Connections

We finally got the internet installed yesterday.

I remember when we did this a few years ago in Scotland. A man with a black bag came and did a couple of clever things with tools and that was it -- we were connected.

Here it was a lot more complicated. My husband and I went down to an office and waited until someone who spoke English was available. We chose a packet and arranged for a suitable day. What we forgot about was the fact that we have not been given our address here. In fact, nobody seems to know it.

"You're in a brand-new unit," the estate agent told us. "We don't know what it is yet."

So on the day we were due to have the internet installed, I had to leave work early. I had to take a dolmush from my university instead of driving home with my husband in the evening as I usually do. I stood on the busy road until a dolmush came along and once it arrived, I wrenched open the door and squeezed myself inside. There was only one seat available, next to the oldest woman I believe I have ever seen in all my life outside a hospital. She was tiny and bent over and in one gnarled brown hand she was clutching a walking stick. Her head-kerchief was tied under her chin and and her full, multi-layered skirts swept the floor under her little black boots. I had to stop myself from staring at her so great was her resemblance to the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

The dolmush driver took off with a great burst of speed, scattering chickens along the side of the road. I've never yet ridden in a dolmush that didn't have loud Middle-eastern music playing, the kind you associate with belly-dancing and plaintive, passionately-sung lyrics, and this one was no exception. Because I was sitting in the front, I had the job of passing fares and change back and forth from departing passengers to the driver. At one point, I held a five-yetele note in my hand for a good minute while the driver negotiated with a noisy woman who appeared to be lost; finally he took her money and passed over the change and I was able to lean back in my seat and watch my little old lady neighbor out of the corner of my eye. She sucked the few of her teeth she had left and ignored me.

I would love to know her life story.

When I got to my stop, I managed to get off without incident. God knows how the little old lady coped; getting off a dolmush takes a heck of a lot more than un poco de gracia and if there is a way to do it that does not require one to bend over and display one's rear end to one's fellow passengers, I sure haven't found it.

When the internet man called, I was ready for him. Although we live almost next door to a mosque, it is obviously not a very successful or prosperous one: no one happens to have heard of it. So I arranged to meet him at the better-known one that is five blocks away from us -- we are spoiled for choice when it comes to mosques around here -- and he even managed to understand my awful attempt at the name in Turkish.

I stood by the side of the road for fifteen minutes, waiting for the internet man to show up. The mosque is beautiful. It is surrounded by orange, palm, pepper, persimmon and pomegranate trees. There is a tall, gruff old bushy-eyebrowed man who lives next door to it, but I know his secret: he talks what sounds very much like baby-talk to his goats and cats.

As I watched the old man and his cats, I was suddenly seized with such a yearning for my cat in Scotland that I could hardly stand it. I remembered how she would settle, purring, in my lap on cold winter days when I sat writing, a cup of coffee at hand. When I got stuck on something, I would always go outside to pull weeds or rake leaves and my cat would follow me, always a good five-minute face-saving distance behind. As I weeded, she would hunt nearby or show off prettily until I reached down and scratched her belly -- just like the gruff old man was doing with his cat. And I remembered more: how easy and convenient it was to use my computer, how plentiful our supply of hot water, and how vividly red our maple trees always were at this time of year. I pictured the Christmas lights going up in our town, a scattering of snow frosting the tips of the trees, the smell of coal smoke in the chilled winter air.

The computer man figured out who I was right away. I hopped in the front seat and we drove down the bumpy, pot-holed road, me navigating as best I could.

Along the way we passed the little old lady from the dolmush, slowly making her way home, walking stick in hand as she hobbled along the dusty road. Obviously she lives in this neighborhood.

I wonder if I will ever know her life story.

One Of A Kind Cat

The cat knows something's up.

There are piles of books everywhere -- in boxes, on the remaining furniture, along the sides of the staircase. The contents of every drawer have been spilled out and rummaged through; suitcases stand open, and cardboard boxes are to be found every few feet.

On her soft little feet, the cat pads through the maze of boxes and piles of books, inspecting everything, glancing up at us with a question in her eyes. We can't take her with us, and it kills me to see her looking so mystified -- or curled up peacefully in a chair for that matter. She is very much my cat, and I know I'll never have another one like her.

Our living room has been turned into an obstacle course. We seem to have as many CDs as we do books, and boxes of them make getting around the room very hard. The phone rings non-stop, and inevitably it has been left beyond a waist-high stack of boxes.

The cat watches our frantic movement with a censorious eye. She is just waiting for someone to sit down so she can leap onto their lap and be petted. This rarely happens lately; no one has the time to spare.

So she does what any good cat will do when she senses her human enablers have grown a little distant: she brings us gifts. Normally, her favorite time for gift-giving is when I am having my weekly writing group meeting. Engrossed, I sit at the computer, instant-texting, and the cat knows she is not really welcome. So she goes out and exerts herself, and if she is lucky, I hear her hunting call, a low, mournful yowl that always means she has brought me something. If I am by myself, I have two choices. I can continue with my meeting and risk the chance of her devouring her catch messily on our one decent rug, or of her possibly still-viable prey crawling off to die under the sofa, unnoticed for days until the smell reaches our noses. Or I can catch it, fling it outside if it is still alive and unwounded -- or quickly dispatch it if it is beyond salvation. At first, I always tried to liberate the captured animal, but this gets old very fast when you have a champion hunter of a cat. Now I am inclined to let her have her way with whatever poor little creature she has caught; even if I manage to catch it and throw it outside, chances are that she'll only catch it again.

Last night, I was up late packing. In the kitchen, I have boxes of Asian foodstuffs piled high. We never managed to get through all the nori, the dehydrated tofu (I don't recommend this), the wakame, or the dried squid that my kids and husband have purchased in veritable job lots.

I was sitting between two stacks of boxes when I heard the cat-flap snap open, then shut. We generally have it locked on 'no-entry', but the cat has figured out a way to open it anyway.

And then I heard that yowl.

Bear in mind that I was in the middle of a maze. A maze composed of boxes of foodstuffs. Most of the time, the rodents the cat brings in have few places to hide. Sure, they can dive under a dresser, but at some point, they have to come out for food and water. But given the state of our kitchen now, every mouse in Scotland could hole up for five months and raise many generations of healthy offspring. And obviously I don't want this to happen.

We've intiated a non-swearing policy in this household. Bad words ostensibly cost the user fifty pence a shot, so whenever someone indulges in profanity, someone else shouts out Fifty pee! Everybody else was asleep last night or I'd have racked up a fortune.

By the time I got to bed, I'd been all over the kitchen with the broom, trying to ferret out the poor little rodent, half out of its wits with terror. I'd sprained my thumb and whacked my hip on the corner of the table and messed up my knees, crouching and trying to coax the rodent out. The cat got bored halfway through this and went to lie down in the living room. She's lucky she made it through the night.

We're pals again, and she's lying in my lap even as I write. I'll never have another cat like her. Good thing that works two ways.

Slinging Hash

I am up to my neck in books. I've got books on psycholinguistics, statistics (non-parametric and differential), grammar (standard and transformational), style, semantics, language learning, and God-knows-what-else. Including dictionaries and textbooks and cook books and comic books and silly joke books and crossword puzzle books and coffee table books and those dumb parody books you give people for Christmas when you can't think of anything else to give them. I almost wonder why I'm trying to write books, I've got so many.

I got so tired of packing books that I went outside into my garden and saw that in the past busy, rainy week, a whole slew of weeds has sprung up. Grass has taken root in places it has no business being, creeping buttercup has colonized half of my garden beds, and montbretia is making a triumphant comeback everywhere. This depressed me so much I took a stroll down the block. And met Stanley, our neighbor, a bed-and-breakfast proprietor who runs the equivalent of a small restaurant in his house.

Stanley is one of those neighbors you only get once in a lifetime. He will loan you anything and never need to borrow a thing in return. He is a marvelous cook who has run his own restaurant in the past; at least three times a month, my daughter, who works for Stanley and his equally lovely wife, brings home leftover vol au vents, sweet and sour fish, venison stew, pork-fried rice, barbeque spare ribs, mango and ginger cheesecake, and lemon grass shrimp. Nothing she brings home from Stanley's ever lasts the night in our fridge.

"You're still okay about Saturday morning, right?" Stanley asked me now, and I felt a slow burn spread over my cheeks. I had completely forgotten. In a heady moment after a bang-up meal prepared by Stanley a few months ago, I had agreed to cover for him one Saturday morning in August.

I was up to my knees in books and weeds and moving misery, yet I had to cook breakfast for a bunch of strangers. There are always at least five cars out in front of Stanley's house, so I knew there might be as many as ten people, maybe more. Stanley could cook for fifty people, in the dark with his hands tied behind his back and never break a sweat, but not me. I've cooked for dozens before, but it has been a frantic, hellish business. Short-order cooking, like waiting on tables, is vastly underrated -- especially when you do it right.

"You bet," I said. "I've got it on my calendar." Which was not a lie: I did. The problem is, the calendar is behind a wall of books. It's been hidden for the past week, and I haven't looked at it.

"Good," said Stanley, looking considerably relieved. "We've got fifteen people in on Saturday."

I did it. Six bowls of oatmeal, eight fried eggs, twelve strips of grilled bacon, ten sausages, sixteen roasted tomato halves, thirty-six fried mushrooms, twelve tatty scones, six disgusting grilled black puddings (I almost gagged just touching them), one broiled kipper, four poached eggs (one with broken yolk), and one problematic boiled egg later, but ladies and gentlemen, I am still breathing.

But I've still got a lot of books to pack.