October 25, 2010. Monday.
Situation: Last night Moi tried to call Squeak to come in from outside: no response. This morning she found a scared Squeak high up a black walnut on our side hedgerow. We dragged a ladder over to the tree, but it hardly reaches to where she sits mewing. Moi suggests we wait an hour, see what she does. “Ezra’s big ladder is over there, but I don’t know how to work it,” she says. An hour later Moi calls me; she has moved our wobbly ladder over to the other side of the tree, and, with our aluminum pool pole, is trying to poke a blanket up to Squeak for her to grab. I tell her to let me try, but I can’t reach much farther than Moi. Neither of us dare climb higher than the fifth or sixth rung. Then I fit the leaf net onto the pole, Moi puts some cat food in it, and I try to poke it up so Squeak will get into the net. She rubs her cheek against the rim, looks down on all sides of the branch she’s on, and mews. “Ezra’s big ladder is over there,” Moi says, “but it’s too heavy for me to use.” I suggest that both of us carry the ladder over and see what we can make of it. “The Boy’s friends know how to work it, but I could never figure out how,” Moi says. I see that its extension uses the same basic mechanism as our smaller ladder, but the ladder is much heavier to handle. “Watch your hands,” Moi yells at me, as we hold the ladder straight up in the air, trying to slide the extension. “Don’t get your hands chopped off.” “Ezra uses that rope there to slide it up and down,” she finally tells me. I pull at the rope once, find that it works well. We slide the extension up a few rungs, lean the ladder on the other side of tree, then Moi climbs up and drapes a blanket over the top. But the ladder doesn’t reach up any farther than our other ladder. We lift it up again, pull the extension out more, then drop the ladder back down against the tree. We both come up with the idea of trying to coax Squeak into a box. I go to the trash pile to get a banana box; Moi ties a clotheline around it (she doesn’t follow my suggestion to push it up with two of her wigwam poles). She climbs up the ladder, but can’t throw the clotheline around the branch to pulley it up. She drops the box, climbs down and back up the ladder to drape more blankets over it. “I think Squeak’s taking a nap now,” and we go in the house to see if she’ll eventually venture down on her own. An hour later, Moi calls me: “I think if we extend the ladder up further.” Moi pulls the blankets off of it. We lift it up, pull on the rope, bang it against a branch, but finally manage to prop it just under the branch where Squeak sits. Moi climbs up the ladder higher than I’ve ever seen her go. “You holding onto the ladder?” she yells down at me. She drapes two blankets along the ladder, then tells me to hand her the pool pole. She pokes the net in and around Squeak, but the cat only mews and paws at it. Then Moi climbs down to get a whole can of cat food. She climbs back up, “You holding the ladder down there?,” and stretches to hold the can about a foot below Squeak. The cat digs her claws into the blanket and crawls down toward the can to where Moi can grab hold of her. It’s 2:30. After we put Squeak into the house, remove the ladders, and put the pole and blankets away (I also push the lawn mower down into the basement for the winter), I put on my walking clothes (I had been wearing my lounging pants all day; got boogie lice on them so I throw them in my laundry basket) and take Mway, who’s been staring at us with looks of disappointment for hours because we haven’t left her out, for a walk.
State of the Path: I bring a new stick I find in the yard, one that I think Mway had found somewhere and put there very early in the day – looks like it’s from a black walnut, has a crust of green fungus on it. The black oak down by the creek looks a brighter red. As I’m looking at it, I see a bird, with white on its wings, flying underneath the big oak at the hedgerow. Then I see a spot of red, redder than an oak leaf, and realize I’m seeing the bird’s head: I think it’s my friend, the red-bellied woodpecker. As Mway and I approach, it flies off. I don’t think I see it for more than 4 seconds. From the creek, I look back at the maples and see that half of them have turned yellow. Another oak along the creek looks even darker red than the ones near the hedgerow, but the leaves look to me like black oak leaves; the bark is deeply grooved, whatever that might mean. I cross the plank (after messing around with extension ladders all day, crossing it seems like nothing). The pin oak leaves seem browner; it and its companion oaks keep dropping leaves into the creek water.
State of the Creek: Winding black and quiet, thick with black undulating grass.
The Fetch: Mway fetches the stick, oblivious to how tired I am after spending all day trying to get a cat out of a tree. After a couple fetches, she rips off a few strips of the fungus-covered bark – I suppose (but this stick was her selection) so the stick doesn’t taste so bad.
4 comments:
OK, writing with a pencil may be slower, but I find it so much surer. Poke away at a keyboard and what happens? -- each word is uncertain, tentative, impermanent, so easy is it to press the “backspace” key and strike it out. But compare writing with a pencil. By the time I’ve pressed all that graphite down onto the paper to complete a whole word, I’m absolutely certain it’s le mot juste. In the long run, writing with a pencil may actually be quicker. It’s like the tortoise and the hare. One word comes slowly at a time, but it is one word creeping surely forward compared to the half dozen or more bandied about in the same time. And between words, if I’m momentarily at a loss what to write next, I simply fling the pencil across the room. By the time I’ve crossed the room to retrieve it, the next word usually has come to me. The words are going down on paper with Shakespearian alacrity – barely a blot on a page. I’ve already finished my first chapter – some 56 pages (though admittedly my handwriting – as you would call it – is somewhat large). By the way, I’m going to need a new pencil soon. MM.
Could it be that I’ve been preparing for this moment all my life? MM.
I have a favor to ask before I launch into my next chapter. I have a good sense about all my characters, but I’m not certain what the music of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis sounds like -- though, who knows, maybe I’ve heard it a million times. Tonight, in any case, could we listen to some of their recordings down in the music room, and could you throw the recording jackets down on the floor so I can keep track of the tunes? I’m especially interested in the composition ‘Round Midnight, as I understand this was a bone of contention between the two musicians. Also, could you make sure the Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary is always on the armchair? And could you make accessible any other dictionaries you have – in particular a dictionary on slang. Plus I’d like to reread Beckett’s works – if you could set those down on the floor? MM.
Don’t forget the new pencil. And another ream of paper. MM.
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