On the Landing

Matt woke up not uncharacteristically early one Tuesday morning to a silent house. Light radiated through the paper blind suggesting that today would be rather wonderful. He turned over and squinted at his alarm clock rather than putting on his spectacles - just going on 7 o'clock. Apart from some chirruping birds somewhere outside, the house was quiet. There was no cook banging about in the kitchen, breaking crockery left and right. There was no sound of the butler's light footfall on the floorboards in the hall. Above all, there was no incessant meowing of the cat, Walter, who served as a trusted alarm when the clock failed. He imagined the cat was upstairs sunning himself by the window or at least perched on the sill watching the noisy grackles.

As he rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses it occurred to him that due to economic reasons he had neither a butler nor a cook - nor a housekeeper for that matter. He must have been awakened out of some dream of opulence, one filled with light treading butlers and noisy cooks. The book on his bedside table, a mystery of a bygone era, seemed to give every indication that that must have been the case.

"I do have to stop reading that kind of stuff just before bed." He thought. "It does fill one's head with the most idiotic notions." He sat up and got out of bed, his toes grabbing the soft plush, camel colored carpet. "I wish I could afford a staff to bring me breakfast and clean and manage household affairs for me."

Matt sighed thinking of all the cleaning he had to do this week. It was in fact the primary reason he'd taken a week's holiday from the office. The impending arrival of his parents from Beijing where they were teaching at university, prompted the sudden rush to clean everything. There was so much to do: there was the laundry to wash, dry and fold, the bathrooms to clean, the carpets to vacuum and a thousand and one other things that needed doing. He yawned at the thought and padded along the floor much more noisily than his imaginary butler would have done and walked toward the stairs. He knew this stirring would cause Walter to let out the most pitiful wails of need as ever a cat could emit. Yet all was silent still.

"Funny," Thought Matt, "he must still be sleeping up on the couch. No, there he is."

And there he was. Walter lay sprawled out lazily on the landing between the small and large staircase. He often waited there for Matt after being chased out of the bedroom at 5:30 (or sometimes even 4:00) in the morning for waking him too early. Matt wondered at Walter's immobility - surely he would have gotten up and started running up to the kitchen to await his breakfast of Cat Chow and water by now. Matt leaned forward and rubbed a finger under the cat's chin. Walter remained inert. Matt slowly drew back his finger and placed his hand on the cat's torso, there was no movement. He quickly lifted the cat, hoping Walter was merely ill and could be wakened, but noticed the rigidity of the feline's body. As his hands, pressed against the stomach, lifted the cat, Matt heard an exhalation of air, a kind of horrifying final sigh. It disturbed the man so much so that he almost dropped Walter.

Matt turned the cat toward him and a sickening feeling came over him. Walter's eyes had gone filmy and grey. His tongue protruded out of the side of his mouth - a morbid parody of death. Matt carefully set the cat back down on the carpet and ran upstairs to the kitchen. He grabbed a large kitchen garbage bag and set it at the top of the stairs then ran down and gingerly carried the cat upstairs and deposited it in the bag. It looked even more ghastly covered in translucent white plastic, but at least he didn't have to see those lifeless, yet staring eyes.

***

"What do I do with a cat corpse?" Matt wondered as he jumped online. He did feel concern and even a pang of sorrow yet not as much as he'd imagined he might have felt. He had, after all, only had the cat for a few months. Those months had been trying, admittedly, but in the last month or so, Matt felt that he and the pet were making a pretty good go of it. He searched for information by typing "sudden cat death" in the Google search box and deduced the culprit may have been a heart worm, that or the poor thing had a sudden aneurysm. Glancing back into the hallway, outside of the den, he could see the bag protruding where stiff front and back paws and head and neck pressed against the plastic.

"What to do! What to do!"

Then he thought about it for a moment, "I'll call mum and dad - they'll know what to do."

His father made a few comforting remarks, knowing Matt had grown fond of the cat before discussing the disposal of the body. This turn in conversation was eerily clinical, ending with this paternal edict: "Just get it buried in the back before the neighbors start to wake."

"Too late," Thought Matt. "In this geriatric neighborhood most of the neighbors would have risen long ago and even now may already peering through their blinds to see what's going on in the court."

Matt moved quickly by the corpse and to the door to the garage where he found a shovel. The thought of garage, cat and garbage bag reminded him of an earlier adventure he'd had at school, but he had no desire to repeat history. Shovel in hand, he returned to the house and picked up the bag. The body pressed against the bottom of the bag and Matt half wondered if it would hold the cat's weight until he'd gotten it outside. He carefully, yet swiftly brought shovel and bag downstairs and out the sliding patio door.

After scouting about for a proper final resting place for Walter, he decided on a spot just behind the lilac bush, far away from tree roots. As he dug, he looked around him trying to decide what he would say if the neighbors asked what he was doing. Should he confess that his pet had died suspiciously in the night or pretend that he was going to be planting flowers for his parents return? The latter notion seemed ridiculous given the position of the grave - who would plant flowers behind a lilac bush? As he dug a space wide enough to accommodate the body, he remembered his father told him to dig a deep hole. But how deep was deep enough? After about a foot of digging, removing stones and breaking roots he hit a layer of impenetrable clay.

"Oh dash it all!" exclaimed Matt, now tired from digging. "I suppose it will just have to do." As he set down the shovel and walked back to the patio to get Walter he wondered if he oughtn't to have had an autopsy conducted to discover the cause of death, but then Matt was always practical over matters of spending and an autopsy would be costly. He lifted the bag and carried it to the hole in the ground then placed Walter in his grave. He carefully positioned the cat so his paws would not stick out of the hole. It took some additional digging and some careful placement, but soon Walter was in place.

In his haste to get the cat buried, Matt had given little thought to how he felt about all of this. He stared at Walter's lifeless body and felt somehow responsible. How if he, Matt, had been a better person, this cat would still be alive. Silly thought, of course, a retributive power taking people's sins out on their pets, yet he still felt a level of guilt.

Quickly, he replaced the dirt over the grave and packed it down by slamming the back of the spade over the mound of dirt. Matt worried that it wouldn't be enough to cover a smell that might attract carrion birds, so he ran upstairs and to the garage where he'd remembered seeing a 40 lb. bag of potting soil. He heaved it over his shoulder and ran downstairs again. As he reached the landing where he'd found Walter, his bare foot came into contact with something wet on the carpet and he faltered. There would be additional cleaning up to do after covering the grave.

The End.

Nota bene: Walter died this morning suddenly. For some reason, I decided to describe the events as Agatha Christie might have done in one of her novels. I'm pretty sad about the loss of the cat; I guess this is simply my way of dealing with it.

Random Notes

Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this fall and my life in general and have come to several conclusions:

1. Moleskine notepads provide the best writing surface for my fountain pen. This brand of note pad has been around a while and have been used by the likes of Van Gogh, Hemingway, and Matisse (Okay, this first one isn't as much about my life as it is about my pen, but the Moleskine top flip reporter's pad adds nicely to the mystique of writing with a fountain pen, and this makes my life happier).

2. I cannot get to Japan in September as I first thought. I found out that had I taken the plunge and just flown over to Tokyo with the idea of getting a job with Berlitz, I would have had to have waited twelve weeks for the proper work visa. During that time, I'd just have to sit on my rice paper mat doing nothing but getting poorer. Therefore, I decided to a) Get a job with a Japanese company (Aeon) that is more helpful than Berlitz in both interviewing (I have one here in Mpls. on September 25) and finding accommodations, and b) go to Japan in January instead of September. This will put off my PhD work (wherever I end up getting accepted) for another year, but that's okay.

3. I need a better job for the fall. I'm tired of the hours at the bookstore and the bakery. Schai has given me information on her awesome job and I have an interview next Monday. Even though they aren't hiring at the moment, Schai says that they have a huge turn over.

4. I don't like Spanish. I have to pass a language proficiency before I'm officially graduated. Spanish seemed the best idea at the time, but I don't like the language enough to keep up with it. I do, however, love Danish and have studied it more recently (having had a year's course at the U of M). If I'm here for fall, I'll probably sign up for a semester of second year Danish. Then I can wow everyone with exclamations such as, "Jeg kan også godt spise lidt mere œblekage. Man kan gotdt drikke rødvin til œblekage. Skål!"

5. If I am going to be here for at least five more months, I'm going to see if I can't get an apartment in my old building in St. Paul. Living rent-free is nice, living in your parents' basement is not. And the not-niceness of living at home outweighs the advantage of not having to pay rent.

Old School Pen

Yes, I know I broke down and bought an iBook this year, and I know we are well into the electronic age, but I still sometimes enjoy actually writing things out. If you look in any number of the notebooks I have in file drawers and boxes, you'll generally find at least one page where I've either spent the whole page practicing my signature or copying out the alphabet (printed and in cursive). I used to be so jealous of my parents' handwriting - they belonged to an age where penmanship was still valued and was taught with nearly the same care and precision that a calligraphy course would be taught.

My dad used to have a pen set he'd received as a gift a long time ago. He kept this at his old desk of the basement of the house I grew up in. One was a ball point and the other was a fountain pen that had a lever on the side to draw up the ink. I used the pen all the time and still love the control I have with a fountain pen. Today I found a place in Crystal that sells new and vintage fountain pens. I bought this awesome vintage British made pen from the 1940s and have spent the whole rest of the day writing stupid things in notebooks and on strips of paper at work just to try it out.





It's so much fun to write with. I've been nerding out over it all evening - buying ink and paper for it, talking to it, naming it, speculating about its past, writing to it. If you give me your address, I'll send you a handwritten and useless fortune cookie sans cookie.

A scare and a word of praise

So I just checked my e-mail and my third reader for my thesis (the one from outside the department) might have to back out. She has a job interview and can't make the thesis defense. She wanted to move it to a week earlier. My advisor went to bat for me in a major way. She sent this lengthy letter telling her how hard I'd been working and how I was aiming to graduate on time. The letter was super terse and direct. I was so happy she was being such a strong advocate on my behalf. Then she sent me a note telling me not to worry and just to keep working.

After yesterday's meeting with her, I was pretty discouraged about my writing until she sent an e-mail to me (after the one to the third reader). Here's a bit of it:

"I hope you weren't too dismayed after our meeting yesterday.  There was lots of purple [reference to her notations], but that wasn't necessarily a "bad" thing.  I think you're on the right track, and the content of your mytho-poetic chapter was good and appropriate for your purpose.  In case you haven't already figured it out (which you probably have), one of my goals is to help a very good writer become an extremely polished writer--and to help you write something which ten years from now you will be proud of."

I needed to hear those words. Now I've just got to finish the damned thing. Thanks to you all for your support as well!

Half way there!

I met with my advisor yesterday regarding my thesis. I handed her my review of literature chapter (24 pages), my Mytho-Poetic chapter (14 pages), my works cited (4 pages), and an outline of my biographical framework. Only about twenty more pages to go, and then I'll be done. I'm actually enjoying my research, but it is still much more fun to talk about than to write about. I'm going to use the last two lines of the following poem in my title. I thought it appropriate as my thesis is about the ambiguity of "Goblin Market." Here's the poem (this is one of my favorite of her works):

Winter: My Secret
Christina Georgina Rossetti


I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.
Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
WHen drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

Penguin Diversion

I've had a fairly productive morning so far after having a fairly unproductive evening (thesis-wise). Instead of working on the chapter that's been plaguing me for a couple weeks now, I watched SCTV with Chadley. We laughed ourselves silly and then I read Abeng until I fell asleep on the Kuyper couch - thanks for letting me crash at su casa again amigo.

Well my brother's blog is up and running, so I've added him to my list of ween dogs - Welcome aboard, Brew Guru. I checked his site this morning and found this fun little entry. Tired of school? Stressed out? Work got you down? Bat a few penguins; you'll feel much better.

Big Mouth Hungry! EAT SMURFS!

You are sitting in your office waiting for one of your students to come to her conference with you. She's the only no show so far - well, you could count the student who told you yesterday that conferences would not be conveneint for him as he was going to the cities and could you please log on to D2L so that you can meet with him online to discuss his paper that he'll probably send as a microsoftworks document, so you can't read it anyway, but wait, he never sent it to begin with, and he wasn't terribly disturbed by the low grade on his first paper, so you don't even consider him. You are glad she didn't show up because it means you can work on your thesis revision and that chapter you haven't finished on your thesis. You are still a little anxious after the meeting you had with your advisor yesterday - you know you are behind and it bothers you; you just don't want her to call that to your attention. You want to be done with the damned thing, but that bout of chronic fatigue syndrome hits you every time you sit down to your computer to work. You can talk forever about CGR. You love to talk forever about CGR. "Goblin Market" is probably the one poem you really get. But when you sit down to your thesis, all the interest and energy flows out of you. You forget how to write a paper. No. Forget about forgetting how to write a paper; you forget how to write. You are still scarred (you almost wrote scared, but either works) after your experience writing papers for American lit last semester. You can still string together words, but suddenly people tell you you are illogical, that you make no sense. You know what you mean, but that counts for shit.

You remember reading the first part of a biography on Leonard Bernstein (you never got past the first six chapters because you have trouble finishing things). You remember how he attended some latin school for brilliant children of brilliant parents. You remember the story of how he wrote a brilliant paper the night before it was due, and how his teachers gushed at how innovative he was and how he took such an unorthodox approach to the assignment, that he received high marks. You wish you could sit at the piano and play the way he was playing at 10.

You think of your friend in New York who seems to live some sort of charmed life. Who can live on three hours of sleep a night and accomplishes more in five hours than you do in two weeks. Who writes cookbooks and caters meals for Oprah, and had a lion and a peacock for a pet when he was a child.

You are always tired. You don't get any exercise. You don't always get your work done. You always have an excuse. You fall asleep at your computer. You get a sore throat (You make sure to cough and sniffle when you tell your advisor this to add verisimilitude to your story. The story IS true, but you still feel bad for using the excuse). You had much more fun writing your paper for world novel this week. You parodied Jamaica Kincaid's writing style, writing in second person. As you write in the same mode now, you feel like a counterfeit. You enjoy this mode more, because it feels lazy. When you read your paper in class two nights ago, one person applauded you for it. Another said "funny." You were proud. You felt deflated when the professor questioned your emotional response to the book you parodied. You felt suddenly like you got the answer wrong, that your sense of well-being hinged on getting the right response. But you've always felt that way. You get tired of that, and always resolve not to care so much, but you still do. You feel more that your thesis is being written for your advisor's benefit than for yours. You realize of course that this is a problem, because how can you write with conviction about something when its written under the pressure of needing to do it for someone else? You try and convince yourself that your knowledge of this will be the thing that pushes you through it, and it will eventually. But you're not buying it right now.

Then your 4:00 appointment arrives - the student from Macedonia - and as you read through his paper (which should be a drudge because you are marking grammatical errors every three words, but isn't because his communication is clearer than most of your other students' - heck, it's clearer than your thesis) you begin to get lost his story of his father teaching him how to repair a gold ring. You are caught up in his story and can see this student's father sitting with him at a work bench teaching him how to solder, file, and polish. This student represents something for you, but you don't completely know what it is. You are glad you didn't send him packing to 101 for non-natives. Maybe he represents your desire for independence as well as connection (but the minute you write that, you don't believe it). Maybe you just wish you had a cool accent and not the non-accent you tried so hard to have so that you didn't have a Minnesotan one.

You think about a record your parents had when you were a child that described the ministry of the apostle Paul from the book of Acts(you feel embarrassed that you just admitted to something so churchy, but then you don't really care either). You remember the actor speaking for Paul recounting a vision he had one night where he saw a man standing there saying: "Come over to Macedonia and help us." You remember the meaning of the vision, but for some reason it registers differently now. Every time you see your student, you think of this dream of Paul's.

You wish you were in Macedonia.

I'm not sure why.

Every time I click on New Post here on blogger lately, my mind goes completely blank. And nothing seems important enough to write about. Oh, wait! I just thought of something. Last night after meeting with JoAnna about my thesis (which is about 1/4th of the way done!!!!!) I drove up to the city and met my sister Becky at Cafe Con Amore Coffee Shop in St. Paul. I'd read that the local chapter of Amnesty International was having their bi-weekly meeting there, so we attended. They were an interesting bunch to say the least - very nice people (one real cutie too named Margaret-she kept Beck and me in the loop). This group has adopted two prisoners of conscience from Algeria who've been arrested, had their trial dates postponed, and now have simply disappeared. They're working to get these prisoners a fair trial as well as fair treatment in the prison that they're in. We were supposed to have the coordinator for the St. Paul chapter talk about what's happening in the Sudan (http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sudan/index.do), but he also announced that he'd been offered a job in Seattle, so the group had to make some administrative decisions. I'd like to see what the Minneapolis chapter (which looks a bit larger) is like.

If you want to hear what's going on in Nepal (another hot spot at the moment), just ask Sween (isn't it your student, Katy?) to tell you about her comp. student who has no way to contact her parents because the king has shut down the country. She can't get back to see them, and they can't fly out of the country to see her. Troubling. Very troubling.

In other news, I stayed over night in Kato Tuesday to work on my Review of Literature chapter of my thesis (Note to Chad: Thanks for letting me crash on your couch Tuesday night - it was far more comfortable than my office floor would have been). After showering, I still felt like a skank in my sweaty tee-shirt and old socks. I was unshaven and a complete mess. So I went to Target and bought some toiletries so I could feel somewhat more human before teaching that afternoon. As I didn't want to make a fool of myself shaving, brushing my teeth, and putting on deodorant in Armstrong's smelly bathrooms, I decided to get ready at Target's WC. I felt (and must have looked) like a homeless man lathering up my neck in the bathroom - it was a new low for me. Next I went to Old Navy to buy a shirt so I could ditch the stanky tee-shirt and sweater. I bought a yellow short sleeve number that shouts "think spring." It looks even better now that I have a sticker on the pocket from Jess - it's a Hello Kitty! inspired seal holding up a yellow card with the number ten. At the bottom in red it says, "Perfect 10" See? I knew there was a reason I loved Jess. Jess, will you bear my children?

What's everybody doing Saturday? What? What? The bloggers are getting together in the cities to sing karaoke at Laura's bar? I thought so.

Sorry guys

Please accept my heartfelt apologies for not blogging in so long. I've been on a bit of a personal retreat from society for a little time, trying to sort out my life. This blog is a super short one to tell you that a bigger one will be posted soon. One thing I do know: My thesis is taking up way too much of my time - It's sapping it out of me.

Anyway, here's a movie everyone should see: Hotel Rwanda. I saw it with my sister, her husband, and our friend Kari two nights ago and it's still resonating with all of us. Ya know what I learned? I don't know a damned thing about what's really going on in the world.

I've decided to start thinking more globally - especially regarding the Sudan right now. Heck, I may even join Amnesty International.

Any thoughts?