The fact is, I am a cat person right down to my inner guts and core. I love their independence, their cleanliness, their blatant disregard for everyone around them, their sweet little faces, their fastidiousness, and pretty much everything else about them. Basically, the cat is everything I wish I could be all at once while still getting people to cater to my every whim and quirk. My cat can walk across my face at 3 in the morning, insisting on food, and I happily get up to serve. If any of my children walked across my face at 3 in the morning, for any reason, I would break out the Mommy Monster and let them have it. It's just the natural order and reasonings of a True Cat Person.
Dogs are a whole different story for me. I barely tolerate most of them. If I encounter a cat in the suburban wild, I will stop in my tracks and attempt to interact with it. If I encounter a dog, I barely give it a second look. They're just so damn happy all the time, and I prefer my animals to have a little more moodiness. A dog will dole out affection for people like a clown handing out candy at a parade. While this may appeal to the masses, I find it patronizing and trivial. Anything worth having takes work, and the love of a cat is definitely worth working for.
When we first got married, I went into a bit of a funk. I was substitute teaching while Peter finished his last year of law school. While I hit the jackpot when it came to men, there was still a hole in my life. That hole turned out to be cat-shaped. We cajoled our landlord, with the help of his cat-loving wife, into disregarding his "no pets" clause and letting us get a kitty. We found her at the shelter. She was 7 months of awesome, and she was ready to come home with us. We promptly changed her name from Kharn to Alice the Wondercat. You can do that with cats. You can't do that with dogs. Alice has been my constant companion for 10 years, and I can't get enough of her, especially since the only person she loves in our house is me.
Then we moved to our current home. My husband, a staunch Dog Person, began his campaign for canine companionship. It so happened that a friend of ours had a lovely yellow lab she needed to re-home. She was 2, pre-trained, kind of cute, super friendly, and I was willing to give it a shot. 3 years later, Pearl is a fixture in our family, shedding all over, eating poop like it's candy, smelling terrible, and making everybody smile. Even me once in a while. Then Peter got into his head that Pearl needed a friend...
Along came Mahone. Another re-homed dog, he is a German Short Haired Pointer with a nervous disposition and an inability to sit still. He has his moments of cuteness, but for the most part, he drives me insane. The kids adore him. He naps with Titus. He chases my cat. He slips on the laminate floors. He eats food faster than a cheetah runs.
And so it came to pass, this True Cat Person became a dog rescuer. Crazy, smelly dogs. I am willing to admit, but only to you, that sometimes I love them. Their incessant cheerfulness can be kind of endearing. Now that I have a Dyson, cleaning up after them is much easier and kind of enjoyable. However, my favorite part of the day is putting them in their crates for the night. When Alice the Wondercat hears the click of the locks, she knows that the house is once again hers, and seeing her pop out from under the bed, hungry for food and affection, brings a calm and peace to my life like nothing else can.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Scaling the Wall
The day before yesterday, I flew to the Midwest with the three offspring in tow. We come back for a month in the summer to swim, eat, drink, visit friends, and get in some quality time with my parents. The thing about my job is that it's portable. I can just relocate to Illinois for a month. Unfortunately, Peter cannot, so he gets stuck behind for at least half of our time here. This means I get to fly alone with the kids.
As you can imagine, I'm not the calmest flyer. Well, I'm not the calmest anything, to be completely honest. So, I like to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. I catalogue all the things that could go wrong: heavy traffic, extra long security lines, broken down computers, alien insect invasions, and I prefer to give myself as big a buffer as possible. The result this last trip was having almost 2 hours to spare. We ate an overpriced breakfast. We went to the bathroom. Twice. Then we went to the kids' play area.
The curious thing about the kids' play area at SeaTac airport is the 8 foot wall that doesn't go all the way to the ceiling. There are two diagonal ducts or something, but really, there's no practical reason for the absence of wall. Perhaps budget cuts. Budget cuts seem to be a logical reason. Who knows? The wall is the perfect temptation for a little person like Titus who loves to throw things at random, and throw he did. He threw his absolutely most favorite and necessary toy in the world: his Night Night. His whole world crumbled when I peeked over the wall from the top of the children's climbing structure and told him there was nothing I could do.
We had to go to our gate. It was almost time to board. You have never seen such a disappointed little person in your life, and even though it wasn't my fault, I felt so very, very guilty. I tried to find someone who worked at the airport. Apparently, no one works at the airport. They work for the airlines, sure, but ask them to help you find a person who works for the airport, and they look at you like you are a recent asylum escapee. I guess the airport just runs on robots and fairy dust.
I managed to find a ticketing agent who had small children who had favorite toys in the whole wide world, and she managed to find someone who worked for maintenance, I assume for the airport, but they could have worked for Denny's for all I know. We were told to go back to the play area and wait. So we did. And we waited. And they didn't come. The boarding time was now dangerously close. I had paid extra to get priority seating, and that didn't come cheap. It was now a matter of weighing my son's emotional and mental well-being against the extra $100 I spent to get on the plane first so we could get the seats we needed (we flew Southwest who doesn't assign seats). I could have bought him 10 new Night Nights for that $100, but somehow, it wouldn't be the same. He'd always associate the airport with this traumatic event, and, let's face it, I'd always feel guilty there. Since we utilize the airport frequently, I didn't want to shoulder all those negative feelings for the rest of my life. It was time for Mama to go over the wall.
I assessed the situation. There was a room full of children and their parents. There was a bench I could climb up in order to get to the top of the wall. There was a large man sitting on this bench. I thought, worse case scenario, he could help me back up. Or I could maybe shimmy up those diagonal ducts that were covered in enough dust to fill 275 vacuum cleaners. I took the kids in. I told them to stay. I went over the wall. The room behind me fell silent. When I got to the top, I saw two things: a long drop down and a metal cross bar that could help me get back over if I could manage to get a foot hold because it was at my eye level.
I landed with a very soft thud in dust thick enough to cover my flip-flopped feet. I retrieved Night Night, who was slightly dirty but no worse for the wear. He survived his flight. I threw him over and heard a very happy Titus. I knew I had made the right decision. Did I mention I was wearing black pants? Now to get to that cross bar. I had to take a running start, which kicked up a cloud of dust all the way to the ceiling that most likely settled on most of the people in the room. I hit the wall with a bang, got my foot up, pulled myself up with the strength of Hercules if Hercules was an out-of-shape woman with little to no upper body strength that was determined to reunite with her children and still make it to priority seating boarding.
When I came over, every jaw in the room had hit the floor. My pants, once black, were now a light grey. I used my white sweatshirt to wipe up the dusty footprints I left on the bench, and we were off in a little cloud of triumph mixed with humiliation with a generous sprinkling of smug on top. We made it to the gate right as our group was boarding, and all was right with the world, even if I was leaving a trail of dust behind me that would put Pig Pen to shame.
We had to go to our gate. It was almost time to board. You have never seen such a disappointed little person in your life, and even though it wasn't my fault, I felt so very, very guilty. I tried to find someone who worked at the airport. Apparently, no one works at the airport. They work for the airlines, sure, but ask them to help you find a person who works for the airport, and they look at you like you are a recent asylum escapee. I guess the airport just runs on robots and fairy dust.
I managed to find a ticketing agent who had small children who had favorite toys in the whole wide world, and she managed to find someone who worked for maintenance, I assume for the airport, but they could have worked for Denny's for all I know. We were told to go back to the play area and wait. So we did. And we waited. And they didn't come. The boarding time was now dangerously close. I had paid extra to get priority seating, and that didn't come cheap. It was now a matter of weighing my son's emotional and mental well-being against the extra $100 I spent to get on the plane first so we could get the seats we needed (we flew Southwest who doesn't assign seats). I could have bought him 10 new Night Nights for that $100, but somehow, it wouldn't be the same. He'd always associate the airport with this traumatic event, and, let's face it, I'd always feel guilty there. Since we utilize the airport frequently, I didn't want to shoulder all those negative feelings for the rest of my life. It was time for Mama to go over the wall.
I assessed the situation. There was a room full of children and their parents. There was a bench I could climb up in order to get to the top of the wall. There was a large man sitting on this bench. I thought, worse case scenario, he could help me back up. Or I could maybe shimmy up those diagonal ducts that were covered in enough dust to fill 275 vacuum cleaners. I took the kids in. I told them to stay. I went over the wall. The room behind me fell silent. When I got to the top, I saw two things: a long drop down and a metal cross bar that could help me get back over if I could manage to get a foot hold because it was at my eye level.
I landed with a very soft thud in dust thick enough to cover my flip-flopped feet. I retrieved Night Night, who was slightly dirty but no worse for the wear. He survived his flight. I threw him over and heard a very happy Titus. I knew I had made the right decision. Did I mention I was wearing black pants? Now to get to that cross bar. I had to take a running start, which kicked up a cloud of dust all the way to the ceiling that most likely settled on most of the people in the room. I hit the wall with a bang, got my foot up, pulled myself up with the strength of Hercules if Hercules was an out-of-shape woman with little to no upper body strength that was determined to reunite with her children and still make it to priority seating boarding.
When I came over, every jaw in the room had hit the floor. My pants, once black, were now a light grey. I used my white sweatshirt to wipe up the dusty footprints I left on the bench, and we were off in a little cloud of triumph mixed with humiliation with a generous sprinkling of smug on top. We made it to the gate right as our group was boarding, and all was right with the world, even if I was leaving a trail of dust behind me that would put Pig Pen to shame.
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