It’s my turn to name our kitty. I said Chaucer at first, but decided it’s too hard to say, all full of fricatives, its final r clipping off the word. It shall be Ollie. We’ve had Wally, dear loving Wally who dropped dead in front of us with a heart attack. Then Molly, with her bundle of fears. A little silly, I guess, the rhyming game, but Ollie rolls off your tongue. My heart is full. Cliché, yes. True, yes. I literally feel it in the region of my heart, a warmth. Such a dear little thing, a scraggly kid. All ears, eyes, and legs. White with large and random patches of black, a black face with a large triangle of white on the nose. He’s lived in a secure and loving family all his three months. His mother and father both live there, a second generation of security. He’s trusting, interested in everything, so busy exploring in the morning he barely takes time to eat.
How can I type this? He’s playing with the keys, climbing on my shoulder. At night he started out sleeping on our heads, then decided it’s warmer under our covers by our feet. After our long and painful months and years with Molly, trying to encourage her to at least come out from under the bed, then easing her as best we could through her cancer, he’s an absolute joy. I think of my mother, after years of taking care of my brain-damaged brother, deciding to have another child. How could she do that? She had Mark to take care of! I see now the great healing another chance can bring. The atmosphere has changed here. Wide-eyed youth is everywhere, leaping at imaginary mice, batting the cords on the blinds, chasing the ball around the circle toy.
Fortified by Ollie quieting down on the back of the sofa behind me, I want to tell you about the documentary we watched here at the Club yesterday afternoon. (We’re having a week’s virtual trip to Vietnam.) The contrast is so stark. It was made by a Cambodian journalist who set out to record the survivors of the Killing Fields and ended up spending ten years sitting across the table from Nuon Chea, second-in-command under Pol Pot, of the Khmer Rouge, who after a long period of denying he knew anything, at last began to talk. He matter-of-factly described how they killed so many people his hand got sore from slitting throats. It was simply a matter of getting rid of the “problem.” Kill off those who stand in the way of a better regime. Near the end of the ten years, just before Chea was arrested, the journalist revealed that his whole family had been wiped out by Chea and his soldiers. The old soldier almost cried. “I am so very, very sorry,” he said. As the old man was led to the helicopter that took him to prison, the journalist said something like, “I am a mixture of feelings. I don’t forgive him, but I’ll miss him.”
Which tells me two things: you can’t sit across the table from anyone for ten years and not begin to see his humanity, his vulnerability, under the layers. Love is seeing the essential being and has nothing to do with politics. The second is that there is a great need for kittens in the world. Kittens demonstrate what it is to start again, to see straight to the heart. Kittens purr when they’re petted, they meow when they want fed, they sleep on the back of the sofa if you won’t let them play with the keys.
Meanwhile, I’m working on my diary. All this goes into it. I have 140 pages now. I’m aiming for something like 200, if the energy of the telling keeps up. I just re-read the whole thing yesterday. I like it, myself, so I’m feeling optimistic.