I guess. And Ellie Bean gave me feelings of pride, happiness, and love.

I miss you, Bean.

My cat is a nazi

Poor Ellie Roosevelt.

For several months, she's been straining to pee. Then, one evening while I'm taking a bath, I watch her jump onto the bathroom sink, climb into the porcelin divot, and use it as a bidet.

I took her to the vet, and he thought perhaps she had a urinary tract infection. Two weeks of twice a day antibiotics ("bubblegum flavored" - sure to win her over) and minimal blood loss on my part, she wasn't any better.

Back to the vet. The morning of the appointment, I can't find the cat carrier. Crap. I'm running late. On my way to the car, I call mom and ask if I can use their cat carrier. Sure, no problem. I start to back out of the driveway, and realize I forgot the cat.

I go back into the house, grab Ellie, and chuck her into the front seat of the car.

Not my smartest move.
Her feet never touched the seat, but rather stuck out every claw she still has and dug them into my dashboard. She hung suspended between the dashboard and the lip of the passenger side window. Good thing my parents, and the cat carrier, were only a block away.

I stick the cat in the carrier and prepare to back out of the driveway, when I notice something small rolling toward me, like a bug or something.
I wish it had been a bug.

Miss Ellie, in her stress and fear of levitating over the dashboard, peed. And the pee was rolling in-between ornamental crevices which were making me swear at Ford's interior designers.

At the vet's, she has an xray, and a not-good diagnosis. Bladder stones. Approximately 20 small, rock-hard spindly things that aren't unlike droplets of starfish.

She had a couple of surgeries and a week in the "cat hospital", and facing another surgery, before I could bring her home.

I let her out of the cat bag (newly acquired from Walmart), and she stepped carefully into the livingroom. Her body was shrunken from the stress of the hospital and from not eating well. Her long legs stepped gingerly to the sofa where she started to rub the antiseptic smell off of her.

It was then that I noticed her legs. At about where a human's elbow would be, she had two bright white bands shaved into her lush, black fur. She walked stiffly, each movement obviously causing discomfort. If cats can grimace, she was doing it.

The stiff legs, the bands, the grimace...I had a sudden urge to watch a World War II movie where good prevails over evil, and kitties prevail over bladder stones.

Leapin' Lizards!!!

Portland was my latest stop on my seemingly endless quest to garner myself an agent for my books. Mom came along, never one to miss an opportunity to buy unique fabric here-to-for unseen in this neck of the woods.

We came home loaded with bags of fabric, boxes from Ikea (that is a dangerous place for fairly-new homeowners!), and bags of books from Powell's. Mom dropped me off at my house, and went home to examine her treasures.

She sat on the floor of her sewing room and spread the fabric out around her. Cute swatches of teddy bear fabric, Christmas elves, kitties and pawprints, next to coffee prints, from under which shoogled a nasty little florescent blue lizard. It shimmied across the floor and found repose between the television and a fabric cabinet.

Mom flew to her feet and ran upstairs. "Doug Doug Doug there's there's a a come now!"

Doug figured out that something icky, and alive, was downstairs, so he donned his leather work gloves and brought a towel.

The lizard was still sitting in its hiding spot, further defining why it's an insult to be called "lizard brain." Doug reached down with his gloved hand and grabbed the squirmy bugger.

The lizard freaked out and dropped its tail. The tail bounced around on the floor for several moments, curling and straightening and curling again as it tried to make sense of being displaced from its body.

Somehow Mom's foot ended up on the glove which still held the very-much alive lizard body, Doug having removed his hand at some point prior. She stayed standing on it, fear paralyzing her.

"Are you going to move your foot?" Doug prompted her.

"Not until I'm sure it's good and dead."

"I think it's dead."

After Doug took care to shake out each piece of fabric individually, I ventured downstairs to see Mom's new stash. I was a little disappointed there was no chalk lizard outline on the carpet.

"Well, I suppose we got lucky," Mom said.

"How so?"

"Can you imagine if it had gotten loose on the car ride home?"

Officially Unamerican

While in NYC, Jon and I saw the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and of course, Macy's at Herald Square. Nearly everything about the city is iconically American, and our itinerary reflected it.

Except for Ground Zero. We never did get there, and I feel hideous admitting this, as if I'm renouncing my own mother, but: I'm not sorry that we missed it.

Why do we feel compelled to pay homage at sites of extreme sadness? We know it happened. We're in a city celebrating our freedom to move freely about the country. Why make a point to stop somewhere that is only going to make us feel awful for having fun? Heck, it'll make us feel bad for even being alive.

My hypocrity is further evidenced by my planning for my next big trip in a couple of years - I want to go to Germany and Poland, and do the World War II thing. Is it that Ground Zero is still too fresh? The wounds too raw to hold up to examination?

We went to the NYC Police Museum. I'm especially drawn to things I cannot do, such as police work, spy work, and cook decently. What should have been a bit of a lark on the itinerary ended up being both Jon's and my favorite stop. The artifacts on display were fascinating, heartwrenching, inspiring. Coming face-to-face with the twisted metal remnants of the lights of a destroyed police car was hard. It brought immediacy to the experience that, before, was something that happened clear across the country from me. Standing in a warehouse building, looking at the blackened shoulder radios and dirty work boots, I began to understand what a devastating violation 9/11 was.

While Jon and I didn't journey to the actual site of Ground Zero, we left NYC with a renewed respect for emergency service personnel. Politics aside, the remembrance of sacrifices that were made that day was tucked into our suitcases alongside our books on the history of the Empire State Building and NYPD T-shirts. We brought those sights home with us, and our world became a little bit smaller.

Wrong Way, Corrigan...

The weather was 100 degrees and rising, the sun relentless, the humidity difficult to breath through. Jon and I had already walked seven miles and it was only three in the afternoon.

To give our tennis shoes a break, we descended into the bowels of the NYC subway system. The platforms were littered with miniature Gucci princesses and Armani princes, cell phones glued to their ears and who knows what other body parts. The system is a perfect example of how someone who eats overly-rich food and too much of it can get blocked up and need to take a serious crap.

"So we need to take the N train south. This dark green line here."

"Where are we trying to get to?" Jon asked.

"Union Square, right off lower broadway."

"We can't get there from here, Kate," he said. He went over to the two-sided plexiglass map in the center of the platform. He traced the route on the map kind of sadly - not unexpected, given my remarkable history of misdirection.

I whipped out my personal map. "But I triple-checked this," I mumbled to myself. Jon pointed to the plexiglass map and showed that I was, indeed, incorrect with my subway directions.

We found the platform that would take us south, and waited for the subway. After a few minutes, a blistering gust of wind blew in ahead of the high-speed rail car. The breeze against my sweat-soaked body was a relief, as was finding the right subway car. I had always hoped my lack of directional sense would be something I'd outgrow, like conspicuously picking my nose.

The subway car itself was blissfully cool with air conditioning, one of the few excesses of NYC that I will not complain about.

After a few moments of rocking back and forth and enjoying the rest break, Jon slowly turns in his seat.

He turns his head back to the wall of the subway car, and whispers in my ear.

"Kate. I think I was looking at the bus map."

Pitch me into the trash

I went to NYC earlier this month with my brother. The incentive for going was a writers' conference that was specifically geared toward thriller writers (commercial fiction books that are full of suspense, some blood, but not gratuitously so). Along with worships given by big-name authors such as R.L. Stine and Lisa Scottoline, there was the opportunity to pitch work to agents.

Let me start with the good parts.

New York is a vibrant city, almost a country in and of itself, with things going on around every corner. More on that later. It was highly enjoyable exploring the city with my brother. We spent more time together than we have in years, and more time just the two of us than I think we ever have. Warning: Cliche ahead: I have a newfound respect for him. It was really good for both of us to relearn that we can always count on each other and we've got each other's backs.

R.L. Stine is a very odd little man. He's this hunched, grizzled man of about 65, like an Italian Woody Allen. He riffed on regretting never learning how to type.

"I still type by hunting for each key. And I don't even use two fingers. I just use this one. I've typed all of my books with this one finger."

"Look how ugly it is."

It was wonderful being in his presence for an hour. I would stick his books in any young readers' hands.

I also had the good fortune of sitting in on a talk by Lisa Scottoline. She writes female John Grisham-type legal thrillers. It's not really fair to call them "female," even though her protagonists are women. They don't employ any gaggy "I am woman, hear me roar" tone. As a teacher, she was exceptional. She had a really thick packet of writing tips for each of us, and within that packet, was...

photocopies of rejection letters addressed to her.

Here's this NY Times #1 Bestselling author sharing the source of what is surely some of the worst feelings she's had in her life. (Any writer who says it's "just another rejection letter" is lying. Each one is like having your boyfriend dump you. So why keep at it? It's like going to a ton of proms, hoping the Prom King will ask you to dance and maybe, just maybe, date you until you are popular enough to stand on your own.)

She was an absolute highlight of my trip. Buoyed by the confidence she instilled in each of the attendees, I approached the pitchfest with the highest of hopes.

We lined up in the hallway of the ballroom, about 200 people churning and teeming with nerves. Today might be the day that changes my life.

Yeah, that's also an attitude that can kill your soul. If you look at any one thing and think, "This is it, I have to achieve this or else I will consider myself a complete waste of oxygen," then you remove excitement from the experience. If you succeed, you're not excited because you preset that expectation for yourself. If you do not succeed, you're upset not just that you didn't get what you were striving for, but you also let yourself down.

(I figure if I tell myself that enough times, I'll embody it. It has yet to happen. I'll keep you posted.)

So the doors open, and we all line up at different tables bearing an agent on display. The agent looks weary at the prospect of listening to three hours of constant pitching.

The bell dings, and we go. I pitch well to my first person, and get a business card offering to read my work. Excellent. On to the next table. Business card. Great. After five business cards, I start to lose my mojo.

I tend to tailor my speaking to the listener's interest. If I think your interest is sagging while I'm talking about the architecture of the Empire State Building, I'll segue into the pushy "elevator men" trying to sell maps at every turn, and how the elevators dumped you out in the gift shop. Lovely coincidence.

I found myself veering off script, tailoring my pitch every time I saw the agent's eye wander. And wander they did. Someone yawned in the middle of my pitch. Agents checked their watches. Sipped their water. Doodled. By the end, I wasn't getting cards, but rather, "Why did you set your book in London? Have you ever lived in London? Don't you think that's a little brazen, setting your book in a place you've never lived?"

And Robert Ludlum lived in eastern Asia before writing The Bourne Supremacy. Thomas Harris really ate people before writing "Silence of the Lambs."

Was it New York? Agents in Portland were far more attentive. Did agents feel more free to maintain their agressive persona being on their home turf?

All in all, it was great incentive to make sure my book is ready for anything before I send it off to the five who expressed interest.

Lord knows I'm not going back for a second try.

The road to Hell is paved with big intentions

Mom was out of town and I offered to take Grandma clothes shopping with me one afternoon. This had two benefits: it helped out Mom by getting Granny out of the old folks' home for an afternoon, and I got to drive Mom's awesome SUV for the day (Grandma's wheelchair doesn't fit in my car. It's weird calling it 'Grandma's Wheelchair', considering it used to be mine. That is one belonging I'm glad to relenquish.)

I pick up Grandma, get her loaded into the chair, and listen to her fret about how I"m ever going to lift such a heavy wheelchair into the back of Mom's car.

"It's okay! I've got it," I said, shooing her back to the passenger's seat. "Sit down, Grandma. You'll fall."

I loaded the chair and got behind the steering wheel.

"Turn off the air conditioning. It's cold in here."

I sighed as I looked out the window at the 95 degree heat beating the landscaping into submission.

At the mall, I unloaded the chair. One must do this quickly, before Grandma decides to "help" and try to meet the chair halfway between the passenger seat and the trunk. This is much less burdensome for the chair driver, you see.

I beat her to it, and plopped her into the chair. We wheeled into Macy's, who had apparently not gotten Grandma's memo that air conditioning has no place in midsummer weather.

As we browsed the racks, Grandma leans back in the chair and asks me, "So, what size of clothing are you looking for?"

Kind of a weird question. As if one goes to the grocery store just to get "food."

"Well, um, I'm looking for nice clothes that I can wear to New York City to pitch my book. Sizes ten, twelve-ish."

"Ten or twelve?" She cranes her neck to try to look at me, but only succeeds in resembling the thing from "The Exorcist."

"HOW'D YOU GET TO BE SO BIG?!"