Go West, Old Man (and woman)

Melissa, my daughter Hannah and I flew out to see the adobe house just after the ink had dried on the contracts and it was finally ours. Ours!
There are times in life when big checks are written, that are accompanied by that teeth-gnashing moment when you get that sinking feeling and buyer's remorse kicks in. You know the feeling: you decide to buy the bigger model with the satellite radio with the chromium sidewalls and after the dealer cleans the crumbs out of the glove compartment and you drive it a block down the boulevard, you change your mind.
"What have I done?" you wonder, "why didn't I keep the 1966 rumpled Fiat with the see-through floor boards?"
So, as I drove the rental car off the highway and onto the tawny streets, I was gripped with panic that the property I saw for only a day or two a month before and bought with the last of my ill-gotten gains, would now look, to my eyes, like the crumbled-down, leaky old termite terrarium that everyone else who had pulled my real-estate agent away from her family dinner had seen, and rejected and walked away from in disgust.
I am happy to report this was not to be, and as Fishbee Ranch, the name we have taken to calling it, came into view, our hearts filled with simultaneous anticipation. Not only were we here, we were home.
By lunch we were opening long-closed closets, peering through spider webs and trying to figure out what to do next.
One of my agenda items was to go down to City Hall and get to know the folks. I had to talk to the planning people, the zoning people, the water people, the gas people, the electric people and the tax people. Many of them are intermingled and cross connected.
My first goal was to try and get the electricity turned on, followed by the water, and if the short four days on site were fruitful, the gas.
I knew in order to turn on the electricity I had to hammer a couple of 2 by 4s under the eaves. Since I had no tools, my Realtor and new best friend recommended a local carpenter, called him up, and next thing I knew he was pounding nails into my wobbly rafters.
With that bit behind me, I met up with the building inspector who, a month earlier, wouldn't let the power company flick the switch. Now appeased, the building inspector slapped a green sticker on my meter and told me I had 180 days to get my act together. Between those goalposts, he'd come back and snoop around and if he was happy with the results, he'd give me a "Certificate of Occupancy." Meaning, under normal circumstances, that we'd be able to set up camp inside the house. Except, technically, we'd have to have our current zoning status "commercial" adjusted to "downtown mixed-use," so we could, legally, live there.
Fishbee farm is four buildings on a half acre, one block over from the main street of a fairly sizable, if not exactly bustling, old mining town somewhere in the middle of Arizona. In my lifetime, you could go to this town, chose a place to eat, see a movie, buy a cowboy hat, fill a prescription, kick the tires on a used car, and browse a couple of curio shops.
In the ensuing years, things have changed. Nowadays, if remaining local merchants feel the urge to unlock the doors, you can get drunk in a bar, or buy booze in the drive-through liquor store and get drunk at home. You can have your nails done, get a tank of gas, visit a relative in the state penitentiary or buy a tool at one of the last real hardware stores in existence.
The once-thriving Main Street still stands, it's quaint covered sidewalks shielding pedestrians from the oppressive sun, but store after storefront, up and down the street lies fallow, empty, awaiting new ideas and entrepreneurs to bring life into down town.
Just beyond the dwindling cotton fields that once went on forever once you hit the outskirts of town, are Walmarts, K-marts, Targets and Dollar stores. You can go to giant grocery stores and shoe stores and Home Depots. Like so much of the rest of the country, these behemoths have swallowed up the Mom and Pop stores, hoovered the customers into the suburbs. Because it is easier, because it is cheaper; it doesn't come much sadder.
But our new home town, not wanting to cut off the nose of progress to spite the face of interested pioneers, is making us jump through hoops so we can restore four buildings, all of them within a section of town that is in itself a Registered National Landmark. We are taking the property to zoning, unless we want to install a “Chipotle” on the site, which would, I suspect, confuse the townspeople and upset the fervent historical preservation lobbyist who, I am delighted to report, are strong and vocal.
We'll be taking turns flying out there to make personal appearances in a series of public meetings, answering questions and with any luck, getting rezoned.
We have vowed to start sorting through the mountain of valued junk we have expertly collected over the past ten years here at Rusty Hinge Road, and at the right moment, exchange our collection of overworked snow shovels for bolo ties and head for Fishbee Ranch.
All will be welcome. BYOH (Bring Your Own Hammer).
And sunscreen.

Adobe Acrobat

Pauline Cushman was an actress, who, while treading the boards through the secessionist south of the Civil War, became a spy for the Union side, got caught by the Confederacy and was almost hung. In the nick of time, she was rescued and then decorated for her heroism by President Abraham Lincoln. Her fame got her a stint working with P.T. Barnum.

According to Wikipedia (so it must be true) “Major Cushman,” as she came to be known, eventually died, in poverty, of an opium overdose at age 60, and was buried in San Francisco with the honors befitting the hero she had once been.

Of course there are many interesting details of her life I have omitted in this condensation; her story is here because she once owned the adobe house we bought last Friday.

During the winter, my father and his wife, Dixie, bivouac at an ancient, grand adobe house in the middle of Arizona. Last month, I related my visit with them in a cleverly written column comparing the continuing snowdrifts of home to the cacti-spiked, sun-drunk deserts of the Southwest.

What I may have refrained from mentioning, as part of my colorful travelogue, was a walk we took around the tumbledown, tumbleweed town, and our serendipitous encounter with an old adobe, a bee’s nest and a “for sale” sign.

When Melissa and I discuss the next chapter of our life together, we usually fantasize about moving up to Vermont and growing facial hair. But for some reason, the sleepy, dog-eared streets of this old Arizona town triggered a long dormant, primordial enthusiasm that neither of were expecting on this trip.

I was willing to buy the property immediately based on price alone, but also because the family has deep roots in the hard-packed soil. Melissa passed on the opportunity to talk me out of it. It surprised me that she didn't even try.

Our renovation project on Rusty Hinge Road is just about finished, as is our tolerance of bi-weekly snow dumps and crinkled curbside fenders. Our jobs and history will keep us here for a while but, deep down, the lure of the west has taken hold.

The Cushman adobe abode is located behind the old boarded-up grocery store which is next to the old burned out movie theater. Besides the adobe itself, there are three other buildings on the property. The asking price was not that much different than the sticker price of a fully-loaded Japanese car. The condition of the buildings is disturbing. The report from the building inspection looked like the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan." And in spite of what we old, staid Real Estate moguls babble ad nauseum, this new place has nothing to do with "location, location, location." It is all about "potential, potential, potential."

Because "Fishbee Ranch" has been vacant for more than 6 months, we are unable to turn on the electricity, the water, the gas or –speed bump! - live in the place. Because the property had been grandfathered as residential zoning, it reverted to commercial after the last owners defaulted on their mortgage and moved away.

Small problems all, because we discovered, luckily, that we share a dream of fixing up an old adobe in the middle of the Arizona dessert and living out our lives as artisan, merchant, book-collecting banjo playing, reclusive, cat-farming, gold prospectors.

As I type this, a fellow named Carl, is crawling into the ancient, spider-webbed recesses of the buildings, "remediating" the termites that have been freely and gluttonously devouring much of the wood that holds the structures together. I have contacted a roofer to have a look at the strange foam roofing that adorns each structure.

Of the six bathrooms on the property, the inspector couldn't seem to cobble one functioning unit from the available parts. Hot water heaters are missing and those on site can’t be assessed with no gas, water, or electricity available.

The floors are spongy. The windows need glazing and most of the wood, which hasn't been eaten, has been baked to splinters in the relentless summertime oven that is characteristic of the locale.

Even so, there are far too many reasons to say yes than scream no. The price was right, all cash, and if one wanted to start over, wouldn't it be nice to start over without a mortgage? An adobe house, while capable of melting in the rain like the Wicked Witch of the West, is naturally cool with it's thick, clay walls. When it's 100° in August, which it invariably is, it can be as much as 20 degrees cooler inside (if you stand near an open refrigerator, assuming you have one).

The ranch-style house, built in the 1940's and the newest of the four, has a window made of colorful agate, a carport and a potentially charming kitchen. There is even a Virgin of Guadalupe sculpture protected by an upended and partially submerged bathtub out by the gate.

The smallest of the four buildings is rumored (by the realtor) to have been moved to the site from a nearby army base. The carpets are so frighteningly stained I am surprised there are no chalk outlines of former tenants remaining on the floor. Under your fully clad feet, you can feel the channels chewed along the grain of the hardwood floors, resting on stringers that I fear are held against the ground by nothing more than gravity and termite saliva. There is a very active bee-hive in the wall.

The fourth house is on the busiest corner of the property with a view of the vacant lot across the street and an old hotel that struggles to keep tenants in its newly renovated shops on the ground floor.

Join me dear readers as we start our journey together. We have not only bought ourselves a fascinating, historical property, we have bought an endless supply of material for this column.

And the termites tell me it's delicious!

Busy as a Bee in Bisbee

By some stroke of luck, when I got out of work the snow had only just begun falling on Rusty Hinge Road. It was a lovely Wednesday morning and the world looked like the handiwork of a mad pastry chef with a ham-handed flour sifter.
The world was surreal as I crept along the back streets in my red truck, all four wheels carrying me over the powdery roads.

The problem was, Melissa and I were due to hop on an airplane Thursday morning. We had long ago planned to visit my father and his wife, Dixie out in Arizona. I was worried that the airports might be jammed up in the snow.

By the time I arose from my post night-shift coma, the sun was back in the sky, and working on the asphalt outside the window. The airline had called, offering us a later flight in light of the back up of travelers, stacked up like cord wood, who had wisely checked their airlines on the previous day and stayed home.

Nope, we were going, but there was the small matter of the buried cars, buried walk ways and the buried streets that needed to be shoveled out before we headed off.

At the crack of dawn, cracked because the temperature had dropped like the GNP, we were headed down a dry highway. And by some other stroke of luck, parked the car, got through security and made it to the gate with plenty of time left to do a crossword puzzle, where applicable.

The plane took off on time and the flight was smooth and after some snoozing and a crossword puzzle or two, where applicable, we arrived in Phoenix's Sky Harbor Air Port and within a few short minutes we were in the rental car and out on the sun bleached highway. My wool cap, vest and gloves were of no use to me now; the temperature was nicely ensconced in the 70s and I was getting my money's worth out of my sunglasses.

My dad is the third generation of our family to live in the little town of Florence, Arizona. Florence is noted for its huge prison complex, as the filming location of "Murphy's Romance," and for one of the noisiest bars ever to be built right across the street from my father's guest house.

My great-great-grandfather, Warner, built an adobe house down near the end of Warner Street. If you stand on the sidewalk in front of my father's house and look to the left, you can see the house in which my uncle was born. If you look to the right, you can see what's left of the hotel where my great grandmother died of peritonitis. My grandfather, age 13, spent his first night as an orphan under a tree where there is now a condominium complex. I could go on like this for a whole column.

Family history lesson notwithstanding, it was good to be plunked on the old man's veranda, munching tasty snacks while he had his evening tequila cordial. The four of us got to talking and by the time we had finished eating the first of many of Dixie’s delicious dinners, we had decided to take an overnight trip to Bisbee.

Bisbee is an old copper mining town near the Mexican border. The mine has long since shut down. Now all that's left is a monstrous, man-made pit, surrounded by a chainlink fence. The old town itself sits on a hillside that is garlanded with the former shacks of the miners. The period banks and shops of downtown now hold art galleries and restaurants. A drive up the twisting, ascending roads provides a spectacular view of the surrounding desert and hills, all the way south, to Mexico.

Dad and Dixie insisted that we stay at their favorite hotel. It's called the "Shady Dell," and it is actually a series of vintage RVs that have been fixed up, given utilities and decorated with period chochkes. Dad and Dixie stayed in their favorite chromium motor home c. 1950, while Melissa and I stayed in a 38-foot cabin cruiser that hadn't been afloat for a long, long time. “The Yacht” was very cozy, although there wasn't really enough room for two people to get dressed at the same time, but the decorator did provide sailor hats for us to wear as we sat on the poop deck with our feet propped up on the railing.

We enjoyed our overnight stay in Bisbee and recommend the trip and the Shady Dell to anyone who is tired of the same old deluxe accommodations provided in the bigger cities.
I kept an eye on my Droid, enjoying the many bars of 3G service that the nearness of Bisbee provided and yet another stroke of dumb luck we missed another snow storm and a unpleasant-sounding ice storm that, according to the tiny screen, had pretty much crippled the old east coast.

My largest weather problem was trying to choose just the right T-shirt to wear as we tooled through the desert in my over-sized rental car, the thermometer happily resting near the business end of 80 degrees. I thought briefly about the shoveling hoards back in New England, but was soon lulled back into bliss by the balmy breeze at twilight and sunset among the Saguaros.

The week went by quick as a thirsty lizard on a hot black rock, and before we could believe it, we were being goosed and radiated by the TSA at Sun Harbor Airport's departure gate. Like the trip out there, the trip back was without incident except about fifteen minutes into our Eastward trajectory Melissa looked out of the window and saw reality 30,000 feet under our wings. Snow, ice, cold, winter.

The cats were huffy when we got in that night, they didn't appreciate us leaving them in the creaky old house at Rusty Hinge Road under the care of strangers. It was cold in the house and by noon the next day, by a final stroke of bad luck, I was shoveling a fresh foot of snow off the cars and the walkway and everything else.

And as I paused, wrapped in wool, shovel in hand, I stopped to contemplate the newly forming concept of adding a fourth generation of my family to walk the wooden sidewalks of Main, Street, Florence, Arizona. You know what? I have had a lot worse ideas.

What will I do with all my sweaters?

I've Compiled a List

Granted, the New Year has past, but I thought I'd kick off the 2011 with a list of my resolutions for the next 12 months.

I will not buy any televisions or cell phones or any other electronic devices because they will become obsolete and go on sale the moment I get them home.

I will not buy anything at Kohl's when they are having a sale. Are they ever not having a sale?

I will not use any medications they advertise on television, especially if they don't tell me what they are used for. Also, if they cause more problems than they cure, no thanks. Plus if part of their blurb says "tell your doctor if you have kidney problems," shouldn't my doctor know if I have kidney problems?

I will not, by 2012, know the difference between Lady Gaga and Katie Perry. I will not know any of their songs. This is more a reflection of what an old fuddy duddy I am.

What's a Justin Bieber?

By the way, are there still radio stations?

I will not vote for any member of any party that includes any sort of beverage in their name. Even if they invite me over to their house for tea, and have a view of Russia from their porch.

I will continue with my mission of informing full-grown adults with enough intelligence to hold down an executive position that wearing a baseball cap backwards is not cool.
I may expand that to baseball caps in general, unless you happen to play baseball.

I will try to go another year without a video game console.

I will try not to watch the news all day.

What's a Snooki?

I will continue to threaten to:
Go back to college
Learn French
Paint a masterpiece
Paint the guest room
Write my novel
Sell the movie rights
Win a Pulitzer prize
Adapt the screen play
Sweep the Oscars™
Make millions
Get my saws sharpened

I am also going to go to Home Depot and buy a long board to replace the rotting one on the edge of the garage.

I will endeavor to eat more Brussels sprouts and fewer Lima beans.

In 2011, I am going to find a good Restaurant in Fairfield county.

I am going to start practicing my banjo regularly and form a string band. We will entertain a growing number of faithful fans at local coffee houses only to be discovered by a big Hollywood talent scout. We will be skyrocketed to fame to the point that contestants on "American Idol," (which I will not watch for another year) will sing our songs. We will not forget the little people who were there when we were on our way up.

At the Grammy™ Awards ceremony I will refuse to duet with Taylor Swift or Kanye West.

I will not allow a ghost writer to help me with my memoirs. (Take that Keith Richards!)

They say if you paint one side of the house every year, your house gets repainted every four years. I 'm just saying.

I will count the number of sides on my house.

I will try not to succumb to the irresistible lure of cats and fail miserably.

What's a Kanye West?

I will not turn into Andy Rooney if I haven't already.

I will throw out more junk than I bring in (this should show up earlier on the list).

I will go to rehab for Dunkin' Donuts coffee at which for years I turned up my nose, and now without, I am unable to function.

I will find a good hamburger in Fairfield County.

I will use the crock pot and the juicer at least once in 2011.

I probably won’t buy an espresso machine even though I thought about it but I don't drink espresso even at Dunkin' Donuts. So…

I will try all the olive oil at Fairway.

I will celebrate 55 Disneyland-free years.

I will put off procrastinating as long as I can.

I will keep my Nobel Prize money.

I will try with all my might to get my column in by deadline although this one is already late. There is always next month.

Or next year.

Never put off for tomorrow what you should have done yesterday.

Merry Merry

`Twas the night before Christmas

And up on “The Hill,

Not a patient was wandering in search of a pill.

One tech was on break with

Another one rounding

And I at the CPRS keyboard a’pounding.

When what broke the silence that settled the floor

Was the sound of buzzer by the exterior door.

When what to my wondering eyes would behold

But a walk-in outside in the dark and the cold.

I paged the OD and I called up the supe

Then I went out to see what was out on the stoop.

The PT was chubby and flushed about the nose

And over his shoulder a huge bag of clothes

Was he drunk and a fall risk? I worried about staffing

He was clearly quite manic the way he was laughing

What’s your name, I inquired as I opened the portal

"I am St Nicholas!" He said with a chortle.

Delusional, manic and a great big white beard

We can send him to Norwalk to be medically cleared.

It’ll take us forever to go through his case

By now the OD was one on one; face to face.

He told us: “Bring Haldol, Ativan and Cogentin,

Trazadone, Risperdal, Colace, Augmentin.”

“He’s bipolar, and having a religious delusion

Prepare the quiet room for four point seclusion!”

The techs did a body check, he had poor ADLS

His red suit emitted some chimney-like smells.

Into sharps went his Belt and his strings

He had no money, no watch and no rings.

I added his name to the days intershifts

While the techs searched his bag, it was full of wrapped gifts.

The he asked just his once, we'd allow him to go

Outside on the deck for a puff in the snow.

Even though he was manic he seemed in control

What would it hurt to allow him a bowl?

Once outside he at once put his hand to his nose

And into the sky the new patient arose.

"Blue alert" I exclaimed to the radio's dial

But the fat man just hung in the air for a while.

"Call it crazy," he said, "some sort of hall-loo-cinations."

"I've been in plenty of tight situations."

"But you get to go home in the morning I'll bet.

But I've got a lot of more stops to make yet."

Then he let out a whistle and along came a sleigh

With eight flying reindeer leading the way.

And I heard him exclaim as he left AMA.

"I might be crazy, but you have to stay."

Paper or Plastic

My diet is coming along well. As I get closer to “human” proportions, my old fat clothes are getting looser and looser. The handful of old “skinny” clothes that I stowed away last diet, are starting to fit. But, while the years and pounds piled on, I had to take most of the smaller clothing off to Good Will. So now, I am giddy to report, I need to buy “all new clothes.”

Fact is, I have been buying new clothes, while at the same time my tailor, Rocco Thimbale, has found a profit center in taking in my “fat” clothes.

“I can always make smaller,” Rocco tells me, looking over the half glasses on the tip of his nose, “its make bigger that’s harder.”

Which is a reminder to me that losing weight is fairly easy, once you make the commitment and find a plan to which you can stick. The real trick is keeping it off once you get to your “target weight.” I will cross that bridge, and alas, probably eat it, when the time comes, but meanwhile, the UPS boxes are bouncing on the front porch like acorns, full of clothing, the next size down. Rocco’s sewing machine whirs in the distance.

One recent Saturday, in an attempt to find things to do (combined with my clothes-buying frenzy), I suggested that we take a field trip to Chester Dibble’s, a long-established, upscale clothing store, in a long-established, upscale town a few exits up the turnpike. In spite of our long tenures in the area, we had, neither of us, been to Chester Dibble’s, so we fired up the old Volvo.

We walked though Chester Dibble’s huge glass doors and onto the sales floor. As usual, the men’s section was Rhode Island to the women’s section’s Texas. I headed off in one direction, Melissa in the other.

The first thing I noticed was the quality of the merchandise . And how nice, I thought, to actually see it and feel it before buying it, a luxury I had not found through Google. Then, as I admired a sweater, I casually flipped the price tag, tucked discretely under the collar. Twelve hundred dollars? For a sweater? I began to flip other nearby price tags and soon discovered that I was way out of my league. The sales staff had evidently already come to the same conclusion, for, while there were just a handful of customers in the store, I was not approached even once by a clerk to see if there was something with which I could be helped.

We continued to wander through the aisles, being ignored, flipping tags and feeling alien. The clothing on these tables and shelves and tucked about the waists of headless mannequins was mostly geared up for weekend wear; the suits were in a separate area. It brought about a whole flood of thoughts through my mind.

I guess, in another universe, the usual customers who actually get waited on at Chester Dibble’s have crossed a line of which I am unaware. Theirs is a lifestyle that involves weekends. The alarm clock blows on Saturday morning – or maybe it doesn’t – and there is an entire set of clothing that is worn for weekend activity. I gather, from the quality and price of these garments, that this weekend lifestyle is devoid of labor of any kind. Unless carrying a shaker of martinis from the Land Rover to the yacht is considered laborious. I envision paneled dens from my real estate days, logs cracking in the fireplaces, fine cashmere draped over the shoulder, tasseled, $800 loafers propped on the leather ottoman, as the portfolio scrolls on the flat-screen, 50-year old single malt scotch glints in the Waterford tumbler.

“Ah, Saturday morning. Perhaps a sojourn to Chester Dibble’s? I could use a pair of $200 socks.”

My life is a bit different. Saturday means a day to do all the things I couldn’t get to during the week when I was in a coma. Melissa has an agenda: yoga, errands for her mother, preparing lesson plans for her class. I always have a list. It often includes a trip to the dump, a combination of words that is not on the to-do list of pink cashmere sweater crowd .

My best clothes, even the ones I have been buying via Google, are not what I wear when I am driving my truck into landfills. I tend to wear a hodgepodge of ill-fitting britches and tunics, collected through the years and now, with my diminishing proportions, often falling off.

Melissa waltzes through the acres of woman’s clothing, pausing briefly to peak at the jewelry cases. Suddenly the quiet din of discreet cash registers drawers is broken by the unmistakable sound of pedigreed dogs tussling over by the alpaca and angora tea cozies. I guess a tradition of Chester Dibble’s is the freedom to bring the dog along. So quaint!

I realize that many patrons are led on leashes, as the two scrapping canines rear up on their freshly-manicured back paws, they growl and nip at each other. So gauche!

I look over and realize that this is not my kind of place. Even if I was the type to light my $25 cigars with $100 bills, I’d likely not buy my Saturday leisure togs at Chester Dibble’s. Like the chain stores I am more known to haunt, I have never been attracted to racks of identical clothing, regardless of price. I prefer wearing things that I most likely will not see on other members of the country club. Fashion, to me, is not dictated by the consensus of a tax bracket, rather by what is comfortable, looks good and fits.

No one even tried to thank us for coming or suggest we return very soon, as we pushed the heavy glass doors open and escaped to our 1987 Volvo and headed back down the highway to reality.

And there was a box on the porch when we got home.

The sweaters were very nice.

Cataclysm

We have three cats now. All are teenagers: Tess is the oldest, Tilden is the crazy boy cat, and Tina is the smallest and shyest of the trio. We didn’t intend to have three cats, but when the well-meaning cat rescue person found out we were in the market and offered to bring Tina by to meet us, she just-so-happened to bring Tilden since the kittens had bonded since they were rescued from whatever dire circumstances had landed them in foster care, weeks earlier.

I am not so stupid or, for that matter heartless, to deny a needy pair of foundling kittens a good home –in spite of the fact that everybody involved and the multi-tiered layers of cat rescue bureaucracy assured us that we needn’t take either one, but certainly we were not under any obligation to take both.

Yeah right. Have you seen their faces? They knew a couple of softies when they saw them.

When Chip Wood, our carpenter, finished redoing our kitchen a few years ago, he promised he’d bring a new grill for the heater vent. While we waited, Melissa inherited her grandmother’s chiffarobe, an old wooden chest which we quickly converted to a kitchen storage unit. Its legs are high enough to allow heat to blow out of the vent into the kitchen.

One recent morning, about sun up, Tess is in the bed, purring like a Wankel engine. Tilden and Tina are on the periphery, clearing their kitty throats and making thumping noises. This is a group effort to get chow on the table. I have always contended that if cats could figure out how to open food cans, they’d have nothing to do with humans. But they can’t, Melissa is up, kettle on the burner and three cats weave around her ankles in the throes of starvation. She ladles kitty gloop into the dishes and, if they approve of the menu selection, it’s feeding frenzy time.

After breakfast, the three cats clean themselves, often in the warmth of a sunbeam and then they have a wrestling match. This mostly involves the bigger cats, Tess and Tilden, and includes running all over the house, thumping, bumping and drooling on each other’s heads. Tina usually separates herself from the fray in self-preservation. After the hours-long sparring match, the cats go to neutral corners and become docile and approachable, allowing us to come close enough to elicit purrs and pats. Tess and Tilden hang out in the bay window and Tina has a heating pad in the corner of the living room where she likes to melt.

Those with cat know-how inform us that these two new cats must get used to human contact. Something that holds no interest to either of them. On a this morning, Melissa bent down to pick up the little cat and she darted out from between her fingers, and bee-lined under the ancestral chiffarobe and, to Melissa’s horror, Tina hopped right into the heating vent, still waiting the grill cover from Chip Wood.

I was, at the time, sleeping off the night shift in my attic man cave, ear plugs in place, likely snoring the rafters loose.

Melissa, panicking, envisioned Tina trapped in the bowels of our ancient heating system, unable to escape certain incineration as gravity brought her closer to the burner. With the recent autumnal temperatures, there was a decent chance that the furnace would fire up at any moment. Thinking on her feet, Melissa went straight to the thermostat to make sure nothing would happen to this little white, orange and gray ball of fluff before the fire department arrived or animal control or she went up the stairs and woke the sleeping giant.

“Lower the number on the thermostat,” Melissa thought and she did just that. In doing so, she actually made the furnace go on. Oh no! Reverse: Temperature higher! Temperature higher!

Furnace off, she then went over to the chiffarobe and summoning her yoga strength, slid it away from the heating duct. Peering into the vent, she noticed a baffle below floor level that was balanced like teeter totter with such precision that the strength of the blast from the fan could control the baffle’s position in the ductwork. But NO tina.

Contemplating her next move, Melissa knew bribing the kitten out of the labyrinth with food was out, as she had a full belly. Clearly feline insecurity negated any chance of luring her from within the darkness with comforting chirps and promises of cat cuddling. Tina, on a good day, will have nothing to do with that sort of nonsense.

Just as she decided to call 911 and live with the sad possibility of losing a third cat in so many months she noticed the little cat in the corner of the dining room, calmly licking her paw.

It appears that Tina was too light to tip the baffle and had somehow hopped out of harm’s way while Melissa was fussing with the thermostat.

Cats 1, Humans 0.

I slept through the whole thing. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net