Over 600 protest 7th anniversary of Iraq war in Minneapolis

Including one very happily married couple next to the banner. Thanks to Franklin for taking our picture! :)

Cleaning Up

The girls and the grandchildren came by today to help us clean up the household. Found lots of fun items we'd lost in the process. Pretty pictures of daughters on Halloween. This is good.

Happy Mother's Day!

Drove a couple hours to visit and take my mother out to lunch. Got a phone call wishing me a happy mother's day from my daughter. All is right with the world!

Rails & Ties

Watched this movie, Rails & Ties on cable today. It's about a woman who drives her car onto the railroad tracks to commit suicide with her adolescent son in the passenger seat. He survives, she does not. But what sets this film apart is that we get swept up into the world of the train engineer, played by Kevin Bacon, who has to decide whether to hit the emergency brake, thus endangering his passengers, or to slow, but keep going, thus killing the people in the car.

So, right, bummer of a movie concept. Tear-jerker, no doubt.

But what surprised me is that the engineer, a working-class man who is proud of his skills, becomes a focus of this story.

When does this happen in pop culture? When does a working person become integral to the plot? When does his life become important, valuable and respected?

Although the movie is implausible and tugs at the heart-strings, there is some honest portrayal of people who love, but are hurting. There is honesty in the pretense of family when none actually exists, followed by the true sense of family that doesn't follow modern stereotypes.

I know some people will not like this movie. I think the opportunity to see loving people trying, and sometimes failing, to show their love for one another is fascinating and worth seeing.

Be Kind

The easiest thing in the world is to be sarcastic. You can point out other people's flaws. You can show all the inconsistencies in your fellow human beings.

But take a moment and ask yourself why you would want to take that path rather than the path of love.

Anger is easy. Compassion is hard. Make your choices and live with them.

That is all.

Back from the National Assembly

Last weekend, Detroit. This weekend, Cleveland. I sure can pick the vacation spots!

We just got back from the National Assembly, an anti-war conference held in Cleveland. Around 400 people participated. This in a time when Iraq is barely in the news, the country is distracted by electoral politics and impending economic crises. It's pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.

I cannot begin to describe the difference between the two conferences I attended in the last two weeks. Cleveland was a majority of old timers with a strong base in the unions. Robert's Rules of Order applied. Very, very different.

We decided to drive a take our own sweet time about it. Stopped in Michigan City, Indiana to see trains. Stopped in Kenosha, WI to ride a cable car and look at the lake. Stopped outside of Milwaukee to rest and relax. Stopped in Madison, WI, to visit awesome independent bookstores.

Really good time and fun to share with Ravenhub.

Whine time

Warning: do not read if you can't stand immature self-pity rants!

You've been warned.

Wednesday morning I got up feeling bad. But I trudged into work anyway. Spent a lot of time in the bathroom having the runs. Finished all my hot projects by 2 pm and went home. Sucked down some Immodium, which finally took effect after the 6th or 7th event. Then I slept. 15 hours straight. Got up feeling slightly better, but with no appetite. At all. I can barely eat an entire bagel before I'm full. Slept some more. Laid around reading. Got up on Friday feeling more like myself, except I still have no appetite. Which is very strange for me.

So big deal, right?

Wrong. Because Thursday was my birthday, dammit! Fifty-two and counting!*

Not to worry. Celebrations will occur tomorrow. Just needed to whine.

Ravenmn

*If I had been born 5 hours later, Leap Day would have been my Sweet 16 Birthday!

Beautiful writing

This post at La Chola moved me deeply.

When bfp talks about her father, she is sharing an experience that is almost the complete opposite of my own relationship with my father. But the beauty of this post, the way she frames it, fills my heart with understanding. This is the kind of writing we need in the world. This is the kind of writing that will show us that even though we have completely different experiences, we can connect and learn and grow. This is good in so many ways.

Home Ownership Blues

OK, this totally qualifies as a privileged post. I (and the bank) bought my house in 1987. It's a decent house built in 1911 with high ceilings and nice touches. But I am not a model homeowner. In fact, I pretty much suck at it.

So last night we discovered water in the basement. We tracked it down to the unheated half bath that we close off in the winter. Unfortunately, we were wrong about the water being turned off. So the pipes froze and the pipes burst and we waited 8 hours for a plumber. Which meant waking up every 45 minutes to empty a bucket overnight.

The plumber came this am, fixed the leak, but not the overall problem. More plumbers will have to be called. More money will have to be spent. And a big chunk of change was forked over for the emergency service.

I am so lucky I was able to purchase this house when prices were low. My mortgage payments are much lower than rent would be for a similar house. It was a great place to raise our daughters and a home to a herd of wonderful cats.

Still, I am not a good home owner. I can't decorate for shit. I let things go to hell and don't really care. I barely manage to follow most of the city codes about mowing the lawn and keeping the weeds at bay. There are rooms of this house that I don't enter for months.

All I need is a place to sleep, keep my clothes and stack my books. I've been blessed with much more.

In an odd juxtaposition, I volunteered to drive people to a celebration of the local Welfare Rights Committee on Saturday. I picked up and delivered two families. I heard afterward that one of the families was in a desperate housing situation and was able to resolve the issue by attending the event. That's fucking awesome.

Let's talk privacy

So have you ever had a gun pointed in your face by a crazy person?

Have you ever had a close relative try to run you over in his car?

Have you ever had a psychotic lunatic hold you at gunpoint until you did whatever crazy thing he decided you should do?

When these sorts of things happen, it's a good idea to get the fuck away. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it means uprooting your whole life and running away to someplace safe. People do it all the time. I did it many years ago. I'm proud of myself for doing so.

Some abusers, especially psychotic ones, are really good at appearing normal to other people. Especially if they are white middle class professionals. Because, you know, those type of people, "our" people, just don't do that sort of thing.

So a few times while the bastard was still alive, I ran into "well-meaning" people who thought it would be a wonderful thing to patch up that unfortunate misunderstanding I had about the man who tried to kill me. So they gave him my number or my address. And he was back with the harassment. So I uprooted my life again. I cut off more "friends" and relatives.

It sounds like I had it rough, but I didn't really. I would much rather go somewhere new and feel safe than to have to deal with the wacko again. I was young with transferrable skills and no kids at the time. Sure, it wasn't fair, but whose life is, you know? Lots of people had it much worse than I did. I had skills and savings and close friends who respected me.

But one thing I noticed, again and again, is how some people could never understand my need for privacy. Sure, privacy seemed like a good thing, but there didn't seem to be any reason to get all whacked up about it. For some people, privacy is something that never even occurred to them.

These people would think, why the hell not give out my phone number to someone who was interested? Why not point out where I lived or worked to a nice looking gentlemen? A professor, even!

So I'm just posting this here to say, privacy can mean nothing to you if you aren't facing the prospect of an angry lunatic with a gun and a grudge. Hello, privilege! Please, just get the fuck away from me.

And stop, please just stop, trying to make privacy a trivial and unimportant thing. It's the reason I'm alive today.

A near-flattening experience

Today I got a treat. Ravenhub worked late so he decided to come downtown and pick me up for a ride home. Normally I take the bus. We agreed to meet around the corner from work, since the street in front of the building is full of people picking up, dropping off, plus all manner of buses. I thought I had it timed well so that I would be waiting for him when he arrived. But he got lucky and got there first. He was waiting in the driveway to a parking lot. I was happy to see him and rushed to the car. From the corner of my eye I something flying at me. It was a fucking huge honking SUV. Some woman had found a break in the traffic and had decided she should take a left turn through a break in the traffic and barrel into the parking lot. Not bothering to notice there was a pedestrian (moi), walking across the driveway at the exact same moment.

Quick thinking that I am, I put my hand out. Because my awesome hand is the most likely thing to stop 3,000 pounds of metal, right? That wasn't going to be enough, so I jumped back and still had to push off the car before the nitwit driver slammed on her breaks.

Next I was treated to something I have simply never before seen in my life. Ravenhub came barrelling out of our car and screamed at the woman who had very nearly hit me. You have to understand. Ravenhub is the sweet and well-behaved one. Ravenhub is the one who can control impulses. Ravenhub is always trying to tell me to control my urge to mouth off in public.

The woman is mortified. The woman is wondering what the fuck this strange man is doing screaming at her. Ravenhub is at full bore, but he uses his "social worker" language: "You have no idea of the consequences of your actions!" he screams. Now who the hell screams that?

I am just staring at this car in front of my face. And at the toddler buckled into a safety seat in SUV. This woman has got some extreme priority issues. Smashing my face in is one thing. But she could have seriously injured that child as well.

Meanwhile she is apologizing over and over. I climb into our waiting car and ask the still-fulminating Ravenhub to get in with me. SUV driving woman pulls up beside our car and rolls down her window. What, she thinks we want to have a chat over this?

I tell her to be careful from now on and we slowly drive away. Whew!

The Book

I haven't blogged about this yet, but today seems like a good time. I took the day off from work to travel to the town where my mother lives. We participated in a book release party for the book that she researched and wrote and that I typeset and illustrated. The book is about our ancestors and the decisions they made as they moved from New England to the midwest in the 1800s. This book is based on letters and diaries that my mother discovered in the attic of the home where we both grew up. The letters describe the "frontier" experience for white settlers in the U.S.

My mother's academic specialty is the migration of people. What is it that motivates people to move from one part of the world to another? What decisions do they make in that process? Is the move gradual or sudden? What political, geographic and societal forces are most influential in those decisions?

What we discovered in this process is that, not surprisingly, the settlement of the "western" territories did not follow the plotlines we learned in school. Our ancestors bought midwestern land in the early 1800s but did not move there until years later. They hired other, less affluent, people to clear the land and establish the agriculture that became the basis of future wealth for our family. The family that cleared the land, built the barn, established the livestock and produced the crops was not our own. Once all the hard work was finished, my ancestors moved in and reaped the profits. The family that did the work is not longer mentioned. That's colonialism 101.

The release party was held at the retirement village in which my mother currently resides. 40 people attended, most of whom were residents of the building or friends of my mother.

This book is important because it dispels some myths and clarifies some truths. Colonialism is a messy, complicated affair. Families are affected in unpredictable ways by capitalism's need to expand and consolidate territory. The ground troops of colonialism are privileged in many ways, but they are subject also to unforgiving circumstances. Colonialism is bloody and messy and difficult. Even the so-called beneficiaries of capitalism often get a raw deal.

My son reads porn. I should have aborted him

I don't have the whole story, but I first read about this internet post at Trinity's place via a comment at Renegade Evolution's blog. The presence of the post on Heart's blog has led to all kinds of crazy actions and reactions, one of which was an organized attack that shut down Heart's blog for a while. Meanwhile, discussions occurred in several places about the original post and various reactions to that post.

Heart's blog is back, although I can't find the source thread, so maybe she removed it. I don't know. But the post has been reposted all over the place. I googled a couple of phrases and found comments on all kinds of places, including a web site for Chicago Cubs fans. Huh?

So, I missed all the discussions. Those that I did find missed something I recoznied in the original post. So here's the post, copied from Trin's, followed by my own thoughts.

I have three sons, ages 16, 15, and 12. I was also in an abusive marriage for ten years in which my 15 year old was a frequent target of my x husband. These boys had a rough time of it, as did we all.

After I left my husband my children acted out for a short time, we all spoke of feeling relief and feeling safe yet there were still some rough spots as I got the hang of trying to do it alone.

Several years ago my accountability program found that the computer had been accessing pornography. Turns out it was my middle son. To date he has been 'caught' accessing pornography many times since then. He was 13 I think when this started.

I banned him from the computer, but after a few months I would allow him to be on it for short periods of time. Each and every single time my son would access pornography within days (and sometimes hours) of being allowed back online. He was aware that he would be caught because the computers are monitored but he chose to do it anyway.

Most recently my youngest son allowed my middle son to play with his PSP. Brandon (the middle child) used it to immediately access pornography online. The child is now banned from computers, video games and so forth. I've talked until I'm blue in the face, I've grown angry and yelled, I've cried when I was alone and when I was in front of him. I've had him read Dworkin, my site, and other places (namely OAG's site) and I still can't unseat this problem. He can recite feminist literature all day long, he can understand the tenets, the ideas behind it, how it links together but he will not allow this knowledge to stand in the way of his porn use.

I don't think I'm looking for advice (I've tried everything I could think of so far) but more a place to simply be sad. I can clearly see why he's looking at pornography, I've figured all that out readily enough, but I can't seem to make it stop.

I know, that as soon as my child leaves my home and moves into his own place that he will be looking at porn immediately. I know that I am raising a problem for women. I know that this child will one day grow and will fully absorb the messages that porn sends to men. I know that my child masturbates to degradation of my people (when I use that phrase I mean womyn) and that with every orgasm he will further solidify his own hatred of and superiority over, women.

I know that there will likely come a day where my son coerces a young woman into sex (rape) and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it. I look into the eyes of my son and they still sparkle like they did when he was a baby, but he's not a baby anymore, he's growing into a man and that man will have trained himself to degrade women before he leaves my home.

As a radical feminist who puts women first I cannot begin to determine what I should do with regards to this issue. My heart breaks because there is nothing I can do to protect the womyn he will come into contact with.

I have three boys. One of them is lost to me and as a mother and a radical womyn this breaks my heart in a way I can scarcely express. I don't know if it says something terrible about me, but you know what haunts me late at night? More than anything else? I know, in my heart of hearts that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would have had that abortion.

I also find myself blaming myself over and over again, even though that radical womyn inside of me stands up and yells that I'm placing blame in the wrong place. I'm not sure what I intended to say with this message. I began writing it this morning and put it away again and finally decided to finish it this evening. I think that maybe I just wanted to share, I keep trying with Brandon and I keep failing. He simply doesn't care. When he wants to jerk off, everything goes right out the window.

Here's the deal: I have no idea what kind of reaction this poster received at Heart's space. Maybe the thread disappeared in the blog attack.

I can tell you that one year of abuse, much less 10 years of abuse, does a lot to fuck up one's head and can lead one to believe all kinds of strange ideas. I know that I did. So I have a lot of sympathy for this woman and for that fact that she's trying to find answers and failing rather spectacularly.

Which is, ffs, totally to be expected. You've been abused, your family dynamics have been fucked over. Of course your life is gonna be screwed up in ways beyond understanding

Somebody needs to tell this woman and her son that they're lives are fucked up for a reason and that they aren't likely to find solutions on their own.

Now I realize there are a lot of fucked up service agencies and head doctors in the world. I met quite a few of them myself. The thing is, the sole responsibility survivors have at this stage in recovery is to keep going until they find help that is useful and leads to a better life. Everything else is beside the point.

I remember myself at that stage. I spent a whole lot of time concentrating on how I was going to handle myself the next time I saw my father. After the abuse, after the stalking, after the attempts to subborn purgery, after the gun shots, it was all I could think about.

Until one day I met a decent shrink who said the following: "The only time you ever need to be alone in a room with your father again is if he is in a coffin and you want to be there to confirm the diagnosis."

That made a world of difference to me.

And I think that this woman, if the post is for real and not some kind of horrible parody, needs to be told that she cannot be the solution to her son's problem. That's going to have to be somebody else's job and the best she can do is help him find a useful mentor or therapist.

But our society doesn't allow for that kind of solution. There is so much pressure on parents to provide all the answers for their children. Even though it's perfectly clear that sometimes parents just aren't equipped to do that.

This whole discussion reminds me of talking to my ex-boyfriend's son in law blathering on about how the Jews should have fought back more during WW II and that he knows for damn sure he would have done that.*

I tried to tell him that, until you've got a gun to your head being weilded by a fucking nut job, you can't know what your response will be. In my book, no matter what you do, you get a pass. I'm not going to stand in judgment of anyone else in that situation. You're an idiot if you think you'd do any different.

*And yes, I do know that many Jews did fight back, which this dude was clueless about -- along with everything else.

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

It’s been a couple of days since the 35W bridge collapsed several blocks from my house, killing a few people and injuring almost 100. I’ve been watching the TV, catching up on the web, but not really processing the issue, other than leaving to go to work early and experiencing delays in my travel home via bus.

Now that it’s the weekend, I’ve had a bit of time to process my thoughts and describe the last few days.

I wrote several paragraphs about what happened on the night the collapse occurred, in part by request of a friend of my mother’s who is a reporter at the newspaper in her town. The e-mail requested information from people who used to live in the town to describe how the collapse affected their life. They used a couple of paragraphs from my account in their story.
I also sent the write-up to relatives and a couple of friends.

Here is that write-up minus the names in an effort to remain relatively anonymous on-line.

Commuting around a disaster

I was working late in downtown Minneapolis when Ravenhub called me from home to tell me the bridge had collapsed. I made a turn around the floor to let my co-workers and the cleaning crew know what happened. I was the only one still at work who would need to make it across the river.

I was able to catch a Number 10 MetroTransit bus on the Nicollet Mall at 6:20 p.m. It goes across the river on the 3rd Avenue Bridge, the first trafficked bridge north of the 35W bridge. The Stone Arch Bridge is between these two bridges and is not open to unauthorized vehicles.

Traffic was bumper to bumper downtown. The bus was unusually full for that time of day and everyone was talking about the bridge collapse. One woman had a phone that carried a news feed and she read it out loud for the rest of us. It took about 20 minutes to get down to the river. Emergency vehicles were flying past every five minutes or so. I saw cars from Golden Valley, Medicine Lake, Anoka, and the sheriff’s office. I saw one dive team truck from the county and three emergency boats. Several fire department trucks came through as well as ambulances from local hospitals. There were at least 5 helicopters in the air from news stations. I saw three ambulance helicopters flying low overhead as they headed to the collapse site.

When we finally made it to the river, traffic was stopped and we crept along in jerks and starts. As we came into view of the accident, the entire bus gasped in unison. We couldn’t see the collapse; we only saw the lack of the bridge we expected to see. Black smoke was billowing from the West Bank and filling the air.

There were hundreds of spectators on the Stone Arch Bridge and the occasional police car used that bridge to cross the river quickly. Probably ten times as we crossed the river, a distance of about one city block, cars had to squeeze over to the side to allow emergency vehicles to fly down the middle of the 4-lane bridge.

In all, it took about an hour on the bus to travel what usually takes less than ten minutes. I got off the bus at Central and East Hennepin and began to walk home. Where I would normally expect to see a bus go by every 10 minutes, I saw none; everyone was tied up in the traffic jam over the river.

There were crowds of people walking and many on bicycles coming and going from the bridge site: far more than I would normally see on a weekday night in the neighborhood. When I crossed over 35W on the 8th St. SE bridge, I saw an occasional emergency vehicle moving below. The north end of the bridge was not in sight, but there were dozens of emergency vehicles parked along the highway.

I arrived home around 8 p.m. Ravenhub said the phone had been ringing every ten minutes or so from friends checking to see if we were OK. All of our friends know that we travel that bridge at about that time every day. My brother-in-law called in. He had been on the bridge just before 6 p.m. on his way home from work. It was his lucky day. I called my mother and left a message on her machine telling her we were all doing fine.

Ravendaughter was working security at the Target Center where they were getting ready for a news conference about the Timberwolves trade of local hero Kevin Garnett. In an instant, she said, reporters jumped out of their chairs and flew out of the building. The press conference was cancelled. She walked home from work along Washington Avenue and saw lots of emergency and media vehicles, but no survivors with injuries. Most of the injured made it to the hospitals or the Red Cross within minutes of the collapse.

Catching up with friends, via Iraq

Within hours of the event, I got an e-mail from my friend who returned to Iraq to help rebuild his country. He is a native Iraqi and U.S. citizen who lived here in Minneapolis for nearly 20 years. He went back to Iraq to help his family and friends. I sent him a copy of my account.

Over the next few hours, he re-sent my e-mail out to other friends and he forwarded other reports he received from mutual friends in the Twin Cities. So, bizarre as it may seem, the best round-up I got about how the collapse affected other antiwar activists was from a former Minnesotan now living in Najav, Iraq.

The city today

Today, President Bush came and went. The major news conferences are over. The politicians have flown back to Washington, D.C. Perhaps the big media companies will take down their satellite dishes and return to picking up feeds from the local stations. I hope so.

Meanwhile, some areas of the city have been turned into massive staging areas by law enforcement with many public roads blocked off. It is impossible to get to any public space within view of the collapsed bridge. It is possible to see the area from the new Guthrie Theater on the riverfront just north of 35W. Its observation deck, a cantilevered mass of blue glass, was meant to be an area for the public to admire the river. As of today, the public is officially uninvited. The Guthrie is allowing only those with tickets to performances to access the view. In the words of a character from one of the Guthrie’s most popular holiday performances, I say, "Bah, humbug!"

The truth is, we Minneapolitans need to be able to see the collapsed bridge, just as New Yorkers needed to see Ground Zero. When a landmark we’ve all depended upon is destroyed, we need to process that and grieve its passing. The emergency has passed; no survivors will be found now. The investigation and the clean up must continue, but this massive display of police power is unhelpful. The roads are closed. One public park has been closed off an turned into what looks like a massive military encampment with mess tents, klieg lights that burn all night long, and boys and their toys from police forces and fire departments from around the state. All of this despite the fact that the real rescues and the true heroics came from ordinary citizens who happened to be there in the first couple of hours after the collapse.

In the past few days, I’ve travelled back and forth across the river on other bridges (obviously) and haven’t had a moments thought about their safety. It seems such a bizarre tragedy that the idea it could happen again is not even entering my consciousness. I can’t explain it.

Our cynicism is kicking in. Why are they keeping the public away? Is it to hide the evidence of that mysterious UFO that flew into the bridge? (OK. That was my homage to the recently defunct Weekly World News!). People are fully anticipating the appearance of Halliburton soon along with the other corporate vultures that profit from catastrophe.

One co-worker who eats lunch in the company cafeteria at the same time I do came up with a great idea. Since the Red Cross headquarters is within viewing distance of the collapse, why not create a public observation area and charge people a few bucks, a pint of blood, or a donation to the food shelves for the opportunity to see the collapsed bridge?

Everyday Heroes

A lot of commentary about the events on Wednesday focuses on the quick response of ordinary citizens to help fellow citizens survive and escape the chaos after the collapse. Minnesotans are known for their generosity in times of trouble. We live in an environment that is extremely inhospitable in the winter. We experience summer-related events such as lightning strikes, straight-line winds and tornadoes. We’ve all been thoroughly trained in handling disasters. We get weather reports every 15 minutes or so on every TV and radio channel every day all year round.

So we’re known for responding quickly and effectively in a disaster. We know how to help strangers stuck in the snow. We know how to clean up after floods and tornadoes. We are known for raising money, volunteers and bringing expertise to help people suffering unexpected tragedies across the country and around the world. We know to act immediately and to work together, because that’s how we survive in this environment.

You probably will hear some bragging about that for a while. Which will mean you get only part of the story. The full story is a little less praise-worthy. Minnesotans are helpful to strangers. We do come through in a crisis. On the other hand, we are fairly hard to get to know on any level outside the superficial and the occasional rescue from crisis. People who move here from friendlier places, especially the south or from smaller rural communities, are put off by how hard it is to become trusted and to make lasting friendships here.

I carry this attitude to the internet. I’ve communicating on blogs and forums with lots of people and formed relationships of respect and affection. But I don’t communicate via e-mail off the blogs and I don’t call people up on the phone. It’s our way.

The people who have checked in and let me know they are happy I was unhurt have touched me. I appreciate your comments. Consider that effusive friendliness from a typical Minnesotan.

Give me a call the next time you get stuck in the snow.

Some Interesting Links

High-resolution photos from the Minnesota Daily, student newspaper at the University of Minnesota

Minnesota bloggers checking in and commentary

Blog of Noah Kunin who lives under the bridge and witnessed the collapse

We're all fine

In case you're watching the news and wondering, we are both home safe and sound. My children are safe. My brother-in-law crossed over the bridge 10 minutes before it collapsed. It took me a couple of hours to get home from work, but that hardly matters in the grand scheme of things.

Today, a bridge collapsed over the Mississippi River. It is a half mile from our house. We drove over it regularly.

This is very sad.

Gone to that great catnip cloud

I am a long-time cat owner. Last weekend, one of our two cats, Mocha, stopped eating and became extremely lethargic. I took her to the vet yesterday and they pushed fluids. She came home last night feeling better.

I took her back to the vet today for more treatment, and she began to fail. She is 16 years old and has never been sick before. The vet called to tell me she was not doing well and they thought she might have a tumor. I told him to keep her comfortable until I could get there after work. Around 2 pm she had a heart attack and died.

Let me tell you about Mocha. We had two cats when we adopted our daughters. Squeak was obviously Ravenhub's cat and Fruitbat shunned everyone but me. So we took the kids to the local shelter and they each picked out a kitten.

Mocha was a black short-haired cat with touches of white. She had a plaintive voice that we immediately translated as "Oh, me or my!"

Her favorite thing was to climb to the top of the cat tower and call us over to play. We would throw a cat toy up to her. A catnip mouse or a plastic ball with a bell inside. She would allow the toy to land next to her. Then she would take it in her paw and fling it back at us. Whereupon we would toss it straight back to her. She taught us to fetch.

My daughters grew up and moved away, but left the cats with us. Squeak died at 17 years old and my dear Fruitbat died at the ripe old age of 21. For the last few years, it's been the two younger cats keeping us old fogies company and making demands.

Mocha would plop herself down next to me on the couch and demand I pet her. She loved to have her head and ears roughed up. She would bury her face in my hand to force me to rub her ears. During the last five or six years she divided her time between hiding under furniture and sitting beside me demanding to be petted.

We called her Mocha the May cat and she lived a good life. I hope her spirit is rolling in catnip heaven.