Cat's Who've Owned Me: Sally and Felicity

Sally was a stray who adopted us, a petite, short-haired calico.  We didn’t have her long, less than a year.  She got sick and went quickly before we could get her to the doctor.  It's sad to not know what happened.  

Felicity was my roommate.  She was a shelter kitty; I couldn’t resist the long calico coat and the big eyes.  Unlike Lucy, she did not like her trip home in the car – it’s a LONG way from Lathrop to Turlock when you are trying to keep a frightened baby in your arms and keep from killing yourself in traffic at the same time.  But we made it, and we settled into each other’s lives quickly.

I was still living at home.  Christina and Lyle were small, and Mom and Dad had a pug named Holly who decided a cat was not to be tolerated.  Needless to say, my bedroom became Felicity’s entire world.  We were two single chicks happy to share the same digs.  And then I got married.

After the honeymoon, I brought Felicity to the house on Lewis Street, hoping she would have an easy transition.  Yah, not so much.  She hid under Ademar’s bed for a couple of days.  Mom offered to take her back and  I cried when I dropped her off.  After that tearful night, whenever I visited, she ran through the house to my voice, jumped on my lap and demanded a good petting (Holly had passed by then, so Felicity had the run of the house). 

As she got older, I guess she developed some bad habits (marking her territory, shall we delicately say), and had to be put down.  She was a beautiful girl and I have a lot of good cuddling memories.

Cat's Who've Owned Me: Lucy

Lucy was the cat who grew up with me.

I was in high school when Mom told me I could get a kitten, as long as it was calico (I guess she loved them as much as I came to love them).  I suppose I found her through an ad in the paper, although I really don’t remember;  I just know I found myself driving from Turlock to Merced in the family car, and coming home with a kitten.  On the way home, she found her way onto the driver’s seat and her way into my heart, settling herself between my neck and the headrest.  I fell in love.

Lucy the kitten grew into Lucy the regal queen.  Everyone loved her and commented on her size and beauty.  She could be fun and playful, and she could sit proudly and survey her kingdom.  I loved to talk to her and she was so soft to the touch.  She was mine, if a cat can ever belong to a person, and never judged me, even when I called her Lucy Goosy.  I called her my book cat because she liked to sit on my books or newspapers as I read.  Maybe she wanted me to stop reading and pay attention to her, but I don't think so – she was interested in the words too.  My favorite picture of her shows her stretched out in an empty shelf of a bookcase.  The picture captures two of my favorite things in life:  Lucy and books.

Sadly, we found her one morning, the victim of a car.  A kind of comically-sad story surrounds her death:  The family was leaving the same morning for Disneyland.  My nephew Jeremy was house-sitting.  On returning from the vacation, I asked him how Lucy was.  He turned, startled, to my mom who proceeded to tell me what had happened.  Mom said she and Dad didn’t want to tell me before Disneyland because they were afraid it might ruin the trip for me.  And they were right: there would have been a cloud of sadness with me the entire time.  I went to my bedroom and cried for a long time, sitting on the little white couch and looking at a framed picture I had.  She was around 15 at the time (she had lived a good, long life), and spent most of her time lying on the back porch by the door.  She rarely left the yard, so I think another cat, or a dog, scared her into the road.  She rests in the back yard on Angeles Street.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

I was first introduced to Sherman Alexie when I read "Superman and Me," an essay he wrote about Alexie's reading experiences as a child on the Spokane Reservation in Washington state.  I found the essay in the anthology I used for my English 3 AP students.  He stresses that reading helped him make it past society's expectations of a reservation Indian (I'm going to use Indian here, instead of the more politically correct Native American, because that's the term Alexie uses.)

I found The Absolutely True Diary while browsing the YA section of my county library.  Recognizing the author's name, I picked it up.  I am now a fan of Alexie's writing and plan on reading more of his work.  The fact that I found it in the YA section is misleading -- I think readers of all ages would enjoy it. 

The Diary is a work of fiction, but I wonder if any of it is autobiographical.  Told by Junior, a high school freshman living on the "rez," the story develops our understanding of the family life, tribal life, and the education (or lack thereof) provided for Indians on a reservation.  Although the story is told by a young person, the emotions evoked are clear and visceral.  While reading, I constantly felt my heart and mind quicken with sudden understanding of how unfair life can be.  Using a kid's language, and a kid's perspective, Alexie is able to express some very adult insights into what it is to be an Indian relegated to a life of segregation.

Junior lives with his parents, his sister, and his grandmother.  Mom and dad are alcoholics, which sometimes means long absences and no food in the house because the money has been spent on liquor.  But he loves them, no questions asked.  Junior is one of the lucky ones in that his parents are not abusive drunks. (I don't mean this sarcastically -- they cherish their children, even when drunk.  Junior's friends aren't always so lucky.)

Junior's older sister lives in the basement and reads romance novels -- her escape from reality.  I mean, that's ALL she does.  Until she marries a Blackfoot Indian and moves to Montana.

Junior says his grandmother is the rare Indian who never takes a drink.  She offers Junior realistic advice, and he suffers greatly when she is gone.

Junior rebels on his first day at the reservation's high school, and asks his parents to allow him to enroll in the white high school in town.  Surprisingly, they easily agree.  I say, surprisingly, because nearly everyone else on the reservation sees this defection as treason and refuses to interact with him except to bully him, including his best friend Rowdy.  In one memorable scene, when Junior's high school basketball team (from his new school) comes to the reservation to play the reservation high school team, the crowed is packed full of Indians whose sole purpose is to boo Junior.  His parents' acquiescence to his request to attend the white school, and their never-failing belief in their son's choice, paint a picture of who they really are: they aren't stereotypical alcoholic Indians, they are parents who want their son to break free of the life that will consume and destroy him if he submits to reservation limitations, and they just happen to have problems with alcohol. The novel revolves mostly around Junior's trials at the white school, and his trials on the reservation trying to buck the expectations of his fellow Indians.