Visual Therapy

Hi there. Just wanted to express concern about everyone's cats. I got so many emails about Bleys an comments about other sick or borderline cats. I hope all is well.

Mostly today I am writing about my cousin, Joe Lupo. He lives in New York and is co-owner of a business called Visual Therapy. They basically go through your closet and pare it down to what you really need to own to look and feel good. He's done this for celebrities and for normal people (although he hasn't come by the house and done this for me...hmm...of course, my closet, thank you St. Louis turn of the century German builders, is the size of a coffin). He and the other Visual Therapist, Jesse Garza, have written a book called Nothing to Wear, which has recently been published. AND, he and Jesse are going to be on Oprah on Friday (that would be tomorrow, the 28th).

I don't spend a lot of time watching Oprah. In fact, in the past 4 years, I have seen it once, when Joe was on last time. Oprah likes Visual Therapy. Maybe you will too. Anyway, you can at least get a glimpse of the more fashionable side of my family. And check out his picture on their bio page. He certainly is aging gracefully.

Sadness Averted

I watched myself move through the stages of grief over the past 24 hours. You know--denial, bargaining, anger, and so on. It was textbook.

My cat--I have two, Hickory and Bleys, and in this case I'm talking of Bleys--started urinating beyond the scope of the litter box last week. At first I was totally enraged; he has never done this before. But then I got worried, especially since Bleys has also lost a little weight, and Friday morning I woke up really early, found more cat urine on a bathroom towel, and then counted the hours until the vet opened and we could get an appointment.

Bleys (pronounced Blaze) is an orange and white Maine Coon, and they tend towards renal problems, and this is what I feared. He's only 10, which is old, I know, but he's lived his life completely indoors and has had a gentle time of it. I was worried, and when I took him in to see Dr. Pendino, the prognosis didn't seem good. He did a cat scan, which is not a CT scan, but a blood test, which made me laugh, for a moment. Looking for renal failure, diabetes, hyperthyroid, liver damage, and simpler infections, his symptoms best matched one of the first two. Pendino tried to be optimistic and push towards diabetes, but when I burst into tears, he told me we should just wait and see what the results said.

I came home and cried like I haven't cried for any death in my life. It was shocking to me. I gave Bleys a bath (he'd wet himself on the way home), and then brushed him dry. He sat in the sunbeam in the front hall and my mind started to race: maybe there isn't anything wrong. He doesn't seem to be acting any differently. Maybe it'll be ok. I caught my denial, and quickly moved to bargaining, which lasted until this afternoon.

Maybe there's nothing wrong, I thought. Maybe if I just feed him more and fatten him up again, maybe it'll be ok. We kept the cat food on a counter in the kitchen, to save it from our ravenous beast of a dog, but maybe Bleys was a little older and didn't like to jump up to eat. Maybe he'd been eating a little dog food and self-starving. Maybe.

Then late last night I went back to anger and sadness. It wasn't fair that he'd die at age 10. And I'd been ignoring the cats lately, taking care of the kids and house and everything else. I hadn't had enough time with him. And I didn't want him to die feeling like I didn't care. By then I was convinced it was renal failure and I knew it went fast in most cats. I figured we had a few weeks.

So I called the vet today, because, unlike my own doctors, our vet gets results back the next day, even on a Saturday. They told me the doctor would have to call me back. Had to be bad news. But I had work to do in the yard, and I had to pass out the block call list, and then work at the house tour across the street. So I told Mike to ask the questions I wanted to ask, and I went about my tasks.

I called Mike from my mother's house after passing around the block call lists, and asked what the vet had said.

"There's nothing wrong with Bleys. Everything is negative. The doctor said to move the food bowl back to the floor and come in for another weight check in 2 months. He said we could do some diagnostic x-rays if we wanted, but that the food bowl might be the problem, and the urinating might be a behavioral sign telling us to move the food bowl."

I couldn't believe it. Could not. I'd practically buried him already. But it's funny, in a way. Stages of grief move gradually, but the reversal is rapid and complete. I've moved the food bowl and told Bleys that if I found more pee, I was going to be mad as hell. Of course, he probably thought I was promising him more catnip. He's never been the smart kitty around here.

Sibling Revivalry

There are 8 years separating me and my next younger sister. Of course, there’s a brother in between us, but I have about as much in common with him as I do with any isolationist mortgage broker who lives in Texas. Bevin is 23, and then Colleen is 2 years younger, about to turn 21 this June. They both attend Mizzou, and this year they live together on East Campus. I’m visiting this week, just a few days, with my girls, who are just 3 years apart themselves.

Being 8 years older than Bevin, and 10 ½ more than Colleen, I was old enough to change diapers when they came along, but then I went to junior high and high school and away from them. They have grown up as acquaintances, people who lived with my parents. I didn’t really come to know them until after I was a married homeowner, when my parents moved up to St. Louis, just a block away, as if we were some long-term family with roots in the area. Which we are, except for that whole 20 years on the road thing we did.

They are much cooler than I am—than I ever was. They know how to drink hard liquor and how to dance at bars. They are smart and interesting, and I’m a mom of two kids who drives a mini-van. I look at them and I know that they wouldn’t have much tolerance for me if there wasn’t kinship. Of course, that road runs both ways; they are lucky too for the bond.

Their apartment, a full floor of a house, is filled with a hodgepodge of cast-off furniture and knickknacks, some from my house, some from my mother’s. I’m sitting in a chair I stole from the dorm; Bevin’s dresser is mine, simply painted black. The kitchen table was from my first apartment, the pots are my parents’ first cookware. There are little reminders everywhere, but jarring juxtapositions as well. The Day of the Dead statue by the computer and the lacquered mannequin in the living room are creepy and out of place next to that end table from my grandmother’s house. It’s like walking through a dreamscape—everything seems right, except for the glowing pink dog.

They’re sort of like that, too. We have similar tendencies towards obsessive-compulsive disorder, but Bevin’s is far more pronounced. The arguments sound like ones I’ve had, but they’re a little edgier. The bumper stickers on the coffee table are places I once frequented—but I don’t put bumper stickers on my coffee table anymore. Wanting to balance my visit with a friend’s birthday night and feeling guilty is very familiar to times when they visited me in college. Colleen’s boyfriend has a similar laid-back stay-in-the-background demeanor Mike once had (but no longer).

Soon, perhaps already, we will all be adults together. They will marry, or maybe not, have kids, or maybe not, and we will take pictures of the whole family on my parents’ back porch. We will argue about politics and religion and go camping and get drunk and wonder how we could possibly come from the same family. Our parents will age and we will resent each other for being there, or not being there, or not being able to be there but desperately wanting to. We will send annoying Christmas letters to each other and know in our hearts that everyone is lying.

But I hope we don’t disappear from each other’s lives. Even my brother—in the end, we know each other better than anyone can, I was there when each of them was born. We have enjoyed and survived our childhoods together and there is this common memory, or shared base, perhaps, that no one else in our lives, no matter how close we may think we are to that person, can ever have.

Bevin stands in the doorway drinking whiskey and soda, teasing my younger daughter and making her laugh.

St. Louis: City or Village?

Most would say that St. Louis is a city. It is: there are 300,000 people within its boundaries and over a million in the metropolitan area. It’s not Chicago, and it’s not New York, but it’s a decent sized Midwestern city. I have lived in St. Louis continuously since 1992, and off and on before that (I was born here; I moved at age 3. Then again I moved back at age 7 and stayed til I was 10). When I moved back to go to SLU, I fell in love with the city proper (as opposed to the surburbs) and haven’t left. I lived on South Grand for a few months after I married Mike, and then on South Compton, which my brother the Texan liked because he could sing various LA-based rap songs about my address. Finally we moved to our house on Halliday, which he also likes due to the Madonna song, “Holiday.” But I digress. St. Louis is a city, an Eastern-style city, and it has a city feel to it.

Which is why I’m puzzled that only about 200 people seem to live here.

When I moved to St. Louis, I was going to be a Russian major. No. I was going to be pre-med. No. I was—well, I was going to be various things. But I did take Russian as my language, and the man who taught me was Dr. Murphy. He was from Boston, learned Russian in the military, was completely brilliant, and I should have learned more from him than I did. College is wasted on the young and procrastinating. I graduated, married the aforementioned Mike, and made it over to Halliday, which sat 10 blocks south of St. Pius V Catholic Church. Through a series of fortunes and misfortunes, I took a job teaching math at the St. Pius V grade school, and there in my 7th grade was Margaret Murphy. It didn’t take me too long to put two Murphys together. No big deal—SLU is only about 2 miles north, it makes sense for a professor to live so close. But then, my brothers-in-law show up at SLU, I guess a sort of legacy, and completely independently of me, become good friends with Margaret.

Stranger still, because he doesn’t know who I am, is Steven Smith. I am like the little sad groupie who keeps showing up at the rock star’s hotel room. Not purposefully, but it keeps happening. I did a brief pathetic radio show at KSLU, where he was intensely involved when we were at SLU at the same time (I would say we were at SLU “together” but that would imply that he knew who I was). He rode a motorcycle and acted like a fictional character most of the time. A little larger than life. Keep in mind that I graduated 10 years ago, and here’s how he keeps reappearing:
*He sponsored a girls boxing event where a co-Venus Envy presenter boxed at the City Museum.
*Paul, who is another coincidence in the making because I know him from SLU but I know his mom from La Leche League completely independently, mentioned that Steve was running the St. Louis Fish List, where he decides where to eat fish on a given Lent Friday, and then 80 people follow him to the fry. I joined and ate enough fish to recognize that St. Pius’ Fry this year is the best fish fry food ever.
*Peggy (of rum cake fame) rooked me into a softball league last fall. It was St. Pius’ women’s league, but sponsored by a local bar that I thought was owned by a parishioner. On our first celebratory visit (actually, we lost 25 to nothing, but we were celebrating our survival), the owner comes by to chat. Steve Smith.
*Oddest of all, my father has dinner with me last week and tells me about this contest at Wash U that he is a judge for. People present their ideas for a new not-for-profit venture and they award the best idea $64,000. In the process, the presenters take classes from the judges—learning how to write a business plan, how to make a budget, and so on. The point is to bring business acumen to the not-for-profit world. One of the finalists is Panda Athletic Club, a boxing venture. Dad went on to describe the presenter: “He looked like an old-time Irish boxer. The hat, the way he was dressed. He had the whole look.” I felt like Clement Moore: I knew in a moment it must be Steve Smith. Yeah, that was him. He’s a finalist in a contest where my father is somehow coincidentally involved.

Perhaps this isn’t weird. Most likely it is commonplace. It is strange to me, though, probably due to my lack of roots. Having lived in 9 cities growing up, attending 3 high schools in the process, the idea of knowing who your mechanic was, much less your neighbors, was unfathomable. Sitcoms were not real life. Nobody ran into each other on the street and asked after your mother. That was Mayberry and it wasn’t true. Especially in a city as big as St. Louis.

Of course, this leads me back to my theory of city living as opposed to suburban living. We have set down roots here in South St. Louis, for better or worse, and so have so many others. Suburbs have subdivisions and residents--we have a neighborhood, and we have neighbors…