Books and plants and cats

I remember back in 1991, after a bad breakup with my first girlfriend, I had, after years of living in apartment complexes, just moved into a rickety duplex on Rainey Street in Austin (now a concrete high-rise and bar hub, but then a series of 1930s wooden homes in a neighborhood) and wrote in my diary (no blogs then, just paper): "I want to be surrounded by books and plants and cats." As it turned out, my very first cat, Frances, disappeared within months after I moved in. And two other cats (Frances' kitten Toonces and a later "Christmas gift," Katie) were run over by cars speeding through the neighborhood. Katie, I found dead in my front yard when I came home from work; Toonces was killed in front of my eyes as I called her to me one morning. (Both Katie and Toonces I buried behind my house; their graves long since torn up for bars.)

I left the Rainey Street duplex to go to grad school at San Francisco State in 1993. Months before I left, a stray cat that I named "Big Sandy" had adopted me. When I left for grad school, I took Big Sandy to my brother's house, across town, asking that he look after him and offering to pay for cat food. A few months later, I got a letter in San Francisco, saying that Big Sandy had died of feline leukemia. (I believed it at the time. Today, though: I don't think my brother and his then-girlfriend/now-wife wanted Sandy around. I think they had him euthanized.)

All of this... I still want to be surrounded by books and plants and cats. Books, though, never change anything. And plants certainly don't. I don't think you are truly blessed unless you have a cat in your home. Thank you, Henny. (Below are pictures of some sort of beauty and meaning that I was struggling for in the meantime: "Look at me! I have a sense of lit'rature and/or knick-knacks...")