This is Basho, Bonbon’s brother. Where Bonbon is a monster cat, Basho is the opposite. Basho is a cat one expects. He is sleek, graceful, beautiful. A classic tuxedo cat, with a small white mustache.
He is, relative to his brother, a gentle being. He tends to warn before leaping upon one. He speaks lyrically, with a sweetness to his tone. He is much better at restraining his claws.
He is, also, small enough for me to pick up, or to carefully remove from my lap. Where he often is, though not as often as Bonbon.
A Celebration of Life(This is my father, Richard Webb Brogan, on his WWII bomber.)
Today we celebrate 250 years of the United State of America, a Celebration of Life at the funeral. Family & friends gather to honor and remember, to share the funny/sad stories, to create a meaningful tribute to the lost. There will be food, drink, and fireworks.
Someone gets drunk and objects to the sweet white-washing of a history more complicated than acknowledged. Such objections are quickly quashed. The young man is escorted out by older, larger ones in suits or uniforms.
The crowd vacillates between true, wrenching grief, joyful memories held close, and fierce denial. It was glorious! The corpse in the casket was universally loved, extremely kind, generous and . . .
Some quietly, briefly meet in smaller rooms to reassure and remind each other of secret, private pain. These stories are not shared in the larger group. The failures and faults and crimes of the beloved corpse will not be discussed in the big room.
Some, my brother and myself, exchange glances, silently nodding at shared trauma. We know that hope and despair lie together in that box.
I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem.
There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli).
I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections.
There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious.
Which is the basic problem. I am old, I am not entirely well, I have very limited energy. Also limited discipline, which leads to unlimited expectations. Impossible expectations. Goals I cannot reach.
Check out that LINKS page. You will see my problem, and that page isn’t even done yet. I have more pages I follow that have not been added. I will be doing that over the next few weeks. Adding, or pruning; we shall see. Many links came from Dave Bonta at Via Negativa, who always has pointers to good reading. Others I found or resurrected myself, and then there’s Substack…
He and his brother were little sweet kittens. This one grew into a big-hearted, clumsy, demanding monster. Affectionate, yes. Demonstrates it by slamming his huge body into my old soft one. Generous, yes. Will bring me toys, usually not-meant-to-be toys, to share with me in a game of fetch. Cheerful, yes. Leaps onto my unwell sleeping body in an ecstasy of greeting.
He is not beautiful. Aren’t all cats beautiful? Not this one. He has a funny face. Big flat nose. Eyes that always seem to need cleaning. Giant paws with rarely retracted claws. He has a lot to say.
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