Our Furry Friends: A Goodbye to Macey

In March of 2007, I was picked up from the hospital by my folks and nephews. Unbeknownst to me, I had an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs that had been prescribed thus leaving one side of my head to swell to the size of a basketball. At any rate, I was a little loopy in the car and it was explained to me we would be making a stop at the American Humane Society.

My mom had dreamed of a little grey lap cat, and she took my nephews into the Humane Society where the little cat she dreamed up was six weeks old and ready for adoption (as was her black sister, who we adopted on behalf of my brother and his family).

Macey wasn’t exactly a docile lap cat. On the one hand, when mom brought her out to the car for me to see, I instantly fell in love; on the other, when she was in the backseat in her cardboard box, her entire arm was outside of the hole, looking for something or someone to scratch.

She was feisty, hated most other people except me, and I miss her terribly.

Last week, her health deteriorated quickly. I knew the last two winters were not good on her arthritis, but something else was wrong. We woke up twice in one week to her vomiting underneath mom’s bed and last Thursday, she wouldn’t move or eat. The most she could do was purr—and she did that ‘til the end. For a domestic shorthair, sixteen years is a long time, and I can honestly say, in return for trips outside and treats, she was my best friend in the whole world.

We woke up Friday morning in a completely different house. For the last several months, she had become increasingly verbal—perhaps she had some dementia. But she would still lay on my chest and purr her heart out. She loved her bubba, and I had nothing but love for her.

I know everyone thinks their pets are remarkable. Yet two memories from her young kitty-hood stand out. After she was taken to get de-clawed, I held her. She would look at her paw and then stretch it out to me as if asking, “What happened to my claws?” Also, one night, we were together, and Patton came on the television. I had never seen it, so I let it start. As soon George C. Scott appeared in front of that gigantic American flag—I don’t know what it was, the colors?—Macey stood straight up and watched him throughout his entire speech, as if she were standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Aside from the year and a half I spent in Montgomery, trying to resuscitate a dying career as a secondary school teacher—we were inseparable. She has left so many memories, even without the pictures and videos. She knew instinctively which Christmas stocking was hers and enjoyed getting Christmas presents from it. She would plaster her nose against mine as if she wanted to breathe the same air.

She was never intended to be an outdoor cat, but the pull was strong for her to roam our yards, which we let her do for quite some time. One day, she found herself on top of a fence, with dogs on both sides, taunting her. When we rescued her, and I was trying to pull the matting out of her fur, we discovered a hernia that had to be operated on. From then on, she was outside on a leash. Everybody would make fun of us, saying they had never seen a cat on a leash before, but we wanted to keep her safe and healthy. And we did. For sixteen years. I can be grateful for that at least.

Cats (and pets in general) have a way of enriching your life. I would say I’ve learned very few maxims in my forty years except one in particular—“Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like children or pets.”

We marvel at the way they can relax. After all, April 15th means nothing to them. You have to admire them and envy them and do everything you can to ensure their little lives are happy and healthy. That makes you happy and healthy.

We still have a little yapping dog and my cat, Amos Moses, who loves to be petted, but doesn’t quite know how to accept it. Raised with a dog—and with very little of the gracefulness of cats—he hovers near you but won’t allow himself to be held or petted very long. I love him, but it’s a different experience. I love our dog, and dogs know how to exude a kind of everlasting love that some cats never exude—but it’s not the same experience. Though mom’s cat, Macey was really mine and I belonged to her.

From her time resting in bathroom sinks to sipping only from Dixie cups to sneaking into desk drawers and my armoire, I have laughed and loved for sixteen years and I should be (and am) grateful, but there is nothing like saying goodbye to that kind of undying love. When they brought her in for our last visit, she looked so sick. It was probably made worse by the (very kind) vet telling us her organs were ropey and nothing could really be done. I left her with as many kisses on her nose as I could. And she was still purring. By God, how can you let something still purring go? But it was the kind, humane thing to do. And I suppose one day I’ll get over it and past it. But who knows? When I love someone, it never really ends, though estranged we may become, whoever it is.

This writer would very much like to hear a scratch at his office door, her little voice which could almost yell my name, or even just that purring. Amos can purr, but it’s almost silent, with no tone. It’s not the same. But the other two animals know something around the house is different, so I must love them more, now more than ever.

Goodbye, Macey—you don’t know how tough that is to say and you never will. But I hope you knew I loved you ‘til the end. And after. And will, long after.

Soundbite Obits

More Than Dumbledore

Last week, like countless others, I was moved by the death of Michael Gambon, a British actor who did amazing things onstage and off. As his obituary headlines poured in, I noticed they almost uniformly mentioned him first and foremost as the second Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise of films. This he was, taking over from the deceased Richard Harris. He made Dumbledore his own and provided some of the more interesting and reflective moments of Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows—Part 2. If someone has been involved in a current franchise craze, Marvel or otherwise, and passes away, they are noted for their appearance in high-grossing films rather than the majority of their work otherwise.

But Gambon was so much more than Dumbledore. A staple of the theatre community, he acted marvelously all his life and made many more movies than the Harry Potter film series. This “soundbite obit” phenomenon of linking artists with not their best but they’re most commercially successful efforts harkened back to an X-post I had seen a few weeks ago mourning that most of the official obituaries of the late novelist Cormac McCarthy had mentioned the films made from his novels more so than the novels this prototypical novelist wrote. He opined something like, “Who cares what movies were made from them? The man was a novelist; that’s how he should be remembered.”

Williams, Elia Kazan, Miller

The American theatre has this problem too. Judging by the obituaries, American playwrights are only known for one work. I knew when Arthur Miller died, the obits would read “Death of Author of Death of a Salesman” while Miller wrote many other great plays (at least between 1944 and 1964), including The Crucible, which may be the great American play. Tennessee Williams, likewise, was (according to obituaries) famously known for A Streetcar Named Desire (maybe also Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and the film versions especially. Now this is understandable to agree. More people in the world go to the movies than the theatre. More people go to the movies than read books. But this franchise frenzy we find ourselves in now? If Michael Fassbender were to unexpectedly leave us, would he be known for his Marvel movies or some of the more penetrating and moving performances of our time?

More than one play

Oftentimes obituaries pave the way for the manner in which an artist is remembered. Eugene O’Neill has somehow been relegated to this idea that he wrote a good deal of plays and eked out one masterpiece before he died, Long Day’s Journey into Night—that one written long after he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature and had given American theatre a voice—the voice of a master, the voice of an authentic American dramatist, whose Iceman Cometh may end up being seen as the better play.

Our concern with mourning the artists we lose has reached a fever pitch. Indeed, we have lost so many since COVID, not just a result of that disease but a baby boomer generation dying out, and we heap on the most financially successful of their endeavors. This may be appropriate when considering Paul Reubens, a man who was (for all intents and purposes) known only really for playing Pee-Wee Herman. But Gambon deserved better. I could scarcely take my eyes off him when seeing him in Conor McPherson’s film version of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and, even in tiny roles—like that of the film mogul in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou—he was a presence to be reckoned with.

Sure, once you click the link, it might mention his other work. But should Alan Rickman and Robbie Coltrane be known as Potter characters when they both carved out their own niches in a country brimming with top-tier actors and gave us many more memorable performances? Will they deign to make Harry Potter part of the headline for Dame Maggie Smith’s passage (may it be many years away)? Or will they acknowledge one of the great actors of our age, whether she participated in Potter or not?

Are journalists and readers so itching for clickbait that they will reduce an artist’s career to one major work just to get views? Is it the journalists or simply the editors (who, after all, often rename pieces of journalism)? When Robert Altman died, I don’t remember obits about the man who made M*A*S*H or Nashville, but a man who nearly made forty movies, some of them not so great, but what can you do?

For the love of Pete, our artists deserve better tributes to their memory than just having participated in Harry Potter or the MCU. They are not given obituaries in major papers because of one incident in their lives, which they were most likely drawn into because their grandkids would be mad at them if they didn’t. If that were their only claim to fame, one would get it, but that’s just not the case.

If franchises are what you’re about—if you crave the new serial from these fan bases—good for you. But know the artists involved are people whose accomplishments are far greater than the world of Young Adult, or even Child, Fiction that you should have stopped reading years ago in favor of something nourishing to your adult soul.

“Well, how many characters do I actually have in an obit headline?” I don’t know, but “Michael Gambon, great actor” would have been sufficient. The people already know his image, so let them read the bloody article and find out more about the artist who inspired them. Open their world. Open your world to new information.

A man with nearly 200 credits in film and television, not to mention his radio and theatre performances, deserves better and so do you. It’s a shame we live in an age where journalism is what it is: mouthpieces for gatekeepers of one shape or another. But we owe our ailing and deceased artists more than pity and boxes to keep them in.

Endgame

A Writer Looks at Forty

Yes, I am a poet (playwright),

two hundred years too late…

I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, choking me. When I made it out alive, on first sight of my father, I urinated all over him. That’s the way I began. I was the most planned-for child ever in existence. My brother, 15-years-old at the time, requested me. And a sibling he was given.

I was born to a salesman who was often gone before I awoke and home after 6pm. He was a very funny man, who turned down college to go on and make a living in the world even though he was academically brilliant when he graduated high school. He was a wonderful father. My mother was/is a cosmetologist who took her GED and went to beauty school, eventually marrying a man ten years her senior about whom she once said, “I will never marry that man!” A whopping 53 years they lived together before Dad’s death. My brother was an outside guy—athletic, hard-working, had a different girlfriend every week until he married at age 26 to a lovely woman. He became a fireman after realizing he couldn’t be kept inside. Has done it a quarter century.

Those are the plain facts. In an area where everybody was encouraged to play sports, my mother and father took a liking to my adeptness at mimicry, joke telling, and impersonations. My mother began to have dreams of sending me to the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Ever since age 5, I dreamed of being in the movies, but I switched to the theatre upon entering ASFA. But that leaves part of the story out.

I was raised in a private Baptist school and was baptized in the Southern Baptist Convention when I was eight years old. A highly religious child, I began even then being enthralled by elements of the old world. Theatre eventually became a part of that as itself began as religious rites. But my love of history (my favorite early school subject) and my distaste for people my own age (I always aspired to be forty; I have made it, have no opinion yet) set me apart. I’ve grown religiously from my beginnings, but I would still consider the Baptist Hymnal to be a real influence on my life.

I was a child who always wanted books near me but could scarcely get through one. I’m certain if I’d been born a few years later, I would’ve been put on medication for something for my reading comprehension was poor and my one claim to fame on the left side of the brain is a healthy degree of skepticism and an A+ in Algebra II, seconded only by my constant and incorrigible 75 average in Geometry.

I began life in a private school in a cul-de-sac neighborhood with very few children nearby. I didn’t get on the school bus; I was driven to school. I remember my childhood as being largely solitary because even my brother was rather physically exhausted by school athletics and was an adult by the time I turned three. I turned inward, voicing my puppets and action figures all the while Dad recorded my “home movies” on a very early, very expensive VHS camera.

My inner life became important to me as I had to imagine school as a seven-hour television show that I was starring in. School it was called, and my best friends were the co-stars, my arch nemeses the “also starrings,” and my current love interest was given a special “and” title. My first friends were all girls, but I was an early bloomer and, as soon as the libido started working, my best friends were guys and women became something else.

As I was nearing forty, the question of a woman in my life was the most pressing thing on my mind. I know several of my friends on their second marriages, my young nephew has married before me—and I remain straight, but unaffiliated. Of course, the woman who would be interested in me would have to deal with various inconsistencies: that I am, on the hand, extremely religious, but also like my fair dose of the profane being the one closest to mind.

There is a story of me as a baby where I cried for a straight twenty-four-hour period. My parents tried everything—food, diaper changing, toys. Nothing worked. Finally, Mom closed the door to my room, leaving me in my crib and the crying stopped. She peeked in and I was entertaining myself by watching whatever gadget hovered above me. There is a very real part of me that wishes to remain alone, but in the wee hours, I wonder how much my life would have been different if any of the objects of my affection had said yes or the ones who did would have changed it if I had stayed.

At any rate, I never knew how courageous I could have been in that department. I was born with a confidence that most mistook for cockiness and likewise made me a bookworm to try and gain that intellectual status people thought I had, but only aspired to. But, as for women, the confidence wasn’t there. I felt defeated by them and there was also something a) about how creativity is sparked when you’re in love and b) how creativity is sparked after coming out of that daze: a rather different creativity can show its face, potent also.

As a practicing dramatist and poet, albeit two hundred years too late, I can rarely write plays not in love. But poems come bounding out in the spaces between these one-sided rendezvous. So, I must be grateful for the gift of both. The gift of occasionally being in love and a woman deigning to spend a little time with me and the time alone where I can pursue my interests unheeded.

My teens are a blur. I was a practicing actor, studying at ASFA, in one show after another. There was no time for adolescence. I knew there was drugs and drinking and smoking around, but I didn’t partake. I was up on a career ladder, which became very unshaken and uncertain by the time I left college.

On reaching my twenties, I was rather comfortable—I knew I wanted to be a playwright, I was in a stable relationship, but I was bored. I don’t know why, but I was bored. Near the end of every chapter of my life, I consider dumping everything I’ve done and trying something new. At the end of high school, I considered studying theology (which, eventually, I did do as a graduate student); at the end of college, I considered throwing my laptop of plays in the nearby like and starting fresh or going to law school. I considered these things, but there remained a through-line—a writer trying to understand himself through his work. I suppose that’s all it really is, even if this might seem a bit glib.

My twenties turned into an awful morass. I was the prototypical millennial—I went into the real world, unprepared for it, and ran back home, screaming. It didn’t help that the bubble burst a few years after I graduated college, and the times were hard. I could have just as well roughed it (in New York, say), but I didn’t. I went into the time of self-analysis that should be the prerogative of teenagers. With our generation, everything was mixed around. People started saying your twenties were the time you should experiment and try to let stick anything on the wall that will, but this isn’t true and is, in fact, dangerous to one’s development because we only have so much time down here, you know?

Thirty was another milestone. After another degree, and a half-hearted attempt at a career in public education, I realized most everything I had ever thought was wrong or misguided. That’s what thirty does to you. As a kid, I loved old movies and music, but when I tried to watch Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, or tried to listen to a song of Neil Diamond, I was bumfuzzled. At thirty, it all made sense. I could explain more, but I won’t as my thirties were full of heartbreak, though they ended with some sense being knocked into me as I became a caretaker to a dying father and had to start looking toward the future.

The last couple of years have been good—perhaps not this one, but that’s because forty was looming. My father locked himself in a room for a week when he turned forty. I did this as twenty-two, so I guess I matched him on a different plane; I just had what the millennial generation ushered in: a quarter-life, as opposed to, mid-life crisis.

Since turning forty, I’ve had no desire or time to lock myself in and/or waste any more time. I must celebrate writing something to publish every week on this blog. I must celebrate a life that could have been aborted twice, with my then self-inflated sense of doom. I must be thankful to be alive and continue.

Before Jimmy Buffett died, I already had the title to this piece, though I hadn’t written it. His song about a drug smuggler, “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” is cogent to the argument. There are many things to mourn about being forty now. This is not a complaint, but 80% of the prizes, awards, contests, and submissions I can submit my work to are no longer open to me. One must be BIPOC or LGBT to get a hearing in the theater or in poetry nowadays. I’ve had my fair share of publications this year, but I consider them flukes, based largely on blind juries.

I cannot help what I am and yet I must live on, doing what I believe I was put on Earth to do. So, there are still some plays to finish, one was finished this year—There Will Always Be a Fire—and some poetry I wrote many years ago has finally had a hearing in a couple publications. For that, I am grateful. But, if God is willing and the creek don’t rise, I could be around for thirty or thirty-five more years, and I would like to see some dreams come true. Everyone deserves it, regardless of their color or other particularities.

I have watched the same two stupid political parties have the same arguments repeatedly. I have watched the film industry turn into a franchise machine. I have watched the decline of the novel, except for the Young Adult variety which are all too often read by people who should be reading something that matches their age. I have seen the theatre also turn to franchises to keep afloat. I’ve seen six Presidents come and go and each is stupider than the last. I have always voted my conscience, never prescribing to one ideology or another. I have loved and been loved. I have eaten and fasted. I have had times to mourn and times to rejoice.

What’s better than that? Does the alpha male who has three children and a mortgage have a better life? How would I know? Does the Yankee or Midwesterner who believes they can leave their home ground and create different families in New York or L. A. live better than me? How would I know? Would my life had been different if I had settled at any time? How could I be sure? Do I want to be sure? Or should I realize my life has been, at least at times, extraordinary? That I have touched people. That I have loved more than I’ve hated. That I have given more than I’ve got.

Yes, I am a poet and playwright two hundred years too late. People like me always believe they would have done better in another century, another time. Who’s to say who’s right in this regard?

What does a writer do at forty? He continues to write. I shall pursue this, even if the dreams always remain at bay and I encourage the same to all you dreamers.

More love. More joy. More dreaming, even if it seems pointless.