Yes, you can use the plural fishes when you’re talking about more than one species of fish, and that’s what I’m going to do.

I was a fishkeeper from 1987-1998. Freshwater, not salt. Five gallon tanks, ten, twenty, and for a while a thirty-eight gallon gem. The beginning of this era was thrust on me by someone else, who gave my daughter a five-gallon tank and heater and filter and pump, plus a couple of fish, for her birthday. It all started so simply. And escalated. And kept going.

Prior to this fish-birthday, I’d only ever had goldfish in bowls. Had never had tanks and all their equipment and all their headaches. I still maintain, however, that the headaches are worth it, because the fish are both beautiful and fascinating. And like potted plants, the waterworld of an aquarium provides a miniature outdoors indoors.

There are certain horrors, too, to fishkeeping. At least to someone as sensitive and invested in animals as I am, they were horrors. Really I don’t even feel like going there now — maybe another time. Today I just want to stay with the pleasures of fish. This quote from the naturalist Konrad Lorenz (from his book King Solomon’s Ring) will give you a hint of what you must face when you keep aquariums: “…there is no other group of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infectious diseases as the fish.” Now back to the pleasures.

How many kinds did I have over the years? Reticulated catfish, angelicus catfish, albino catfish, algae eaters, guppies guppies guppies, swordtails, mollies, many varieties of tetras, including the lovely little neons; gouramis, bettas, angel fish, and more. Interesting, graceful, different demeanors in different species, and so on. An underwater adventure.

I salute every single one of the hundreds of fish who lived in my tanks, from the tiniest baby guppies to the largest angel fish and gouramis. I’m glad to have known each one of them.
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read… Mugsy’s book… Mishibone…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

since I currently have no picture of him in my possession (but he looked a heck of a lot like Mandy), here’s a picture of one of his favorite thickets. he loved hiding in thickets.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman’s lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn’t stay asleep long once he’d lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don’t like, is the Latin for “flattering.” Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he’d been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn’t want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I’d only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn’t yet know about the town and its malevolent denizens. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn’t want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman’s word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn’t yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn’t want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached the landlord a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit’s time with us.

I don’t know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blasé face. Ya ma, I know. That’s Brandon’s cat Bandit. That’s why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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read…  Sehnen…  Neverending solitaire…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Time to write about Braon, six years dead. It’s been put off for way too long, the reason for that being that she is very hard for me to write about. There are reasons for that, a couple of which might show up here on this page, and a couple of which won’t.

Braon and all her siblings were born in summer, on Tuesday 20 July 1999, at the end of the twentieth century. Puppies who would live their lives almost entirely in the new millenium. Not that they could know.

                                                                       the last picture ever taken of her, about three hours before she died on Saturday 19 February 2005. she was euthanized, as it’s customary to say, after a surgery that revealed a hopeles cancer.

She was the last-born of the seven puppies, the runt of the litter. She wouldn’t breathe at her mother’s stimulation, so mom gave up, and Braon was finally coaxed into breathing with a plastic straw and human breath. I wasn’t the one who did this, as I wasn’t at home when she was born, and don’t even know if I would have thought of it. It’s always struck me as having been a very clever idea, but I doubt I would have come up with it — me the Aspergian with all my difficulties regarding such daily life common-sense issues.

And so she breathed, and kept on breathing. The next hurdle was that she didn’t know how to suck properly, and feeling this improper sucking, her mother would push her off the breast. The person I lived with — the one who had done the artificial respiration with the plastic straw — bought some little baby bottles and baby formula and said I would have to feed the puppy that way. Now, as much as I love and value animals, and as much as I have sacrificed for them and nursed them and raised baby-this and baby-that, there are certain things I just dig in my heels about. I’ll do slave work for animals anytime, when it’s necessary. If the mother had been dead, or milkless, you would have found me bottle-feeding every single puppy in the bunch. But I looked at this newborn in my left hand and the bottle in my right, and then I looked over at the mother engorged with milk and puppies feasting away, and I said to all present: Damn it, there’s a mother full of milk over there. Proper dog-milk. And this is her own puppy, and damn it, this puppy’s gonna have that milk. So I proceeded to teach the puppy how to suck and the mother not to push her away. I would wrap the little tongue around the teat and move the little jaw up and down. Swallowing wasn’t done quite right, and some milk would dribble out while a little got swallowed. Mother’s paw would come over to push off the inept mouth, and I would push it back with the words: Indy, no. How many feedings before Braon got the hang of it and Indy accepted her? I don’t know anymore. They were born on a Tuesday morning, and I think that maybe on Wednesday night things gelled. But it was many feedings in that number of hours, and I had to be teacher and referee. It was all worth it when that moment of success came. When Braon wrapped her little tongue around the teat without my help and sucked away without my help, and during the whole meal, Indy made no attempt to push her off. I continued to watch the feedings for a couple of days, to make sure there was no backsliding, and then I was free of that particular animal task.

Braon loved toys  — even more than did my other three dogs. And like her father, she loved to run, and run fast. It was funny how it worked out with the two female puppies that I kept. Braon was built like her father Mishi, a lab mix, and was a lot like him in what I will call personality (though I think animality says it better). Her sister Brainse was built like their Rottweiler mother, and was a lot like her in personality. I loved watching the complex relationship between these sisters and pack-members, Brainse the alpha sister to Braon’s omega. They would defend each other vociferously against any foe. They would groom each other and cuddle and be absolutely endearing in their love for each other. But they could also be downright jealous of each other, and competitive, especially when it came to food and toys. I would bring home the toys and bestow one on each dog. After a half hour or so, there would be low growling. Brainse would browbeat Braon, every time, to give up her toy and let the alpha big sister take it. This is the way of the pack, but I’m a human and I like fairness, and I would swap the two girls’ toys. Not entirely to Brainse’s satisfaction, because what she wanted was both toys. But she always accepted my compromise for a while, and they would each have a go at the other’s toy. Eventually, all on their own, with only a very small amount of growling, they would switch back.

After that rocky start, Braon went on to be, to all appearances, my healthiest dog. Mugsy eventually developed geriatric vestibular syndrome (very scary in its onset) and significant arthritis; Mishi got grand-mal epilepsy; and Brainse got hypothyroid. All three ended up on daily medication. And there was my healthy Braon, just keepin’ on keepin’ on.

And so her cancer was a tremendous shock. I’m told this is a very fast-growing cancer that can go from one tiny cell to fatal, blood-pumping tumor in only eight or ten weeks. If I’d been told any one of the other dogs was dying, it would have shocked me just a bit less, since they had other health issues already. Braon gave not one single sign of illness until the 13th of February, and on the 19th she was dead. It’s no exaggeration to say that I have never, six years later, recovered from the shock and suddenness of her death. Her ashes are here in the room with me. Her photo-portrait looks at me from the wall. Her fairy figurine — designated as hers because it arrived in the mail only five hours before she died — sits on the windowsill. I see these things every single day, and there are still deeply sad and perplexed moments from time to time, when I still can’t believe that my healthy young Braon, my straw-baby, my little sister,  is gone.

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read…  Stolen stars…  Scealta liatha…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Why are the details of Pepper’s arrival so murky, when many events of that same year are still very clear? Why does the memory pick and choose like that?

The year was 1991. Maybe it was in September that I bought Pepper, maybe a bit earlier. Romi and Juliet had finished raising their two mostly female broods, and after giving away three male-female pairs of finches to family and friends, I found myself with a shortage of males. Still in my seasoning period, which had already resulted in a Cinnamon and a Ginger, we now gained a Pepper.

I’d wanted Pepper to be a dad someday, but then I’d wanted parenthood formost of my finches, and it just didn’t happen. Pepper may have been the father of a clutch that didn’t survive, but Sugar was another candidate for that title. But of the three finch broods that did live, all of them were fathered by Romi. I’ve never been able to figure this out. I provided my females with handsome uncles and sons (line-breeding), and handsome non-relatives to choose from, but they just didn’t seem to want anybody but Romi. When he died, so did family-making among my finches.

So he was never a dad, but he was one of my good friends, and my longest-living finch (nine and a half years). When he was in his prime he stood up well to our Zachary’s occasional tendency to be a brat, but past middle age, all traces of macho stuff disappeared, and he didn’t want to posture anymore. Can’t blame him. I don’t know how male animals — especially the human kind— keep up all that ridiculous male strutting and vying for first place. Yes, it’s programmed into the genes, but you’d think that humans at least, having these advanced brains, could override that programming when it becomes clear how silly it is.

You’d think I’d have more to say about a life that lasted more than nine years. I wish I did. But it is a fact, even if I don’t like it, that my memory down the years has mostly held the smaller animals in groups: the finches, the parakeets, the fishes, the rabbit babies, and so on. Individual differences and quirks and voices stood out to me strongly, as long as these animals lived. But now, years after the last finch died, and the last rabbit, and so on, those idiosyncracies that I used to know so well have faded in a lot of cases. It saddens me, because I want to still recall each one of them in all their individual detail, but the fact is that often I just can’t. I remember that Pepper was a zebra finch in his ways, and was also himself in his ways, and that while he lived I knew him pretty well. I remember he was funny and good and smart and brave. I remember that I hated seeing him go, as I’ve hated seeing every single one of them go since I was four, five years old.

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read…   All my stars…   Stolen stars…   Mugsy’s book

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

Yet another zebra finch, and yet again I don’t have a photo currently to hand. Ginger was the light-grey variety of zebra, and she’s the only one I ever had with a white dot on her forehead. She was also one of the zebras I actually purchased, as opposed to all of those that were produced for me by my two breeding pairs. I went out shopping for another female and came home with Ginger. Because of that little white dot.

Zebras tend to be jaunty little birds that chatter quickly and move the same way. Ginger was a little different. Not defective in any way, not too slow or too mellow, but there was a very slight slowness and mellowness to her that made her an individual.

And there was something else unique there too. For most of her life, Ginger always had in her eyes this little expression of amusement. As if she found everything that went on with her and her cagemates, and everything that went on in the rooms and the apartments around her, just slightly funny. And her amusement always became mine too, because whenever I saw that expression in her eyes, it made me smile. Those of you who know I have Asperger’s and have read elsewhere that I don’t smile much might find this strange news. But all the laws of my internal physics are different with animals than they are with people. And while it’s not terribly frequent that a human will elicit a spontaneous smile from me, animals can do it a hundred times a day.

I never got any chicks from Ginger. It’s always puzzled me that from close to thirty finches that I had at the apex of my finch-keeping, only two breeding pairs established themselves, and both of them contained the same male.

Ginger died in January of 1998 when she was close to seven. Another star in this Aspergian sky, with a little white “star” on her forehead.

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read…   All my stars…   Braonwandering…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

One of Miri’s three children, Juliet’s granddaughter. Her name is not pronounced to rhyme with tile. It’s the Irish spelling of the name Sheila, and that’s how you pronounce it. Of Miri’s other two kids, Julie died young, and Zachary comes up on another page. I’m ashamed that my memory isn’t absolutely positive about when these three hatched, and I can say with only a 90% degree of certainty that it was in April of 1995.

Síle was a very light grey, and had her family’s happy nature in a double portion, as her father was also her grandfather. All zebra finches have happy natures, as far as I’m concerned, and maybe it’s my biased mother’s eye that leads to me to believe that the line of my Romi and Juliet was an even happier crew. Or maybe not. Maybe they really were.

As the numbers in my finch family were lessened by age and death, by early in 1998 I had only one possible mother left, and it was Síle. I would cage her mostly with her uncle Pepper, and though she and Pepper did try more than once to make a family, she would always peck the eggs open after a few days of sitting. I didn’t know whether this was because she knew the eggs were infertile, or whether she was simply not mother material. Whichever it was, it resulted in the fact that when she died in January 1999, she left behind only her brother and her uncle, effectively ending a family that had begun in 1991. I would try one more time in 2001 to keep this family going by getting a new female to pair with Síle’s brother, but I had waited too long, and it didn’t work. Síle was the last lady of Juliet’s big family that I said good-bye to, and there were never any others after her.

When Síle died, we were living in a small apartment in a huge brick whale of a building that had sixty units. My landlord had sold the building to some kind of a nebulous partnership, and a few months after Síle was gone, we moved across the street. The partnership moved all remaining tenants into one half of the building while they re-did the empty half, and then shuffled everybody again to do half number one. In summer 2000, more than a year after we’d moved out, they finally got around to gutting my old apartment. It was never again going to look the way it had when we were in it, and this made me sad. The workmen always left the apartment unlocked. Every afternoon when they quit for the day, I would go over and walk through my old place. I’d watch the gloomy progress of my former walls being torn down, my floors torn up. I actually found a couple of things of mine that had been left behind and never thrown out by the tenant after me (who was someone I knew).

And I found something else. Sometime in December 1998, not long before she died, Síle had lain her last egg. Once again she’d actually sat on it for a while, so again I’d hoped it was fertile. Nope. Eventually she started pecking at it one day, and by some clever move or other, managed to hurl the yolk out of the cage. It hit the baseboard, broke open, and congealed there. I’d been on my way out when this happened and made a mental note to clean up that yolk when I got home.

So much for my mental note. I forgot all about that yolk. Then Síle died. Then I noticed the yolk again. Now you can call me sloppily sentimental, or too sensitive, or anything you want, but I couldn’t touch that yolk. It was the last of Síle that I had, the last infertile egg with no new generation inside. It made me feel I still had a little bit of her to look at that yolk.

When we’d moved, I’d cleaned that place from stem to stern… except for the yolk. I couldn’t wash away the last of my little bird. I decided to leave it for the next tenant to do, a stranger, a person who wouldn’t know exactly what it was they were obliterating.

Nearly two years had passed since that egg had been produced. I sneaked into that apartment four or five afternoons in a row, until they started locking the doors again. And there was Síle’s yolk, still on the woodwork down at the floor. Two years it had lasted, and that pleased me. I had never expected such longevity from my tiny bird’s last tiny yolk. Once the doors were locked again, that piece of wood and the dried yolk adorning it were history. My history. Síle’s history.

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read…   Mental hell…   Cutting the pie…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

She was another one of those tiny zebra finches, a daughter of Juliet. Miri was of the dark grey variety, and was the only one of Juliet’s many children to successfully have children of her own. She was born, hatched, whatever you want, in the spring or summer of 1991, because that’s when Juliet produced two broods and never produced anymore. There were at least twelve new finches in my life when she got finished.

Miri was finch-like, naturally: chattery and fluttery. I paired her with various males over her life, but the only one she showed any real interest in was her father Romi, after Juliet had died. In the end we had the line breeding, father and daughter, and when she was at least three years old she came forth with her only brood. Three chicks, one of each of the zebra finch colors: white, light grey, dark grey. I wish I could remember exactly what year this was. It really uspets my Asperger’s obsession with detail when there are such details that are important to me that didn’t stick in my brain. It was certainly no earlier than 93, and may have been as late as 95. Her last child, a dark grey boy called Zachary, died in May 2001, and after ten years of parents and children and grandchildren, the family of Romi and Juliet ended.

When the toughest part of motherhood begins to slack off for a bird, when the chicks are feathered in and the feedings aren’t as constant, the parents begin to look less weary and anxious. This is usually when the chicks begin spending their days outside the nest, returning to it at night, and eating a certain amount of seed on their own. You have never seen any better combination of worry and pride than when you watch avian parents with their young on the first day of fledging. I’ve seen it in both wild birds and caged, and it is precious, in the best sense of that word. It is dear. You see the worry and the pride in the parents when the young take their “first steps,” and you’re rooting for them. At least, I root for them. “You’re children are beautful,” I say in sweet tones, to any bird parents (to all animal parents, in fact) I see with fledglings. And I said those words to Romi and Miri too, on the first day their chicks emerged from the nest, and for at least two weeks more. I can see that moment fifteen, sixteen years ago as clearly as if it were last week: Zachary, Julie and Síle coming out to the world for the first time, their parents anxious and proud. Mother stays perched beside the chicks, father darts and flies place to place chattering, in the manner of dads who are guarding the family. Yup, I hear him as if it were last week.

Miri the little mom, whose name had come from one of my favorite episodes of the original Star Trek (Captain Kirk and all that), left us two days before Christmas in 1997, in the evening. As always, I hated seeing her go, but there’s no questioning that having one or more children left behind after a certain animal dies is a great comfort, a legacy.

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read…    Extemporaneana…   Being toward death…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved

Once again, there’s no photo. I have so few photos with me in the ponystall. And even if I ever get back what’s in the storage, it’s only a part of what I once had. Many pictures and rolls of film that were mine have been thrown out by other people. Not to mention a host of other belongings.

Brucie was another grandchild of Maman (there were twelve of them, after all). Brother of Chloë and Spot and others. He had the familial smallness, and likewise the familial white hair with grey patches. Because he was, from birth, the stockiest of the six kittens, we started out calling him Big Bruiser, which was eventually shortened to Bruiser. But as he got older, three or months, becoming a young feline fellow, I felt that Bruiser was no longer appropriate, that he needed something with more dignity. Hence Brucie. But there was disagreement. When Bruce and Chloë were five and a half months old, my mother decided she wanted them, and off they went to live with her. But she liked Bruiser, and went on calling him that for a long time, maybe even until he died. Whereas I would always refer to him as Brucie on the phone with Mum, and when I’d go out there for a visit I would never, ever call him Bruiser.

If any cat at all in Maman’s family can be said to have had a bit of the bully in them, then it was Bruce. But this family was so thoroughly good-natured that their version of bully was very, very mild indeed. Though he wasn’t the first-born of the kittens, he was definitely the leader, the boss. A benevolent and kindly boss who was loved by his siblings, who never feared him. They simply deferred to him.

Another driver, another car, another dead cat. And the eternal debate over outside versus inside cats. In another post like this, I declined to set forth the arguments on either side, and to defend my reasons for opting, most of the time, for letting my cats go outdoors. And my mother had always let hers go out as well. Someday, when I’m further along putting my small books about the animals together, I will write about that debate, but not today.

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read…   Streams four…   Twenty-ninth december…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved

Katschi. It’s a very long time ago she died: 31 years ago today. She was another homeless or lost lonely one that I took in, back in the previous century, in 1971. I was eighteen, and she was no more than two, I think. In the beginning I named her Kätzchen, even though she was not a kitten, but a grown cat. I don’t remember how long that was her name, only that at some point I changed it to Katschi. This was much easier for family members and vets to pronounce, and easier for vet techs to spell. Most people, in fact, wouldn’t even try to pronounce Kätzchen. They’d just say: that grey cat.

My boyfriend and I had gone to the Shaw’s market in the evening for something or other, and there she was, hanging  at the corner of the building. As people walked near her to enter the store, she would duck backwards into the darkness. Except when I came along (animals have such great subliminal skills; they always knowwho the animal person is). When my boyfriend and I approached, out came Katschi with no fear at all, talking loudly, accepting my touch, rubbing against me. All I talked about in the store was the cat, and that if it was still out there when we finished, I was going to take it. I think I even got some cat food in the store.

Of course she was still there when we came out. And that was it. Off into the car with us, and she was mine until she died. This death happened way too soon, after only eight years. Things went wrong in her body that at that time could not be fixed.

One of things that could be fixed, after a fashion, was the devastation of glaucoma. It had been misdiagnosed as a chronic eye infection for over a year (treated with antibiotics), so that by the time I tried a different vet, the damage already done was great. This was in 77 or 78. She was totally blind in her right eye, which had filled with fluid to almost twice its normal size, and there was 20 or 30% sight loss in the left. This was a new type of cat crisis for me, and I have Asperger’s, and unfamiliar things send me into great anxiety. The vet suggested removal of the eye, which horrified me at first hearing, but he would send to me an animal eye specialist so that I could discuss other options.

Eyes. Eyes and horrible things that happen to them make me very squeamish in general, and especially in someone I love. And eyes were a favorite thing of Katschi’s, that is to say, my eyes. On how many mornings over eight years, when she decided she wanted me to get up, would she sit on my chest and scrape my eyelids open with her coarse cat tongue?  A great many. And now she had lost more than half of her eyesight, when I’d been faithfully taking her to a vet every time she got discharge, and faithfully applying antibiotics. And all my efforts had resulted in this loss of vision over a misdiagnosis. Resulted in the words: “The eye should be removed.”

We went to the specialist. He confirmed the diagnosis and the damage. He showed me fake eyes in the palm of his hand, and he showed me photos of animals with these eyes in their heads. Either way, the fake eyes looked spooky to me, and so unnatural. He knew I was willing to go into debt for this procedure if it was good for Katschi, but he also knew I wasn’t as deep in the pockets as a lot of his other clients. He told me that the eyes were purely cosmetic, that they were bought by people with money and purebred animals, people who didn’t want to look at a face with only one eye. He said there was absolutely no medical reason to have a fake eye. And if you just get an eye removal, your own vet can do that just as proficiently as I can, and he’ll charge less.

Back at home, I took a few days to think. In the end I decided on the cheaper way out, not because of money, but because of the spookiness of the fake eyes. The surgery was done, and it looked pretty awful until the swelling went down and the stitches were out and the fur started growing back. And then it looked just fine. As if she simply chose to keep that eye closed. And she was so much happier, because she no longer had this swollen, paining eye that she couldn’t protect with her lids. The remaining eye was treated to arrest the glaucoma, and she lost no more vision. Everything turned out peachy for Katschi that time.

But in late 1979 we weren’t so lucky, though at first it seemed we would be. Katschi had gone off her feed and some other symptoms for about a month, so back to the same doctor she went. A tumor on her spleen. More surgery. A phone call from the vet after the surgery made me joyful: the tumor was benign and was removed with the spleen, and she would be good as new. When I brought her home, she was fine for one day. Eating, moving around, etc.

But the next day was the end. She vomited every morsel of food she ate. She looked unhappy in the extreme. She didn’t want to do anything. It was a Sunday and the vet was closed, but he was at home and said he’d see her. Grossly enlarged liver. Nothing to be done. Why? He said that sometimes the strain on the body of carrying even a benign tumor can bring on an organ failure, or even the anesthetic itself. He said he couldn’t have predicted it, as it’s very random. He said he was sorry, that she’d seemed to him like she was going to do well. Nothing now but the lethal injection.

And so went my grouchy, demanding, loving, independent, one-person Katschi, who had no interest in any human but me and was only interested in scratching the rest of the family. So she went, on the 16th of December, 1979.

Twenty-four years later, December 16th reared its random head again. On that date in 2003, my nineteen-year-old nephew died in a vehicle crash where he was serving in Iraq. He was the driver, the rest of his unit was in the truck with him, but only he was killed. The accident was not his fault, or so said his unit-mates and his superiors, and I believe them. If Nathan was anything, he was responsible. It’s happened more than once in my life that a certain date ends up representing more than one death. I was informed of my nephew’s death, in an oblique way, on December 17th by a cop standing at the door. Ever after that, I could not stand to look at that cop. Shoot the messenger. But that’s the way it is. He brought the news, and seeing him triggered a moment of trauma.

To remember you today, Katschi and Nathan, and remember what might have been, if it weren’t for the damnable randomness of living.  And the damnable randomness of dying too young.

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read…   Mishibone…   Braonwandering…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved

Jürgen Jergen Oppenheimer was his full name. I was eighteen when I got him. And if you find his full name a tad too much, think on the fact that the one before him was, in full, Jeffrey Jeremy Hilary Boob Jason Julian Chaucer. I was a teenager, for heaven’s sake, and a teenager with Asperger’s at that. Take a gander at some of the names Opal Whiteley gave her animals: Peter Paul Reubens, Lars Porsena of Clusium, and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus. And she was just a little kid with Asperger’s. By comparison, I wasn’t that bad. And by comparison to Jeffrey, Jürgen got off easy.

He was a gift, of sorts, from a sibling. One summer day, 1971, I’m there in the livingroom, and sibling squeaks open the heavy front door, tosses something onto the rug, and says “Here’s an orange cat for you.” Orange was my favorite color for male cats in those days, and the previous one, the aforementioned Jeffrey, had died earlier in the year. Then sibling shut the door again.

Jürgen was probably less than six weeks old at that point, very puzzled to have landed in this strange place. He would prove to be calm and quirky, and almost all the time an introvert.

So who’s the kid in the photo with the interesting face treatment? I’ll call him Joey. He lived nextdoor and was great pals with Jürgen, the only one of my cats who was laid back enough to be friends with a four-year-old. As I myself had been, Joey was not what you’d call a mainstream sort of a four-year-old, but he and I were different from the norm in mostly different ways. Joey was often very serious, even moreso than I was at four, but once in a while he would come out with something that was a howl.

One spring someone buys Joey a plastic fishing pole, with a plastic and magnetized worm on the end, and a separate, magnetized plastic fish. Joey was bored with the plastic, lifeless fish, and seemed to find it much more fun that Jürgen came along one day and went after the bait. After that, it was their game. One day my father saw them at it and said “Catfishin’ Joey?” And with a completely straight face, staring down at Juergen in the puddle, Joey says “Yup.” And the cat, despite his general dislike of water, never hesitated to roil around in the puddles to catch that damned plastic bait.

Another of Jürgen’s much-loved games was to sit in my lap while I ate and be passed goodies from my plate. His favorite hand-outs were plain donuts. The old-fashioned kind, made in an old-fashioned donut shop.

Joey’s about 42 now, with kids of his own. I don’t keep in touch with him and couldn’t ask permission to use his picture, so I’ve concealed his face. I’m 57. Jürgen, of course, is gone a very, very long time, having died on 8 December 1984 at the age of thirteen.
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(photo by l. billard)

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read… All my stars… Braon…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved