![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jul. 6th, 2015
One of the drawbacks from forcing the cats to get in the house on the Fourth is that Sammy no longer cares to stay here during the days and lounge around on the patio with Coco and Ash. Apparently he doesn't trust me, thinks I'm going to grab him and force him inside to endure interminable hugs and pecky kisses.
By this time of the summer, I ordinarily have them in the habit of spending the days in the house to spare them the scorching summer days, but on top of all the rain, it has proven to be a moderate summer thus far. We have not been having those 100-degree days. Here we are going into the middle of July and our high-temperatures remain in the low nineties. This weather is bound to change in the upcoming weeks, but maybe I will let them be this year, see how it works out. I don't mind it if they continue to lounge around on the patio. I just do not care to see them burrowing into the dirt to pass away the summer day.
By this time of the summer, I ordinarily have them in the habit of spending the days in the house to spare them the scorching summer days, but on top of all the rain, it has proven to be a moderate summer thus far. We have not been having those 100-degree days. Here we are going into the middle of July and our high-temperatures remain in the low nineties. This weather is bound to change in the upcoming weeks, but maybe I will let them be this year, see how it works out. I don't mind it if they continue to lounge around on the patio. I just do not care to see them burrowing into the dirt to pass away the summer day.
Ronald Reagan
Jul. 6th, 2015 04:03 pmIn the early years of the Soviet Union, it was not unusual for curious Westerners to venture abroad and take a look at this new innovation in government and to become outright infatuated with what they saw, apparently not seeing everything. One New York reporter, Lincoln Steffens, famously enthused, “I have seen the future and it works.”
Ronald Reagan, at a CPAC meeting in 1977, played off Steffens’s line, saying, “I have seen the conservative future and it works.” Reagan apparently did not see everything either.
[Source: Craig Shirley, “Rendezvous with Destiny”]
Ronald Reagan, at a CPAC meeting in 1977, played off Steffens’s line, saying, “I have seen the conservative future and it works.” Reagan apparently did not see everything either.
[Source: Craig Shirley, “Rendezvous with Destiny”]
I watch Coco and Ash as they lie down beside each other on the patio table, coolly surveying their grounds, paying especially close attention to the subtle maneuverings of the birds. Now that Sammy is spending a lot more time elsewhere, Coco and Ash are partnering more. And I sadly think of Willy. Ash and Willy used to be very close partners, siblings; there were only two cats in the group then, and that was them, for about a year, a little more than a year. I wonder if Ash remembers him. If Willy somehow walked into the yard, after perhaps only being lost for all this time rather than dead, would she be excited to see him, gamboling about and happily meowing?
It's funny, odd, but I sometimes feel like I miss Willy more than I miss Bo, feeling sadder for the cat. However, that might be only because Bo can feel to me like he belongs to another lifetime, to some faraway place where I was young and still had high hopes, so that I can only barely recall the reality of those years when it was just him and me, despite the fact that we are talking about close to twenty of the best years of my adult life. The cats, by contrast, make up the last ten years of my life and still counting. Out of sight, out of mind, I'm afraid. Indeed, I can hardly remember my own mother as a real person anymore, gone nearly ten years longer than Bo. But then, sometimes, when you are not busy and your mind starts drifting on its own, you remember, and you feel what you are missing. Your heart literally hurts, like it is being squeezed, those pangs that leave you a little misty-eyed.
It's funny, odd, but I sometimes feel like I miss Willy more than I miss Bo, feeling sadder for the cat. However, that might be only because Bo can feel to me like he belongs to another lifetime, to some faraway place where I was young and still had high hopes, so that I can only barely recall the reality of those years when it was just him and me, despite the fact that we are talking about close to twenty of the best years of my adult life. The cats, by contrast, make up the last ten years of my life and still counting. Out of sight, out of mind, I'm afraid. Indeed, I can hardly remember my own mother as a real person anymore, gone nearly ten years longer than Bo. But then, sometimes, when you are not busy and your mind starts drifting on its own, you remember, and you feel what you are missing. Your heart literally hurts, like it is being squeezed, those pangs that leave you a little misty-eyed.