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Plinius, the cat logarithm

Finding Plinius could be impossible at times. For days on end the only sign of his existence could be that his cat bowl was empty in the morning. At some point, mostly drawn by Phoebe’s calls in the evening, he would walk out of the shadows in the garden and return home to sleep in the margins for a couple of days or on his favorite chair in the kitchen. I was never certain of his return. In that way he was like my father, too. It was very likely he would come to pick us up for a weekend but never entirely. When I shared this observation with my mother once, she quoted from “The Hobbit”: It’s a dangerous step, the first step out of your own front door.” Implying, I guess, that no one really knows whether they are going to return at night. But the remark wasn’t all that helpful. Some people do make more of an effort than others to come back. My father had a challenging work schedule in a big law office in the city. I guess, I was somewhat harsh towards him. Still.

Walking into the kitchen that night I found Plinius right away. He was sitting in his favorite chair, looking up and squinting his eyes as if he had actually been waiting for me. A small reading light had been kept burning as every night in case we girls were to walk into the kitchen in search of something to drink. I walked over to Plinius and kneeled down in front of his chair. He yawned and turned his head to the side. “Plinius,” I whispered, putting my fingers in his fur. He felt real, shaggy softness, powdery cat fur smell with a hint of cat litter. I put my nose into his fur and inhaled. A real cat. When I looked up, Plinius had closed his eyes again. He wasn’t purring, mind you. But he let me be. Unusual. As I looked at him, my face close to his face, noticing a bit of mucus leaking from his dirty pink cat nose, the long whiskers, the white grandpa beard on his chin, there seemed to be, in his very presence, a message. It was like working on a math problem, knowing you just had to think right about and even more importantly look right, look in the right way, whatever that meant, at the equation and you would understand it. That was how math usually was for me, the answer to a problem was right there, in front of my eyes, on the paper, I just had to bring it into focus.

And that was what Plinius seemed to be to me that night in the kitchen, a living and breathing logarithm to express a specific, meaningful relationship between an unknown value and me, cat2me is the output from the function cat2 when the input is me. I looked at him really hard. Did Phoebe speak cat as well? Did she know what kind of a cat logarithm Plinius was? Plinius himself couldn’t be bothered to help me. cat2phoebe is the output from the function cat2 when the input is phoebe. Plinius sighed as if bored by my slow mind, moved a bit under my hands, and farted.

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‘Where Wild Things Are’ Author Maurice Sendak Dies – NYTimes.com

'Where Wild Things Are' Author Maurice Sendak Dies – NYTimes.com.

Sendak has been most influential as an artist and illustrator to my work but even before that his wild things encouraged me to be WILD when I was little and to STARE into peoples’ eyes and tell them ‘BE STILL” when they were showing their terrible claws and rolling their terrible eyes. I still love his obnoxious, headstrong creatures who cut through all the embellishments, the sugar-coating, the lies about the children’s’ lives, and I admire his life-long refusal to deliver educational commonplaces to kids. I LOVE HIS WILD THINGS. I LOVE HIS PIGS. I LOVE MAX. Thank you, Maurice, KING of WILD THINGS!

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Sirius

Often, on late summer nights my mother, my sister and I laid down flat on the lawn of our front yard and looked down into the stars. The grass of our lawn was long and wavy, different from the short cut golf course front lawns of our neighbors, and woven through with moonflowers that smelled lovely in the warm, damp night air and in their whiteness actually glowed like little stars themselves. I remember one night when I felt particularly light and small, and grateful to gravity for holding me securely to the surface of my own planet. The stars glittered in the distant depth. My mother giggled when she noticed that my little sister had fallen asleep right there on the lawn, her head nestled onto my mother’s shoulder. Suddenly it seemed so unlikely to me that in all of the universe expanding before my eyes our planet should be the only one with life on it. I asked my mother, who had been silently holding my hand whether she thought that there was life out there. My voice sounded like a whisper. It was the kind of question to which you don’t really expect an answer.
My Mother took my hand and pointed down at the three stars of the belt of Orion. “Your fist like this”, she said, “covers about 10 degrees of the night sky.” She moved my hand slowly over the dark water and spoke in her methodical way, no use to interrupt her. “20 degrees south-east of the belt of Orion, you see, there is the brightest star in the night sky, right in the constellation of Canis Major.” She waited for a moment for me to catch up with her. Our entwined hands travelled over the night sky and stopped. And there it was, deep underneath us, the brightest star of the night sky, as far as I could see. “Do you see this star?” she asked. “It is called Sirius. It is 23 times more luminous than our sun, twice the mass and the diameter of the sun. It is only 8.5 light years away.” The way she said “only 8.5 light years”, it sounded as if she was talking about a Sunday picnic destination. It sounded like: We could take the bike. It’s only 8.5 light years away. Before I had a chance to point that out to her, however, she had started talking again, and almost without warning, though in answer of my question, switched from her facts, from degrees between two points of light in the celestial sphere, luminosity and brightness, and mass of celestial objects, to a startling revelation: “My grandfather, your great-grandfather, believed that there is life in the Sirius system. The Dogon, an African tribe with very acute astrological knowledge, have believed for centuries that there is life out there as have the ancient Egypts and the Sumerians. According to the Dogon Sirius is accompanied by two other stars, a very small and incredibly dense star they call Po Tolo, which means “very little star”, and which modern astrology has confirmed to exist only recently and calls Sirius B. Indeed it has turned out to be a small star with an incredible density, heavier than the iron we know on earth. The Dogon also claim that the other star in the Sirius-System is lighter and larger than Sirius. They call it Emme Ya. And around Emme Ya they say there orbits the home planet of the Nommos, the children of Sirius and Emme Ya.“

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Ms. C. at lunch time

During lunch I sat alone at a table munching the Orzo salad from Taki’s the day before when a girl from my French class slouched down at the table and dropped a paper bag on it. I acknowledged her presence carefully with a limited smile. She just stared at me for a moment without a greeting. She called herself C., her teachers addressed her as “Ms. C.” with a slight tone hovering between reference and irony. She was pretty in an unusual way with dark wavy hair almost down to her hip. No make-up, silver earrings, green eyes. The kind of girl other girls like as much as the boys do. A girl next door, but in a perfect kind of way. The kind of girl that never has to compete with anyone for affection. I think her father had a “name” but she displayed a slight if still tasteful disdain for her environment. I had booked her under the category “snob” but it was obvious that she at least did not want to capitalize on her family’s riches as she was always just dressed in jeans and T-shirts. Then again, maybe she just didn’t feel the need to show off her social superiority by displaying expensive clothes. And she attended public school.
She unwrapped a sandwich with lots of lettuce from the paper bag and began to eat. We still kept silent. She still was one point ahead of me for not responding to my greeting. Oh, whatever.
She chewed methodically, eating around the rim of her sandwich until the crust was gone. Interesting. We still didn’t say a word. She looked at the bread the way a gardener might regard a trimmed hedge and – appearing satisfied – put it down on the paper bag. Another weird eater, I decided, thinking about Penelope. “You are staring,” she interrupted my thoughts, “it’s rather impolite and ill-mannered.” I looked at her and could not decide whether she was being serious. “Ill-mannered”, my gosh – this was the seventies not the fifties. I decided to be generous and replied well-naturedly: “You eat like a crazy friend of mine. You probably even have a direction in which you turn your sandwich, like only counter-clockwise.” She looked at me some more. I kind of held my breath but not really. This was a suburban chick after all. Why did she have to sit down at my table? “Who would eat their sandwich counter clock wise?”, she retorted with a hiss. What was her problem? I had more urgent things to think about, but then I caught the twinkle in her eyes. She giggled. “: “La majestueuse égalité des lois qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. “she recited with an affected voice. “That was awesome.” She added with an appreciative nod towards me “Of course, France was a pseudo-left intellectual who is rightfully forgotten by today.” I stared at her again. She smiled broadly. I felt an amazing surge of affection for her. She seemed so real. I smiled back. Then I giggled. Then I laughed out loud. We both laughed until the kids from the next table started throwing us nervous glances. I wrapped up my well-trimmed sandwich, stuffed the Orzo container into the paper bag and left the cafeteria.

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Anatole France

School was uneventful. I told my homeroom teacher that I occasionally suffered from migraines and had therefore missed school the previous day. She didn’t seem to care much and handed me a short list of catch-up assignments. I would have to go to the library but that was fine with me.
The clock in my homeroom where I had French first was usually three minutes fast. I watched the minute hand and caught it moving occasionally. My French teacher labored to convey an overview of social realism in French literature to an uninterested class with a limited vocab. I took the occasion to successfully bring out some marginal knowledge about Anatole France to compensate for my absence the previous day. Something like: “La majestueuse égalité des lois qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. “ Another pet writer of my real mother. “Les dieux ont soif.” Seemed important to my mother for me to know that Louis Aragon considered Anatole France a pseudo-left intellectual. I didn’t add this, keeping the balance between the well read student and the know-it-all a teacher would feel threatened by. Ms. Weinert beamed at me and forgot asking about a written excuse for my absence. My physics teacher was equally pleased when I asked a couple of questions about electromagnetic fields. As I said, it was an uneventful day at school and I was relieved when we were dismissed.

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Eventually I would come back to the city, Summerville was a transitional place. To realize that a place, childhood really, was transitional, to be followed by something else, something that casted its shadows ahead but could not readily be identified yet – that was an immense insight to me. No matter how I would resolve this particular situation I found myself in (and I still had the confidence that I eventually would figure it out), no matter how I longed to be back in my old neighborhood, in the city, I would outgrow the life I once had had here, in my old 95th Street neighborhood, I would quickly outgrow my new life in Summerville and then I would be on my own. Decisions had to be made that were much bigger than my science project – and yet this project had something to do with it.
When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we kids usually had ready-made answers. Most of us were influenced by our parents’ preferences. There was not one future plumber among us but many (soon to be famous) writers, lawyers, dentists, psychologists … or so we thought. We had no idea – and I realized this that very day. We had no idea how narrow the gap between us and this strange tomorrow would be where we had to be something, someone to count. But what impressed me even more that moment was the sudden if still vague suspicion that the adults who asked us these questions did not seem fit to make more than a very few stereotypical suggestions … dentists, lawyers, writers indeed.