Jim Hare classic posts Archives

View From The Recliner

Hi Walt,

Greetings from the land of retirement.

I am making up as I go, as always. It might be easier if someone
could give me a life style prescription based on my blood type (to
save time), or if I could find an herbal wrap for my intentions (to
enhance meaning), or use a topical tobacco rub on my activity
schedule (to create fulfillment). But like diet, it is individual, as you
have always said, Walt, “Different strokes…”.

I have two legs of the 3LS set, borrowed from somewhere:
1. Do little
2. Do it slowly

I'm still working on number three. It might be something about self-
expression, which is why I sit in the recliner and sip bad coffee in the
bubble glow of my laptop. What I mean by bad coffee is throwing
three partial cups together, cups left unfinished the last two days,
including the one-third full paper cup from Einstein’s Bagel Shop.
Coffee lovers everywhere would cringe at my blend of lazy in the wee
hours!

Nearly blind Alpha traces her practiced feline routes through the
room in her own personal darkness using her established paths and
dim light from the stove hood in the next room to keep her from
running into furniture. She assumes the attack posture and jumps
wildly at a sound, or to avoid some phantom, drawing her ears back
in a menacing cat Kung Fu pose, like a kitten practicing her moves.
Still playful after all these years.

I reach down and scratch the side of the recliner from time to time,
just to watch her freak out again. She goes into spastic and
threatening postures, but her cataracts make it treacherous for her to
carry out her threats, so she settles back down after a start and a
spasm or two. Cute, but sad, and lucky for my hand. I'm glad we
saved her. She would have been dead within an hour or two in the
Laughlin heat after being dumped.

Like Tyler, our schnauzer who lived with three legs, the cat inspires
me as only disabled animals can; tempted as I am sometimes to fall
into self-pity as my own abilities ebb. Easy for the cat though, she
doesn't have pesky higher-order thinking skills constantly reminding
her she is on a downhill run to being worm fodder. Absurdly, my
main advantage over animals, my mind, is also my main
disadvantage. When it is not solving some problem or helping me get
lunch, it is often forgetting something or slipping off into some worry
or other. But, like the cat, I carry on in spite of it all, pantomiming
frisky moves from memory when the spirit moves me. Then I begin
to obsess over the latest ache or have to go find my keys or phone.
(insert rimshot)

The big green recliner is a Lazy Boy. Aptly named! You can find me
sitting there often in the middle of the night, like now, giving print to
my thoughts, a past habit that continues in retirement. Maralyn's
spirit is strong with the chair. Charlie the Pug jumps up with me
whenever I sit here. We inherited the dog and the chair from Maralyn
last spring.

When I said before that animals are not given to self-pity, I have to
add that I guess they do mourn. At least it seems Charlie did, for
many months after Maralyn died. Also, being the “only dog” of a
widow, he had no clue how to relate to another dog. Tagg has been a
good teacher, and Charlie, like Alpha, has found his place in the pack.

So, now Charlie wrestles with Tagg, and Alpha comes out and sleeps
among us in the living room during the day instead of hiding under
the bed, and we are one big, strange menagerie of a family, even if
the fragile peace between Alpha and Gus is broken by frequent hissy
fits, mostly when Alpha blunders into Gus, who sometimes seems to
deliberately plop herself down right in one of Alpha's pathways. Gus
can be such a bitch!

Much amusing unimportance goes on around me, so I report it like
the dutiful journalist of the mundane that I am, until the pastels begin
to rise in the dark sky outside. Lights come on around the
neighborhood, but for me it is time for a little nap.

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