Maine Coon?

Before Saturday I'd never heard of such a cat breed as Maine Coon. My husband's cousin, an electrician, stopped by to look at some broken light switches and stepped back in awe as Argus, our Big Friendly (Feline) Giant sauntered into the room. "You got a Maine Coon?" He asked.

What? That's just Argus, the bigger half our kitty brothers duo Argus 'n' Odo. Odo's got short hair and a mean lean frame, but identical Jellicle cat tabby markings as Argus. Maine Coon? We were abuzz with excitement. We searched through Wikipedia and Cats 101 in quest for the Truth about Argus. Big? Yes. Above average intelligence? We think so. Friendly? Yup. He's also interested in people but not clingy, sometimes chatty. The tufts of fur in his ears extends beyond the outer edge of his external ears. He has tufts between the toes of his snowshoe big feet. Tail as big as a feather duster, belly fur hanging low. Maine Coon! We got ourselves a Maine Coon. Don't we? Doubt sets in. Suddenly it matters. We need to know.

So what is it about we humans that drives us to establish lines of authority, lineages, pedigrees for everything? Does believing or not believing Argus is a Maine Coon make any difference at all? Chris says he likes to know because it gives him a narrative. The intrigue of the Maine Coon's story ranges from the theory that they descend from Norwegian forest cats--Chris envisions Argus padding softly across a blanket of snow in a forest of pines--to having sprung from the fortunate felines once belonging to Marie Antoinette. She was able to save them before losing her head. And yeah, the narratives add some flavor. Argus, a sea-faring cat, snoozing away atop bags of grain, helping himself to the hungry sailing rodents daring enough to nibble a bag open. This affinity for the salty sea may explain his fascination with our toilet water.

What was funny to note, though, was my own hesitation in granting Mr. Argus--affectionately called Poop Gus by those closest to him--the title. Maybe he's not REALLY a Maine Coon, I interjected. Don't get all excited, y'all. I found some authoritative breeders who would insist he cannot be Maine Coon. No pedigree. Would we be laughing stock if we were so bold as to presume? No way to know the Truth here. Maine Coon? I dunno.

I correlate both my skepticism and my family's eagerness to claim this presumably elite status for our cat to common human behavior. There are those who feel safer, I guess, if their ideas are validated by a sense of coming from authority or having been transmitted via pure lineages. There are those who are attracted to the narratives, and perhaps others who feel special or elite (Sneetches on the beaches?). Then there are the skeptics, like me, unwilling to say for certain this is this or that is that. The joke may be on  folks like me, but I don't mind. Having my doubts leaves me open to possibilities. As for Argus, I'm fairly convinced that as long as we'll rub his belly from time to time and make sure he gets a little canned cat food in his dish every morning he doesn't give a flying fart whether we call him Maine Coon, Poop Gus, or anything at all.

Hope is the slimy thing with gills that emerged from the mud...

I teach 2nd grade. I've told y'all that before, right? Here's a sample of writing that tickles both my funny bone and my fancy that there's hope for we human beings yet. The assignment was to write about the vocabulary word INCREASE. I wish you could see the elaborate drawings that go along with this piece. It includes a plethora of detailed dinosaurs, a giraffe, then a series of drawings that begin as asmall dot that grows into a larger dot, then several versions of amoebic looking things that in turn look like fish then fish with legs. This lad has an encyclopedic memory for all things dinosaur and animal. I will leave his sentence structure (or lack thereof) as written and simply allow you to enjoy the delightful thought process of this scientific thinker who has an awe for life:

Increase

means to grow grow grow

Life begian so small as small as planckton that small and then to land and got bigger and bigger! and bigger very big. The goraif is the tallest thig on erth so small to so big. 

You gotta love that exclamation point mid-sentence. Each day before he goes home he poses questions to me like, "Who would win, a lion or a tiger?" "Did you know the tiger descended from the saber tooth cat? Most people call it a saber tooth tiger but it's really a saber tooth cat." "I wonder how life began in the first place."

You keep on wondering, kid, and asking questions.

Love the Players, Hate the Play

My oldest daughter is an anonymous wife in her school's production of Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I. I spent most afternoons this week tying her hair up into a knot on the crown of her head, spraypainting her head black and applying eyeliner out to the edges of her temples. Months of rehearsals and the work of a league of parent volunteers (of which I was not in the ranks) culminated in a series of performances that would probably surprise most attendees with its quality. Granted, everything from the characters to the accents and even the set was highly imitative of the renowned Deborah Kerr/Yul Brynner movie, but the fact that the director was able to draw this level of imitation from a group of inexperienced actors ranging in age from 5-14 made the show remarkable. Kayla was given a chance to participate in something larger than herself, and I got a kick out of her backstage bonding with fellow cast-members. The only thing wrong with the play is that the play itself is stupid.

The director made an effort in the program to assure us all that this story was fictionalized, and that she took the opportunity to teach the children of the beauties of the culture they were about to ridicule and marginalize. Ok, that shows my bias, but I don't know how else to respond when watching a stageful of impressionable minds supplicating to a statue of Buddha to help Anna stay awake for the scientific sewing of dresses even though she be only a woman and therefore unworthy of his interest. I get it. It's humor. I suppose the play attempts to reveal prejudice on both sides of the cultural divide, but it comes across as highly lopsided, and without supplemental information, these kids might walk away from this experience believing that all Buddhists pray to the eastern doppelganger to their western big guy in the sky. They might also believe that Anna was bringing progress, not imperialism in those bags that the young Siamese sailors unloaded from the dock.  But, as Kayla reminded me, it would have made boring entertainment to have the audience watch the royal family meditate for 15 minutes onstage. Yeah, OK, I'll relent.

However, to provide some counterbalance, I streamed the more human Anna and the King through Netflix on my classroom Smartboard yesterday as I worked for free filing and organizing my classroom for the weeks to come. Here Buddhism and Christianity are portrayed in a more objective light. Neither East nor West is idealized, neither is villainized. This retelling is a more objective look at history. There are Buddhists who ask for favors as readily as their Christian counterparts. The civilized use barbarians to attain their imperialist ends and the barbarians are forced to make humane decisions. It's complicated. Jodi Foster and Chow Yun Fat suit me better than Kerr and Brynner, but even I recognize that this, too, is fiction. Both versions are stories, but we humans live by our stories. Does it matter to which ones we subscribe? I think so.