I’m a fan of mythological metaphors. Hence, Kali–lily.
In a piece that begins, “I love chimeras,” today Maureen Dowd ends her rant about GOP chimeras opening Pandora’s Box with:
The Republican Party is now a chimera, too, a mutant of old guard Republicans, who want government kept out of our lives, and evangelical Christians, who want government to legislate religion into our lives.
But exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education, even in the blue states and blue suburbs of Maryland; a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a “culture of life” than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Even as scientists issue rules on chimeras in labs, a spine-tingling he-monster with the power to drag us back into the pre-Darwinian dark ages is slouching around Washington. It’s a fire-breathing creature with the head of W., the body of Bill Frist and the serpent tail of Tom DeLay.
And then there are the wonder-full American anarchist Muppets, who have been sucked into Disney’s insatiably blanding maw.
Of course, the possibility of a culture clash between Disney and the Muppets always seemed quite obvious. Until recently, let us not forget, Disney would not employ anyone with a beard at its theme-parks. One look at any picture of Jim Henson and the 1970s creative nebulous of The Muppet Show, on the other hand, reveals a group of hairy hippies, most of whom look like Robinson Crusoe at Day 405 on Treasure Island. The Muppets are essentially joyous and irreverent — their currency is pigs loving frogs, caterpillars smoking hookahs, Dr Teeth and His Electric Mayhem having “bummers”, and a disgruntled Statler and Waldorf trying to assassinate the whole cast. It’s hippies parodying reactionaries, bread-heads, divas and bores. It’s hard to see how they will fit, intact, into Disney’s cleaner-than-clean, carefuller-than-careful corporate world.
We’re surrounded by ’em –the moneyed right-eous. It’s the Crusades all over again, but this time on an even more spiritually destructive and global scale.
(Heh. Were you beginning to think that I was so wrapped up in my Little Picture that I wasn’t interested in the Big One anymore??)

I haven’t posted about b!X lately, but I’m getting a kick out of the current flap over his curtain peeking. (For those of you new to this weblog, b!X is my erstwhile son who stirs up Portland, Oregon politics to force the truth rise to the top.)
The “man behind the curtain” never likes to have the spotlight focus on his handiwork. Meanwhile, b!X makes no effort to hide who he is or what his weblog is for.
I know that there are lots of webloggers who hide behind anonymity. Personally, I tend to see as more credible those who put themselves out there the way traditional newspaper columnists do — a little photo and a little bio. That makes them real to me and makes what they write more believable.
No curtain here. Just a little ol’ grandma raising hell at the keyboard. Well, maybe not so little. And not so old, either. Heh.

That’s what she’s asking as she sits in her recliner the morning after her cataract surgery. Her teeth are chattering; her hands and feet are ice cold. Her whole body hurts, she says.
Why me, she mutters. What did I do to deserve this? Am I such a bad person? Give me something to make me die.
I figure it’s a reaction to whatever anesthesia they had to give her to keep her calm for the eye surgery. We have to be at the eye doctor’s in two hours to get her bandage off and have her eye checked.
But she wants to die. She doesn’t want to get up and dressed.
I put a heating pad between her back and the chair. I cover her with a fleece throw. Make her hot coffee.
Why me, God? Was I such a bad person? She keeps asking.
And so I say, it doesn’t work like that, mom. Were the women and children that Americans killed in Iraq bad people? God has nothing to do with making bad things happen.
This all happened yesterday. We did make it to the doctor’s.
Last night I got onto Tamarika’s blog and found this richly long and wonerfully linked post on “The Atheist.”
One of the links was to a NY Times piece by Natalie Angiers, whom I researched and wrote an introduction to when I did some free-lance writing for a conference on Women and Science that was held at the Emma Willard School some fifteen years ago or so. (I also wrote a speech for Jane Fonda for that event — which, I have to say — she ignored in favor of touting her latest exercise video.)
Back to Natalie Angiers, who says in her essay:
So, I’ll out myself. I’m an Atheist. I don’t believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don’t believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren’t, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I’m convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let’s even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.
And later in the piece —
From my godless perspective, the devout remind me that it is human nature to thirst after meaning and to desire an expansion of purpose beyond the cramped Manhattan studio of self and its immediate relations. In her brief and beautiful book, “The Sacred Depths of Nature,” Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist, articulates a sensibility that she calls “religious naturalism,” a profound appreciation of the genuine workings of nature, conjoined with a commitment to preserving that natural world in all its staggering, interdependent splendor. Or call it transcendent atheism: I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.
I wish my mom could read those books, but she isn’t a reader. Never has been. As a result, she’s not much of a thinker either.
But she does think a lot about God. She needs someone to take responsibility for what happens to her. It’s never anything she does. She also worries that I’m damned. Begs me to pray.
As I’ve often said, if there is a “god” who actually allows all this awful stuff to happen to people, then I wouldn’t want to go to his heaven anyway.
I’d rather hang out with people like Natalie Angiers and Tamarika.
OK. So, how do my atheistic tendences jibe with doing ritual house cleansings and other such pagan-based ceremonies. Well, they’re psychologically empowering; they’re performances.
And we have not yet discovered all the laws of physics. Perhaps generating energy through communal ritual does somehow affect the cosmic flow and science hasn’t yet figured out how it happens.
If nothing else, I get a kick out of playing the conjuring Crone.
Headology and all that.

Over at Ronni’s, her cat Oliver, offers his side of the story.
I kinda like using the convention of anthropamorphizing animals or inanimate objects to offer a unique perspective on a situation. Maybe I’ll try it using my cat. Or maybe some object in my surroundings.
I’m thinking about it. Except I can’t think too much because I’ve had a major headache all afternoon.
Me: OW!!

… to end an exhausting day, although caring for a medicatedly docile mom is a lot easier than caring for a discombobulated one. But one cataract is out and she’s sleeping. I’ve had a week of having to remember to put one eye drop in the selected eye four times a day, and yesterday and today it was three different eye drops at various times. She had the easy part.
And this is the thought, by May Sarton — from today’s Writer’s Almanac:
“My cat likes to go out at one in the morning, so I have to let him out. And at two he meows to come in. [During that time] I make notes for poems. And then in the morning, when I’m all there, as much as I ever am, I work at them. I would not still be a poet without the cat.”
She also wrote, in her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, (1965), “There were moments … when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart.”
For me, there seems to be no getting to the real things, cat or not. At least not yet.

I took a break today. Got a massage. My sciatica’s acting up.
Tomorrow I’m taking mom in to have her left eye cataract removed. It’s going to be a busy day, I’m sure.
Today, I finally realized that between 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. is when my mother “sundowns.” Remaining calm through that is a challenge for me, since my instinctive response is to confront her about it.
I’m learning to take deep breaths, speak very slowly, and try to distract her. She seems to calm down if she can get on a roll telling me the old family stories that I’ve heard a hundred times already.
Deep breaths. Uh huh. Uh huh. Mmmm. I keep saying. She just keeps talking. Talking is better than ranting.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
It well might not bring any posts from here.

dormitory…………..dirty room
presbyterian………..best in prayer
desperation…………a rope ends it
george bush…………he bugs gore
the morse code………here come dots
slot machines……….cash lost in me
animosity…………..is no amity
mother in law……….woman hitler
snooze alarms……….alas! no more z’s
a decimal point……..I’m a dot in place
the earthquakes……..that queer shake
eleven plus two……..twelve plus one
and, for the grande finale:
PRESIDENT CLINTON OF THE USA…….TO COPULATE HE FINDS INTERNS

It’s May Day. You know, Beltane, fertility rites — at least some harmless dancing around a Maypole.
Unless you’re Catholic, and then it’s not nearly as much fun. Ancient pagan May Day festivities, which celebrated sexuality, were watered down by Christians (especially Catholics) into long lines of children carrying and/or strewing flowers in procession toward a statue of the Queen of Heaven — a virgin, of all things.
It’s really ironic that I, who, if I celebrated May Day at all, would prefer the Beltane way rather than the watered-down version, was, for several years running, the pre-teen girl who carried the wreath of flowers that crowned the statue of Queen of the May at the end of the procession.
I hated being the crown-bearer. I’d break out in hives on April 30, and my mom would have to make me soak in a tub full of baking soda solution. But my folks were prominent in the parish. I was expected — forced — to play my role as well.
That’s why I love the movie The Polish Wedding. The movie climaxes on a Catholic May Day event much different from any I experienced. It ends the way I wish mine did.
My mom hated the movie.
And this is what I remember singing the last time I walked down that aisle carring the crown and itching like crazy under my long, pale green taffeta dress:
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.
Of Mothers the dearest,
Oh, wilt thou be nearest,
When life with temptation
Is darkly replete?
Forsake us, O never!
Our hearts be they ever
As Pure as the lilies
We lay at thy feet.
Oh my. May Day! May Day!
And lest we forget,
…..May Day is not just about the arrival of spring. It is also 1880s workers demanding humane treatment; it is men and women around the world marching in solidarity against the factory owners who would have them work all day, every day but Sunday; it is anarchists, socialists, and leftists of every kind working together within the labor movement. This association of May Day with radicalism is ultimately what led to it being downplayed in contemporary accounts, while Labor Day remains as a state-sanctioned holiday.
The first May Day, in 1886, was a call for eight-hour workdays by the workers in many American cities; it is now mostly associated with the Haymarket Martyrs. A bomb thrown by an unknown person at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square killed one policeman; authorities rounded up whom they considered to be the leaders of the local labor movement and put them on trial. Mother Jones said of the incident: “The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.” …..
Mother Jones. Now’s she’s a real May Day Queen.

While she’s no Kazik, she’s mine, lopsided markings, assertive personality, and all.

She always where she’s not supposed to be.

And she follows me around like my “familiar.” Heh.
I got her from a pet store, where she was sitting in her pan of litter because the cage wasn’t big enough for her to sit anywhere else. Funny looking and no longer a kitten, she lay like a sphynx in the sand, refusing to look anywhere but straight ahead.
She cost me $25 bucks. She’s worth a million.
Calli. Because she’s a tortoise-shell calico. Or Kali, because….

Almost a dozen years ago, when my daughter went to the animal shelter in Boston to get a cat, she saw him slumped in the corner of his cage, looking (in human terms) depressed — unlike the other cats who were vying for her attention. When she had the cage opened and lifted him out, he immediately put his paws around her neck and started purring, nuzzling her neck and then hunkering down into her arms and sighing with relief. When put pack into his cage, he went back to his corner and lay as if dead. The worker there told of how he hated the cage and how unlikey it would be for someone to adopt the two-year old of mound of matted, hacked out, and drooling fur.
She was hooked.
Cleaned up, fed, and loved, he turned into an amazingly kingly feline in both nature and stature (despite his short legs).
She named him Kazik, the nickname for Kazimierz, which translates into Casimir, which is the name of one of Poland’s greatest kings.
Kazik had been having some physical problems lately. The test had shown a urinary track infection, diabetes, and more. He was on medication.
Yesterday evening, she found him on the floor near his litter box, laboring to breathe. They rushed him to the veterinary emergency room. All four of them went together — my daughter, son-in-law, grandson, and Kazik. It was past the toddler’s bedtime, but they all went together. Kazik was deeply loved by all of them.
Only three of them came back. They had to make the tough but necessary decision. Kazik died in her arms.
On the way home, my grandson insisted that he didn’t want to leave Kazik there. “Nooo, want Kazik to come home!”
They tried to explain that sometimes animals and people, like trucks, get broken. Sometimes you can fix them. But sometimes you can’t. They are too broken.
She had just had a similar conversation with him about Bambi’s mother. “Want Bambi to be with his mother!” he cried. She didn’t talk about the hunter; rather she told him that Bambi’s mother was hurt and broken. And how his father would take good care of him. “Nooo! Fix Bambi’s mother!”
When my grandson asks, they will tell him that Kazik is never coming home. That he was too broken to fix. They will talk about how they all loved him and how sad they all are that their wonderful pet is gone, and they will soon let him pick out his own cat from the shelter.
It’s my grandson’s first lesson about dying. It’s only the beginning of the lesson. As he asks, they will do their best to explain — within the context of their non-religious beliefs. (It’s so much simpler to explain if you believe in heaven.)
Kazik, yesterday. My mom at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Life is a long letting-go.

Goodbye, Kazik. You were, indeed, a loveable king of cats.