odds and ends

Here are me, my mane, and Raghu Dixit. My phone was out of juice, and Barry is not good with his camera, so Raghu had someone take the pic with his phone and then posted it to Twitter.

So many random things on my mind...

I work a block from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is the best farmer's market in the city, and especially wonderful in the summer. Yesterday I came home with: local peaches, local nectarines, two kinds of plums (shiro and Santa Rosa), a quart of small heirloom tomatoes, a couple of Kirby cucumbers, French breakfast radishes (very mild), and a couple of young, mild red onions. Ate tuna last night mixed with chopped onion, tomatoes, cucumber and radishes. When I'm there, I tend to buy as much as I can carry. Barry is especially fond of the heirloom tomatoes. He loves tomatoes, but they're basically horrible and flavorless for most of the year. Most tomatoes have been bred to travel well and to be "attractive" (round shape), so most of them end up kind of hard and mealy...they look good but don't taste like much. "Heirlooms" are grown from old, non-hybrid seeds, and are grown outdoors and in season (as opposed to year-round in greenhouses), so they not only taste wonderful, but they're bumpy and delicate and irregular and all kinds of wild colors. When they're around, we basically eat them with everything, or eat them plain, and then buy more.

Splurged a bit today (hey, it's payday) at Sephora on a rollerball of Marc Jacobs' Honey. I got some small samples a week or so ago, and I love it, which is no small thing, considering that I am way picky about cologne and have only ever liked wearing a handful: Bellodgia (Caron), Coco (Chanel), Rush (Gucci), and Escape (Calvin Klein). I've tried others, but those are the ones I return to over and over. I go to Sephora a lot and just walk around and look at things, and always feel rather daring when I actually buy something, since you're basically spending at least $15 for a single item. And my inner cheapskate comes out when I look at $23 lipsticks, no matter how nice they are. I also bought a facial treatment I really like, an at-home facial peel. It's for daily use (yeah, right), but a box of five lasts me a month and only costs $15.

This is Patricia, who does cat rescue and set up near my office on nice days. She's a little wacky, but I love her to pieces. She never lets anyone touch the cats - but she lets me. This is earlier today - she's bottle-feeding three-week-old kittens. I admired one of them today, and she just handed it to me. We've tried to adopt from her a couple of times, and as much as she likes Barry and me, and knows we are long-time cat owners, she stalled and stalled and made excuses until we gave up. She kept saying she had to check this and that with her sister, that her sister would call us, and it never happened, even when we were trying to adopt an older cat - we thought she'd let him go easily, since older cats are much harder to place than little kittens. Still, since she lets me hold tiny kittens, we're still pals.

strange changes

I have indeed changed the title and description of my blog, and if I do buy a domain name, it will be some iteration of the new title.  A lot of people are carrying the banner of Coney Island and of Brooklyn a whole lot better than I am.  That's not being hard on myself; it's just a fact.  I'm writing about other things.  And lately, it seems to be more opinion than memoir.  If you read way back, it's very memoir-y, but these days, not so much.

Yet again, I can't seem to use or see my Amazon widgets from my home computer.  Am I starting to hate Blogger again?  Perhaps.  I did figure out, though, how to change my job from book publishing to whatever it is I do now.  Actually, I love my job.  I kind of bustle around all day long, although it's mostly sitting at my computer, updating lists and documents, and especially reading and sending e-mail.  My phone rings maybe twice a day, but the e-mail just pours in.  Obviously, I adore e-mail as a form of communication.  All of that letter-writing I did from around 1971 right up to around 1998 or 1999 has done me some good.  (And the only reason I wrote letters that long was that I was very close to someone in Chicago who didn't have e-mail and was also a great letter-writer.)

My mind is wandering a little.  I've had a cold all week, and yesterday it was so severe that I stayed home, coughing and sneezing and nose-blowing all day.  Read a lot of the latest book on my Kindle, The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and someone whose name I could tell you if my Amazon Associates widget was working.  (Seriously, Blogger, whassup?)

A kitten is under consideration.  There is a cat rescue woman named Patricia, who sets up right across from Union Square, in front of Whole Foods, weather permitting.  She and I have become very friendly, since I show up practically every day she's out, and we are both great cat lovers.  She is a wonderful woman.  Anyway, I've been resisting, resisting, and resisting...really not easy, because she always has so many lovely and adorable kittens and cats.  But somehow, one of the kittens got to me.  She's six weeks old, a long-haired calico, and Barry and I are in love with her.  We had thought about the name Martha if we ever got another cat; Barry's mother's name in Poland was Marta (which was changed to Myrna when she came over here at age 8), but I thought Marta was a little harsh-sounding and suggested Martha.  And when I first saw the long-haired calico, I thought Coco would be an excellent name.  But of course, she has her rescue-cat name, the name Patricia's been calling her, which is Delilah.  So of course, we've been referring to her as Delilah, and I think if she comes to live with us, Delilah it is.  (That's how our middle cat, Lolly, got her name -- is was her rescue-cat name.  Xena and Maya both came to us without names, and I named them both.  I'm a pretty good cat-namer.)

Anyway, someone has already adopted one of Delilah's sibs, and may or may not want Delilah as well.  If not, Delilah is ours.  I've held her a couple of times, and she cuddles right up and purrs.  She's a beauty, and I've never had a long-haired cat.  Of course, we would then have four cats.  Barry didn't bat an eye -- I'm afraid I've made him into an even crazier cat person than I was or am.  He fell for her right away; he has a particular soft spot for calicos, ever since we got Lolly -- although I'm the one who spotted and chose her.  I'm a good cat-picker too.  I was the first one to spot Lolly, Xena and Maya, and brought Maya home without Barry ever seeing her first.  (This was after Tiggy died, and she and I were so crazy about each other it was pretty much a given that I'd be coming home with a new kitten at some point.)

I know four cats is crazy.  Tell me something I don't know.  That's what we get for not having children.

what the hell? and what the hell happened to my body?

some stuff

I just deleted a post I wrote last week...I had a bad crush for about five days, and then got over it.  I have kind of mixed feelings about it.  In some ways it was a good feeling, and in some ways I just felt kind of stupid.  You'd think I'd be done falling for musicians, just because they play beautifully.  Musicians are bad, bad boyfriends.  And this dude wasn't going to be my boyfriend, anyway.

This all started when I went with Barry to a jam session he likes, a blues thing.  I used to go to a lot of blues jams back in the early-mid nineties, when I lived in Manhattan and listened to a lot of blues.  Also, I had a couple of blues musician bad boyfriends back then. 

Barry's been going to this thing for a while, and a lot of the people there are my old friends, who he's gotten to know, and there are some other nice folks he's met (one of whom was the five-day crushee).  So I finally went.  A lot of the old crowd is now in their 50s rather than their 30s, and are far nicer and calmer for it.  I did enjoy talking to one of my old boyfriends, who actually hadn't been a bad boyfriend due to being a musician.  He was in fact a fairly good boyfriend except for being a little nuts, or maybe more than a little.  I know now that a good deal of it was chemical, although some was also emotional.  He's on meds now, but still mildly cracked.  But he's a real sweetheart and it was nice to get caught up.

 

(Wow -- I figured out how to put in YouTube videos again!  Yay for me!)

One of these dudes is the sweet old boyfriend and one is the five-day crush.  If you guess right, you get to read this blog for a year, absolutely free.

Work is still great.  One of my bosses brings in bagels and lox every Friday.  (I can't eat the bagels, of course, but I do eat a bunch of nova and cream cheese.) 

I saw my doctor last week, and the finger thing is not arthritis -- it's actually something called "trigger finger," which is an inflammation of a tendon, sort of like carpel tunnel.  (I remember an older lady, many years ago, complaining, "I have the carpet!)  So I'm going to see another doctor this week, an orthopedist who specializes in hands, to get a shot of steroids in my finger.  Eek.  I don't like needles.  I don't like anything that hurts.  I don't mind getting blood taken any more, because the people in those labs are really good at it.  (In the olden days, the doctor or nurse would do it right in the office, and those folks weren't necessarily blood-taking experts.)  But Barry will come to hold my other hand.

Current faves and earworms:  Teenage Dream by Katy Perry (another one that played incessantly in my office at Dweck).  Forget You by Cee Lo is still on the list.  Weezer recorded an excellent cover of Viva La Vida, the Coldplay song I like so much.  I'm listening to my mp3 player a lot these days.  

Also reading a lot, because that's a subway thing.  A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer.  Cancer on $5 a Day by Robert Schimmel.  The Ape House by Sara Gruen.  I'm tempted to reread some old favorites, but there's so much new stuff to read.  I did finally finish the third Stieg Larsson book -- I had a hardcover copy, but didn't get the job done until the Kindle.  How did I ever live without it?  I have around 1100 books on it now, plus another 400 or so in holding on my computer.  I bought four or five of them, many are fee (public domain), and the rest were gleefully bootlegged.  I tell everyone that the Kindle changed my life.  I guess the mp3 player did, too, although the Walkman did long before that.  (I listened to Imperial Bedroom and Graceland endlessly back then.)

Free summer concerts coming up soon, and the best one in Prospect Park, hands-down, is Los Lobos.  Also, the Holmes Brothers are playing free at City Winery in a month or so, and I can't believe I haven't seen them in over ten years.  They were great friends of mine when they were a local NYC group, playing in dives; now they're famous world-wide for about twenty years now.  They play all over the world and are rarely in New York.  I particular look forward to seeing Sherman Holmes, who has been a great pal since the early 80s.  When I got sober in 1986 and disappeared from the bar/club scene, of all the "friends" I had while drinking, Sherman was the only one who picked up a phone and called me to see where and how I was.  I don't mean the only one in that band -- I mean the only only one, from all of the musicians and fellow blues fans and bar rats.  Only Sherman.  I will love him forever for that.

There has been some consideration of a fourth cat in the Levy household.  There is a very nice cat rescue lady who tables across the street from Union Square, and I have fallen very hard for a ten-month-old tortoiseshell.  More to come.

My cat Maya

I got Maya as a three-month kitten about 13 months ago. I did it all by myself.

When we got Lolly, some years back, I felt a really strong bond with her, but so did my husband, and since he was out of work and had never had a tiny kitten before, I let him have her. Which doesn't mean that she and I don't cuddle a lot; it just means she's Daddy's girl.

(Are people with children like this, I wonder, trying to win over this or that kid?)

Some time later, we adopted a pair of sister cats about 11 years old, Jaime and Samantha. This temporarily brought our cat population up to its highest level, five. Jaime was an exquisite calico (I said she looked like Ida Lupino, and when Barry saw her in an old movie, he absolutely agreed), and loved the humans, but hated and hissed at all other cats, including her sister. It was clear that Jaime needed to be an only cat, and we posted her gorgeous puss on Petfinder, and found her a nice home in New Jersey.

Samantha was a very skittish, slightly long-haired torbie, and did a lot of hiding. When she stopped hiding, she started taking to me. I had renamed her Tiggy because she was one, and it turned into a great love affair. She used to give me these melting looks and walk across Barry's lap to get to me. After a few years, she got sick and died. We cried so hard that the vet cried, too.

So a few months after that, I was walking past a vet's window, and there were two little black kittens in a cage, and I went in. The woman behind the desk said that they were a boy and a girl, but they all liked the girl better. So I held the girl and took her home and named her Maya.

Barry held back a lot to let me be with Maya, and it was enough to get her pretty solidly on the way to being Mommy's Girl, but after a while, he couldn't resist, and started to play with her. We have very different styles with cats: he's a player and I'm a petter.

Lolly is not liking Maya who is bigger than she is and who is so obviously adored by Mommy. But Lolly will always make out OK because we both love her so much. And Xena mostly sits it out. She requires very little fuss.

But Maya seems to have turned a corner: she's sleeping right next to me. She had been sleeping at my feet for months, occasionally over the covers and between my legs or feet. But Barry recently saw her sleeping next to me, and I saw it when I woke up this morning. It makes me very happy. I know I sound like a crazy cat lady, but Maya is a special friend to me. she sits in my lap when I watch TV and sits outside the door when I'm in the bathroom and races me to the kitchen so I'll pick her up. She is velvety soft and has a bit of a pot belly, looking much like a slightly smaller version of Kit-Kat, the cat Barry had when we met. I think that's why he suddenly started liking her: as she got older, she looked more and more like Kitty.

Maybe it's because I didn't have children that I like having a community of cats in the house, though three is a little much in a one-bedroom apartment. (We each had one to start out with.) They're loving and have interesting interactions and sometimes are just so funny.

Maya has two favorite toys. One is a tiny stuffed bear we call "Little Bear," who sometimes shows up in our bed at bedtime. Maya also loves ice cubes, and runs to the kitchen every time Barry fixes himself a soda. She likes to bat it around, and sometimes picks it up in her mouth and carries it from the kitchen to the living room, which is really cute. So one night, Barry calls me into the bedroom, where I see a wet spot on the comforter. I sniff it, and start laughing. I said, "It's her ice cube," and we both realized that Maya had figured if she could bring one toy to bed, why not the other? We now close the bedroom door when she has an ice cube. I don't think I could have gotten through the past year without her. She is such a darling cat.

Saturday with the cats

Barry and I are the kind of people who are a little too involved with our cats, having never had children. (I was hoping to spend a lot of time with my nephew, now five, but my brother moved farther and farther away and is now in Rhode Island, so I'm lucky if I see Walter once a year). We've gone from two cats when we first moved in (one mine, one his) to five at one point (too many) and have kind of settled on three as a good number.

Our oldest now is Xena, generally called Miss Xena, who is about 14 and is black/grey tabby and white. I saw her in a pet store when she was about three months, and loved the spot on her nose. She is the fussiest and more like what non-cat people expect of cats. She will be picked up and petted only when she feels like it, and will meow endlessly in the morning for food. (My friend Susana used to say that cats think of us as "can openers with legs.") She's a little stout and heavy, like a cinderblock with fur.

Middle cat is Lolly, about 7 years old. She is a very lovely calico. I spotted her at a street fair, where someone who does cat rescue had a table. I saw this tiny little calico pom-pom in a cage full of kittens, and fell immediately in love. We were actually at the street fair with Barry's cousins from Denmark, and after we parted with them, I asked to go back to the street fair. I tried to point out the kitten to him, and took a leaflet from the woman. I called her two days later and said, "I don't think I can live without that little calico kitten." She said, "Oh, you mean Lolly, She's climbing up and giving me kissed right now." So we set up a meet n'greet the next weekend, when she was tabling in front of the Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center. We got to hold her and I brought a camera. (If I can ever find the right drivers for my scanner, I'll try to post them.) So we took her home a couple of weeks later, when she was about nine weeks. Barry lost his job soon after and was unemployed for about seven months, during which time he and Lolly fell much in love, so she's really a Daddy's girl, though she affectionate toward me as well. She's small and fluffy and light.

We ended up with a Mommy's girl when Barry took on a cat from a workmate who had to give her up. Samantha, a tabby/tortie, was renamed Tiggy, and she and I were inseparable. After about three years, though, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and went to take The Big Nap. I cried a lot, I have to say. So a couple of months later, I was walking past a local vet who had a cage in the window with two black kittens. So I went in, the assistant said "It's a boy and a girl, but most of us like the girl better." So I held the girl, and Maya, at about three months, came home with me. She's now about a bit old and heading to be a biggish cat, longer than Xena and bulking up. She has a tiny patch of white at her crotch which cat people call a "speedo." She's heavy and velvety and luckily decided she was Mommy's girl. She comes when I call her and her favorite toy is an ice cube.

This Facebook thing is really crazy -- lots of old friends and friends of friends and all kinds of widgets and gadgets. My husband mostly uses it for music stuff but my circle has a lot of talkers and readers and writers, as well as a finagle of folkies (I just made that up, a la murder of crows et al). I have a strange group of friends -- a few people from my high school who left before graduation for one reason or another, friends of friends that I know from my teen years, my former closest friend's estranged musical partner.

It's hard when old friends fall by the wayside. I had one who could not admit she was an alcoholic when I was deep into recovery; when I last ran into her, she acted very superior because she was active in AA and I wasn't. (I went daily for about five years and pretty much stopped making meetings after eight years. I have 23 years without a drink now.) It's a shame because I met her when I was about 13 and she's one of the funniest and smartest women I've ever known. But I know about that immersion-in-AA period; I used to be scared of non-program people when I was first sober. Some people never grow out of it, which is how I lost the best friend I met in the rooms. He just got deeper and deeper into it. Barry and I ran into him at DiFara Pizza a few years back, and he was with a sponsee. I just don't see spending all your free time on recovery stuff forever. They say that AA is "a bridge back to life," so I got back to life. Dating within the rooms is also a horror, but I'll get to that another time.