Category Memoir

Chosen by cats

Nancy Crowe

If you are in transition, chances are an animal is or is waiting to be your teacher. Cats in particular choose us for these missions, although some cleverly let us think we do the choosing.

For example: A tiny, loudmouthed tiger kitten adopted me at a Southern Indiana animal shelter when I was just out of graduate school and unsure of the next step. When I picked her up, she looked me straight in the eye and meowed. I’d passed muster.

UnknownRaven Mardirosian describes a similar experience in “Just Another Crazy Cat Lady Story” (2014). She had just arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado for graduate school. On the East Coast, she’d left behind her fundamentalist Christian family and her “sort-of” girlfriend at their Christian college, which banished Mardirosian from campus when their relationship was uncovered (by said girlfriend).

It was the beginning of many years of wandering — if not running — and yet there she was in an animal shelter, about to take on the commitment of adopting one of two kittens. She was drawn to the darker one, as the orange tabby reminded her a little too much of the beloved family cat whose loss she still grieved. But when the orange tabby’s tiny white paw grabbed her finger, Mardirosian knew she’d been chosen.

That orange tabby, Avery, became Mardirosian’s link to a kinder, gentler way of being amid a return to the East Coast and a series of jobs, schools, apartments and girlfriends. People in her life asked: When are you going to grow up? When are you going to get right with the Lord? Avery just napped in her lap, knowing she would figure it all out.

While living in New York City, Mardirosian adopted Zoey, a little gray street cat, through a fellow CCL (crazy cat lady). After thoroughly vetting Mardirosian and her living space, CCL brought Zoey for a trial visit.

Zoey turns her eyes my way: jade green, with just enough of a razor slit to show that I’m not the only bitch in the room. …

Then she decides to come over and say hello.

She likes you.

The magical three words. All of the chasing after my parents’ love, the attention of the beautiful redhead or blonde or black-haired girl at Henrietta’s … flies back in one terrifying sword of truth — she likes you — as Zoey remains in my lap, not quite seated, not quite standing.

She does, doesn’t she?

Still, in the beginning there was fearsome hissing and screaming, broken glass and an abscessed injury to the base of Avery’s tail. Though Zoey did settle down, she remained moody and opinionated — much like Idgie, my aforementioned loudmouthed tiger cat.

Mardirosian developed a unique relationship with each of her feline charges: “I’m much more aligned to Zoey, the secret observer. The runner. I’ve got that skill down pat. Avery challenges me to remove the labyrinth that winds its way around my heart and let others love me.”

Her account of Avery’s illness and the agonizing decision to let him go, after nearly two decades of life and love, is wrenching. Though deeply moving in and of itself, it brought back the loss of Idgie, who passed at age 16, quite vividly.

Even in her grief, Mardirosian recognizes, as I did, that her friend and guide is “safe, happy and free. … This crazy cat of mine will fly on. I may not know how — but trust the energy that propels him forward will move me in the same way.”

At our city shelter, I met a tortoiseshell kitten. I picked her up, and she reached out and patted my face with her paw. Lucy is now an easygoing 3-year-old, a very different cat with a new set of lessons.

My education continues.

Wings and water: A life in motion

Nancy Crowe 2 Comments

“Blue Heron Woman: Poems,” by Gail S. Burlakoff (2014)

This is not a review per se, as the author is a friend and former neighbor. Call it an observation.

“Blue Heron Woman” is the name given to Gail by a Cherokee-Cree medicine woman, the author bio explains, “and the name suits her; she has spent much of her life wadingBlue Heron Woman through one thing or another, watchfully waiting for the next adventure, moving from one place to another, defending her young, and surviving.”

The poems tell her story, from Hawaii just before and just after World War II to summers in the Ozarks; Panama; boarding school and college; as a “corporate wife” in St. Croix and Peru; and the end of that life and the beginning (and continuation) of another. It’s like a home movie with images that flicker by before taking off again, gradually forming a mosaic of a life.

It is not a fluid journey. There are stops and starts, joys and pains and choices. There is, Gail writes in a poem near the end of Part I, an itch to move on to something that will certainly be better — but the voices of the also well-traveled generations before her interrupt: “Halt. You are where you are for a reason. Stop, think, breathe, and be aware of who we are, Where we came from, Why we came. You are one of us, A courageous woman. Bless you.”

A blessing, indeed. I read the Kindle version of this book, but I recommend paper and ink for poetry. With an e-book I am never sure if the stanzas and line breaks are as the author intended, or if what I am looking at is simply where it all landed on the digital page. The photos, too (by Nikolai Burlakoff) would of course show up better in print.