MARY T. WAGNER
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The Catbird Returns

12/18/2017

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Sharing this "vintage" essay I wrote in 2009 about the late, great Meatball. He was, literally, "the cat who saved Christmas" for me one year, as you shall soon discover...

Meatball moved in a couple of days ago, a temporary gig until the end of the semester.  He came with a cat carrier and a bag of “senior” cat food, in the arms of my prodigal college student son who was home for a 24 stretch of TLC and laundry service before returning to campus.

My son’s first official action upon returning home was to stretch out on the sunlit sofa in the living room and crash for three hours. Meatball’s first official action was to put Lucky, the forty pound puppy, on notice that he’d be missing an ear or an eye if he got too close.  Lucky is part Border Collie, so he’s pretty smart for a five month old.  Rambunctious, but smart.  He took the warning to heart and is keeping a three foot radius from danger most of the time.

We’re all making some adjustments here, but for now I’m still basking in the afterglow of kicking into “mommy gear” for an entire day.  I cooked dinner—turkey tetrazzini—one of my son’s favorites.  I actually had the oven and three burners going on the stove at the same time.

This is no small feat.  I use my stove so rarely these days that after the holidays last winter, a mouse moved in under the left rear burner.  I thought that Smokey, the sixteen pound house cat who likes to stage death scenes for my enjoyment, would take care of business, but in the end it came down to me and a “live trap” I picked up at WalMart and a dab of peanut butter.  After contemplating the frigid outdoor release options, I finally set the little guy loose in the garage with a handful of bird seed.  He repaid me by getting in to my car a few days later and drowning in my half-full bottle of Diet Coke.  Yes, I know, one mouse looks much like another.  But in my heart, I know that this was the same little guy who had thought outside the box for his kitchen living quarters.

I did laundry—five huge loads of T-shirts and socks and jeans—and folded it too.  This, too, was no small feat, and these days is completely out of character for me.

I made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, and served them with “real” hot maple syrup.  This too, was a departure.  Back when I still had four kids around the breakfast table and everybody wanted waffles or French toast, I bought the kind of breakfast syrup that comes out of a plastic squeeze bottle and costs a fraction of the genuine article.
And for the crowning piece of nostalgic motherhood, I produced two new “Looney Tunes” collections of cartoon DVDs to watch as we chowed down on breakfast.  You just can’t beat the classics.  I’ve always had a bit of the “kill the fatted calf” thing going on when one of the kids has come home from college. 

It felt great.  It felt deeply satisfying.  It felt like being a retired firehorse and suddenly getting back into harness.

And through it all, Meatball kept chirping away like a canary.  Yes, “meow” has generally been the expected cat commentary throughout recorded human history.  Meatball just cones with a more interesting vocal range.  I don’t know how else to describe it, but if you were listening from another room, you’d think I had a pet bird in a cage in there.

This wasn’t Meatball’s first trip home.  He was the definition of Christmas for me just a couple of years ago. 

Back then I was behind on everything because of simultaneous family disasters a hundred miles away that had started in early November with my mother's broken leg and gone downhill from there.  I wrote no newsletters.  I baked exactly two small batches of Christmas cookies before the kids came home, hung no garland, left the creche in the storage bin, looked for but never found the mistletoe ball.  When the kids came home for a few days over the holidays, they were the ones who hauled out the ornament boxes on Christmas Eve and made sure that something was hanging on the tree.  They made merry as they rolled out and decorated the traditional butter cookies in truly demented ways while I sat, exhausted on the living room sofa.
But Christmas day itself came and went with me driving solo on the tollway to Chicago and back, making a round of two hospitals and a nursing home to keep an eye on things on the only day without snow in the whole week.  I was not a happy camper.

I was feeling very "Grinchy" that morning as I pulled out of the driveway at eight in the morning.  But then as I drove, the sunlight and the season and the fact that I've got kids that I adore got to me, and I felt a spasm of generosity twitch in my heart that up until then still felt two sizes too small.  A half hour into my drive, I called my older son, who at the age of twenty-one was most definitely deep in slumber, and left him a voice mail.  Hey it's Christmas, honey, yes you can bring the cat home.

Simple words, but they masked a world of complexity.  Mike had adopted Meatball from an animal shelter and brought him home to his student apartment about eight months earlier, where the eight-year-old cat promptly became known for leaving his odorous "mark" on his master's clothing.  The problem seemed to be resolved by Christmas, but I was still wary.  There was a very large cat who already owned my house, and so I drew a line in the sand at the plaintive requests to bring Meatball home for the holidays.  I was thrilled to death that Mike had a cat, since I always think that life is far better with pets.  But two adult male cats who were strangers sharing space in the same house?  I could foresee only disaster. 

So Meatball stayed home alone at the apartment with a big bowl of cat food and a big bowl of water while the rest of the family gathered and visited.  And on Christmas Day, I wasn't the only one on the road—my son would be driving eighty miles back to his apartment that day to check on his pet. 

And so during my own Christmas drive, thinking of my baby spending half his day traveling back and forth just to make sure Meatball was okay, I took a leap of faith and relented.  And felt better for the rest of the day.  Three days of feline togetherness passed with no accidents and no bloodshed and a new era in terms of pet visitation. Meatball proved to be no-fuss houseguest with the mind of a simpleton and the peskiness of a two year old. 

Things are a little more complicated now.  You could tell that Meatball knew something important was in the works as my son was leaving when his master carried out baskets of laundry…but not the cat carrier.  He stood on the staircase, chirping, as I got my last, heartfelt good-bye hugs.  Then there was a final pat from my son, and the household was suddenly minus one young man.
 
And so we are all adjusting.  Meatball has taken to dogging my footsteps like a puppy, driving the real puppy in the house—restricted to the kitchen most of the time—absolutely bonkers.  Smokey the cat, sensing that this new arrangement may be lasting a while, has taken to dourly stalking around in an existential funk and curling his vast bulk into an empty laundry basket as though it was his Fortress of Solitude.  I can’t bear to tell him that it doesn’t make him invisible.  Lucky the puppy is putting up with the topsy-turvy reality of seeing the new cat sampling his dog food.  It’s got to be a dominance thing on Meatball’s part.
 
And if you close your eyes and imagine, you just might think there’s a canary chirping in t
he other room.

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Empty Nest

12/15/2017

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 My official notice that my nest was finally going to be really and truly empty for the first time in 36 years came, without warning, in the mail. After a thoroughly lovely, sunny morning spent at an art museum with a friend, I had returned home and then checked the mailbox by the front door. I leafed casually through the assortment of bills and catalogs and other junk, and then there it was. 

A perky, colorful notice from the postal service verifying that my younger daughter was officially changing her mailing address to a city across the country.

This wasn’t actually “news” in the strictest sense. She’d been gone for several months, and this new location was something she’d been working at putting roots down in for a long time. It was a very good thing for my daughter, in fact, by any measure. She had had something of a love-hate relationship with that particular city for a number of years and had come and gone from there on more than one occasion, but this time the place just felt “right” for all the right reasons.

But all of that cool mature rationality didn’t stop me from standing at the kitchen sink and bursting into tears. Go figure.

Since my first child was born (the “training baby” that paved the way for the next three) I’ve tended a nest in one form or another. For most of that time it was a nest in the country that grew to have five bedrooms and was surrounded by acres of fields and woods, hawks and foxes and deer and birds of all feathers. And while my fledglings were young, there was plenty of hiking and cookie-baking and story-reading and minivan-driving that utterly and joyfully consumed my life and identity. I didn’t skip a beat at keeping that nest in place even after I went to law school and then the marriage collapsed after twenty five years. With teenagers still in high school, I kept trimming the Christmas tree and cooking dinner and baking cookies and keeping the spare bedrooms primed and ready for the older ones to use when they came home from college.

Then, at last, I sold that large place and moved to much smaller digs a couple of years ago. Now if I want to visit the forest primeval, I actually have to get in my car and drive there, though the drive is quite short. And yet…it still has a spare bedroom and that is very important to me.

For the past several years, my younger daughter has still called my location “home” as she has come and gone at various times to other parts of the country for professional or personal reasons. She is an artist who practices in a physically demanding art form, and she has a severe chronic illness, and she is the bravest person I know. And somehow the fact that I could still keep a safe landing pad for her kept me on an even keel despite the wrenching emotional upheaval of moving from the only stable home I’d known in my own life.

I’m pretty sure one could draw a direct line from my own life experience to the importance I place on having that “nest.”

The simplest way to describe my family’s functioning would be to say that my mother was in charge. Nothing of importance happened without her approval, and often times at her initiative. I remember that no matter where she was, she always wanted to be elsewhere. She is now 94 and widowed and has been crippled for decades. She lives in a very nice apartment with a good view of a river and a majestic historic building that she loves to see as the sun sets, and friends and excellent amenities for wheelchair accessibility, and she is still striving for one more move.

This did not generally lend itself to a feeling of tremendous permanence as I was growing up. But a particularly disastrous initiative had us leave my native Chicago when I was sixteen in order to move to an abandoned farm in northern Wisconsin with no plumbing except a kitchen sink. The nearest town had 143 people and that was two miles away.

In order to continue my education at a Catholic high school, I was sent off to a small city forty miles away and I boarded there, at least for the first few months, with a family recommended by the high school principal. It didn’t go well. I came back to the farm every weekend, and there was literally no room there for me. There were only two bedrooms in the unfinished farmhouse. My parents slept in one; my younger brother slept in the other one, which had just enough room for a twin bed nestled against one wall and a dresser tight up against the other. I remember having to sleep in a hammock in the living room when I came home for the weekends. And things only went downhill from there.

In short, any illusion of having firm ground beneath my feet vanished when I was sixteen, replaced by a yawning, inarticulate terror of abandonment and isolation that has haunted me through the rest of my life. It drove making some of my biggest life decisions, and blinded or paralyzed me from making others. My parents and brother moved back to Chicago four years after leaving it for the farm and picked up at the same address they had left off. It was too late for me not to have been utterly broken.

Fast forward to college, marriage and motherhood. As one, then two, then three, and finally four children arrived, I found an incredible source of fulfillment and happiness in making a stable home for them. With every bedtime story, every Halloween costume sewn, every batch of cookies baked, every Christmas stocking hung by the fireplace, I could feel something heal inside myself.

As they grew older, of course, their needs changed. Instead of fresh diapers, a corsage for the prom. Instead of lunch in a brown paper bag, money for gas. Instead of help preparing for a science quiz, reassurance that a major life decision was a good one. And so it went, through the college years and beyond.

Bringing me, inevitably, to the arrival of the change-of-address noticed that sent me, at least for the rest of that day, into a bruised and weepy tailspin. If there had been a pint of Hagen Daz ice cream in the freezer, I would have eaten it right out of the carton.

I have dried my tears since then, put my chin up, and claimed the entire bathroom counter for myself since I no longer have to share. And with the approaching Christmas holiday doings, I haven’t had much time or inclination to brood.

But there is a new year about to start in just another couple of weeks. The turn of the calendar from one year to the next is always a time for reflection on the past and optimism for the future. Sometimes I make resolutions, and sometimes I don’t.

This time around I hope I’ll make some adjustments in my thinking. I’m already known for relentless optimism as a coping mechanism, but let’s take the glass-half-full analogy a step farther and say that when all is said and done, my nest isn’t quite empty yet. None of my kids may be getting their mail sent to my house anymore, but I’m still here, along with the four-footed pets. And so I might as well start picturing and investing in my current surroundings as a warm, comforting nest for myself.

Because you know, after all these years, I have damn well earned it.



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