Tazzi — December 2014, probably around 19
Dear friends and readers,
It’s been three weeks since I last wrote, and very slowly, painfully, not clear if at all truly, Clarycat is improving somewhat. The main thing is she is still eating, drinking, using her litter box, cleaning herself, and she is lively within limits. She follows me about, comes to the door when I return from being out, visits me in my chair in my workroom. She is aware something is wrong but not sure what it is, so remains in a kind of stunned state.
Yes my beloved Clarycat is now an elderly disabled cat. From some photos my friend, Martin, sent me, it appears that the way Clary often looks is commmon among cats in this “stage of life.” You see his beloved Tazzi at her best just above this in the last year(s) of life. I have opted (I think without meaning to act this way just not doing more as yet) not to go for x-rays lest the anesthesia kill her, and because I probably would not go to the huge expense and painful procedures in the hope I could prolong her life. The question is for how long? could they prevent another stroke? I remember what excruciating pain and misery Jim knew — after that operation. How no one helped him once the cancer metastasized into his liver. We should have cut loose and had one last holiday in England. Could he have had a good time with the idea in his head that now he must certainly die soon? He would not go to the fantastically expensive expert doctors. He only said to me near the end, “don’t let them hurt me. I know I may end in hospital and you won’t be able to help this.” In the event he died at home in the bed we had bought for him after the operation.
I am keeping an eye on her a good deal and she stays close to me; that means I pick her up and put her on my lap when she comes by, put her down, I help her steady herself. I did find her in her old spot between the back of my computer and one of the two workroom windows — the old spirit back. But she could topple any moment and topple the computer and wires so I have to take her down. She is slowly retrieving what she can but will never walk right again and never be able to climb much or come down from low heights easily.. She stays close and a new reinforcement of my homebody habits is how she looks forlorn when I go out. I find her cuddled into my side when I wake in the morning. She struggles to walk on her own. My job is to keep her spirits up.
Here is a poem Martin sent me that he wrote about Tazzi when she began to decline:
Our cat is old, she feels the cold
She sleeps beside a heater
Her world is shrunk to just one room
A basket on the kitchen floor
A food bowl, water, litter tray
No need for cat flap any more
She does not pass the kitchen door
A scarecrow, gaunt and deaf, she croaks,
A silent purr between your palms,
Her skin is thin, her backbone
Pricks beneath the fur you stroke
She cannot jump onto a chair,
Enfeebled legs will not permit her,
Who was so graceful, strong and fast.
The table cloth stays clean at last.
Her pleasure used to be to sit
in the front window
and watch the passing street.
But you cannot leave a cat alone
However still she looks
Who cannot get outside in time,
And pees on books.
She came to us some six years old
A rescue cat, is now perhaps nineteen.
She put her paws up on my chest,
And she decided it was us.
Dismissing all the rest.
The former cat, blocked by a door
Would quietly dig the carpet up.
But she will stand at the door and squawk
Requiring service now now now
Unusual cat, to almost talk.
There has been a time when she would wait
While I made breakfast and had sat down
To sit upon my lap
A few minutes before wandering off.
Allowing of affection
You could not pet a person so
Unharmed by petting, unseduced
Indifferent going on her way
The action left the better.
Despite it all, the spark of life
Is still alight, she has a healthy
Appetite for what she likes,
An unexpected turn of speed
When chicken scraps appear.
O sweety puss, O kitty cat,
A dragging leg today,
Not a good sign I fear,
But you just carry on,
There’s no self-pity there.
That’s right: there is no self-pity in Clarycat.
On her blanket a couple of mornings ago
Clarycat is one of my living links with Jim. She grieved for his death, as he lay dying by running back and forth in the hall, caw-cawing. She sat in his chair for two weeks after his body was taken out — she was waiting for him to return. When he didn’t, she slowly became attached to me.
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But yesterday morning fraughtness reached a different kind of height. I finally faced the reality that our passports may be rejected when we try to travel. The UK site says the passport need only be valid for the time we are there, but I phoned at last — the British embassy and British Airways, went to two different post offices, phoned online another person: the answer was airports have no general rule, and British Airways itself might not let us aboard because our passports will expire before the end of six month afterwards. When I heard “you can never tell with security guards,” my heart sunk. These are silent petty tyrants (the worst type of authority figure) I’ve had to deal with three times now – they ignore all you say. You have no civil rights.
When I found the place on line where we were to print out the application, I discovered that Izzy had said nothing because she too was reluctant to mail the passport off — out of fear it would not return in time. I was in the position of having to pressure her to do what was painful for me to do. I needed her help to navigate the damn site. Together we managed it. I knew where to go to get the passport photos — still the local drugstores are doing it. Our ordeal began at 9:30 am when we got online to look; and it ended at 11:45 am when we were driving back home having handed in to our local post office two envelopes with all the appropriate materials in them. Cross your fingers for us. Hope very hard. I have lost nearly $2000 since Jim died in non-refunded airplane fees (twice on Expedia I was egregiously robbed; cancelling a flight because of the pandemic I got nothing back) so if we must buy our airplane tickets ahead and the passports don’t come by late August, what then?
I told (by the way) my congressman would help expedite the passport renewal. Neither of his phones takes messages and it is explicitly written on the website, he can do nothing about passport renewals as the state department will not answer queries. The post office no longer helps you (De Joy strikes again). Ordinary people who know no one like Izzy and I are powerless w/o laws and customs on our side. They used to be, a little bit. No longer.
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Ah, I see I’ve not told you — my friends reading this — why we are traveling. Well around middle to later March my proposal to give a paper at the upcoming Trollope Society conference at Somerville College, in Oxford, September 1-3, on the theme of Trollope and Women was accepted! We are in time to stay in the college too! Izzy will come (I could not do it without her), and we hope to spend three days in London afterwards.
Somerville College, Oxford, very early women’s college (recent photo)
Finally see the Imperial War Museum with its fabulous collections of art (not sure which schools, perhaps many?) and its legendary history exhibits. Go to a play. Walk in the London parks again.
Here is my proposal:
Anna Carteret at Lady Mabel Grex (1974 Pallisers, from The Duke’s Children) — she gazes out the window at Frank Treghear and Lady Mary Palliser
Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction
Using a gendered perspective, I will discuss women characters who act, think, and feel in unexpected ways, whom recent readers find hard to explain, and cause controversy. I’ll focus on lesser known as well as more familiar presences.
My first & central pair will be Clara Amedroz and Mrs. Askerton from The Belton Estate. Most essays have been about how Clara at first prefers the glamorous, guarded, demanding and upper-class Captain Aylmer to the open-hearted, farmer-like, affectionate Will Belton. I will dwell on Clara’s refusal to give up her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a woman who fled an abusive husband and lived with him before her husband died, thus enabling Mr. Askerton and her to marry. Mrs. Askerton is stunningly unexpected in her generosity of spirit and mix of conventional and unconventional views. The first half of my talk will move from Clara to other young about to, just married or not marriageable women whose lives take them in insightful directions, e.g., Lily Dale, Miss Viner (“Journey to Panama”), Lady Glencora, Emily Lopez.
The second half of my talk will move from Mrs. Askerston to sexually and socially experienced disillusioned women, e.g., Madame Max, Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Mabel Grex, Mrs. Peacocke (Dr Wortle’s School), as well as older mature women who are mothers, and whom Trollope takes seriously, e.g., Lady Lufton, Mrs. Crawley, Lady Mason.
Trollope dramatizes what might seem perversities of behavior these women resort to as contrivances to get round a lack of concrete power (used against them, sometimes by other women, e.g., Lady Aylmer) to try to achieve results they can be happy or live in peace with. The point of the talk is to show how Trollope probes and makes visible psychological and iconoclastic realities in his women characters’ lives.
While I’m about it, I might as well tell why I am reading — and just reveling in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. I realize now that I never read it with enough attention, never gave it the respect it deserves as a brilliant account of a woman’s college (it takes place at Somerville where Sayers went! — called Shrewsbury in the novel). I remember who did it so am collecting clues! It’s like reading Austen’s Emma for the second time. My proposal for an online 4 week winter course at OLLI at Mason was accepted too:
Women in and writing Detective-Mystery Stories
We will explore the genre of detective stories of the mystery-thriller type from the angle of the woman writer, detective, victim & murderer: our three books will be Josephine Tey’s (Elizabeth MacKintosh) The Daughter of Time (the story the mystery of Richard III); Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night; and P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. We’ll also see (outside class) and discuss two movies: Robert Altman and Jerome Fellowes’s Gosford Park and J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (as rewritten by Helen Edmunsen and directed by Aisling Walsh). It’s a feminist literary history course, an outgrowth in one direction of the course I taught this past winter: The [archetypal] Heroine’s Journey
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This may be labelled fraught days we have learned to avoid. I’m now following or receiving substack newsletters from Susan Bordo, whose books on feminism, the body, literature, I once admired and read in. She writes vigorously and in the middle of the month described her fraught ordeal making out her and her husband’s taxes. She does them, using Turbo Tax: Turbo Tax Hell.
I was moved to write as follows:
My husband always did the taxes; he had a Ph.d in Math and was good in arithmetic. I have yet to figure out how to do percentages and long division. And he was very impatient, a bad teacher. So he did the taxes until he died — some 10 years ago now. My adventures with Turbo Tax and my older daughter the first year after his death will go undiscussed. For 3 years I was gouged by experts who couldn’t be bothered to understand what was my predicament. I have a portfolio of invested money by Schwabb, a legacy from my parents). I have an autistic (my younger) daughter who lives at home but makes a good income. She comes with me with her forms. Finally through the OLLI at Mason where I teach and a course called How to do your Taxes I learned a little about what all the rectangles meant — I began to realize why my father each year would become enraged at how much he had to pay. But through them I discovered AARP does anyone’s taxes for free if there is an office nearby. The first year took them 4 hours. You might say luckily I have never made any money on my 2 books. The people put notes in explaining everything — We arrive at the library we go to where AARP can found as the door’s open and get out around noon — mine now takes 2 hours + — but we also spend time waiting in a line of chairs too. The whole thing makes me so nervous that this year for the first time I discovered I was writing down wrong information about when my husband died. No one ever caught it.
So there you have what happened to me, to us, to our family group (includes two cats) this month that matters most in practical ways and practical things matter.
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Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke hard at work on proposed new cottages which her uncle will never build (1994 Middlemarch, scripted by Andrew Davies)
We have begin Eliot’s Middlemarch on Trollope&Peers and the reading and discussion will take all summer; in a few nights (if not tonight) I shall turn my attention to Elizabeth Gaskell and her Wives and Daughters, as I’ll be reading and teaching it at OLLI at Mason from middle June to late July. Both books have exceptionally superb Andrew Davies film adaptations. The two Italian classes I’m teaching are going well. Would you believe I’m reviewing a book for an 18th century Intelligencer where I’m rereading Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers: I remember Anne Oldfield. I had no idea he derived some of his early wealth from enslaved people on plantations. I’ve two subscriptions with my friend Betty to see operas and go to plays next year; one with Izzy to go to the Folger once again to see Shakespeare. So I soothe myself.
I lost my one close and true friend of 44 years and all I do is an effort to replace him. I’m listening to Ross Poldark by Winston Graham being read aloud in my car and I realize I loved it so because the couple at the center are to me Jim and me. The attitude towards class and social life mine. I love to escape to these historical fictions and romances and to real historical narratives too — I’ve now added mystery-thrillers of the detective story type descending from Agatha Christie. I have decided Joan Hickman has it closest; it is with her we feel safer. Let’s hear it for spinsters and widows alone.
Miss Marple — I’ve enjoyed four serials thus far and am just mesmerized by PD James’s Dalgliesh (two thus far) on TV; her books have a quiet but persistent melancholic vein that makes them worth while …
So I’ve succumbed after all — how gentle, tender and touching are the Dorothy Sayers mysteries with Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter — I’m loving him in the book too. Escape from the present into an Arcadia where death still resides, from hard lives to dreams that create an analogous experience to those I imagined and was really in with Jim.
And on the other hand, the way I’m learning to read Elena Ferrante’s books from The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chihava, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards I find I can do in these women’s mysteries: in the interstices of these — Gaudy Night, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Jessie Childs’s The Siege of Loyalty House (harking me back to DuMaurier’s King’s General only this one so much realer and close to today’s fascism rising) even, is the discovery of myself and aspects of my journey in my mind and feeling I find across The Neapolitan Quartet. Really.
It is very hard to live on without Jim — I spend hours, days, weeks, months alone working here (reading, writing) and playing here (movies and friends’ chat) conflicted because I don’t force myself to go out — where I am sometimes rejuvenated but often come home so stressed and wonder why I went. I now know that what I am driven to do to my feet sometimes is a form of stimming. I keep learning at these autism sessions so much. Our (me, Nina, Bianca) first Women with Autism online zoom group seemed to go so well. Another thing for you to cross your fingers for me. I am so very frightened without him.
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 