Bog people

I'm in the very last moments of the finishing time, the part that if this was a dream I'd wake up with the red hot sensation that I have to go present my work AND I HAVEN'T PREPARED.

And I'm not ready. I've had some time over the last couple of days, and just canNOT concentrate. More than monkey mind, twitter, hummingbird mind. I'm in this weird social vacuum, where F is off kayaking with Eldest Daughter, and just about everyone I hang out with in town is away doing something debauched or cottagey or friend-supportive... and I'm reliving the tailing days of my first MA, 19 years later.

Then, I'd moved back to Windsor to live with my mom for one term (after being on my own for several years) to finish up some course work after my foray into the astonishingly underpaid world of academic publishing hadn't exactly been congenial to writing a thesis I wasn't all that into anyway. Another example of shoveling the bulk of my production into the butt-end of a degree. I was in the middle of an unsettled love affair, and my lover had moved back to TO for the summer.

So I was housesitting, for a month for a prof in my dept. Theoretically, I was cat-sitting. And... the house was vile. VILE. There were stories of how they'd once had 9 cats and had a Room filled with newspaper that served as a litter box. Now there were only two threadbare cats, but the scent of the soggy past clung, and the bathtub was so filthy I didn't even want to have a shower in it. Cat hair everywhere, including on the dusty collection of medieval instruments in the living room. Lutes and dust mite larvae.

The cats were a little resentful of my presence (litotes). None of the doors in the house would close firmly -- thick paint, bunchy carpets, warped wood -- and the older cat in particular -- Charlie -- would hurl himself against the bedroom door at night until he'd launch himself onto the bed. There I'd be, asleep, then there I'd be, hurled into the nightmare of hissing, drooling, angry cat. I developed asthma I didn't know I had.

Theoretically, the cats would "go out in the back yard and come back when you clap your hands and call out "kitty kitty round up." They never came back. Mostly, I found myself under the porch, trying to grab this elderly but agile cat by his giant cat feet. They were, of course, fully clawed and teethed, these cats. And I was fully gouged, track marks of bad judgment in arranging my life.

Against all of this, I was supposed to be writing my final paper. It was on Seamus Heaney, and it had something to do with the poems about the bog people (I was fascinated by the preservation through centuries, the stories that rose to the surface based on the simplest artifact, like the iron age murder weapon), but I can't for the life of me remember what I actually wrote about. I knew that I couldn't make myself focus on it. I tried the kitchen table (eyed by the cats I kept "forgetting" to give their 7 daily vitamins shoved down their throats in pats of butter), I tried my usually trusty library, I tried the back yard. I finally ended up writing this damned paper in pencil on long narrow-ruled paper in a creepy doughnut shop. When I finished, I toted it back to the House of Spores jubilantly... then set up my typewriter and realized that somehow I'd smudged out half the writing with my sweaty little hands.

I managed to decode and make stuff up, and trotted off to hand in the paper to Tom. And the day I did that, I came back to find Charlie... bald. Bald and forlorn. The other cat (much less memorable) had licked the hair off his head. I didn't know much about cats, but I knew enough to find the vet's number Colin had left me, who said "bring him in."

That simple command, of course, required me to go into the CELLAR of this reeking, dusty cottage and retrieve an ancient, heavy cat carrier that looked like a lobster trap and was festooned with sharp pokey bits. And to ... FORCE this ball of demon-cat into it.

When I left Charlie at the vet, I located a previously unknown well of callousness. SO LONG SUCKER rang through my head, and even when the vet called the next day and said he'd done a biopsy but thought Charlie had a malignant tumour and I should let his people know -- I didn't. Care. That cat did not merit my sympathy.

But there I was, left with... a vacuum of time. No more bog people, no more death-dance with charlie, just the subdued other cat who generally left me alone. And the weird completion of a degree with no go-forward plan, a tenuous love affair with someone in another city, friends all out of town, no job and no real home base. I wanted to celebrate, but there was no one to play with. And I was still trapped in this fusty, filthy house until Charlie's People could get back from england.

I needed space to let what was next emerge... and I turned to the mindless kind of obsession that I gravitate to when I'm anxious. A complicated jigsaw puzzle of an escher image. So for two days, I leaned over the (greasy) table in that (grimy) kitchen in that (dusty) house and put together a complicated puzzle of birds turning into fish (or the other way around) and listened to the CBC. There was an ideas program about Mazo de la Roche that I was fascinated by, not having realized that the melodrama of the Jalna series had been mirrored in her life.



So I made the puzzle, and the people came home, and I collected by $200 or whatever for cat-sitting and packed up my Hyundai Pony and drove off to find the next part of my life. Coughed the cat hair out of my throat and never saw charlie again.

This is all alive right now because... I'm in this same space. So weird to realize this. My own mostly dust-free loft (notwithstanding the decaying plants), but a people-free weekend, and an obsession with knitting a complicated sweater instead of carving into the meat of my presentation (which is NEXT FRIDAY, PEOPLE!!!), staying up late reading blogs about ranch wives, letting the frets about what the hell to do with the next part of my life hiss and drool at me in the middle of the night. Not exercising, eating popcorn for dinner. I can't quite locate the equivalent of that sketchy doughnut shop for the last push on my presentation, on the revisions to my diss. Afraid, maybe, to hand in that paper and find that I'm no closer to a life in tandem, in the right place, with the right work, than I was in 1989. Me, bog person, preserved.