CAT ENTANGLEMENTS

tarbaby watches

Cat entanglements is what is going on. A cat, TarBaby earlier, Caterpillar most recently, clawing my leg for attention, I want. I've fed TarBaby several times today. He licks the food I put before him and likes it a lot. When he's done licking it, he's done. He'll eat a little bit, then leave all the rest. He was wanting me to feed him when his bowl is full. Caterpillar wants me to let her out, let her in, hold her. Let TarBaby out. It's something about this time of day. They leave me alone all day long, and when I sit here to start writing to you, here they come, tugging on my pants with claws, I want. Every evening, day after day, at this time of day I pick up TarBaby's bowl and show it to him, it's full of catfood. There is catfood everywhere. I come back here and sit down flustered. I sit down and Caterpillar tugs. She wants. I picked her up. That's what she wanted. Now she's between my arms on the desk as I work the keyboard. I understand a lot of people with cats do this. It's cat nature that when one of the giants sits still for a few minutes it's time to pile on. I wouldn't have it any other way. When TarBaby comes back in I'll give him some fresh catfood lickins before he turns in for the night.

It must be supper time in their own timing. It's only TarBaby and Caterpillar. If I start writing this in the daytime or the night, here they come, I want. I pick Caterpillar up, and before I can put her down I have to unhook 3, 4 or 5 claws from my shirt. She tries to unhook herself by pulling. It doesn't work, so I take a claw between finger and thumb and have to pull against her pulling. She hisses and tugs until it's free. My shirts and sweaters have little threads sticking out all over from Caterpillar's or Tapo's claws. Both of them snag their claws when they walk on cloth. Caterpillar's signal to want in the house is plucking the screen on the door. She always gets hung. She used to get hung up so bad she couldn't get unhooked. I'd have to go outside and lift her enough so her weight is not tugging on the hooked claws. Caterpillar doesn't have much of a mind for figuring things out. It makes her mad when I pull her claws off the screen and she hisses at me and sometimes makes like she wants to bite me, but doesn't. She doesn't get it when I explain to her that without an assist she'd be hung there a very long time. It can't be because it hurts her, because I only hold the claw itself. It's her impatience with being handled. She forgets she called for help.

TarBaby is still outside. He may stay out all night. Caterpillar has gone to her personal place. Tapo is on her orange pillow cleaning herself. She's been at this for awhile. She keeps herself immaculate. They all do. The wall has an opening near the ceiling where a stove pipe passed through. A mouse that lives in the attic uses that open space in travels from one place to another. Tapo is staring at the space. Caterpillar was awhile ago. They all keep an eye on that space for the chance to see the mouse. When they catch one, another one replaces it. Keeps the cats happy. Candy bars that run on little feet. Once, I had the communal bowl of dry food not far from that wall. Because of location, the mouse could creep up to it and get away without getting caught. I moved the bowl to the middle of the room. The mouse never came back. It went to dine on some catfood in the night and got itself dined on. I have to confess to a twinge of guilt for the premeditation, setting up the mouse to feed a cat, but that's the nature of the wild. It's the nature of civilization too, we just do it in different ways. Death is a dream. Advance the mouse to the next lifetime where it will have nightmares of cats. Only a dream.

Caterpillar passed through on her way to the bathroom, a nighttime hunting ground. The hole in the floor in the corner behind the tub apparatus is the mouse entrance. A cat lying near and perfectly still is alerted by the skitter of mouse toenails on the floor behind the apparatus. When it crosses the floor, that's it, cat shit. Minnie Mouse out looking for something to feed her babies. This is Motel Hell for mice. The blinking sign says VACANCY, come on in and get free cable on the tv. They never return to tell. Living in the country it is essential to have at least one cat. For the mice. Much better than any store bought mouse trap. And there's nothing to deal with later. My cats eat everything. Not all cats do. Some cats like to leave it out so you can see they're taking care of you. I feel like a dog is essential living in the country too, to keep varmints away from the house. I like having Martha and Jolene here for this reason. Dogs for varmints outside, cats for varmints inside. Gotcha covered. Varmint busters. A dog abandons the self-preservation instinct when it comes to protecting its human. A dog's role as its master's protector is that much stronger than it's self-preservation instinct, which is about as strong in everything as any instinct. Dying for the master must be a dog's highest virtue among dogs. If dogs made movies, protecting their masters would be a major theme in their samurai films.

The cats are all settled now. TarBaby found a spot he's never hunkered down in before, so he's happy. A new place to hunker. He mystifies me. He's thin because his metabolism is going kind of hyper requiring him to eat a lot, but he also doesn't feel well eating. I saw the same in Jr. Food just did not appeal any more. He's hungry a lot and wants something fresh every time. I understand him. Sometimes it gets to me after putting out for the dogs every morning what TarBaby didn't eat the day before. I thought I found something when I picked up some little cans called Petite Cuisine, something like that, "people food for cats." He went at it ravenously. It has a lot of liquid. That's what he likes. The soup. He eats a little of whatever it is and goes on. He has a sneeze too as a result of this whatever it is that has his metabolism going like it is. The vet didn't cure him, but they brought him back to life. Whatever it was is still with him, but it never manifests as any more than occasional sneezing and being hungry all the time, but only satisfied with soup. At least he's getting that. I try different kinds of catfood to see what he might like. None of it. He likes it juicy and wet. He licks it dry and he's done.

When I take into account his health, he is not the least bit unreasonable. I'm the one that's unreasonable. Like when I'm sitting here like right now writing and his claws sink into my leg to tell me he wants me to feed him when the bowl is full of catfood. A little bit ago I'd been kept at by Caterpillar, kept at by TarBaby who jumps up like he wants me to pet him and ducks when I reach to touch him. When he sunk his claws I barked like a dog, WHAT!!! He put feet on floor and positioned himself for quick exit if need be, ears pointed back to hear what's coming next. Then I feel bad for shouting at him, because I never have. I get exasperated when his bowl has plenty of food in it and he wants me to open a can that costs a dollar and a quarter so he can lick the soup. After Caterpillar had been tugging at me for the last couple hours wanting something. When I'm in my sensible mind, it's not a problem, but I'm not always in that mind. It seems so unreal for TarBaby to be unwell, I have to remind myself when I lose sight of it.

BOYS & GIRLS

composition in gray #19

I've been paying attention to my own automatic reactions to gender. The two female cats, Tapo and Caterpillar, I treat one way, and the male, TarBaby, I treat quite another way. It's automatic in me. I catch myself talking to TarBaby the way I'd talk to a male, man or boy. I praise him for being a good hunter and a good jumper. I don't sweet talk with him. With Tapo and Caterpillar I tell them they're my babies, call them my darlins. But not TarBaby. I don't cuddle TarBaby like I do the girls. It's not because they require that I treat them these ways. I've done it since they were kittens.

It's the same with the way we automatically treat children. Little boys get talked to the way we talk to boys, praised for being good at chasing, hitting or catching a ball, taught at an early age how to handle and respect guns, called Little Man, given toy tractors and trucks. Little girls have baby dolls they play mother to. We tell little girls how cute they are, how pretty they are, how charming they are. It's what I tell my girl cats. It's not what I tell TarBaby. It's like from the day we're born and wrapped in either pastel blue or pink we're treated according to our gender and expected of according to gender, named according to gender.

In the big culture we all share, there are two distinctly different cultures living side by side, intermingled every way it can be be done. They are male culture and female culture. Male culture encourages warriors either on the battlefield or football field. In female culture girls learn to dumb themselves down if they want a man's attention. You say, that's perfectly natural. That's right. It is. I just bring this up because I like to entertain my self-delusion that I am sometimes conscious and even make somewhat conscious decisions. You might say the very first thing we learn is our gender. According to Freud, it's our number 1 concern.

In the same house, boys are raised one way, girls another. I've found in later years that my 2 sisters and I didn't know the same parents. Parents, both mother and dad, treated me like a boy, and treated them like girls. It's only come out between us in the last few years that we had very different parents. I think it's fascinating in the way William Faulkner would tell the same story told by maybe 3 different people and it turn out to be 3 different stories.

I can't get out of my mind the little girl I saw yesterday with the light gone out of her child eyes. The Stanley Brothers song comes to mind of the woman sitting at the bar who's more to be pitied than scolded. I don't know the divine plan for the girl's life. Don't know anything about her. But I saw pain, the depth of which can only come from one place. It's one of those many times it is necessary to have a word with self, a reminder that I can't take care of other people's stuff that is no business of mine any way you look at it. To persist would be the way of the control freak. And it could create complications out of control. Best to let it be. For all I know, she didn't sleep well the night before and was sleepy. What I felt was triggered by my own imagination.

Part of why my heart was so moved by what I took for pain in her demeanor and eyes was she's a girl. It's not right for girls to suffer. But they do. We, every one of us, have learned to live with our own inner pains that are with us all the time. My impulse was to save a little girl from feeling pain, a little girl who should be pretty and cute and charming, not hurting inside. I don't know how I'd have felt if this had been a little boy. Suck it up, kid, hold it inside, little man. I know I wouldn't say that, but I have an idea it would lean in that direction, though I really know better than to say one way or another. I wouldn't know what to do, but be kind to the kid and treat him with respect. That's all I could do for the girl too. I believe I would feel the same compassion for either girl or boy.

For one thing, it tears me up to see a woman cry. When I see a man cry, I tend to think, Get over it. That's definitely a gender response. Boys and men tend to be competitive with each other. Girls and women tend to be competitive with each other too, though not always. That's one thing we have in common. TarBaby just now jumped up here onto the desk. I said, "Hey, my friend." He's different since he returned from 3 weeks in the cage at the vet's. He learned meditation there. He has a position he hunkers down into and he sits perfectly still gazing straight ahead with eyes open. Sometimes he'll have his nose an inch or less from the wall. He goes around to shelves up high he can jump to where there is only enough room for him to hunker down and meditate. It helps him pass the time in the house when he'd rather be outside hunting, but the dogs keep him indoors. TarBaby has discovered inner stillness.

CARING PEOPLE

glade valley presbyterian

A day of varieties of feelings, thoughts running all over the place, an urge to sit down and write, but no idea what I feel so compelled to say. It's a feeling in the heart, a need to write what I'm feeling that has no words. The feeling is a heart overflowing with love for all that's around me at any time of day. Drank coffee in the evening yesterday and didn't sleep much. Got up in the night and read some in the Monk biography, which is beautifully written and gives a good picture of the world around him, late 30s Harlem, the world of night clubs, the musicians, the club owners, the 40s, the 50s, the time of jazz in Harlem when be-bop was brewing. Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins. Sometimes it feels like I'm there, hearing the band on a little stage in a little club with little tables, everything packed together, the musicians as crowded as the audience. Smoke, liquor, women, men, and what comes next when you mix all them together. Anything and everything.

At our BROC (Blue Ridge Opportunity Commission) meeting today held at the Head Start office on Crawford St., we were dined with chili burgers and cole slaw. About 20 kids there. They were truly a cute bunch of pre-school kids. Something I noticed struck me curious. The "white" kids were the only ones that looked like they didn't have any love in their lives. The Mexican, or Hispanic, kids had a radiance about them and in their eyes. On sight I could see they had plenty of love at home. Some of the white kids looked drawn in the face, no gleam in their eyes, no expression of any sort on their faces. My heart went to them. I saw they have little to no love at home. I felt like the kids were at least being loved by the adult women there at Head Start. Caring women make a great deal of difference to a heart-sick child.

One little girl, red around the eyes, wan in the face with eyes expressionless, I can't get out of my mind. I feel like I know what she's going through and she is without recourse in any direction; even God doesn't help. I may be dramatizing, but I don't think so. I'd guess the child has seen things we don't want to know about. It was such a curious contrast with the Hispanic kids, eyes bright and alert with round, bright faces. My guess is that south of the border they live with poverty a whole lot better than we white folks do. A pre-school kindergarten can't do a lot toward putting light back in a kid's eyes, but it can give a little light of hope where there is none, maybe. It's worth the chance. The women there are all big hearted mamas. The kids are in good hands that care. They are influences aimed at helping the kids develop their own character.

Our Alleghany branch of BROC is called the Alleghany Planning Committee. The new woman who keeps the office, can't say secretary anymore -- a dead word, office manager, wrote out three pages, copies to all of us present, of the 26 case histories through January and February of assistance we've given people seeking help to pay electrical bills, each one of them so obviously in dire need, it feels like doing the right thing to help one of them, but 26 is quite a lot given our little county. We raise the money once a year with the Hillbilly Show for helping people who need help. This winter was a lethal winter for the infirm and poor. People need help. No matter what scripture you read of the variety of world religions, we're urged to help people around us in need, to take an interest in the well-being of someone who can't help him/her self get along in this world for a great variety of possible reasons. Why they're poor is not our concern. Every one has a particular reason for their poverty in an unforgiving society that doesn't tolerate the poor.

I like this particular bunch of people working with our mountain county BROC. About half of them I knew before. It's a bunch of people who are lively and live full lives, love God and look after one another. I know for a certainty that if I were struck down with one thing or another and needed some help, they'd all come running. That's the kind of people they are. It's what they'd all do for each other. At the Hillbilly Show, this is the bunch of people you see on stage and selling tickets. What makes the Hillbilly Show work is all the people on the stage cuttin up and acting a fool are people who care. They care about each other and they care about the people in the audience. They care about everybody in their lives, in their community. When I sit at the long table with them, I feel the comfort of home. The women bring covered dish and it's the same as dinner outside after communion. Mountain cooking at its best. It's a feast every time of cooking by the different women. All of it is good. The men pig out and leave the place with bellies hanging over their belts.

Agnes Joines is the head knocker, and it's a well known fact that if you want something done, give it to Agnes. She's on town council, and she's good. She's good at rules of order and that way of thinking. Of different meeting experiences I've had over the years in Sparta, BROC is the only one where anything has ever got done. There's an art to meeting-going that I don't get, and the rest of the people of BROC don't get either. We want to get something done. Meetings have become entities like cocktail parties where you stand around and talk at length with great perpendicularity and say absolutely nothing. It's an art form. Some people are great at it, like riding a surf board. I never got it.

In a movie I saw Saturday, The Belly of an Architect, by Peter Greenaway, English, filmed in Italy and Rome, I heard a good one that's been with me since. The character the architect is American and his wife is American, from Chicago. Two suave Italian men in tuxedos are talking about them. One said, 'What does his wife think?' The other said, 'She doesn't think. She's American.' The woman in silk said, Uhm, the way it would be said in polite society after someone let slip the racial slur that starts with n. A sigh of disapproval, but no more.

That was in my mind at the meeting today and I looked around at everybody, and saw them all people who think. Every one of them has a good head on the shoulders and give consideration to their decisions. These are country people. Italians don't get exposed much to country people, only to Americans that can afford to spend time in Italy or anyplace else. That's why I like being among these people, as I said above. Because they care, they think. For me, it fulfills what I believe a church is meant to be, an assembly of caring people whose purpose is to help the poor in the community. I like about it that there's no denomination, no dogma, nothing to memorize, no saying you have to believe this way or else, no religion, no saying ours is the only way, no us against them. Just a bunch of caring people that get together to help out some people in times of stress, at least a little bit. And we have a good time doing it.

MOUNTAIN RADIO STATION

sue @ wcok 1060 am

Today I got in the groove painting the first time since starting a month or so ago. Before, I was painting mountain musicians on used wood. I liked that, but after a certain point, wood gets scarce. Now I want to paint mountain musicians on canvas. Working on Pine Swamp fiddler, Howard Joines. His face came together for me today. The likeness I'm after isn't far away. I'm giving him a 5 o'clock shadow primarily to show he's a working man playing old-time music, not somebody with a violin chair in a symphony. The shirt, white, could be either. There was a time I was thinking it looked more like Heifitz, the violinist, than Joines the fiddler. By now, I have him at least looking like he could be a Joines.

The fiddle is the main concern from here on, and the shirt and fingers. The fingers are ok. The fiddle takes as much attention as a face. I like to build colors on top of colors. It seems to me a variety of colors on top of each other make a more luminous finish coat. By the time it's finished, I want you to hear the fiddle when you see it. The fiddle is a little bit off, but I like it. I like leaving something a little bit off. Gives it life. I read somewhere long ago that in Islamic art, like architecture, mosaics, the geometric designs they use, the tradition is to leave a flaw in everything. The flaw is there for a kind of signature that this is a creation of the human mind, therefore imperfect before God, as we are. I like that, so I don't worry over some flaws. I'm not after perfection, but a feeling. I want it not just to look like the subject, but to be the subject. I want it to feel like his presence. I've never met Howard, but I know a lot of his kin. Jr was his nephew.

Working toward a series of musicians of primarily Alleghany County and central Blue Ridge. In my way of seeing, these musicians are the truly important people, when it comes down to who's important. They carry a tradition that goes back all the way across the ocean and way back in time. They keep it alive. Old-time is the original American music, the root out of which all American musics grew. This region of the Appalachians is a fountain of traditional music. All up and down the mountains is, but the central Blue Ridge got the name and attention from Bristol where The Carter Family, The Stonemans and Jimmy Rogers made the first country music recordings in I think 1927. Later, the Stanley Brothers started with a job at the Bristol station playing at lunch hour. One of these days soon I'm getting in the Catfish and driving to Bristol to see the museum there. Might drive to Dickenson County, Virginia, to the Ralph Stanley Museum another day. I want to get over to MtAiry to WPAQ to go in and get acquainted. It's the model for my radio show. I'd love to see WCOK play all mountain music. It does, considering Sue is playing what the listeners want, mountain music.

Sue invited people to call and tell her what kind of music they wanted to hear and wrote it all down. Country, bluegrass, regional. And that's what she plays. People are listening to the station again. Advertisers are coming back. Sue is looking at getting new equipment to replace things like cd players and such. She is getting that place on its feet. The guys spent the last 18 years running off advertisers and listeners, then took all the station's country cds over that period of time, plus Rhonda Vincent. One of them liked Dolly Parton and Rhonda Vincent passionately. It wasn't because Rhonda is bluegrass, but because she looks like a mannequin. She looks so much like a mannequin he can bear the bluegrass for the look.

Sue has already brought the station back. I remember the day or 2 when the station had nobody there, because the silly boys left the same day and that was that. End of station. The station manager had a job at WBRF in Galax and didn't get over here much. He found Sue at church, a woman out of a job looking for one. Never been in a radio station. He took her to the station and showed her everything in one morning. Next day she was on her own to figure everything out. And she did. She's done figured everything out and has it in order so she can put her hand on it in a hurry. She likes to fulfill requests if the song is in the station. Sue is committed to the station. It is her own. She has created it and it's working. It makes me happy every Saturday morning when I go in there and see Sue. It's like the captain is on deck, all is well with the ship. In this time when conscientious is little more than a word that's hard to spell, Sue stands out.

When the awards people in Sparta are handing out awards for outstanding contributions to the community (I don't know that any such award has ever been given), I elect Sue for someone who saved WCOK for the county. She has, in fact, become the voice of Alleghany County. She's a good one too. She cares 100%. And she doesn't do anything half way. She dives into whatever it is she's doing and she goes the whole hog. She wants to put together a radio station that serves the community, and she has done it.

It's almost back to where it was when Arnold Clodfelter, Judy Halsey, Nelson Harrell and Ron Brown were at the station, and Jeff Michael had live bands every Saturday morning perform for an hour. It's that show I'm replacing with mine. I tried having live music in the beginning, but I am not inside the music world enough to be getting bands to come in on Saturday mornings. I'd rather play their cds. Everybody makes cds now. They can be made at home with a computer. And I love playing the music to the listeners. I want every show to be entertaining to the max.

People who love old-time and bluegrass, mountain music, are the people I play for. They've become the people I paint for now. I don't paint for galleries. I want to paint for the people in my world in the county. I want to honor the people of the county painting their musicians in the same way I honor them by playing their music. I have to say I feel a certain fulfillment, that I've done something worth while, spent the later years of my life honoring the people of the mountains, saying, in effect: This is you and this is good.