the other side of me

Notice the same institutional gray walls as in my previous post. Guess where I’m spending my Sunday?

I love this show. It’s just what the world needs (particularly the part of the world that also reads occasionally reads comments like these on The Superficial).

One of my favorite parts of South Bend’s small-town baseball games is the mascot:

The vegetable races, Omar’s favorite, are another highlight:

My trip down memory lane continues with the story of Tiramisu - the cat, not the dessert.

You can’t really tell the story of Tira without starting with the story of Emma. Emma was my first pet as an adult, a beautiful light gray tabby that we brought home from the animal rescue. I will never ever forget the way she reached her paw out of the metal cage to pet my shirt. I knew that she was the one we were taking home.

Other than her incessant purring and the kneading of my hair while I tried to sleep, she was the perfect cat. She loved to play fetch with a little stuffed cow named Moo-Moo. She had absolutely no fear. She’d visit our neighbors and lived for chasing our neighbor’s beagle around the parking lot of the apartment building.

When I went to leave for a semester in England in January of 1997, she was nowhere for be found. Every time I called home I would ask Ben if he’d seen her and every time he’d sigh and say he was sorry, but he thought she’d run away. I came back that summer and I would walk the neighborhood looking for her. I was pitiful.*

My friend Kelly, another exchange student who I’d met in England, took pity on me and brought over one of her new kittens to replace Emma. I named that kitten Tiramisu, after my favorite dessert from a restaurant near Nene, where Kelly and I had studied. And so began my life with Tira.

She was the opposite of Emma. She hid in the bread basket on the fridge most of the day, only coming out to use the litterbox or eat. She didn’t like people. She didn’t sleep with us or play with us. She just existed. She played with Athena, the ferret, a bit. She also got the passenger seat in the Honda Civic when we moved to Arizona, while I shared the back seat with a carseat and a magical staff - not my most comfortable four days.

In retrospect I feel bad for Tira as it was impossible to live up to Emma’s legacy, but she always was a part of our family. I would love to have a cat like her today. After all, I’ve got a kid to bother me while I try to sleep or to play fetch and chase dogs. Now I long for a quiet soul like hers.

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* It is worth noting here, too, that this was a benevolent fib on Ben’s part, as Emma had been mauled by a dog, dragged herself to our front step, and when Ben found her he took her to the vet to have her put down. He returned home to destroy all evidence. I only found this out when I accidentally killed his ferret three years later.

The bad news is that my camera drowned.

The good news is 1) that I found a great deal on the same camera and it is SLOWLY on its way via free shipping, and 2) that I have all those photos I downloaded from floppies to keep us company as we wait.

So here’s the first in the walk-down-memory-lane collection. This is the first house B’s dad and I ever lived in - 526 Union Ave. in Rock Hill, South Carolina if anyone is interested in visiting.

We lived in an apartment a few blocks away and we’d drive by this house occasionally and every, single time I would say, I want to live in that house. If it went up for sale, we’d buy it. If it was available to rent, we’d move. Imagine my sheer and utter surprise (and JOY!) when one day we drove by and there was a for rent sign in the yard. We called that day.

The rent was steep for us - $600 a month. - but we filled out an application anyway. And we waited, and waited, and waited. It seemed like an eternity. Of course that could have also been because I was enrolled in a summer school Logic class with Houston Craighead at the time and that made the month drag. At any rate, we got it. Man I loved that house. We both did. It exuded something.

One day we were exploring the attic and we found a street sign that said Goodplace. We pulled the sign out of the attic and hung it in the halllway and, from there on out, that’s what we called the house. Lots of wonderful things happened there, including the arrival of Mr. B. It certainly lived up to its name and we were very sad to have to leave it when we moved to Arizona.

Baedyn and I drove by last summer when I was in town and it looked so small. I hadn’t noticed how life gets bigger with time. Don’t get me wrong, I would move there in a second if my life would allow it - it’s still Goodplace. It’s just that life has changed so much in the last ten years and I hadn’t quite realized how much so until I saw Goodplace again.

You’ll have to excuse the mud splatteredness of the sign as it sits in debris that’s been blowing through our yard. It’s been a bit rough ’round these parts the last few days. Hope seems to have survived, though.

I love free wi-fi.

Like most evidence of other life out there, this is fuzzy:

What a phenomenal film and an incredible story.