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June 3,1998
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litterboxes and laundry without endJaguar spent the entire morning curled up in a tight ball inside one of the round cat condos. A small tuft of white hair stuck out the opening. He stayed there through all the cleaning activity, through Roberta piling two loads of clean laundry from the dryer over the condo, through the vacuum cleaner. Around noon he emerged, walked slowly in a dignified manner to the community water dish and drank deeply for about 5 minutes. Maybe longer. He just kept lapping up water like he'd never had a drink in his life. On his way back to his hiding place in the cat condo he sniffed at some clean litterboxes on the floor next to the big yellow bucket of litter and Roberta was sure he was about to spray. He didn't. Goldie and Bobby were going at it like crazy. Goldie had Bobby in a head lock. Both were growling and meowing but not hissing. Then Goldie just trotted off to the laundry room and curled up by the window like nothing had happened. Another one of the black cats went after Alexis who seems to be unpopular with other cats despite her gorgeous coon cat appearance and friendly way with people. Maybe the other cats are jealous of the attention she gets. I worked in slow motion and a semi-trance from lack of sleep and general lethargy, ennui, anomie, whatever. I'm sort of dull and spacy lately. Anyway, about 11:00 I was sure I would never get the dishes and litterboxes done by 12:00 so I could show Roberta how to retrieve and read her e-mail before she had to leave to go pick up her son. In fact I started to feel like I would never be done. This weird vision of the rest of my life stretched out in front of me: an endless loop of litterboxes getting peed in as soon as I got them clean and accumulating faster and faster as I kept having to stop washing them to load and unload the washer and dryer. I could not imagine myself ever stopping, as if I were caught in some sticky stuff that solidified around me. I'd work harder and harder and get fewer and fewer clean litterboxes to show for it. The mountain of wet laundry waiting for the dryer would grow ever higher until I was surrounded by it unable to move. I shook myself out of this by describing last night's thunderstorms. Yes, another band of thunderstorms roared through last night on top of Sunday's spectacle and Friday's sneak attack. No tornadoes or microbursts reported last night though. The bright white flashes of light woke me up several times last night. Roberta, Bob, and Nora all said they didn't know there were any thunderstorms last night, that either they slept through them or the storms didn't make it to the coast. Nora suggested that the bright white flashes of light might be signs of alien abduction ... or a near death experience... but I'm sure they were lightning. The radio reported severe thunderstorms here and this morning I saw a few branches down and lots of puddles. Besides, wouldn't I have noticed if I'd been abducted by aliens? chidoriEver since the bookphobic homophobic painter moved all my books to the basement and criticized my choices (what was that, like 3 years ago now?) and the interior decorator made sweeping gestures indicating my few books in the living/dining room should be moved upstairs, I have this thing about my books cluttering up the bedroom. Hmm, the painter wanted them in the basement if they had to be here at all and the decorator wanted them out of sight in the "public" rooms of the house, and for that matter, the assistant decorator dweeb suggested putting a screen in front of the book cases my friends and I finally installed in the closet (doors removed) in my office so guests sleeping on the futon wouldn't have to look at my books. Mind you said books are neatly arranged and organized in categories and aren't particularly offensive to look at (or to read for that matter) but I developed a thing anyway. I've gone right on buying books and reading them, but I did hit a bit of a reading slump at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, which I am finally get over. During that time the books I kept buying accumulated unread on the bedside table along with books periodically pulled off the shelves for reference and not put back. So the other night I had a bookquake. A book avalanche. Lots of books on the floor next to the bed. I decreed it time to go through them and reshelve the ones that I'd read and had places waiting for them in the office and sort the new and unread ones into piles by subject in preparation for shelving and reading. Not that I have enough shelves for them, but I liked the idea of at least grouping them in categories again. You never know when I might need to round up all the Antarctica books or all the Japan as seen by 19th century gaijin books or whatever. So last night I was sorting through the books and picked up William Higginson's The Haiku Seasons for a browse (one must browse while sorting - it's part of the ritual). I opened to the following anonymous poem:
The word for plover in Japanese is chidori, which is on the official list of seasonal words as a winter word. I looked it up in my trusty Martin's Japanese-English dictionary but it wasn't there. Martin's is short on haiku season words and long on business terms (ah, my old life rears its head). Anyway, I got to wondering: What kind of plovers live in Japan? I turned to Birds of Japan by Mark Brazil, conveniently located a few books further along in the pile, and read the entire plover section. None of the usual plovers I know and love (piping plover, semipalmated plover, and black-bellied plover) seem to occur in Japan. I don't know why chidori is a winter season word. Most of the species described in the book occur in autumn. I tried to figure out which species the haiku poet referred to and guessed that it must be Charadrius veredus (Oriental Plover) because the common name in Japanese is O-chidori, which would, I think, translate to "honorable plover", except that the book lists it as an accidental with only 20 confirmed sightings. So the identity of the haiku plover remains a mystery, but I had a really pleasant "Janet's library moment." marine iguanaIn another "Janet's library moment " last night, Nancy asked me to look at Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle to verify something quoted by David Quammen re Darwin throwing a marine iguana into the water. I remembered the passage but had a hard time finding the page. Nancy remembered it as being a land iguana, but Quammen's citation referred to marine iguana. The hunt was on. Finally, since the index was no help I turned to the pages having to do with islands where I had seen marine iguanas, figuring Darwin would have seen them in the same places. Sure enough, I found the relevant passage and it was indeed a marine iguana that Darwin repeatedly threw into the water to watch it swim back to him. He viewed this as evidence that the marine iguana felt safer on land, as well as indicating marine iguana is stupid. the new tiresAnd now back to today's story after that pleasant library interlude. After litterbox washing and Roberta's e-mail lessons, I zipped home and changed my wet, bleachy t-shirt and dirty jeans for nice clean jeans and a clean California Native Plant Society t-shirt that Joan-west had given me for some birthday or other. I grabbed a book from the newly sorted pile: Jennifer Ackerman's Notes from the Shore. I got to the North Reading Midas shop at exactly 2:00 PM and the tires weren't there yet. The guy took my car into the garage, put it up on the lift , and took the old tires off in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the tires. I sat with Notes from the Shore and had read a full third of it before the tire delivery truck finally arrived. Customers came and went with minor things - two loose heat shields, one thing that cost $17.49 (I have no idea what it was), and lots more. The Midas shop has an aquarium in the waiting room. It's a magnifying spherical container set into a black box. It looks elegant and makes the fish look gigantic. Little tetras and goldfish looking big enough to eat for dinner. Two little kids waiting for the heat shield to be tightened on their mom's car got really excited about the fish. By 4:15 when my tires were all installed and I was ready to hit the road again I'd read nearly half of Notes from the Shore. |
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