Sometimes, I don’t like getting up in the morning. Correction. I do NOT get up in the morning, I rise in the early afternoon. Morning for me is 10am to 11am. Anything prior to that and I am either sleeping, or some kind soul is cooking up a mean breakfast in the kitchen that has roused me and my hunger. Or—if especially cunning . . . someone has appealed to my joy of cooking nature by conjuring act, seduction, or sweetness and I am making a tall stack of pancakes, towering like fluffy beige clouds.
Pixel and Odin have taken to waking me up the morning now at 8am, like clockwork every day. But let me back up first. When we all go to bed at night, Pixel curled up in between Brooks’ legs and I, resting on the crook of his arm as he reads and i listen to my iPod, Odin curls around the top of my head, his paws kneading my head and ponytail softly, purring, making my pillow a delight to lay on (though he can be a little hog) and all is pleasant and right with the world. We fall asleep like this, the four of us.
Then I wake up to different creatures in the morning.
First with Pixel scratching at the towering pile of books on Brooks’ nitestand, pulling them down with intermittent ruffle-thumps, while Odin dives under the blanket to get a better bite on our toes. Then Pixel takes to my side of the bed, leaps up onto my nightstand and sits directly on my alarm clock, tap-dancing on buttons until the correct one turns on my radio and it blares the morning music, which means I have to re-set my alarm clock. If this proves to be ineffectual, a crashing sound comes when he returns a few minutes later and pushes the alarm clock off the back of the nightstand. Meanwhile Odin is soft-paw scratching at the back of my bare arm which lies exposed outside of the blanket. If this doesn’t rouse me, it’s straight for the aerial tactics – he pounces directly onto my face and lands with both paws onto my closed eyelids, for added effect.
Sometimes I flail and yell a bit. More often than not, Icurse about interrupted sleep and the general nastiness of all things kitty. Occasionally cats fly like Peter Pan out the bedroom door get slammed out. This doesn’t deter them for long . . . the loft space above us is open and so they dangle from our closet and peek around from above and over the bed. Then the howling starts and paper chewing for the silly person who left bills or magazines or instruction manuals or cardboard boxes out—anywhere. Desperate measures call for cat sky-diving which will really scare the shit out of you, four eagle-talon spread claw-foots coming down to knock your wind clear out.
Then, whoever is more or less irritated, you HAVE TO get up and FEED THE CATS. And perhaps, if you are lucky, you can return to a couple more hours of blissful sleep until you have to be where you have to be.
But it was an especially nice night and a particularly eventful morning of cat acrobatics and i woke to some fresh yellow and white in the garden. Snow drops and some yellow crocus things. But they are calling for 5″ of snow late nite through mid-afternoon.
Spring is such a tawdry tease.
Well—that’s ok . . . some very nice things have been happening. Me and an old friend, Anne-Marie have reconnected and I am so glad to have her back.
When I lived in Detroit many years ago, had first met Brooks (online, which is yet another story) I also met Anne-Marie. It was a randomly created room called SSH (Stop Say Hello) on Yahoo! Chat, when that stuff was just getting started. She lived in Canada at the time and she was the first friend i met on the internet who i actually met in person. She drove a long way to see me so we could stomp around at some kitschy cool club in Detroit where the dance floor was like a train wreck—you didn’t necessarily like what you were seeing, but you couldn’t tear your eyes away either. Seems we played pool that nite, but my memory is such a blur from those days. Now that she has children and I am living on the coast, perhaps she can help fill those missing bits/years in.