Nothing much has changed here except that I am working a lot too much, it’s too hot outside (and we never did get our monsoon), and I think Kana throws up hairballs every other day because with her IBD she has difficulty passing the fur as she ought to.

Here she is in her new Cat Person chalet. I didn’t make a chalet last time because I thought Kana, my box queen, was too big. But SHE doesn’t think so.

For fun I thought I’d share an old poem with you. It was published in the journal Front Range, Issue 6, Spring 2011. It’s more narrative than usual for me, but I remember having fun writing it. After my daughter graduated from the University of Oklahoma (Boomer Sooner!), the gardener and I drove back to Arizona through Texas. So did daughter and son in daughter’s car. It was a fun family trip, and it was kind of relaxing that it was in two vehicles. Two years before her graduation, my daughter had performed in summer stock in Texas (Granbury and Galveston). So the last time I had been in Texas before daughter’s graduation was twice the summer she was there–once to Granbury and once to Galveston. The old theatre in Granbury has been the scene of John Wilkes Booth sightings. The idea is that he didn’t die when the history books tell us he did, but instead he went to Texas and got back into acting.

***

Booth Made Footprints in Texas after Escaping the Burning Barn

 

John Wilkes Booth didn’t die an assassin’s death

but like a schoolteacher in love with Shakespeare,

in his bed confessing with precise diction

 

though at that point not a soul believed him

because he acted the role of nobody

so authentically that his own frustrated soul

 

banned from acclaim for what was left for him,

returns to the scene of his last applause

and blesses the opera house actors

 

who can hear his boots slipping down the aisle.

My daughter and her castmates searched

in every shop, in the fly system

 

weights and pulleys, the rotting velvets and silks

wishing not to find him knowing if they found him

they would silence something important

 

something bigger than he was back in Washington,

or on national tour, in the middle

of the country, an opera house in Granbury

 

which is to be expected in a state

like Texas which magnifies everything

under its glass where you drive and drive

 

for days and are still in the same damn state,

a state of industrial stupor.

We aren’t lulled by the long grasses, the stretches

 

between.  Count the oil derricks

vying with the windmills, the refineries,

and the ghost of boot prints in the dust

 

so enormous I worry that our kids

driving ahead of us on the Interstate

on the way home from college graduation

 

will disappear into one, swallowed

into the mirage as if they were never

part of us, leaving us searching for prints.

***

Do you like cats? Do you like veterans? Do you think a 95-year-old man should have a good birthday even during Covid? Then you might want to pull out your box of birthday cards and fill one out for the human grandfather of Bob Graves, the Writing Cat. Bob looks so much like my Mackie Man (RIP, 1998-2015).

This is what Bob sent in his Bobington Post yesterday: