Mysterious

Keyzer hard at work!

This entry will take a little while to get around to the title.

Kate and I returned from Maine yesterday afternoon, having spent about two days up there for her grandmother Eleanor's (father's side) funeral. Gram, as I was coming to know her, made it to about six weeks shy of her 99th birthday. That's really a cause for celebration, in my mind. If the person was healthy and active for nearly a full century, it's a joyful thing. I met her about two weeks ago, over Mothers' Day weekend. She was frail, of course, and it was hard to hear her much more than six feet away, and it seemed to take her five or ten minutes even to recognize Kate. Her voice was a bit like how ancient Greeks describe old mens': a gently chirping grasshopper, audible only as a murmer until you draw very close.

After she'd looked at our wedding photos, and seemed reminded of many of the people there, she took a more active role in the conversation. By the time we left--a little over a half-hour later--she was saying she wanted to save her nice new pajamas for the upcoming wedding (whose it wasn't clear), and she was starting to plan a dance, where she'd invite a lot of men. "Come back soon," she said as I was leaving.

Not many spoke at the funeral--she'd outlived all her original friends, of course, and many of the family were shy, but the few stories were good. (Eleanor's oldest son, Kate's uncle Bob, even read one of her love letters to her future husband. The passage where young Eleanor ran herself down as having been "hateful and unreasonable" the night before brought the house down. I can only wonder what they'd been fighting about.) So I decided to share my little story, a tiny fragment but with much in common with the rest.

Before Thursday's funeral I'd met only a handful of the Gardner clan, and now I met the rest. Like any family, of several generations, with a range of personalities from sparkling to withdrawn. It was a good way to escape the ongoing anxieities of life in Rhode Island.

Kate and I had spent the night before at her father's house, and the most unusual thing I found was Steve's cat Norton. Steve's a boarder, a family friend, and he'd cleared out to make room for my wife and me. But Norton hadn't, so he expected life to carry on as before. Since the other cats of the household don't like him, he stays in Steve's room and makes his entrance and exits from the house through the window. This means you have to let him out when he sits in front of it staring back at you, and it means you have to let him in, too. But he has a unique way of asking in. The window's about three feet above the ground, so Norton leaps up, hangs onto the sill with his claws, and headbutts the window until you open it, at which point he clambers in and then mills around the way cats do. That amused me, but we made it a tough night for poor Norton. He tried about four or five times to settle down on the double bed with us, and eventually gave up and slept on the floor.

One other thing struck me about our visit: I'd brought along a somewhat wonkish book on biblical history, on the writing of the New Testament. Kate's father asked me what it was, and I explained to him about my interest in the Old Testament especially, and about the documentary hypothesis. I was going into such things as the J and E texts, when he re-emerged from his office with a stack of about five books on biblical and religious history. He didn't say much, but desposited them on my lap. I looked them over, chose one, and thanked him. Not the kind of reading list I'd ordinarily expect to find in a person!

Anyhow, we spent the next night at Kate's mother's place, which was in somewhat of an uproar because they were frustratedly waiting for a delayed closing of the house they wanted to buy (which has finally happened). So we spent the night on a futon mattress on the floor, and I slept as peacefully as I can remember. Well...and there was Kaiser. Kaiser's a five- or six-year-old Weimarauner, a big sleek hound dog, about the size of a small Great Dane, who's very friendly and roughly as intelligent as your neighborhood golden retriever. Sit down in the living room, and Kaiser's very likely to come over and introduce himself by standing in front of you, with his head over your legs, staring blankly into your face. Tell him to "lie down" and he might sit, but otherwise will continue staring you in the eyes, with not a hint of comprehension. You pretty much have to wait for him to get bored--which takes a while--and lie down on his own.

Harmless dog, sweet disposition, makes not a sound. But the pinnacle of canine intelligence he sure ain't. Actually, no. Harmless...not so much. Kaiser's not violent. Doesn't bark or bear his teeth, and the few times I've been around him never seen even a small flare of aggression (he even woke Kate up early Friday morning by licking her in the face, something she'd rather forget). But harmless...that was the wrong word. Dogs are known for their gas production, and Kaiser is very much a dog. Yup, he can give Senor Disgusto over here a good run for my money in the domestic offensiveness department. It's times like that I prefer cats.

All in all, two good days of rest from being reminded every moment of my concerns down here. Trips, even small ones, can be cathartic that way. So we drove back down in the rain yesterday, and North Kingstown had that damp, warm feeling of incipient summer when we arrived. I do have a few job prospects still, and the sale of the dock is moving ahead, albeit slowly. But prospects aren't income, and the down payment is not yet in the bank. So life now is still mostly worry.

The mystery? A small thing...Jasper has three dishes: one for hard food, on the right, one for water in the middle, and one for canned food, on the left, which we fill every evening. On any given day, you can see one, and only one, piece of hard food in his water. Think it's there by chance? I might remove it, and a few hours later, there's another. There are never two or more, only one. And it always reappears after I remove one. So the cat seems to be deliberately placing a piece of hard food in his water...why? Flavor? Superstition? I just don't know. It's mysterious...