HIS Karate-Do

Well, these days I find myself a bit more inclined to writing my occasional note to you all… nope, not retired yet, but we did just upgrade to a new computer, which (until videos, photos, additional programs, and malware degraded its responsiveness) brings up the internet so fast, I don’t waste most of my time waiting and waiting, like in the TV commercials, haha. Anyways, I’m sitting here in the “CatRoom”, so called because it’s the cats’ home here on the second floor. They spend their evenings here and their days in the garage, feeling so secure that they often remain asleep even when I walk right past them, en route to the computer. Simba’s awake and lying next to my chair, mostly because I shooshed him off of his “throne” so I could access my email. We joke about the CatRoom, much as we used to joke about Batman and Robin’s BatCave, BatCar, Batphone, etc…and that we wanted to see how they decorated the BatRoom (bathroom, get it?…juvenile humor from the sixties). Anyways, as I look around me, I realize that this room not only contains the cats and their belongings; it serves as our office (with attendant computer, [...]

The other day, I was playing “cat and mouse” with our two rather aged cats, Nikki and Simba. In this case, I was the “mouse”, as I twisted, turned, thrust and pulled a foot-long metal wire (a good cat toy) with a feather at the end. I say “aged”, because they’re both 14 years old as of last March. When you calculate it out, if a cat lives to be roughly 17-20 years old (at least the ones that live in the relative safety of a nice home), then, the average year equates to roughly 5 cat-years. Hmmm…5 X 14 equals 70 cat-years. Yet, the brother and sister tabbies look pretty much like they always did, though they do spend an inordinate amount of time sleeping these days. I remember back in 1995, when they were two tiny kittens, marveling at the speed of their movements while they were “sparring” with each other. If you’ve ever watched two kittens playing in a blurr of fur, you know what I mean. And here, “70 years” later, these old felines still have “got it”, albeit with a little less flash and losing their interest in the “mouse” after a couple of minutes. [...]

When my dad and I eat lunch every week, we spend time catching up on whatever happened over the past seven days since we last saw each other. I will often ask, “Anything new happening Dad?” His normal response is, “Nothing much…” Then he’ll go on to describe whatever little changes occurred over the week; a patient at Dialysis receiving a kidney transplant, a fellow resident recovering from pneumonia, the neighbor’s cat giving him a small scratch on the hand, the last batch of Fuji apples I got him were not as crunchy as he liked, and so on. Multiply that by 52 weeks, and you have a year in which “nothing much new happened.” And at 86 years old, that’s not so bad…a decent quality of life, no emergencies, a few small scratches, the old memory’s still holding up, appetite’s good, etc. Then, once in a great while, Dad will wax philosophically and think about the years 1977, 1997 and 2006, in particular. Those years stand out in his mind, as these mark major events in his autumn/winter years: in 1977, Mom unexpectedly passed away; in 1997, he suffered his first stroke; in 2006, he moved out of his [...]