We have all been through the wringer in 2020, and we have to endure three more months of it. After July's tumult with appendicitis, a hospital visit, TOO MANY follow-up appointments for the surgical incision, recuperation that felt like walking in quicksand with concrete blocks tied to my legs, I found comfort with this guy in August.
Evander is a lap cat. He's not always in someone's lap, but he makes a pretty regular point of spending time in mine. Even with a tender incision that was still healing, I found a way to still let him sit and purr and snuggle.
And occasionally look up at me, with those deep olive green eyes.
I might not have been able to get through a day of recuperation without a nap in the middle, but Evander could not get through the evening without lap time.
It's a little heart-meltingly adorable to have this guy lean in, place a paw on you, tightly close his eyes and take a nap.
And then there's that adorable angle of his head, giving me that squinty-eyed look of peace.
Let's talk, lady. About...whatever.
I started to feel well enough for a short train trip north.
We left our apartment on a rainy day, passing by the homeless woman that sets up her sleeping mat in front of the pharmacy that sits below us in the same building.
I think that the world remains shocked that here in Italy, most people are quite compliant with the mandate to wear masks. Even our street neighbor is. If you look closely, you'll see that she too is wearing one, as she lays back against the building facade and reads her Bible.
In the train station, we waited for our platform number to be posted, and stood behind Ms. Wearing ALL My Designer Stuff at Once, with her Prada hair barrette, down to her....
...Dior athletic shoes.
yeesh.
We arrived in Venice a little over 4 hours later, to more rain.
It rained through the evening.
The following day was beautiful, though. We popped into a couple of churches.
We went to St. Mark's Square to see it without so many tourists.
We shopped a little. Strolled. We also went from restaurant to restaurant, it seemed...I guess that this is what happens when you've spent most of the year INSIDE.
You go just a little bit nuts, maybe?
You've seen the scenes before, even at night, and still, you take the pictures.
And when you're cooped up for longer than usual - thanks to a pandemic, thanks to a stinking hot series of Italian summer weeks - you take your book to a piazza, lean up against the monument in its center, and read in the slice of shade under the noon sun.
Venice really doesn't fail to offer up the views, even when you're not aiming for a destination within the city.
But we did have one: the Peggy Guggenheim Collection
It's encoded in our American DNA, I think, to stop and consider the view of a supremely wealthy person, on the damn Grand Canal.
And to sigh.
(Before you think about the challenges of living in this watery city, and the cost of the upkeep of your palazzo...and sigh again. With relief? Tinged with envy?)
Artists need to admit to the world that they are, by their very nature, materialistic people. We MAKE STUFF. But when it comes to the work of other artists, particularly the ones we admire the most, I think that we sometimes can also concede that those belong in places where many other people can see them.
This, on the second and last day or our very short visit, is the workspace for rehabbing gondolas.
And very nearby is this little enoteca that makes and sells cicchetti, which is mostly a Venetian specialty...
With your glass of wine at lunchtime or during your aperitivo (Italian happy hour), cicchetti are served alongside. A seemingly endless array of toppings on sliced bread are sold to compliment the drinks AND, just as importantly, keep those drinks from resting on an empty stomach.
Sliced pear with walnuts and gorgonzola, porcini mushrooms with a soft cheese, smoked salmon and capers, little crustless sandwiches with sliced boiled egg and tuna, creamed salt cod (a particular Venetian specialty)...is your mouth watering?
Mine is, with the memory.
And as we took our water taxi back to the train station, cops on jetskis.
Because Venice.
A picturesque scene with the Rialto bridge.
And after that little trip ended, we came home and later found that our favorite dive bar had reopened...and the owner stocked one of my favorite ciders.
I even went out, bought some clams and cooked.
You know, like a regular person.
I stopped just feeding Maria, my sourdough starter, and I began to enlist her in baking again.
Spelt
I'm working on getting some more height and bigger holes in the crumb.
The bread itself is excellent in flavor...but in the absence of much else to challenge myself with, I'm aiming for better, magazine-photo-worthy quality.
Flaxseed and spelt...healthier, and a little more height.
Our fish guys had octopus one day...so I bought one, cooked it and made a salad with it, potatoes, olives, paprika and a big glug of olive oil.
And the bread experiments? Even better when you finally cave and take a few lessons from NYT Cooking on how to make a classic grilled cheese sandwich. (hints: butter the bread on the inside; put a light layer of mayo on the outside surface, cheese in the middle of course, and some pressure on the sandwich when its in the hot pan...ta-dah)
We went to Eataly, shopped for some provisions (we're anticipating Italian restrictions for the virus' second wave, although they may take a little while longer - than in other European countries - to manifest), and finally tried the in-house pizza restaurant. That cheese on my pizza? Fior de latte mozzarella...meaning: flower of the milk mozzarella. SUPER melty.
While this guy is hounding me about chicken I'm cooking for one of my innumerable chicken salads, I notice that one of his pupils is larger than the other.
That's odd.
But odder still on the next day is his inability to keep food or water down.
Cats sometimes do this, but this one hasn't before. Not in the year we have had him.
So we take him to the veterinary hospital north of Rome because 'our' vet has moved from her old clinic to this facility.
And in 36 hours, it is determined that not only does he have pancreatitis (basically, a highly inflamed pancreas with infection), his condition is, according our sweet vet: critical. He is between the stages of VERY sick and 'we recommend euthanasia.'
This was what our visit on his second day was like. He was in terrible shape. They had surgically inserted a feeding tube, and it was secured by that bandage around his neck. They had him on a constant IV of antibiotics, analgesics for pain and fever, and because his pancreas was inflamed and nonfunctional, he was also on an insulin pump.
While he perked up a little, and even ate a few bites of food while we talked to him and gently petted him, he was in a very sorry state.
Suddenly, and with no causal explanation, we were about to lose Evander. Our boy. Our boxer, with a lightening fast left hook. Van der Puss. The lap cat I needed.
When we came home from that visit, I broke down.
I just couldn't imagine another loss.
We just got him and his brother, I wailed.
Not another loss. Not now. Now, when everything else has become so...bleak.
We came to visit him every day. I'd like to think that with our dedication, he was encouraged to hang in there and improve. The hospital allowed us to use an empty examining room to spend time with him. To try feeding him. To talk to him.
And he always rewarded us by perking up when he heard and saw us.
We spent each of about four evenings sitting on the floor, talking with the vets, encouraging our boy to eat, holding him when he approached a lap, watching him as he slowly walked around the room.
And he continued to improve.
This is the view from that empty examining room. A fairly unspoiled expanse of the Tiber river and farmland beyond, north of the big city.
It is one of the most beautiful views I have ever had of that river, which snakes through the center of Rome.
Visiting hours are 4 to 6pm. We spent as much of that time as possible with Evander. And sometimes, we stayed later than we were supposed to.
Here he is, in his chosen sleeping place upon first arriving at home - the bathroom rug, where his huge, goober brother has taken charge of the folded towel and left Evander to steal an edge. But we'd like to think that Jasper was still attending to the ill, in his goober-ish way.
We brought Evander home with strict instructions on care, because he was not out of the woods. The feeding tube had to stay in, because he wouldn't eat enough to balance out his insulin dosage.
We'd had a diabetic cat before, so this regimen wasn't entirely new, but the business of re-acquiring all the diabetes supplies to replace what we had, two years ago, donated to the cat shelter (that our newest boys came from) from pharmacies that are never, ever stocked in everything you need, thus requiring umpteen million trips to various stores and such...that was a stressful thing to add to the other stresses.
You know how you check a cat's blood glucose level?
You prick his relatively insensitive ear tips and tease out a drop of blood for the strip on the meter.
Evander has no ear tips.
(so the bases of his ears are pricked instead...which can be extra painful for the humans doing it and the cat enduring it...I have the scratches to prove that)
And he was put on long-acting insulin, a dose that we had not yet established as correct, as his blood glucose was, according to the vet, all over the place. He was incredibly groggy, slept a lot, and was not consuming the calories needed to balance out the insulin.
If he didn't eat much (and lets face facts, most diabetic-friendly food for a carnivore is yucky), we had to take this terribly gross wet food for diabetic cats, use a stick blender to mix it with water, strain it, and then administer through the feeding tube. This was doable while he was groggy and sleeping a lot. But with additional blood glucose testing, we were finding that the insulin doses were too much.
We reduced them. Progressively.
And with a cat that was becoming more himself every day, the blood glucose testing became tougher to accomplish, and the tube feeding led to an incident in which he fought (like the boxer he is!) and managed to yank out the feeding tube, spray the dining room with that wet food sludge, and The Spouse had to spirit him back to the hospital.
I was convinced that Evander was, contrary to the normal reasoning of most veterinary health specialists, about two weeks after his initial diagnosis of pancreatitis (which is dangerous for either dogs or cats), healing enough to not need insulin OR that feeding tube, if we just allowed him to have his regular food.
Two more nights in the vet hospital, and despite low blood glucose test results with only a half unit of insulin on board, the staff was preparing to surgically insert another feeding tube into Evander's esophagus, and I asked everyone to reconsider.
I'm shocked to say that they did.
He came home again.
He spent a few days being quite wary of us, hiding under furniture and being very cautious. No lap visits.
We couldn't blame him.
He needed time. He needed to feel safe.
He has spent a number of days sleeping a lot in the 'cave' of the cat tree.
But he has graduated to what we call 'the terrace' of the cat tree. And his brother has been pretty amenable to sharing the real estate in order to watch the pigeons on the window sills of the Senate building.
And he has even graduated further to what we call the 'penthouse' of the cat tree.
I wasn't going to post on this whole debacle until he came back to our laps.
He did, just in the last couple of days.
Our boy is back. With us.
Against some serious odds.
I am braced for the next thing, 2020.
After a pandemic killed a number of my sources of income, robbed me of even the extracurricular things I've been enjoying, every country's economy is limping horribly, my spouse had surgery in March, my appendix almost killed me, tropical storms and disturbances have wreaked havoc around the globe, my 'lap cat' almost didn't come home from the hospital (that's THREE hospitalizations for my little family of four within seven months), and my home country continues to be subjected to additional destructive forces from within, I'd like to think that I've had enough.
The glimmers, the bright spots...the loaf of bread with the right height, (if not the big, sexy sourdough holes - YET), the very occasional evenings out in this endlessly fascinating city, the little developments on artistic and professional fronts that tell me I'm not completely done with living/doing/working/creating yet, the fact that Italy's COVID numbers are still far lower than those of all other Mediterranean countries as well as a goodly chunk of Western Europe...I see these things. I try to recognize them for their positive light on an otherwise dour, damp landscape of 7 months' time and little visible on the horizon to improve it.
I'm safe. A roof over my head. A kitchen to work in. A few projects underway.
We've all recovered. I have someone to laugh with and plan with.
But I am braced, nonetheless.
For whatever reason, the Peggy Guggenheim collection has several Jenny Holzer benches in its garden.
Holzer is known for her work with words. One of her better known series is called Truisms. The statements are often one-liners, authored in a kind of anonymous, sometimes cynical voice.
Here is my favorite.
You could think of it as bleak.
Or you could think of it as realistic.
Right now, I prefer the latter.
Savoring.
And waiting.
