Hammett Encounters a Talking Chair

Thelonious pursuing one of her favorite hobbies, back when she was alive.

Friday night I saw my acupuncturist for the first time in six weeks, which was lovely. There’s been less raving lately about how fabulous he is because he was away in Mexico for five weeks of surfing on what was actually one of his twice-annual five-week surfing trips to Mexico—talk about self-care, particularly given that he has his own business. If I had my own business, I’d probably never go on vacation at all, let alone for 10 weeks a year. He’s extremely serene.

When I got home, I took another crack at fixing the wobbly lamp, with some further hardware I’d obtained, and at least for now it’s as solid as one could want. My mother’s lamp-wiring advice: “Keep fiddling with it until it’s the way you want it.”

I lapsed into self-pity later in the evening and vowed never to get another cat. No, I would just live without this, that and the other, alone in my little apartment, mourning my departed cat, waiting for my remaining time in this vale of tears to pass. It’s only going to be 40 years or so at the absolute most; I can make it.

But when I woke up Saturday, I thought, forget that: I’m going to have all that stuff. What I want is not excessive. There is no reason to refuse myself these things.

I took some kitchen items to the thrift store and then rode my bike to the very pleasant pet store at Church and Cesar Chavez, Noe Valley Pet Company, where I bought some cat toys for the future cat.

Then I went to Best Buy at Harrison and 14^th (kind of a horrible place) and bought a Sony radio so I can hear KQED in the living room and the kitchen. Yes, I was going wild.

After that, I went home and had a nice chat on the phone with Mr. Bull about cat adoption. She said if I wanted to go to the SPCA the next day, Sunday, to look at cats, she would go with me. It was only 3:30 or so when we got off the phone, so I decided to stroll over to the SPCA and look at cats right away.

I brought my lease just in case and happened upon a cage full of black kittens, including one little short-haired boy cat, who is right now locked in my bathroom, since it’s my first full day away from him and he is at that inquisitive age, six months. I think his name will be Hammett (after Kirk, not Dashiell), which lends itself to the nicknames Ham and Hammy.

He’s very friendly and affable, and so far he is manifesting perfect cat behavior: he goes in the litter box, hasn’t clawed anything, doesn’t bite or scratch my fingers when I pet him. I warned Tom not to teach him to regard fingers as toys, because I think he’s going to be big.

Saturday night he was up much of the night, therefore so was I. I had a good cry over Thelonious, holding the cedar box with her ashes in it, and I feared it was just the way it was going to be with Hammett until he was older and that I’d have to confine him in another room (i.e., the bathroom) at bedtime, but last night when I went to bed, he crawled under the covers with me for a bit—it was unexpectedly soothing to have that warm little body there, an emissary from Black Cat Land come to console me for the loss of the other black cat—and then he went to sleep on the comfy chair.

He only got up once in the night that I noticed, to see (again) what those papers piled on top of the shredder are.

This morning he sat down on the answering machine and then got up startled, no doubt thinking, “Odd, a talking chair.”

Saturday night I watched about ten minutes of the original Manchurian Candidate with Tom and then went home to be with Hammett.

Yesterday I went to Rainbow for groceries and did my cooking for the week. Besides the usual grains and beans, I tried a recipe that I hoped would approximate Whole Foods’ vegan brownies, and one that I hoped would approximate Whole Foods' vegan chocolate frosting.

The former came out surprisingly well but took absolutely forever and dirtied way too many things, including the food processor. I had to wash dishes for 45 minutes afterwards. Maybe I’ll just continue to pay Whole Foods the $1.89.

The latter didn’t come out at all. The recipe called for two tablespoons of brown rice syrup, but after four or five, it still tasted awful, so then I tossed in some honey—that’ll sweeten this stuff up, by gum—and then I had to put the whole batch in the compost bin. Tom tasted it before I threw it out and politely said, “It wasn’t what I was expecting.”