Snowflake sneaking a drink, 1997

Snowflake the Old Lady, 2008

It has to be at least a year since Snowflake (Woidat) took up residence in the dining room. In fact I think it’s over two, since I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been part of the feline family for as long as Parsley has been around. Until Saturday, when something strange happened.

We’d already committed to taking her to the vet. She was suffering, and wasn’t eating. On Thursday night I had managed to get her to eat a little Fancy Feast tuna – which probably wasn’t good for her, given the likely state of her kidneys, but it had to be better than not eating at all.

Perhaps because of a little new-found energy, perhaps with the extra attention, or perhaps just wanting to let us know how ill she was feeling, on Saturday she crawled out of the dining room into the hallway. I was on the phone to my mother at the time, and I’d already had a hard time telling her what was going on. When I saw that Woidat had come out to see us for the first time in years, I just lost it.

Whatever the reason for her coming out of her shell for the final day, we were pleased to be able to spend a little time with her. She curled up to sleep on a towel in the bathroom, and seemed reasonably content. Elliot came by and spent some time with her on Saturday – of course she’s been part of the family since he was eight. I only felt her shiver, Vicki says she purred for her.

The trip to the vet on Sunday was as painful as we expected. It’s hard to say that you don’t want them to run tests and maybe see if she can be treated, but all that would have bought would be some small relief for us. For the cat it would be more indignities and at the best, longer to suffer. So yesterday afternoon I laid her to rest in the yard, beside Pepper and Boober, her sometime nemeses.

I still find myself surprised that a cat who has always somewhat set herself apart, especially recently, has affected us all so deeply in her passing. But we were happy to give her a home for the last seventeen years, and I will never regret taking her in.

Snowflake and Boober, 2002

Snowflake (aka “Woidat”) was a stray on the campus at Kodak in Richardson where Vicki was working. She was in pretty bad condition, and terrified of people.

Vicki told me that she was going to try to catch the stray. I was annoyed. It wasn’t up to us to rescue every stray animal in the city. But she caught her and brought her home, intending to clean her up and give her away, but when I saw her I couldn’t let her go. She was bedraggled and scared, but she was such a pretty cat and so clearly gentle that we decided she had to stay.

That was 1994, and even then she wasn’t a kitten. She was probably somewhere between two and four. So she has to be at least nineteen now.

She must have been abused before we got her, and over a period of time. For years she’s snap if you tried to touch her belly. You could pick her up, but only if you were very careful. Her gentle nature didn’t extend to threats. She’d bite and scratch viciously if you tried to stroke her stomach, or if she felt cornered by the vet. She’d yowl loudly in warning first, and she’d yowl if she was nervous, even if she was purring and enjoying the attention otherwise.

Back then we still had Mokey, Boober’s mother, and Mokey and Pepper, our first cat, had a constant turf war going on. Snowflake put a stop to that, and ruled the roost for a while.

When we moved to McKinney, in 1995, she went crazy in the empty rooms and long hallway with hardwood floors. For days she’d run around the house, building up speed and sliding to a stop.

She and Pepper always made a show of hating each other, but Snowflake withdrew slightly after Pepper died. She and Boober got along reasonably well, and she tolerated Elliot’s cat Smokey most of the time. But Boober has gone, and Smokey is with Elliot, and she’s too old to manage change. She hated Lavender and Parsley from their arrival as kittens – with good reason, because they each terrorized her. For the last couple of years she hasn’t moved from the dining room, and we keep the other two cats out of there.

I’ve known since she claimed the dining room that she wouldn’t be with us much longer. When Boober grew old, I always knew that I’d be miserable when he died. With Snowflake I didn’t think it would be so bad, for two reasons. Partly that she has pretty much cut herself off from us for the last couple of years, so we haven’t been close to her, and partly that I’ve always felt that however long she was with us, it was so much better than what she had been through that I could only be happy for her.

But I guess that was pretty stupid thinking. When a cat has been with you seventeen years, even if she has become an irascible old cow, she’s still part of the family. When we returned from England three weeks ago, I was worried about what Lavender and Parsley would have gotten up to, but it was Woidat’s condition that upset me. Over the three weeks she’d aged, and her eyes had become sunken.

A few weeks before we left, Vicki had Snowflake’s fur shaved, because she hadn’t been able to look after herself and it had become very matted. When we returned, it felt clammy, and she was quiet, for the first time in seventeen years.

She did improve a little, she yowled occasionally if there was someone around, but today Simon told me that she seemed to have stopped eating. I know what that means, having been through it a few times now. We could maybe find something to get her appetite back temporarily, but it would only buy a few days. Her kidneys are probably not functioning, and the best thing we can do for her is to take her to the vet one final time.

I don’t know if I can.

Many years ago, when the web was in its infancy – I think this was in the days of Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock – I stumbled upon a poem by Gavin Ewart. It upset me so much that I printed it out, because I knew I’d want to read it again, but didn’t want to bookmark it. It wasn’t something I wanted to encounter by accident.

Back then Pepper would have been middle-aged. Even though I knew she had a few years left the poem reminded me that I’d be devastated when we did lose her. Now that time has come around again, and it’s time to acknowledge that our Woidat has seen her share of living summers, and far more than anyone would have forseen for the bedraggled, abused young cat Vicki brought home seventeen years ago.

A 14-YEAR OLD CONVALESCENT CAT IN THE WINTER
Gavin Ewart

I want him to have another living summer,
to lie in the sun and enjoy the douceur de vivre –
because the sun, like golden rum in a rummer,
is what makes an idle cat un tout petit peu ivre –

I want him to lie stretched out, contented,
revelling in the heat, his fur all dry and warm,
an Old Age Pensioner, retired, resented
by no one, and happinesses in a beelike swarm

to settle on him – postponed for another season
that last fated hateful journey to the vet
from which there is no return (and age the reason),
which must soon come – as I cannot forget.

And it is, there’s no question about that. But I can’t help feeling that the intense focus on the fact that the president black is missing the far more important fact that he’s well-educated, thoughtful and capable. We don’t need a president of a particular color, we need a president who is insightful enough to understand problems, confident enough to solicit contrary opinions, and strong enough to implement solutions. From all accounts, Obama is all of these.

What concerns me about the issue of race in this inauguration is that it is obscuring the fact that he was elected on his merits. If his election comes to be seen as the last word in affirmative action, rather than a mandate to the government to stop hiding from problems, then the Obama adminstration will lose much of its authority.

Maybe a lot of people voted for Obama because he’s black. (And maybe even more voted against him for the same reason – that would be my guess.) But he was elected because he demonstrated himself to be able to comprehend, and tough enough to act.

The election itself depressed me, because it demonstrated again how unpopular intelligence is in politics.  Obama was attacked because he’s a good speaker and able to reason through difficult questions without needing a teleprompter. He was portrayed as an intellectual elitist (the first always implying the second) and not a man of the people.  He refused to play the bumpkin, and was attacked for it, but the people, amazingly, decided that this time we should choose a smart guy over a plumber. Though it took an economic collapse to demonstrate just how much we need the smart guy.

I don’t want to see that derailed. I don’t want Obama’s victory over prejudice to be solely over racial prejudice. I want it to be seen to be over anti-intellectual prejudice, and I want the executive to be seen to be as capable as it certainly is.

When I see the words “President Obama” or even “First Lady Michele Obama” I feel a thrill of excitement – of a possibility of great things ahead. But I’m not excited – well, maybe a little – because we have a black president. I’m excited because we have a president who will be able to apply real intelligence rather than hide behind hubris

Among many stories of the consequences of our invasion of Iraq is this one. I heard it last week on All Things Considered. If this is the outcome of “victory,” there is no honor in it, only shame.

This last weekend has been tough, and in a way it isn’t over.

We returned from a couple of years in Seattle in 1987. My wife, Vicki, had been in a car wreck while up there, and was still in constant pain, having trouble thinking and driving. One day in late ’87, she backed into the garage door and made a hole.

Into that gap, in the depths of winter, stole a tiny tabby cat. She’d probably been living in the relative warmth for quite some time when we discovered her, and of course we couldn’t turn her out then. So she became Mokey, a character from Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock – still one of my favorite series, and my all-time favorite children’s show. (Nothing else Jim Henson did – as brilliant as it was – came close to Fraggle Rock, in my opinion.)

Well, as soon as we decided to keep her, and before we had chance to get her to the vet, she ran back out and got pregnant. Cats tend to do that. The result was a gorgeous mixed litter of tabbies and what were obviously siamese-mix kittens.

We gave away all but one. The kitten we kept had siamese points, tabby stripes in seal-point colors, and bright blue eyes. He liked to lie on clothes in the laundry basket, so we called him Boober, after the Fraggle who loved laundry.

He was a menace, as kittens are. In the middle of the night, he’d sneak up between Vicki and me, then reach out and stick all of his claws into my back. Several nights he’d make me wake up yelling. I’ve no idea why he singled me out for this treatment, but I’d always find it funny – after I’d calmed down from the shock.

Our house in Flower Mound had a vaulted ceiling, and a brick fireplace, with an inside brick chimney that ran all the way up – probably to twelve feet or so. One day, Boober climbed up that vertical chimney, just by clawing the bare brick. He got to higher than I could reach – we have a photo of him somewhere – and I have no recollection of how we got him down.

We had him declawed. I’ll never do that again to a cat, furniture notwithstanding, and I’ve always wished I had made that decision before we did it to Boober, because his claws were such a central part of his life.

After neutering, he got fat. He was never a huge cat, maybe fourteen pounds, but the pudgy flaps in front of his back legs would sway as he walked. So we called him “blubber” and plenty of other variants.

One day – we were living in Richardson at the time, so he’d probably have been about five – he followed Vicki out into the front yard. (We always keep our cats indoors, which is why we’d had him declawed.) There was a hawk on a telegraph pole.

Boober saw the hawk catch a squirrel, and was terrified. He slunk back into the house and hid.

Another time, he decided to try exploring our artificial Christmas tree. It couldn’t support his weight. The stand collapsed, showering the floor with ornaments, tinsel, and a very unhappy cat. He was quite disoriented. Eventually he staggered through to the bedroom and sat on the bed, still looking very dizzy.

Our siamese, Pepper, who was always a temperamental, jealous sort, started sniffing around and yowling at him. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Boober do anything of the kind, he’s always been such a gentle cat, but you could see the look in his eyes: “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He reached out a paw and smacked Pepper hard across the face. Bam.

He also earned the label “chicken”, though with his size we’d sometimes decide he was a turkey. He was terrified of thunderstorms. If there was one in the area, he’d find a hiding spot. Sometimes he’d bury himself under the blankets on the bed, and at other times he’d find a hiding place. We don’t even know where all of his hideouts were. He’d just vanish.

So we’d try to predict thunderstorms, and be sure he was penned up in our room if we heard one coming in. That way he’d make a nice warm furry footwarmer under the blankets.

He was our storm cat.

He hasn’t been bothered by thunderstorms in a few years. Maybe he’s gotten brave, or maybe deaf or lazy. I’d suspect lazy.

Ever since Pepper died, Boober has prowled the house at night yowling. There was never any real doubt about his siamese heritage, but the yowls are as clear evidence as any. He and Pepper never seemed especially close, but he started stalking around the house, apparently looking for her, and crying like only a Siamese can.

It’s been several years since Pepper made that final trip to the vet, but he’s never quit. Sometimes he yowls because he’s out of food or water, but mostly it seems to have no cause.

And that’s especially unfortunate, because he’s been yowling so much in the last few weeks, and I just ignored it. But this time I think he had something to cry about. We finally noticed last week how little he has been eating. By the weekend he wouldn’t touch his food at all. Vicki couldn’t even tempt him with cat treats, which until only a couple of weeks ago he would gobble up.

Last week he peed on the floor in the utility room. He’s always been picky about the litter box, but this time it was clean.

So on Saturday, I took him to the vet. He has a heart problem. It sounds quite serious. The vet opened a can of food, and he ate – but since then, he only took a couple of mouthfuls on Saturday, and none since. On Sunday the vet called with the results of lab work – his kidneys are failing.

It isn’t surprising. He’s a very old cat, now. Much older than Pepper was when her kidneys gave out. But, damn, he’s been part of the family so long. Elliot hadn’t turned four when we got him, and he’d have been eight, already middle-aged, when Simon was born. I’m not ready to let him go.

In a few weeks he’d turn nineteen, but right now I doubt he’ll make it until Vicki gets back from Oklahoma on Thursday.

This is the part I hate about having pets. I know that afterwards I’ll look back and feel that it was all worthwhile, and we’ve had a great nineteen years with him, but right now – I hate it. I’m fifty, and I keep crying over one silly old mog.

It didn’t help that on Saturday, after taking Boober to the vet, I watched the end of a truly tear-jerking anime. Yes, they do exist, and no, I wasn’t expecting this to be one, or there’s no way I’d have watched it then.

And on Friday, of course, I found that twist to the story I’ve been working on that gives the potential for a tragic interpretation of events. When the story demands that your characters suffer, and it usually does, you let them suffer, but at the same time you’ve grown close to them, and their pain is upsetting.

So much so that it has been very hard to make revisions this weekend.

With those three things, but most especially the decline of our once fun-loving cat, this has been a very long and upsetting weekend, and the prospects for the rest of the week don’t look much better.

Do you want the terrorists to win?

I have to admit I totally failed the quiz linked on the results page: “Do you drink Republican cool-aid“. Zero percent.

—

In other news, Mr. “I have a PhD and I’m not afraid to use it” has won. Again. I came up with an alternative that followed all of his rules, and he changed his rules and turned it down flat. If this wasn’t about the artistic opportunities of a 10-year-old kid I wouldn’t even care, but I guess working parents have no business wanting kids to play music.

In 2003 the US made it clear that it would invade Iraq, come hell or high water. At the time, I compared the venture to trying to kill a hornet by smacking its nest with a baseball bat. I’m sure it wasn’t an original comment, but it has always seemed like a good analogy.

Back then, questioning the rationale for war was tantamount to treason. We had Freedom fries, the Dixie Chicks’ dates were cancelled, and anyone who suggested that maybe – just maybe – aggressive action in the Middle East wasn’t likely to produce the results we would like – well, the invective directed against such people was vicious. It was pointless even to try.
Now it’s 2006, and it looks like we’ve Seen The Light; the Administration’s unpopularity is directly attributable to the war; and there’s going to be at least a divided congress because of it.

But if this is a protest vote against the war in Iraq, I think we’ve missed the point.

If we’ve become disenchanted with the war because of how badly it has been handled by the Adminstration, then we’ve missed the point that we had no right in the first place to attempt to impose our vision on another country.

If we’ve turned against the war because almost 3,000 American servicemen and women have died, we’ve missed the point that 300,000 Iraqis have also died for our adventurism.

If we plan to pull out without consulting with other interested parties, like the UN and Iraq’s neighbors, we miss the point that we got into this mess by ignoring international opinion in the first place.

These are not idle grumblings, in my very uneducated opinion.

First, if we fail to recognize that we had no right to impose our vision, it won’t be too long until we’re gung-ho to do it again. Saddam Hussein was an evil, genocidal dictator. But he was no threat to the US, and that was clear, which is why the Administration had to twist the facts so thoroughly to claim justification for invasion. We know this now. But if the Administration knew before the war that he was no threat, why did we invade?

Why, to bring Freedom and Democracy, of course. There was no secret about that. We know who the architects were, we know that they’d wanted this to happen for years, we know that they believed that Freedom and Democracy would have a ripple effect through the region, bringing peace and stability. Rajiv Chantrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone makes it very clear the the architects had Plans, and it wasn’t just Democracy that they intended, it was good old American Democracy, i.e. free-enterprise capitalism, which is why the health administrator was more interested in selling off the health sector and insuring Iraqis (Iraqi health care had been state-provided) than in getting supplies to hospitals.

Until we recognize that we invaded Iraq not because it was a threat, but because we had Good Intentions for the country, we won’t recognize when the next politically-motivated catastrophe is beginning.

Second, the death of almost 3,000 Americans is a tragedy. It’s absolutely right to be furious with the planners of the war that so many of our best have given their lives for this unneccessary action.

But the Iraqi death toll hit 3,000 many years ago, and has climbed exponentially. Quite apart from the hypocrisy of ignoring the soaring human tragedy of Iraqi civillians, men, women and children, there’s a strategic problem that we’re only beginning to recognize, but that should have been obvious three and a half years ago: that every casualty attributed to us increases the hatred towards us and motivates the next generation of terrorists.

By not recognizing the devastating effect of the war on the Iraqi public (economic as well as social), we’ve fertilized the ground for terrorists, jihadists, suicide bombers, whatever – and done so well beyond Iraq’s borders. We took international outrage at the 9/11 terrorists – outrage that even allowed Iran and Syria to aid our security services – and turned it into international outrage against the US, so that Al Qaeda can recruit would-be martyrs on the streets of every Islamic nation.

Until we recognize that, we will not recognize the terrible position we’ve put ourselves in.

Third, we invaded without international backing. Countries that didn’t want to be cut off from US trade and aid, and – god knows why – Britain – these made up the “coalition of the willing”. Countries with extensive diplomatic experience of the Middle East stayed away. Countries that listened to the huge majority of their population stayed away. I’ve always felt it was a great irony that we castigated France for following the will of its people while we were “bringing democracy” to Iraq.

We took this action in the face of public opinion everywhere outside the US, and in the face of the reactions of their governments. And we failed. Now many Democrats want us to withdraw – but in a manner as unilateral as when we went in. That tells me that even the Democrats haven’t recognized that Iraq is not just an American problem.

At this point, we’ve probably screwed the situation so badly that everyone knows it’s unfixable, and the UN and Arab League will not be willing to sacrifice their own forces in trying to calm the region. But if we don’t make the effort, we’ll be blamed even more, within the Middle East and by the rest of the world, when Iraq implodes.

We do not recognize that Iraq was never a US-only problem to solve, and that other nations are being harmed by its meltdown. That gives the whole world a reason to hate US arrogance.

Because we don’t recognize these things, anything we do to try to solve the problem will backfire on us.

More than that, we have two years now before the next election, when a provenly cynical, prevaricating Administration will blame the just-elected congresscritters for interfering. By 2008, the catastrophe will have been spun as a Democratic problem, and the theorists and empire-builders of the right will be selecting their next target. And they’ll believe that they can make a success of it.

And we’ll be swinging that baseball bat at another hornet’s nest.

Well, I’ll know better next time.

(Edit: By that, I don’t mean arguing with someone who’s smarter than me. I do that all the time. I’m just wondering about the kind of person whose ego requires PhD to show up in “From” lines.)