Fat Cat, Kettle Corn, Back to School Girl Friday Round-Up

When I went to pick up my student ID, the twenty-something in charge barely blinked an eye. “Have you had a Panther ID before?” he asked. “Not for a while,” I answered, ‘not for a while’ being forty years ago. He was just checking not starting a conversation. “Do you have a preferred name?” was the next question and then he asked me to take a seat while the machine printed my ID. He couldn’t have been more nonchalant, like it was every day a 77-year-old person came to get a student ID. I loved that so much. I took a picture of my ID right away because it made me so happy.

I finished the kettle corn. It had to be done. Enough with the dainty snacking. It was time to move on.

Herc, the cat, has gotten portly or broad in the beam as we call it here. This is because he takes steroids and because he eats a lot. We indulge this by keeping his bowl full of dry food all the time and giving him canned cat food, fluffed up with a fork, at cocktail hour. For the latter, we hoist him up on the counter lest the hounds disturb his concentration. We do this because a year ago, Herc was on death’s door, skinny with a weird, undefined shadow on his X-ray. To counter his bulked-upness a bit, I’ve deepened my commitment to playing more with him. This distracts from my scrolling time so it’s a sacrifice but he’s so worth it.

A collaborative poem is comprised of stanzas contributed by many people on a common theme. I am not a poet but had an opportunity to contribute to a poem entitled “They too, had Names,” a “collaborative poem to acknowledge those who have died while in ICE custody in 2026, to date.” Organized by Kim Suhr of Red Oak Writing through her Use Your Words effort, the poem is very solemn, sometimes very hard to read. Here is a link to Kim’s Substack and the full poem. My contribution was this: I tell them if they take me/I will die/They don’t look at me/They talk only to each other/My bones fold into themselves to be carried to the car.

After a year of this madness, I have adjusted. I am no longer lying awake at night worrying about the fate of democracy (although I’m still very worried about it). I am not out of kilter all the time. I have relearned the fine art of compartmentalization, of having a place for everything and everything in its place. And I reminded myself of the healing balm and energizing nature of forward thinking, of having a beautiful goal. My beautiful goal now is to complete this graduate certificate in gerontology, a joyful thing despite the fact that the first course is Death and Dying. I’m going to be brilliant, I just know it.