Katter bort!

Went to the Timbers match Sunday, and took my bride.That in itself is something of an oddity. The Loved One enjoys a good soccer match as much as the next woman, but she also loves her peace and is a woman of calm good sense, none of which is there to be had in the North End at a Timbers contest.But she knows I love both the game and the surroundings, so when our friends Brent and Julie offered us their tickets she gamely stood by her man for ninety minutes to watch the final preseason friendly against the Swedish club AIK.

It was a fairly decent match, as footy goes; one-nil to the home side, which is always polite - a guest is never pushy - although these guests played a pretty rugged game of calcio. Our new Scots striker headed one in almost before the singing started (and was desperately unlucky not to get a second before the half) and the Boys in Red held on to the one-goal lead despite some shifty work at the back.But for my inamorata the real fun was all around her.

Our capo - the leader of the singing and chanting in the Timbers Army was this wonderful gal we called "Rosie" (because she looked sturdy and energetic enough to pull a double shift at Kaiser riveting together Liberty Ships) - is a long-term fixture in Section 108 and did her usual terrific job of conducting the singing; Mojo found her quite delightful.I liked this gal, who, in the excitement of the moment, actually slipped her feet out of her shoes and stood on them. Probably easier on the soles than the nubbly terrace pavement, but whatever the reason she made for a rather cute picture.As always, the Army poured out their hearts and their songs for the team; that's the Great Tradition of the game, and in case you enjoy a good singalong, here's a terrific place on the Web to learn a new song or two: "FanChants". They even have my favorite Newcastle song to the tune of Yellow Submarine, with the chorus that goes "Peter Reid had a fookin' monkey's head, a fookin' monkey's head, a fookin' monkey's head..."One thing you can always count on in Portland is creativity, and here's my vote for the so-far tifo of the year.I have no idea if AIK has a mouse mascot or not, but Jeld-Wen Field - from the days when it was plain old Civic Stadium - really DOES have a colony of feral cats, so, there. Great signage, whatever the real Swedish mouse situation.

The real thing starts next Monday, and should be a hellacious battle; our old enemies the Flounders of Seattle are looking scary good, and we'll have to be strong and fierce to bring the Cascadia Cup home to Stumptown this season.Cats away!

St. Valentine

"There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder."
- Charles Morgan"You don't marry someone you can live with - you marry the person who you cannot live without. The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands."
- Alexandra Penney

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction."
- Saint-Exupery

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."
- Ingrid Bergman"To love another person is to see the face of God."
- Les Miserables

"Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time."
- Lawrence Durrell"If you love someone, let them go. If they return to you, it was meant to be. If they don't, hunt them down and kill them slowly."
- Chief

"True love never dies for it is lust that fades away. Love bonds for a lifetime but lust just pushes away."
-Alicia Barnhart

Horseshit, Alicia. Lust and love are fire and fuel, fuel and fire, that joyous bonfire made when Love's strong Arts (of such noble individual parts) makes one fire of four flaming eyes and of two loving hearts. You couldn't be wronger.

It will be ten years ago this October, but I still yearn for you, my love, like I did when we first married; to talk with you, to work beside you, to make love to you, to make a life with you.I love you. Happy Feast of Valentine.

Friday Jukebox: Tears

My bride told me this story.

She and The Girl were coming home from a simple errand; a shopping trip, a visit to the library, and she was playing this on the radio as the station wagon pulled to a stop at the curb outside the house.
She sat for a moment, watching the windshield wipers push the spitting rain, until she heard a to-a-parent-familiar sound and turned to see our little girl weeping.

Like any mother would do, she turned and unfastened the Girl's seatbelt and hauled her over the partition into her lap. She hugged the small, shaking body to her, and kissed the bowed head on the sleek, shining black hair, and asked Missy if she could tell her Mom what was wrong.

Mojo says that when she had swallowed down her sniffles the Girl said;

"This song makes me think of all the bad things I did and the times I wasn't nice, and the times you didn't like me. And that makes me feel sad."

So Mojo squeezed little Missy tight and promised her that part of being mommies and daughters was that you were always loved, no matter what sort of bad thing you had done.

Because, really...what else can you say?

And the two of then sat listening to the pattering of the rain until it was time to go into the house.

Rude Awakening

I'm not sure if I've ever actually given you a full MTO&E of the personnel here at the Fire Direction Center, but one of the senior troops is Miss Lily, the little calico cat.She is a veteran of my first marriage, a rescue-cat from the animal shelter in Astoria, Oregon, where she nabbed my rain-slick sleeve one December day and has been with me ever since. Here's a tale of one of her adventures from some years ago. She is really a very personable cat.

She's also a very self-contained little soul, as with most cats; the only time she will admit to the weakness of need is in the night hours, when she likes to climb on sleeping people (me, typically, because, I think, I am bulkier than my bride and hence a better observation post). She then cuddles down on my chest and falls asleep, and since she's a tiny mite of a cat - less than 6 pounds - it's not really unpleasant. She never bites or claws if I move in my sleep, but she's very persistent, and will reclimb Mount Niitaka after I settle back down.

She is now very, very old in cat-years, probably more than sixteen depending on her age when I brought her home from Astoria. She sleeps most of the day, and she has stopped catching the small birds and mice that used to entertain her and annoy me. She has also become very thin, and her stomach is causing her trouble; she has difficulty keeping her meals down, and she is always ravenous. It doesn't help her that she shares her food bowl with Francesca Cypress Nittaneous III (a.k.a "Fat Nitty"), a feline stomach with legs, so she often has to bolt the vile canned concoction to prevent it disappearing inside the Nitteous One before she can get a taste of delicious by-products.

I am the only other troop in the entire unit who really likes her as something other than furniture. Mojo has little or no patience for either cat and will touch them only on sufferance, whilst the kids will alternately ignore or annoy her depending on their mood; Little Miss is slightly fearful only because Fat Nitty once ran her claws through the girl's blanket - just to get purchase rather than in fear or anger - and Missy has been wary of her ever since. I am the only human who will invite them onto my lap, or pet them for no other reason than tactile pleasure or simple companionship.Her one enduring fault is that by early morning - and I do mean early - her gyppy tummy is troubling her and she begins to caterwaul for her breakfast.

This morning she was doing her usual sand-dance over my prone body and singing her "Feed Me, Seymour" cat-song (which Mojo and I have learned to ignore until we're ready to get up) when she suddenly stopped.

Hunched over in the blanket-valley between us.

And shat the bed.

If you live with one of these little creatures you probably know that there is nothing more pungent than cat shit. Within seconds both humans AND the cat had lept from the bed. It fell to me to bundle up the beshat bedclothes and drag them downstairs to the washing machine; if left for even moments the penetrating pong of used catfood will permeate the very paint on the walls of a room. My bride - who if allowed will drowse into the early forenoon - mumped disconsolately into the kitchen, a surly dryad in an ultramarine Hello Kitty T-shirt, made a pot of coffee and then retired to an armchair in the front room looking like...a woman who had been awakened at 6:30 am by a cat fouling her bed.

Our daughter found the entire incident hilariously disgusting (or disgustingly hilarious) when she emerged a bit later. And the guilty party herself seemed more interested in her catfood than apologizing, although she spent a suspiciously long time cleaning herself up afterward before going back to sleep.

In most respects this would be just another tiny fragment of domestic excitement. The sheets are cleaned, the bed re-made, the cat asleep, the humans all gone about their business.

Except...our little cat has always been a very fastidious creature. This was VERY unlike her...and disturbing all the more for that. Like humans, animals entering the final stages of life tend to begin to deteriorate mentally as well as physically. I hope this was just a noxious accident, because if there are more to come it suggests that our small companion has begun the steeper slope of the descent we all eventually make towards the Big Sleep.And for all that she is nothing more than a rather smallish, aged calico cat her time on Earth is short enough as it is. I will miss her cat-look, the feeling of her gentle bones on my lap, and the shirr of her soft fur under my hands.

Her arms long and small

I made Mojo this little valentine and liked the result so much I wanted to post it.The inspiration for the graphic were these lines from William Wyatt's "They Flee From Me":
"...but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "dear heart, how like you this?"

My love seemed to like it almost as well as the gift card from Sock Dreams. I like that, too.

OhmiGod! The kids are climbing the walls!

These are from the preceding weekend. Little Miss wanted to show what she had learned:Yeah, that'll get you a full ride at Stanford, sweetie.

But it did inspire the Boy to show us what HE could do. So here they are, climbing the walls:Sadly, the Great Louse Invasion still goes on - Mojo is home today steeping the Girl's head in some awful prescription Pemetherin^TM goop that's supposed to kill the little bastards. However, we've already tried the over-the-counter insecticide shampoos, which I read are already full of Pemetherin and have, apparently, facilitated the breeding of a race of super-lice immune to the toxin. Great.

I welcome our new ectoparasitic masters.

...and the bronze medal goes to...

...my bride, and I.

It was eight years ago today that we gave in and became a legally recognized domestic partnership in the State of Oregon. Since then there have been Chinese orphans, diverticulitis, cat yack, about a cubic kilometer of filthy diapers, and hard choices about music and where everything goes in the china cabinet.

But through it all, you have ever been my strong arm, my clear voice, my encompassing mind, my open heart. What I am, as good a man, as loving a husband, as giving a father, I owe to you as much or more than to myself.

These have been good years.

In the words we spoke on our wedding day, Donne's words,

"Now, as in Tullia's tomb, one lamp burnt clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
Fire ever doth aspire,
And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,
But ends in ashes ; which these cannot do,
For none of these is fuel, but fire too.

This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong arts
Make of so noble individual parts
One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts."Happy Anniversary, love.

Heatwave

We returned from the paradisaical Oregon Coast and our rented Xanadu in Tillamook County ("Land of Cheese, Trees, and Ocean Breeze") on Sunday to the dogmouth heat of a Portland August, and were mightily displeased withal.

You have to understand that Oregon goes through about a month or less of what you people call "summer"; you know, where everyone outdoors sweats, the sidewalks burn the soles of your bare feet at noonand everything not anointed with the balm of mechanical cooling (I've heard it called "air conditioning" and I understand that entire actual houses are built with it in other parts of the country...hard to believe, I know, but there you go; autre pays, autre mores...) melts into a wilted heap for a good part of the period between the spring and fall equinoxes.

For Northwesterners this is particularly pathetic since our "summer" is what many other portions of the world, and much of the rest of our own nation, would call "a week or so of pretty warm weather".

Temperatures in the mid-90's would merit at best a sniff from Angelinos, outright dismissal from the humid denizens of the Atlantic seaboard, and a sigh of relief from the truly heat-smitten in places like Florida, Texas, the entire Gulf Coast, and much of the central continent as far north as Saskatchewan.

Here they practically prostrate the entire region, with freeway signs shrieking smog alerts and local fire-and-murder news shows pausing to note the number of heatstroke victims. These are usually second only to the drowned, drunken bastards and bastiches

[There really needs to be a feminine of the term for the product of the sexual union between unmarried people. "Bastard" is such a...male...word; you just can't get the same satisfaction out of calling a truly loathsome female a "bastard". So, as a complimentary service, I give you "bastich"; the double-X version of the despised love-child.]

heaved out of the Sandy and Clackamas Rivers like so many doughy pale salmon.

I note in passing that in those portions of the outer Southeast drained by the aforesaid rivers it is considered a social faux pas equivalent to failing to obtain your ankle tattoo by puberty to swim without downing a half rack of Natty Light, or the equivalent in nasty fruit-flavored "coolers" for the distaff dwellers of the land of the payday loan and the Budweiser cap. Hence the slow but steady drain on our priceless national reserve of future check-kiters and meth cooks.

Anyway, that dreaded Hell-week is upon us, so it was a hot and somewhat frayed little family that went back to work, daycare, and Portland Parks camp on Monday. I don't know how the others did - I worked a hell of a long day Monday. I know that by today everyone was pretty cranky, and as I was finishing up another fourteen-hour workday today I got a call that showed my bride's name on the face of the cell phone.

"Yes, love, you caught me; I'm working." I answered.

The sounds coming out of the phone sounded like tango night at the Lemur House up on the hill at Oregon Zoo. I was finally able to make out my daughter singing, my son shouting, and my wife's exhausted voice.

"If you can come home soon, I really need help."

"What is it?"

"It's your son. He's out of control, and I need your help with him."

Now my wife is a pretty hardy woman. A century ago given a gingham frock, a lean-to shed with a couple of heifers, and a Henry repeater her name would have been the byword for flinty self-reliance in every sodhouse from Kennebec County to the east bank of the Platte. She isn't intimidated easily, and can whip her weight in progeny if well dug-in. So this sounded like a bad one.

"OK, I'm on my way."

I was already in the work truck - I'm scheduled on a grading job tomorrow at seven - and headed home before I was able to get all the information.

It seems that, along with the more predictable misbehavior, defiance, namecalling, insults, and all-around crappy attitude the Boy had managed to somehow attack and "tried to choke" his baby sister.The lad's explanation - which he delivered in the patient, ever-so-slightly-bored but exquisitely rational tones of a Republican congressman explaining to you why it is far the better that your grandmother learns to survive on Whiskas than that his multimillionaire constituent foregoes his windsurfing vacation to Dubai - was that the tiny preschooler "said mean words to him". Mean words, apparently, being her comments about her daycare class going bowling that day and her having had a kegling experience denied to him. Which, as any fool could tell, required that he grab her about the neck.

It was insanely difficult, listening to his offhand recitation of his attack (however abortive, however brief), not to go utterly, Drill Sergeantly, berserk. To unleash the sort of fearsome rage that once reduced quivering 98-pound trainees to...umm...more fiercely quivering 98-pound trainees.

Especially when he explained that he liked bowling more than he loved his sister.

But I have promised that I would not be the "Mad Dad". Instead, we had a very adult, very direct conversation. He produced, as requested, three options to control his temper before it led him to attack his mother or sister again. He mouthed the "right" words. He fidgeted and wriggled, making clear his discomfort with his shaming.

I did fix him with a very modified version of the noncommissioned stinkeye which produced a gratifyingly immediate quiver when I insisted he apologize to his sister and inquire as to her welfare. His mother stood in the doorway, and I could hear the tremor in his voice between Missy's piping replies.

I think he understands how seriously I feel about what he did. But his deepest regret - the only time he cried at all over the entire affair - was when his mom told him he would be denied his weekly overnight cuddle with her. He is more sorrowful, and more regretful, for his punishment than his little sister's peril.

I told my son, at one point in the proceedings, that you could love someone and yet not like them, or not like something that they did; this in relation to how he had attacked his sister for what she did - "teasing" him about the bowling. My point was, I added, that part of being a family was caring for, and about, your family, even when they were irritating you.

And restraining your natural instinct to choke the living shit out of them for so doing.

But I'm afraid that I do not like what my son has done, and am finding I do not like him much, either, at the moment, because of the obvious insincerity of his contrition and his unconcern for his sister.

I am finding it rather more then a little difficult to digest my own advice, as well.

At the moment.

The house is quiet now, with only the tapping keys and the faint, odd grinding noise from the television cabinet to my right front that tells me my bride has, again, turned off the television but left the cable on. The children are asleep, each in their several beds, at peace for the moment.And outside the mirrored night-windows the stars are shadow-patterned with high clouds that foretell the coming of a cold wind from the sea, and the hopes of a softer, gentler day tomorrow.