Cat Stripped of Civil Rights in Humiliating Afternoon Raid

This is Ham guarding his Top Cat sisal-covered scratching post, which he totally uses, and whose crisp, elegant silhouette makes the rest of my apartment seem shabby and outdated.

It bothers me to use “whose” for an inanimate item, but the correct word does not seem to exist; I guess it would be “whiches.”

Gloria, whose unusually long feet were sticking out of the car window.

The robot, whiches intimidating pointer indicated the direction of the lavatory.

Unlike Thelonious, Hammett does not claw the corners of my mattress nor the sides of the upholstered chair. Of course, he is unlike Thelonious in many ways—I had assumed some things Thelonious did were things cats did, but in fact they were just things she did.

Hammett, most emphatically unlike Thelonious, doesn’t mind being cradled feet up like a baby. He is extremely alert, as you can see in this picture. When I leave for work, instead of seeming not to notice, like certain other cats, he stares right into my eyes as if he fears he’ll never see me again. He likes me to blow him a kiss as I close the door. At least, I think he likes that.

He definitely likes to put his toys into crevices and then try, usually in vain, to extract them. Sometimes he drops one of his balls into a shoe and then fishes it out. I have several of his toys in a cardboard shoe box. When I open it, he chooses the toy he wants and plucks it out with his mouth.

To the end of her days, Thelonious thought any rhythmically moving object needed attacking, even if it was my hand—Hammett is quite a gentleman in this regard—and so I would put her in the glass-doored closet when doing my shoulder exercises, where she sat on the other side of the glass in a perfectly placid manner.

When Hammett must be detained in the closet or bathroom—if I’m opening the door to the trash area, for instance, through which he is eager to exit—he gets panicked after about four minutes and starts to meow frantically: “Help! I’ve been stuffed in a small room by insurgents! Do something!”

Two Friday evenings ago, Lisa M. and I saw Music and Lyrics, which was pleasant. The following day, I went to visit a friend near Portola and Laguna Honda for some horn-related exertions in her wonderful music room. Then I went to On the Run to buy some walking shoes. They do a strange thing there, not seen for a decade or two: They measure your feet.

They also have you walk back and forth and assess the shape of your foot and arch, and then fetch the shoes that may work. I bought a pair of New Balance men’s 816s (the 816 on the back looks a little like BIG) and the whole thing took 15 minutes.

Sunday of that weekend, Tom and I went to David and Lisa’s to watch the Oscars. Lisa had made many wonderful refreshments, including a mushroom-barley salad that was really great.

By then, it was seeming that my new shoes were somewhat oversized. So much for having had my feet measured. All that did, I guess, was make it so I thought I didn’t have to determine for myself whether the shoes fit or not.

I asked Tom what he thought. He thought they were just fine, which is what he thinks of everything. I tried to feel that way, too, but finally concluded the shoes were definitely too big. On the Run readily exchanged them, and let that be a lesson to me.

This past weekend I went to see my friend Carol Joy in Novato on Saturday. We saw Breach, and both liked it. In the evening, I went to see the jazz combo Consorcio at Caffe Trieste, the new one at Market and Gough.

Sunday was a big cooking day: kidney beans, brown rice, butter cookies with chopped pecans, chard soup, and pasta sauce. I froze the latter in one-serving amounts for future use.

I have been eating a lot of salads lately, using Rainbow’s labor-saving salad mix and adding tomatoes, carrots and avocado, along with my proprietary dressing, which is made out of extra-virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar, soy sauce, onion powder, two grinds of black pepper, Dijon mustard and half a clove of garlic.

With determined effort—the use of plenty of olive oil and plenty of avocado—it is possible to eliminate the displeasing tendency of salads to be low in fat.

I’ve been tootling on the trumpet lately, and using the Lorraine Hunt Lieberson CD of Pablo Neruda poems as a sonic placeholder between warming up and the rest of my practice, during which interval I also usually do my stretches.

It means, “You may not be hearing the trumpet right this second, but I’m not yet done making noise.” Her music is good for this; using Megadeth for the same reason might backfire, causing those within earshot to think, “Will this misery never cease?”