Old Cat sat in her window sill beneath the half drawn blinds. She felt the goodness of the warm sun on her skin but her bones ached, her body tired. Crow came to visit her in the afternoons. When they were young, he came to taunt her for being kept prisoner behind a pane of glass. Crow had been feathers and noise; Old Cat patiently waiting to demonstrate her hissing and claws.
Now Crow worried over her, hoping a window or door would be left ajar so he could take her away. Her eyes were too old to see her prey, he knew, and her legs too slow. But he could feed her and tend to her with the patience that comes from regret over things passed.
“Was it all worth it?” Crow asked.
Old Cat blinked slowly, then turned her head away. Crow knew she could no longer hear what he said.
When I took Charlie for a walk the other night, I turned right at the bottom of the our apartment building’s steps and crossed the parking lot. A narrow strip of grass runs between a row of garages and a retaining wall where the management company placed poop bags for the dogs.
In one of those awkward moments where too many people make strange choices with not enough room, a neighbor haspicked out the wall of one of those garages as his designated smoking spot. Tucked in the shadows, his pensive body language comes too close to someone who is waiting for something they shouldn’t. He’s a neighbor - no real threat came to mind - yet I had to will myself to stay the course that would put us in that awkward hey-whats-up zone.
The boxes of poop bags were empty. I had one on the retractable leash handle but wondered if it was the end of the weekend without anyone to stock it or whether this particular pole gets forgotten about. I don’t usually take that route, preferring most other directions. The strip opens into a lawn where the retaining wall and garages end.
I watched the white ball of floof with all of the pack bread out of him choose spot after spot to mark before beginning his circular poop-dance. It’s a funny ritualistic instinct but I’ve got to think he wonders what the hell I’m doing sitting on my water bowl every time I go. I waited as patiently for him as I did for my neighbor to move on and chose to walk up the parking lot.
Hanging directly in front of us, the moon had taken on an orange-ish tint. The craters seemed exagerrated and the crescent tilted at an uncanny angle with the rest dimly illuminated like a rushed prop on the old Flash Gordon serials. Perhaps it was Saharan sand blown across the Atlantic. Two years before, it was thick enough to color the moon, too, and left a faint smoky odor in the air. I would have to check the news, I thought, as I turned left to go back up the stairs to our apartment.
Later that night, comforting myself by scrolling through Reddit before going to bed, I learned that it was a lunar eclipse. /r/Austin was full of photos. There is something to be said for the wealth of information and convenience the internet and our phones in particular provide. I might not have known for days, if ever, that I’d witnessed an eclipse.
But I’d also chosen not to take up this format of writing again just before taking Charlie out. I’d given it up in 2004, in part, for the same reason. What had started as a novel way to take the kinds of personal experiences into the open became an act of futility. Although Twitter and Facebook were about three years down the road for me, there were more ways than I needed to connect blossoming around. It was already mundane, this “global village” we’d been promised.
There was an equal sense of futility in opening up for an audience that didn’t exist. It’s not the cravings of my ego to have my experiences taken up by others. I don’t have any delusions about either my ability to writeor to have had anything at all worth the interest of others. I love writing for what it is but not as an occupation. Digging into onself for the truth that underlies the boring and uneventful is a painful burden if done regularly. One day on the light rail back from USC to Long Beach, out of nowhere, I decided to close up shop. I needed to be out there in life, I thought, rather than sitting inside myself ruminating. Although I’ve flirted with idea of starting up again, it never really took hold. I missed it, certainly, but I found this particular voice had fled, or died or gotten a career.
I traded in one missed eclipse for another.
Yesterday morning I (asked Neil Gaiman)[https://www.neilgaiman.com/feedback/?to=neil] how he knew when something he wrote was worth the trouble. At the time, I didn’t make the connection to any of this but clearly it was sitting there. The Sunday before I watched him speak and wish that I’d known that the audience could submit questions that he would answer. More than answer itself, I want to hear that there even is an answer.
