False Alarm

No, this is NOT our cat. The animal pictured above is/was Tiger’s friend. And when this cat jumps from the porch railing onto the porch floor, he makes the same thump sound that Tiger made. So, Dave named him False Alarm. Which is probably a step up from the other thing Dave calls him which is Better than Nothing. Having False Alarm around is better than having no cat around. (It’s lonely without our Tiger.)

Catwise, not a good day. But weatherwise, it was a perfect day. No wind. Shhh, hear that? No wind. And sunshine to beat the band. All day, clear sky.

Yes, all day I had warm sunshine to sit on the porch in and read Haven Kimmel’s second memoir, She Got Up Off The Couch.

Kimmel is a gifted writer – smart and funny. I loved “A Girl Named Zippy,” her first memoir – of her youngest days (oh, the details she can remember) growing up in a town of 300 people in Indiana.

“The Solace of Leaving Early“ is a novel that just floored me from beginning to end. That book blew me away.

OK, here’s a sample of her writing from She Got Up Off The Couch. The author is staying with her mother’s friend, Olive. She and the woman were changing into nightgowns and preparing for bed…

“My feet were freezing and I cursed myself (curses, curses, I said) for having an eye like a camera. I had just added something to the photo album of Things I Wished I’d Never Seen. This one could be cross-referenced under Not Sure What it Was.

“Olive’s body had been covered with stretch marks and varicose veins, like a map you turn over and can never make sense of. Dotted all around the silvery stripes and the bright blue raised veins were more and more moles, thousands of them. Her breasts were large and hung to her waist, and everything was sinking in folds – a thick ribbon of skin over the elastic of her underpants; pockets above her knees. The skin that wasn’t blue with veins or black with moles was as white as the belly of a deer, and then there were those bright red hands, so chapped she no longer had fingerprints.”

Great, huh? “…those bright red hands, so chapped she no longer had fingerprints.”

And this: “That was the thing about Julie; she always looked exactly right for whatever she was doing, whereas I always looked like I’d walked through the wrong door into a story that had nothing to do with me.”