and wider and brighter

I'm going to take a break from the class war today in order to pay tribute to Armagideon Time HQ's resident feline matriarchs...

...Little Baby Setzer (the gray and white tabby) and Nubby (the tuxedo cat). They started visiting our house in the summer of 2005 as part of a quartet of feral kitten sisters. When we brought the entire group to our vet to be fixed that following spring, we were informed that both Nubby and Setz had already been knocked up and that they were too far along to safely abort.

(Maura and I have since been told that was bullshit by someone from the local feral cat spay and neuter group, but what's done is done.)

We took the pregnant pair of felines into our home, and they gave birth -- two days apart from each other at the end of April 2006 -- to two litters of four kittens each. While she carried out her maternal responsibilities to the letter, Nubby wasn't enthusiastic about motherhood and let the more dedicated Setz pick up most of the slack.

Unlike their non-pregnant sisters (Money and Princess) who couldn't wait to get back outside after the post-spay observation period, Nubby and Setz embraced the housecat life style and never looked back. We ended up keeping four of their kittens (Jem, CooCoo, and Carmen from Nubby's brood and Witch Baby from Setz's), the other four (Tyra, Beezo, Ultima Morpho, and Gizmo) were placed in good homes.

The Cure - The Lovecats (from a 1983 single; collected on Staring at the Sea, 1986) - Staring at the Sea being one track and the Atlantic Ocean removed from Standing on a Beach which I own in LP format. It was the first Cure album I bought (at In Your Ear's Harvard Square location, along with a copy of PIL's Album, in the January of 1992), and I picked it up because I thought the girl I was dating (a very strange woman named Maura) was a big fan of the band.

Even though confused my past and present tenses -- she had been a big fan, but became disgusted with them after The Top -- the purchase was a mini-watershed moment that shook me loose of punk purist attitudes concerning music.

hurting runs off my shoulder

My mother passed away in November 1988, when I was sixteen years old. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, but those thoughts tend to be more about the social and familiar upheavals that came in the wake of her death, rather than of my mother as a person.

I’ve spent decades coming to grips with my relationship with my father and the way in which he loomed large as both a positive and negative role model during my formative years. With my mother, though, it’s different. I can joke about being my father’s son (which can be the blackest of black humor, indeed), but the question of what it means to be the son of Ruthann Weiss has never been decisively resolved.

This is partially due to the passing of time, and the richness and vibrancy of my memories of the woman gradually fading over the years. I can remember specific events and incidents, but the overall picture of who my mother was as a person has gotten hazy. There was a degree of deliberate intent in that; right after my mother passed away, I made a conscious decision to pardon her shortcomings and problematic aspects of her personality. Which brings me to the other reason why I can’t get a decent handle on the role my mother played in shaping my life: her last eight years on earth were a downward spiral of obsessive behavior that crossed the line into outright insanity near the end.

As much as I tried to bury the memories related to her slide into increasing erratic and dysfunctional behavior, they still remain the strongest impressions I have, and color the rest of my memories, good and bad, of her. It confounds my attempts to piece together an accurate picture of who she was and what she meant to me, except…

…I remember something that happened a few weeks before her death. I was in my room drifting in and out of sleep. The house was cold, which may or may not have been because we stiffed the oil people one too many times (again). My mother came into my room. She was a little unsteady on her feet -- but not completely blitzed on port wine -- and said “You must be cold.” She took my army surplus jacket off the doorknob and spread it over me like a blanket, kissed me on the forehead, then trundled off upstairs.

Sometimes a single recollection can be more than enough.

Roger McGuinn – It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (from the Easy Rider OST, 1969) – I posted this track before, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, but what the hell. My mom gave/lent me this record, and a turntable to play it with (which I still own, but is in dire need of a new stylus) when I was fourteen.

Me First and The Gimme Gimmes – Sweet Caroline (from Have a Ball, 1997) – My mom loved Neil Diamond (and Rod McKuen – I think there’s a correlation there), which led to some really miserable times when I discovered that his genius was not universally appreciated by my Kiss-loving peers in primary school.