The last time I posted, Vinnie had just gotten stuck between the screen door and the glass door, with the cat door RIGHT NEXT TO HIM. A month later, this sweet moron is still struggling with the notion of the cat door. Here is my daughter offering him moral support.
please enjoy my daughter cheerleading our very dim and loving cat vinnie through the cat door that has now been in place for a month. pic.twitter.com/PgAgR7ST6K
— Marjorie Ingall (@MarjorieIngall) November 24, 2020
This cat has helped make the last few terrible months bearable. Shout-out, as usual, to bideawee shelter, where we’ve gotten all our family cats. (Pre-Vinnie: YoYo, Bookie, Slinky, Novella, and Dottie. Novella and Dottie are still with us and tolerate Vinnie in all his kittenish enthusiasm and general idiocy. See below: Novella is in front and Dottie is behind her. They like to cuddle and look suspicious and peeved when interrupted.)
The late, great Sebastian was also a shelter kitty, but not a bideawee kitty; I inherited him from a coworker who moved to the Netherlands. Sebastian predated the kids and Jonathan. He lived long enough to love Jonathan too, move with me to San Francisco and back to NYC, and get to know Josie. He lived until she was almost two. Once, before she could stand, I watched Sebastian walk up to her as she sat on the rug and head-butt her, then lie down. She deliberately toppled into a plop on top of him, her giant pumpkin noggin lying on his side. And they both took a little rest. He was a wonderful boy.)
In work news, my co-SorryWatcher did a great post on some serious apology-weaseling by the New Orleans Police Department. I reviewed National Book Award nominee The Way Back by Gavriel Savit for the New York Times Book Review, and heard from my wonderful 10th grade English teacher who was very excited that the NYT’s own A.O. Scott was also in the Book Review this past weekend and we were both her students at Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island. And we both really loved reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” and The Awakening.
It feels like forever ago, but my neighborhood had a huge kettle-banging celebration when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. (I love that her family calls her “Mamala.”) It felt like the East Village of yore. Other than that marvelous interlude, though, things are still pretty stressful. Awfully hard to wrap one’s brain around 250,000 Americans dead for no reason while the federal government failed to act.