One of my cats is called Freud because I like to give weighty names to my cats and because I am completely enamored of psychoanalysis.  I have travelled all over the world, but the five years I spent in analysis was the most fascinating journey of all. I put Freud, along with Darwin, Nietzsche and  Read the Rest…

This story involves two rodents if you count opossums as rodents which they aren’t; they’re marsupials.   That they are related to kangaroos doesn’t make me love them.  They still look like giant rats. I found the aforementioned opossum, dead, under my apple tree on the morning I was leaving for a long weekend at a  Read the Rest…

During the warm weather, my cats come and go as they please.  They prefer doorman services, but they have cat doors: one from the house into the sun room and another from the sunroom to the outdoors.  I sometimes prop a house door open to spare them the onerous inconvenience of pushing through two flaps.   Read the Rest…

I always knew that one day one of my cats would pee on the Great Books: that ponderous, pretentiously leather –bound set from Encyclopedia Britannica which my parents bought in the 1960’s.    The exclusively male writers, chosen by Mortimer J Adler, include Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Plutarch, Aquinas, Newton, Kant, James, Darwin.  There are 52  Read the Rest…

I live in a rabbit warren of a house in Seattle, Washington.  My backyard borders a small private cemetery.  When I first moved in, I put a gate in my back fence so I could slip into my own private park and walk around whenever I wanted to.  I love my quiet neighbors.  I’ve twice  Read the Rest…