Friday, May 21, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sunset Over Monroeville
Mid-nineties again. Taken from about the same location as the last photo.
I miss seeing the sun set behind the hills. I miss the way the trees and the woods would loom over you in the evening when you drove along the back roads that wove beside the creeks and between the hills.
Some Time Ago
Alpine Village, Monroeville, PA. Hanging out with friends one summer's day on the Dusches' front porch. I think I'm reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
Probably around '95 or '96.
Had some potential, back then. Also had a better head of hair.
A Few More Old Friends
Again, this will be boring for most people.
Heidi, the Pennsylvania farm cat, who never quite adapted to the Texas climate:
Me and my friends used to call her the hippy-cat, for no actual reason. She was always a lady, except when she wasn't.
Schnehball:
He was always extremely skittish, unless he was in the garage, which was kind of his domain. It was always warmer than the rest of the house, but being a Texas cat, I think he preferred it that way.
Hammer and Ranger, my parents last two dogs:
My mother helped out a neighbor who was breeding wire-haired dachshunds, which were kind of uncommon in this country. I think my mother liked this partly because she'd had a wire-haired dachshund while growing up.
Hammer's the one in the back, looks kind of like a stretched out spaniel. He was always a bit nervous, stand-offish and quick to anger around people. He'd always walk around with a tennis ball in his mouth, pretty much all day long. He'd even sleep with it in his mouth. If he had to bark, he'd either drop it, bark, and pick it up again, or he'd bark around it.
If you tried to pull it out of his mouth, you'd discover that dachshunds, being badger hounds, have some serious musculature around their jaws. Along the same lines, they also bark about as loud as a dog three times their size.
He used to do this other thing where he'd sit at one end of the kitchen and wait for you to sit at the other end. Then he'd carefully set down the tennis ball. He'd give you a look, and eye up his shot. If he wasn't satisfied, he'd pick up the ball and set it down again. Then he'd knock it toward you with his nose, wait for you to throw it back to him, and then do it all over again. No one ever taught him this.
Ranger, the one in the front, was much friendlier. We used to call him Thumper, because of how he'd wag his tail and smack it against the ground. He'd hop up on the couch and sit next to you like a person, upright and leaning back against the back of the couch.
Here's another shot of him, waiting to attack a piece of rope he always liked to attack:
You could get into a good tug of war with him. Again, dachshunds are hunting dogs, and are stronger than you'd expect them to be just looking at them. You just about lift Ranger off the ground when he was clamped to that rope. Then he'd growl at you through clenched teeth, and you'd let him have the rope, and he'd shake it around for a while.
He also liked to tear up wrapping paper, which was always useful at Christmas time.
After Hammer died, Ranger carried one of his old tennis balls around for a while. He was good dog.
A Couple of Old Friends
I was just put in mind of these two. My old schnauzer, Kasper, who was my dog growing up, and my old cat, Uli, who was my cat through much my late 20s and 30s. They've been showing up in my dreams a lot lately. 
Here, they're hanging out in my folks' backyard, on the edge of Corpus Christi
This will probably be boring for most people, so you can probably stop reading now. Just want to get some of these memories down.
We picked up Kasper on Feburary 13th, 1979. It was snowing. As soon as he walked into our house, he went over and started eating our cat Gretchen's food. He was originally pitch black, then turned silver after a bout of kennel cough. He would yodel when he saw you coming home. My brother taught him a trick where you'd hold out both your hands, closed, and he'd tap the one he thought the food was in with his paw. If you laid down on the floor and played dead, he'd come over and lick your face til you got up. He lived til the Fall of 93. I don't think he recognized me the last time I saw him.
Uli (short for Ulrich) was a stray that showed up on my parents' doorstep just before Christmas, 1989.
They'd moved from Pittsburgh down to Corpus Christi when I'd gone off to college that fall, so it was the first time I'd seen their new house. I think it was the first time I'd been in Texas. When they moved down, they had Kasper and they had Heidi, a little black-and-white Pennsylvania farm cat. By the time I'd gotten down there, they'd picked up white stray cat that was eventually named Schnehball (it's sort of German). So the first night I'm down there (which I think was also the night a scorpion crawled out from under my bed and I killed it with a shoe), the first night I say, "You've got a black-and-white cat, and you've got a white cat. Now you just need a black cat." Two nights later, Uli shows up on the doorstep. So I say, "Now you got to keep him."
He was always kind of sickly and stand-offish, being the second male cat in the house. He used to swat Kasper on the nose when Kasper walked over to him. But he'd follow along on Kasper's walks. And then he'd get fatigued, so he'd sit under a bush and meow until my mother picked him up and brought him home. Then she'd finish Kasper's walk.
After a number of years in Corpus, my dad lost his job. A long stretch of unemployment followed before he found work in Tulsa. But since they were moving into an apartment, they couldn't keep all of the pets. So I volunteered to take Uli, up where I lived in Pittsburgh. (Plum Borough, really. Eastern edge of the suburbs.) Had to meet my cat at the airport. Then when me and my roommate got him home, he was freaked out by the stairs in the townhouse. Like the sight of people moving vertically freaked him out.
Couple of nights later, I'm lying in bed, which was a mattress on the floor, and my eyes are closed, and I hear something so I open my eyes. The Uli-cat was staring at my, two inches from my face. He got used to the new place and the new latitude after that.
He had long sharp claws which could leave a good mark on your arm. He liked to be scratched behind the ears like a dog. He drooled a lot, especially when he was happy. One friend in Madison called him Drooli. My friends back in Pittsburgh called him the Uli-cat, and El Gato Pusicato, which was kind of dumb, but we were in our twenties and drinking a lot at the time. In Madison, my ritual when I got home was to call out "Uli-cat! Where you at!"
If he liked you, he'd take your hand in his mouth, not quite biting. But if you tried to jerk your hand away, he'd get ticked and bite down hard. He'd also hunt your hand if you moved it around like a mouse or hid it under carpets or just stretched it past the edge of a table he was sitting under. Which was fine, if you were okay with your hand getting torn up if one of his claws caught you.
He'd flip out if there was tuna fish.
He'd also flip out in a different way if you tried to get him in his carrier to take him to the vet. I always had to disassemble it, then rebuild it around him.
In the morning, whenever I woke up, he'd be sitting next to me, staring at me and waiting for his food.
One time, there was this mouse in our townhouse, kept getting in the food. My roommate hunkered down beside Uli and said: "Why don't you catch the mouse? That's your one job. Catch the mouse. Catch the mouse." The next morning, Uli left the dead mouse on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. I felt proud of him.
He lived to be 19 years old, and was the last of his generation of pets. He wasn't in good shape toward the end, and I probably waited too long. He spent the last night sleeping with his head on my arm, and we spent the last day watching "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Cool Hand Luke" before a friend came and drove us to the vet. He rode there with his paws against my chest, staring out the window at cars going by, turning to look at me every so often like he was wondering what was up.
He was a good cat.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
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