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 volumes in all.

My father read them.  His note-filled bookmarks still stick out of them.  When he died, I brought the set to my house in Seattle.  I knew my mother didn’t want them: she only read Jerry Falwell approved books.  I thought I would keep them around to see if I would read them.  If not, I would sell them and become fabulously wealthy.

I haven’t read them and it turns out that nobody else wants to either.  For one thing, they aren’t reader friendly:  the books are heavy, the pages thin and the print tiny.  I am at an age where these things matter.  I sat for a minute in the cat-pee scented air to see which Great Books I have read in Penguin or Riverside editions.  Hmmm.  I went to a private liberal arts college so I have read quite a few of them.  So as not to sound pretentious, I won’t list them.  The only of these guys I have continued to read throughout my life are Shakespeare and Sigmund Freud.  In Book Chi Part Two, I am going to ramble on about what else I like to read and I guarantee it won’t sound pretentious.  At least some of it won’t.

I don’t know what got into the culprit who peed on the books last night.  I don’t even know which cat it was.  It’s the 5^th hot day in a row and we are all a little ragged and drained; but Freudy was the cat who seemed most distressed about something.  He appears to be taking exception to my trying to put him on a diet. There’s a certain poetic justice in Freud peeing on the Great Books, I suppose.

I have tried to sell my set of Great Books to book stores, on Craigslist, on Amazon, and in yard sales, and no one wants them.  Now that they smell like cat pee and I can’t conscientiously pass that off as the scent of old leather, I expect they’ll end up on my parking strip with a free sign on them. How the mighty have fallen.

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 had to sell houses and move because of neighbors who had relocated from hell.

The cemetery is a sanctuary for city animals.  What with the neighborhood cats, the squirrels, opossums, raccoons, rats, moles, and birds, there are spontaneous episodes of Animal Planet nearly every day.  The other day I watched a raccoon carry something furry through my yard.  I called my neighbor, Gwen, who knows something about nearly everything.

“Do raccoons eat rats or opossums?”

“Nope. They’re not carnivorous.”

Before too long, here came the raccoon again with something furry in its mouth.  It came from across the street, into my front gate, through my side yard.  I decided, given the color and texture of the furry thing that it must be a baby raccoon.

“Now why is that raccoon dragging her baby all over town?” I wondered.

By the time I saw it the third time, I realized it was not the same baby.  The mother was evidently ferrying her young to what she felt was a safer home.  I hope they are now comfortably ensconced in a generous cemetery tree and not in the yard where they keep the grave digging equipment.

At sunset, my cats—Winston, Artemis, and Freud– set up lawn chairs facing the cemetery wall, mix up a batch of mai tais and get ready for the nightly show.  For a first act, an opossum’s nose may appear and a body will heave itself over the fence, followed by 3 or 4 little noses and bodies.  They strut along the top of the fence like the Rockettes.  The raccoons then come through a hole I have cut in the fence, a hole that creates a thoroughfare for everything in the neighborhood with four legs.  They tumble around the yard, play with the rubber ducks in the bird bath, and for the denouement, they tip over the bath and run off to vandalize someone else’s property.  A few squirrels chatter in lieu of bird song to close the show.  Winston, Freud and Artemis come in, drunk, and whine at me to give them something to eat.

My cats have understandings with the wildlife in the neighborhood.  With the raccoons and opossums, I believe relations are amicable and consensual.  The arrangements with the birds and rodents are a bit more ominous and are stories for another day.