Kitties & Doggies & A Crazy Quilt Heart

Lately, everywhere, a boat load of attention is lavished upon cute doggies and kitties and their seemingly endless repertoire of adorable expressions, captionable poses, and anthropomorphic utterances like “Can I has a cheezburger?”   One can actually begin to see these domestic divas, these fussed-over fluff muffins wrap their bewhiskered lips around human catchphrases and that’s where the goofy insanity begins.  And the manipulative get busy. 

So few people actually read anything anymore, we who write are not too proud to trick our audiences into rediscovering the almost archaic practice. Fairly transparently pimping adorable canine companions and feline familiars by clever cyber-diarists lures potential readers in to SIT, STAY and READ. Mommy bloggers and Foodies seem to keep pace larding their letters with butt-clenchingly edible baby pictures and glistening drooling photos of standing rib roasts. But chum your writings with big-eyed sweet-breathed puppies and fuzz-bomb snuffling kittens and you have -  zip! bang! - Instant Following.

Far be it for me to judge. In fact I am jumping in.

My kids are not cute babies anymore.  Oh no.  Far from that.  And my standing rib roasts look like Civil War forts; assaulted, burnt down, and pissed on by Sherman's army.  So...

I’ve got it figured out. Everybody is a sucker for a fuzzy nugget of four-legged unconditional uncomplicated love.  They are cheap fur therapy since human beings dare to foolishly love one another.  As such, we right brain-left brain wonders of creation inevitably launch that leaky love skiff together onto a treacherous gulf of lava infested with mines and giant sentient prickly spiny sea urchins. We do it over and over, blank-eyed giggling amnesiacs, only to be atomized yet again with a loud “crump!” and a steaming sprinkle; parts of us raining down in a ever spreading radius and landing with dull thumps.



Just what circle did Dante invent for that heart-warming interlude?  Back to puppies and kittens, quick!



We could learn a lot from my dog Calamity Jane who, after working up a frantic full-speed run in pursuit of the almighty tennis ball, will lock up and execute a kind of Labrador-drift slide maneuver connecting head first into the wall.  She's done this twice. She stopped doing it because it hurt.

I am not complaining because the arc of love can be blissful. Just so burdened with overwrought transience for human beings. Luckily the sea urchin spines do a whale of a job when stitching oneself together after an episode. That is if you can run down all those parts that rained down and sufficiently complete the quilting bee that will ensue.



Kittens, puppies.



For me, it’s a crazy quilt heart.  I am happy, delirious even, just to be greeted at the door by a kinetic wiggling pointy-toothed smiley fur person who couldn’t care less if I have idiosyncrasies. Even better for gullible soft-touches like me, a HERD of fur persons of varying origins and pedigrees meeting me at the door. Six tails wagging, twenty-four paws patting me down for hidden treats, six silky foreheads to pet. To them, we taste, sound, smell and feel like god.  Bliss enough for this set of opposable thumbs.



As long as there is something to eat!