On Pages, Ages, Music & Cats

Guidebooks to life rest on my decades-old desk, thick and thin poetry tomes I turn to for inspiration and diversion. Bright days and dark nights run through the works, contemplative confections all—save for one that trades in philosophical whimsy and a few that collect witty yet dramatic dispatches. (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Metaphoric ash and polysemous verse singe the skin and sink everyday actions and objects into infinite meanings. Life’s seasons expand beyond a calendar year, for instance, and I’m falling into winter.

Obtuse is a word I learned as a child: a thickness of thought that corrodes reason and the heart. Babs got it right in the year before my birth when she sang, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” Where would we be without one another?

Most days I see both scruffy and scrubbed men and women begging for Monet from lawn chairs precariously perched on median strips and beside exit ramps, in emails and on social media. There but for the grace of God go I, you, and all who pass them without so much as a glance, lest they detect our darting eyes and target us for extra-special attention. People who push such people away are not the pluckiest people in the world, but fearful. The stock market rises and decimates retirement accounts, employment ticks up and down, inflation soars and dips, all see-saw indicators of the economy and how much spare cash we keep in our pockets. We hold our breaths and count to ten, then do it again, worries weighing us down more than they should. As the poet Cristina M.R. Norcross observes, “We have always been at peace/but we become lost in the forgetting.”

As ever, street poets also provide the sustenance I need. Webs, an album from Weaving—aka Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Derek Weaving—is doing just that as I write. I plan to spotlight it tomorrow, as it’s out this Friday, so for now I’ll simply say that the 10-track set is akin to a seemingly gentle river flowing to the sea. (Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be.) It’s a soft-hued, slightly psychedelic delight.

Daily writing prompt

Which animal would you compare yourself to and why?

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My blog’s name tells it all, I suppose, though its name originally had little to do with me; in February 1997, when I launched the original Old Grey Cat website, I named it in honor of our feline companion at the time. He was old and grey and, sadly, destined to die from cancer later that year. (I kept the name when I began this blog in 2014.)

Cats live the best lives, I think. They’re solitary beings that thrive in colonies with others of their kind and people, too—much as I do. I can easily entertain myself, but enjoy hanging out with likeminded souls. There’s not much more fun, for instance, than a Bruce Springsteen concert when the house lights come on during “Born to Run” and reveal 20,000+ fans raising their arms and singing along as one.