Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans

Last Saturday’s posting announced a companion book to A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story, which I’ve been promoting on this blog since December 8 of last year. The first book gave birth to the second. How? Through the wisdom of an editor.

            Way back in April 1991, this prospective editor for A Cat’s Life wrote me she’d be interested in the manuscript but only if I deleted half of the 42,000 words. I did and Crown subsequently published Dulcy’s first book in September 1992.

Drawing by Judy J. King from A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story.

            The remaining words have languished on the computer since that time. I tried to breathe life into them three times, but that same editor found them wanting. Years passed and the editor left Crown before I finally hit upon an idea that worked for me. However, it didn’t work for any editors or agents I queried. None of them even asked to see the manuscript.

            Ultimately, I titled the manuscript Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans by Dulcy and Dee Ready and decided to publish through Wayman, a new press that offered publication. In her second book, Dulcy suggests to fellow cats twelve habits that can make their lives with humans and with one another the nirvana they longed for. Following each habit is a short reflection I’ve written to show how Dulcy’s habit has influenced my life. Twelve habits; twelve stories purred by Dulcy; twelve reflections mulled by me.

            Today, I’d like to give you a sample of Dulcy’s writing and also of mine. She titles her eighth habit “Accept the Inevitable.” To illustrate her contention that a great gulf exists between the inevitable and the merely intolerable, she inserted a poem detailing her response to my attempt to convert the two cats with whom I lived to vegetarianism.

            Dulcy rebelled. Becoming a feline vegetarian was not inevitable, only intolerable. She purred her disgruntlement in the following poem:

Where is my food?

My giblets with gravy?

My liver with sauce?

My tuna with oil?

My beef with its broth?

I won’t taste these pellets.

These are not good hors d’oeuvres—

not toothsome

not tasty

not luscious

not pleasing—

To one whose fine palate

Knows real haute cuisine.

So give me my food,

My gravy, my beef.

I won’t eat these nuggets.

I won’t stoop to bawl,

But give me delectables,

Or give nothing at all.

Dulcy incorporats this poem into her text for the habit. I follow her text with my own. Here’s my take on Habit 8.

How can we recognize the inevitable as opposed to the intolerable? Dulcy seems so sure of the difference. She saw Bartleby and the love I felt for him as inevitable. But when I brought a third cat into our household, she found this intolerable and disappeared into the pantry for an entire year. Daily she crouched on a shelf there. She left it only to go outside.

For one year she did not talk to me or lie on my lap or lick my fingers. Her message was clear: “Living with Tybalt is intolerable.” And so I gave him to a farmer who later called and said that Tyb was a great mouser.

I have not always been so sure of the difference between inevitable and intolerable. Twice I almost had a nervous breakdown because I accepted as inevitable the conditions under which I was living and working.

But when I let silence surround me and listened to the stirrings of my heart, to the instinct I had for survival, I realized that staying in these situations was not inevitable. The work was merely intolerable. I could leave; I could change the furniture of my life.

What is inevitable? What must happen? Children growing up? Yes. Our bodies slowing down? Yes. Aging? Yes. Death? Yes. Time takes its toll on bodies. They break down, rust out, die. All that is inevitable. And perhaps one other thing is inevitable—love, freely given, abounds in possibilities.

Love can have all the life-giving force of a rain shower. It can help us grow and blossom into all we were meant to be. It can help us flower. The result of a love that is given freely and unconditionally is growth in the spirit.

That growth is inevitable. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Dulcy believes that the great god of cats calls us to fields of love. That, too, is inevitable.

There you have it—a sample from Dulcy’s companion book Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans and a sample also of Dulcy’s wit with regard to her life experience and the philosophy flowing from my own.

Purr and peace to you.

A Cat's Life: Dulcy's Story

In a posting last June, I described my relationship to a cat who, when we first met, gifted me with her name. She was Dulcy, the sweet one. After her death, she purred the story of our life together in a book channeled through me.

        A later December posting detailed how I came to have 670 trade paperback copies of that book—A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story. At that time, readers could purchase it through PayPal. Now Amazon sells it, as well as the e-book edition. All this gladdens me.

        Why recall this to you today? Because next Tuesday, a second book Dulcy created will become available. It is entitled Twelve Habits of Highly Successful Cats and Their Humans by Dulcy and Dee Ready. In my next posting, I'll explain how this companion book came to be. Today, I’d like to share with you the story of how I realized that I needed Dulcy in my life.

        I’ve already related the story of my return to Dayton in 1971 upon the completion of grad school. I could find no work because of having an FBI file. However, a warehouse manager hired me. Unfortunately, the warehouse sat outside the city limits, and without a car, I had no way to get there. Luckily for me, a fellow employee offered to pick me up at the home of a mutual friend. I’d ride my bike there each weekday morning and hitch a ride.

        One November afternoon, I pedaled happily away from the friend's house, turned left, and traveled a few blocks down a neighborhood street. All was as usual until I heard a car approaching behind me. Slowly, ever so slowly and deliberately, the car edged me closer and closer to the curbing. I kept pedaling, staring ahead, not wanting to look to the left side for fear of eye contact.

        Long moments passed. Pedaling became difficult in the narrow passage between the side of the car and the curb. Unexpectedly, a hand reached out the car window to grab and twist my wrist. It shoved me sideways so that the bike and I tumbled to the ground. My body fell awkwardly, my feet still held captive by the pedal guard.

        As the car sped away, I could see the heads of two men.

        I lay shaking on the grassy verge for a few moments, fearful that they’d come back. Glancing at my aching wrist, I realized that the intrusive hand had twisted off my watch. I’d treasured it for seventeen years because my aunt had given it to me when I graduated from high school. It was now gone, but were the two men?

       Clumsily, I mounted the bike and pedaled furiously toward home. On the way, I sang “I Whistle a Happy Tune” as loudly as I could. 

        

Then, as I’d feared, the car drew alongside me again. The two young men inside greeted me cheerily.

        Ignoring them, I concentrated on pedaling. Finally, perhaps annoyed with my off-key singing, they sped away. I was relieved because I'd feared they’d follow me to where I lived.

        A few days later, the warehouse manager fired me and I got a job teaching at a dropout center. Then in March 1972, a friend, worried because I had no one to go home to for comfort, encouraged me to pick out a kitten from the litter in her upstairs closet. Thus, Dulcy came into my life.

        For the next seventeen and a half years, she became my ally. Not only was she the sweet one. She was solicitous about my welfare, always greeting me with a purr and a rub of my ankles. She became, I say this with deep gratitude, my companion.

   

Choosing a Definition

In August 1973, a Minnesota friend invited me to work on a reading curriculum. I lived in Stillwater while completing the project.

The St. Croix river flows past Stillwater, Minnesota,

a town of 11,000 when I moved there in 1973.

            Steeped in lumberjack lore, the oldest town in Minnesota sits contentedly next to the St. Croix. This river town has a charm I’d never met before, and it became my home for the next thirty-six years. Early on—in September 1981—I became a vegetarian. My reasoning, once again, was based on what I considered peace and justice issues. Here’s the story of how that happened.

            A convent friend visited, bearing a gift. The cover of Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition proclaimed that it was “America’s first complete guide to cooking delicious natural foods.” Annette knew that I gardened and enjoyed trying new recipes. “The gift seems perfect for you,” she said.

My battered copy of Laurel’s Kitchen sits before me.

            She was right. Together, the two of us sat next to the river—she meditating on its lazy flow and I devouring the book’s introductory section: “Giving the Gift of Life.” Her gift lies open now on my computer desk so I can easily find the passage that changed my life. I began the paperback not knowing that the words printed on page 39 would touch some part of myself that had awaited definition.

As of mid-1975, world famine has intensified to the point that fifteen thousand human beings, most of them children, are dying of malnutrition each day. For the first time in its twenty-seven-year history UNICEF has declared an emergency situation. Meanwhile, for all our own anxieties over economic recession, the major health problems in the United States continue to be those related to overconsumption. Our consumption patterns are hurting us, and they are now jeopardizing life the world over.

            Our meat-based diet is perhaps the most obvious example. We now consume about twice the protein our bodies need, and beef is our hands-down favorite way of doing it. As Frances Moore Lappé has shown us, every pound of beef on our table represents sixteen pounds of grain and legumes removed from the total available to a hungry world. What we do not all realize is that this high-protein feed is administered to a steer during the last few weeks of its existence. The sole function of most of the soybeans and other feed crops we raise is to turn lean range-fed beef into the marbled fat beef that our doctors warn us against.

            The relationship between meat consumption and available grain is therefore more sensitive than we might think. If demand for meat goes down, the steer’s last-minute cram session does not take place. In 1974,when the market for meat did fall, the grain that was so unexpectedly released actually did find its way to poorer countries. (The italicized word is in the original.)  

            I responded wholeheartedly to these paragraphs. Here’s how my thinking ran: If my eating less beef would help the hungry of the world, then eating no beef would help even more. By doing this, I would be silently affirming my belief in the holiness of all life. Moreover, less consumption meant fewer steers raised and that meant fewer of these sentient creatures would die.

            The final statement of course had to be that I would also cease to consume chicken and fish. They, too, were sentient creatures, and chickens especially were being raised in abysmal conditions.

            “I’m a vegetarian now,” I announced to Annette.

             “What prompted this?” she asked.

            I read her the three paragraphs. She refrained from citing the counter arguments about one person being able to do little to feed the whole world. Knowing me well, she knew that for me life is holy. Sacred. And becoming a vegetarian would be a way of living that belief.

            We drove home. I emptied the freezer of chicken, beef, and fish; gave the trove to a friend; and settled down to learn how to cook as a vegetarian and what to order at restaurants. I’ve never regretted this decision.

            As Lao-tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” Out of the stillness of my commitment arises the transformation.

            

Moving, Moving, Moving On

Toward the end of the school year in 1972, I felt the need to move on. Actually, this on-line memoir has shown me that I had a tendency during those first years out of the convent to move on often—to a new apartment, a new job, a new state. 

            This nomadic lifestyle began in the convent. I took first vows in January 1960. From that time until December 1966—six and a half years later—the Mother Superior sent me to five schools in two states.

            To use an analogy, by the time I left the convent, I’d become a sprinter, not a long-distance runner. That is, I didn’t stay long in any one place.

            After the convent, I stayed at home in Missouri for a month. Then I moved to Dayton, Ohio, to work. During the next two and a half years, I lived in six apartments before attending grad school in Minnesota for two years, living off-campus.

            Returning to Dayton, I lived in an apartment and taught at the dropout center for a year. Next, I moved to New Hampshire, where I lived in an apartment for three months before settling in an 1810 farmhouse with two roommates. A year later I returned to Missouri. Several weeks later, I drove north to Minnesota to work.

The autumn beauty of New Hampshire.

            So in the six and a half years between leaving the convent and moving back to Minnesota, I lived in eleven residences and four states.

            Add it up.

            In thirteen years—from January 1960 to August 1973—I lived in sixteen residences in six states.

            Once I moved back to Minnesota, I lived in two different places before I bought a home in May 1977 and ceased to roam—or, to use my analogy, to sprint. I abided in that welcoming 1870 lumberjack home for thirty-two years.

            During those thirteen years of wanderlust, I never thought of settling in one place. Strangely, I’d left the convent because I thought I wasn’t a good teacher and yet again and again I’d reentered classrooms. While at the dropout center in 1972, I’d even flown to Detroit for two job interviews to teach outside the United States.

            In a spacious hotel room in the Motor City, an urbane gentleman interviewed me for a job teaching at an American school in Turkey. He asked me to give him three, short definitions of myself.

            “I’m a human being seeking meaning. A teacher who values community. And an animal lover.”

            Next he asked me about my philosophy of education.

            Then he offered me the job for an enticing $10,000 a year. Since I’d been making $7,000, this tempted me. However, I had one question that would influence my decision.

             “Will I wear a veil when I go out of the school’s compound?” I asked.

            “Yes.”

            “I wore a veil for eight years. Long enough for me.”

            My next Detroit interview was for a job teaching in Aruba for a U.S. company that had established a school for its employee’s children. Afterward, I was offered the job—for $12,000 a year.

Oranjestad—the capital of Aruba.

            Before accepting, I again asked one question: “Do you facilitate meetings between the children who are citizens of Aruba and the visiting children of your employees?

            “No.”

            Once again, I turned down the job.

            On my return to Dayton, I began to look for a teaching position in New England. While getting a graduate degree in American Studies, I’d become intrigued with that area and its Yankee mentality.

            By this time, I’d learned to drive and bought my first car. So in August 1972, I headed northeast. I stayed in Claremont, New Hampshire, for only one year. You can read about my teaching there in the following postings:

·      Two Roads Diverged

·      Holy Ground

·      The Box Sprung Open

·      Thank You One and All

            Thanks for joining me on this peripatetic journey throughout my life. One of these fine posting days I’ll share with you my conclusions on why I kept moving on. And why I am now moving again—back to Minnesota. Hang in there with me!

Photographs from Wikipedia

Afterword #1: Throughout the remainder of May, I’ll post about the publication of a new book that is a companion to A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story as well as several other social justice issues that have impinged on my life since 1973 when I left Claremont, New Hampshire.

Afterword #2: At the Dayton dropout center, I participated in segregated education. If you’re interested in  reading an article in today’s New York Times about these schools in New York City, please click here.

Walking the Walk

The Dayton Dropout Center was an alternative high school for young people who’d dropped out of the public school system, but still wanted to work for a diploma. On Saturday, I explained that sixty of these sixty-one students were African Americans. Five of the seven teachers were also African American. Only Denny and I were Caucasian, and we two caused a brief uproar among the other teachers.

            Denny had been at Woodstock, and his view of the prevailing culture was even more jaded than mine. Both of us were somewhat aligned with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s—he, much more than I. Denny never spoke of his background, but I assumed, because of things he said and his casual approach to money, that he was of the upper class. I’d come from a working-class background, and had little money, but I surely was part of the prevailing white culture.

Woodstock Poster for the 1969 gathering.

            I’d been involved in the Vietnam War protest; I wasn’t married, nor did I have children; and I’d been a Roman Catholic nun. So my concerns differed somewhat from many other women.

            Denny was a Jewish man of fierce intelligence who didn’t suffer fools gladly. Like myself, he felt that much of what happened in Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, and Vietnam was accomplished by foolish men whose value systems had gone astray. They’d lost their way.

The peace symbol created in Great Britain.

            The students valued Denny’s opinion because he seemed so confident in himself and his views. He seemed to simply know the answer to any problem a student presented. Moreover, his wit was dry and sometimes acerbic. The students, to use a word I seldom use, adored him.

            The dropout center opened its doors to students in late November 1971. By March, Denny and I both felt that the school’s goal was misguided. Its founder wanted to help African American students enter the middle class of the dominant culture. Denny and I both considered this white culture to be shallow and materialistic. Despite that, we’d done our part to fulfill the school’s goal. Yet both of us were beginning to balk.

            We wanted the students to embrace their own culture. Motown records had made people everywhere aware of the richness of the Black culture. Moreover, universities around the country were  establishing Black Studies programs that explored the contributions of black writers, musicians, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs to American society.

J. C. Penney, Jr., who established the J. C. Penney department stores in 1902.

            Denny and I wanted the students to reject the dominant culture, just as we’d rejected it—or so we thought. One afternoon we seven teachers sat down together in a spare classroom to discuss what seemed like a dilemma to Denny and me. The two of us explained where we were coming from. Then the conversation went something like this.

            “You’ve got it all wrong,” the teachers told the two of us.

            “Why should anyone want to be part of this culture? It stinks!” Denny and I countered.

            “The two of you are well intentioned. A bit idealistic, though. You’re part of the culture you’re putting down.”

            “We’re opting out.”

            “Just how are you doing that? You both live in white neighborhoods. You shop in any store you want. You don’t worry about the police following you down streets when you drive around town. You both have bank accounts. You’re both highly educated in predominately white universities. Tell us—just how have you dropped out?”

            “But we didn’t choose that. We were born into it. Now we’re rejecting it.”

            “Doesn’t look like that. You haven’t rented a room in the inner city and tried to shop at the grocery stores there. You don’t frequent the stores in this neighborhood. You drive away from this school each day and into your side of town—with its clean stores and advantages. You talk the talk. But you don’t walk the walk.

            Silence.

            “The truth is you’re asking these children to reject what they’ve never had.”

            Silence.

            “You can’t reject what you’ve never had. You need to have it first.”

            “But it’s not worth having.”

            “You say that because you have it. These students need to taste the good life. Only then will they know both lives and only then can they choose—with knowledge and experience—to reject one or the other. Or to somehow embrace both.”

            Silence and then, “That makes sense.”

            Denny and I returned to the classroom. We both continued to help the students prepare themselves to become part of white neighborhoods and businesses—to become welcomed additions to the dominant culture.

            What we also did was to teach them all we could about the richness of their own culture. I used black poetry, short stories, and novels and encouraged the students to use these to write about their own lives. Denny taught American history with an emphasis on the contributions of African Americans.

Zora Neale Hurston, a noted author of the Harlem Renaissance,

whose most famous work is Their Eyes Watching God.

            Today, I know that my fellow teachers were right in their assessment of Denny and me—two young, white idealists who tried to tell our fellow black teachers how to teach and what to value. Our hubris knew no bounds. Both of us were articulate; we could “talk the talk” with ease. As Mary Turpie, the professor at the University of Minnesota, said about people like us—we could “b---s---.”

            But I never “walked the walk.” I still live in an all-white neighborhood. All my friends are white. I feel no apprehension when I go into stores. No fear that the security guards will follow me around. I’ve even stopped protesting injustice. What happens to us? Do we just wear out? Or do we give up? And when I say “us,” I mean “me.”

            In a recent posting, Penny, of lifeonthecutoff, said she’d “lost her bounce.” I have, too, and I don’t know where to find it.

All photographs from Wikipedia.