The Postscript

Peter and our cat, Felix, have been playing their nightly game of chase and tag. Peter always loses. This might be because Felix makes the rules—and is the referee.

I remember that feeling of being convinced there was this world of secrets I did not know, and I’ve been reminding myself there is a very good chance that there is no secret. And then reminding myself, if I don't know something, I can always just ask.

I saw Ruthie, and she had not made pickles. Maybe the cucumbers had not cooperated. Maybe she was working on other things. Maybe she just lost interest in supplying every relative in her large family with pickles. A person does not need a reason not to make pickles, and yet I felt Aunt Ruthie owed me an explanation.

I didn’t even know how long red squirrels lived. Three years, I later learned, is average, although some have lived up to 10 years in captivity. But even with a steady supply of seeds, I don’t think Stubby was living under optimum conditions. Somebody had already gotten the end of his tail, after all.

Felix enjoyed his room at the Sheraton very much. In addition to the French fries, there were a lot of places to explore, and he discovered he could hide under the dust ruffle of the bed and attack our feet. When we went to bed, he climbed up between us. “What a good cat!” I said.

Estefan is an older gentleman with a broad smile, and he was sitting at a sewing machine improbably parked in a tiny spot behind the beverage cooler. Estefan said he would be delighted to sew a sofa cover for us. He came to look at the sofa. He borrowed a tape measure from Peter, and he wrote a lot of numbers down on a pad of paper. Then he left with Peter’s pen in his pocket.

It always starts in the same way. I get a sore throat. First, I ignore it. I have found this is the best way to deal with imminent disasters. When I used to drive old cars, I would turn up the radio when I heard an ominous noise. Loud music and deliberate ignorance can take you for many miles.

There is cheese by the slice and wine and pickles and cookies and toothpicks. The only things they don’t sell at Bonanza are fresh breads, vegetables and meat—because you know you are supposed to go to the proper store to get those.

“There is nothing as nice as a crisp cotton sheet” is what my mother would say. She hangs her sheets out on the line to this day, and perhaps that’s what got me thinking about perfection. Perfection has to be imperfect enough to notice it, to enjoy it, to make me pay attention.

Living with a cat, you start to eye gravity with suspicion. Small items that appeared to be securely in place must be scrutinized, as if living under the imminent threat of a major earthquake. Living with a cat is like living in a spaceship. Items cannot be expected to remain where they are put. Everything needs to be put inside something else to prevent it from floating away or, more accurately,...

Maybe my writing will make somebody smile. Maybe someone will feel less alone. Maybe it will be used to line the bottom of a birdcage. But whatever happens, I’m hoping it will be useful in some small way.

Rod Stewart has the untidiest hair you’re likely to find on an octogenarian (outside a long-term senior care facility), and I decided he was my new role model.

I’ve had several cats but, as far as I can remember, I had never made breakfast for any of them. Peter scrambled up an egg and gave Felix part of it. Felix loved scrambled eggs. Then Peter got reading up on what else cats like.

“We have a tradition in Mexico,” Jorge told us, in English. “When you are given a plate with food, you must return it with a gift. This is what we do with our family and our friends.”

“What was that?” Peter asked. Peter sleeps with earplugs when we are in Mexico, but the noise outside our bedroom woke him. I went to investigate. It appeared there had been some small-scale vandalism in the night. The garbage can had been mysteriously overturned and bits of crumbled bread were all over the floor.

I explained to the baker (to the best of my ability) that I had a meeting at 2:00 and I would love to bring “sweets” to the meeting. The meeting, I added, was with Americans. (There will also be several Canadians, but I decided not to complicate things.) I could tell he sensed the problem. This man looked as if he’d been baking things long enough to have heard of the eccentricities of Americans.

Getting a piece of cake in the middle of the day adds some unexpected sweetness to the day. Peter and I don’t speak enough Spanish to know how to tell these people how grateful we are, how at home we feel, and how much their everyday kindness means to us.

We’ll be staying in our little one-bedroom apartment, and I’ll be writing at my little green Formica desk. It’s not the fanciest place. It’s nowhere near as nice as the homes of most of our friends. But every night our landlord, Jorge, will greet us and the colorful suns hanging from the walls around us will smile at us and we will know we have everything we need.

Right outside the elevator doors, they started singing the Frank Sinatra tune, “Don’t Blame Me.” The setting might not have been the most romantic, but the acoustics were perfect. Those barbershop singers brought tears to my eyes.

It turns out that no one cares if I stay up too late eating toffee. There is no editorial committee reviewing my statements from the previous day, informing me of how they might have been more clever or less embarrassing.

When I see typewriters, rather than experiencing a pleasant nostalgia, I feel something closer to dread.

I wondered how much we could ever know about a little red squirrel. We pretend he thinks just like us and we know, of course, this is not true. But I know he was watching, and I was glad he was there, on this day my mom was not feeling her best. I don’t know what he was pondering as he sat there, his fingers knit together, looking earnestly into the window. But he seemed very intent, as if he was...

The biggest change I would like to make in the new year is to stop behaving as if I have all the time in the world. While I don’t know how much time I have, (and I hope it is still considerable), none of us knows. I’d like to be a little gentler on myself in this new year. I’d like to treat myself like a person who is not going to live forever—simply because I am not.

There are so many troubles I have never known. There is a world of pain I have never experienced. While I was dwelling on a couple of hastily dressed kids with messy hair quietly doodling in the front pew, there were wells of pain and loss and confusion right in front of me that I could not imagine.

Auntie Jo would head downstairs to wrap presents and, at some point, their dog, Twinkie, would make a mad dash out the door. We’d all scour the neighborhood until we found Twinkie. Then Auntie Jo would go to change her clothes and emerge, more resplendent than the Christmas tree.