Skip to main content

CORONAVIRUS COMFORT


Yesterday was a milestone in the Time of the Coronavirus.  No, it wasn’t the new number of deaths or new infections.  Nor the number of test kits, swabs, reagents, and PPE delivered to lucky governors and mayors who won the Matter of Life and Death Lottery.  No, it was a much more significant, a much happier, milestone.   

Yesterday was the tenth birthday of The Kittens, aka The Idiots, better known as Calyx (who sometimes goes by The Big ‘Un, Rosebud, Flaw Paw, Baby Boy, or Mr. Biggie Large) seen below,
and China Blue (whose sobriquets are Little Sweetie Girl, Little Boo, and Honey Bunny), seen below.  
So I want to give a quick, day-late-and-a-dollar-short, shout-out to the two fur balls who make my day worth getting out of bed for.   And to their mother Orontea (below), aka Mama Tee One Time and The Tea Meisterin, for whom I played birth coach ten years ago.
For The Kittens, (and they will always be The Kittens, regardless of the passage of time), living as they do without a calendar or an iPhone message bing thing, it was a day like any other day.  And that’s the thing.  In the Time of the Coronavirus, the cats are a great comfort and a point of reference.  They ground me.  Their routine never changes, pandemic, no pandemic, it's all the same to them.  Their days consist of verbs and verb phrases, some of which repeat over the course of 24 hours:  Eat, sleep, wake up and stretch, cuddle, chase, disappear a tin foil ball under a piece of furniture, eat, hop into an open closet, poop (not in the closet), pee in synchrony when we do, cry to be let out of the closet, scratch something they shouldn't, eat some more, chomp off a tulip bloom, puke, sleep.  It’s a full life.
And they’re a big part of mine.  They are a constant source of amusement, affection, diversion, and a daily reminder of how the repeating rhythms of life remain unchanged, even in a pandemic.  I love them for this.  They are essential workers in my currently circumscribed world, and they're keeping me as cozy as this comforter. 

So, grab a kitty if you’ve got one, and hold on tight to life as it was, is, and ever will be.  Because in these pandem(on)ic times, yesterday is the same as today and tomorrow.

Keep it real!  Wear your mask!
Marilyn


Comments

  1. Love the kitties! Happy birthday to them! Extra cuddles I hope! ~k x

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are so very right.we don't have kitties,and yours are precious by the way,but if we concentrate on the import things we have, family's, friends,daily routines we will get through this and enter the new chapter awaiting us. Love you thanks for the positive vibes

    ReplyDelete
  3. They're very odd though. China Blue for example demands to be in the bathroom when I take a shower. Otherwise she could give a shit about where I am, or what I'm doing. She's cute though!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A MONTH IN JAPAN – TOKYO, NOVEMBER 5 - 6, 2025

November 5, 2025 – Shibuya, Daikanyama, and Shinjuku The Lonely Planet Pocket Guide to Tokyo  "Walk Shibuya" describes Shibuya. Thanks to its iconic intersection, Shibuya serves as a kind of visual shorthand for Tokyo in the global imagination.   The thrumming crowds, glowing lights and giant video screens that you associate with the city?   They’re all here – and turned up to the max.   Shibuya is a center for youth culture, and particularly fashion, music and nightlife; it’s among the best places in the city for clubbing [Me:  "Oh, to be 20 again!"], live music and shopping….To the west are the hip residential enclaves of Daikanyama and Naka-Meguro; these neighborhoods …can give you an alternative image of life in the capital – one that’s low-rise and low-key (but still very Tokyo).    Shibuya Station We took the Chiyoda Line from Nezu Station a few blocks from our apartment, transferred to the Hamzomon Line at Otemachi Station, and got off at ...

ORONTEA DEL POGGIO IMPERIALE APRIL 8, 2008 – APRIL 8, 2026

PEDIGREE Her official name, as registered in the Associazione Nazionale Felina Italiana , was Orontea del Poggio Imperiale.   She was a Chocolate Point Birman (Sacred Cat of Burma in English, Heilige Birma in German, and Sacro di Birmania in Italian).   Like so many cats, Orontea had numerous other, unofficial names:   Téa for short, T! for shorter, Mamma T One Time, The Meisterin, Beauty Queen (which she was), Devil Kitty, Marlon’s Girl, Sweetie Girl, Beauty Girl, and Best One (except for the other two kitties). POGGIBONSI Téa  was born in a litter of four at Poggio Imperiale, a cattery in Stefania’s home in Poggibonsi, a Tuscan hill town between Florence and Siena.   Téa ’s mother Galy was a Blue Point Birman also born in Italy, and her father Fiorucci was a Chocolate Point Birman born in Sweden.   According to the Italian Feline Association, cats born in 2008 were required to have names beginning with O.   Stefania named this litter after o...

A BRIEF HISTORY OF JAKUB AND MARYA

I recently assembled 15 photo albums from literally thousands of color prints my husband and I had amassed since the 1980s, as well as a handful of black and white prints left to us by our respective families and dating back to the 1930s.   Among the photos I inherited from my father, was a photo (above) of Cousin Andy Sova, Cousin Irene Sova, my father Steve Kalata, and Cousin Emil Sova taken in Garfield, New Jersey, in 1925.   The photo, like a Proustian madeleine, sent me to a file of raw genealogical research materials on my paternal grandparents my mother had compiled in the early 1990s, before her death in 1995.   I have her files here in Berlin. In those files I found a few notes, some funeral cards, and several documents about my father and his parents, as well as my own notes from research on my father’s family I’d done in 2016 through ancestry.com .   It was all ultimately pretty sketchy and inconclusive on who, what, where, and when, but there were a few...