Kerrygold’s Dubliner cheese is one of several reasons I have not been able to commit to being a vegetarian. Seriously unsure I could live without a bit of it from time to time. Other than that cheese and some other isolated dairy purchases (ice cream), I try to buy organic sustainable happy cow milk products when I have to. But dairy is not inflammatory to me, and all I use is a plop of milk in my coffee and some organic plain yogurt for probiotics and calcium. Cuz no, despite my advanced age I’m still not taking calcium supplements.

I am an animal lover and advocate and yes obviously I abhor factory farmed meat. But I also run quite low on iron and after years of experimenting with diets (for weight loss, but also vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, etc…) I just know what my body likes to run at its best. And it involves small amounts of meat a couple of times a week. So I pay through the nose for allegedly sustainably-procured animal protein. Which means our Thanksgiving turkeys are about 75 bucks. But I feel better.

On the subject of food, one of the bright spots of my week was knowing that my great-niece, quite new to food at only 6 months old, zealously enjoyed the organic, washed, steamed, pureed, stored in bpa-free-containers sweet potatoes I made for her. She will grow up and grow old never knowing that as an infant, Mamie took such joy in a few hours of steaming vegetables and spooning them into serving-sized trays. But Mamie knows. Somehow when I blinked, turning away for a moment from giving hugs and love to my niece, she grew up and had a baby. So now I have this teeny, tiny hand in nurturing the baby of the first baby I ever loved.

To segue into babies that I love, Peepers is still alive and more than half-well, after convincing me he wasn’t going to make the new year. I won’t bore you with details–well, I actually WILL, probably, at some point–but for now he’s acting close to normal for a cat his age. Which is an adjustment for me, because three months ago he was acting like a cat less than half of his age. But as I type this, I hear the news that the only other remaining sibling in his litter was put to sleep this week for kidney failure. So at their age (15) and of unknown parentage (they don’t know who their daddy was, surely he was a drinking, smoking, philandering diabetic cat with no job) I guess it’s time to acknowledge his frailty. Interestingly, Peepers was the runt of his litter, and that’s the reason I ultimately kept him. Which involved a bit of a tiff, because he had been promised to a friend of a friend. But after keeping the litter long enough to safely vet and re-home them, I decided to offer that girl another cat because I couldn’t part with the Peeps. She didn’t want another cat, and Peepers stayed. I’ve never had a cat before him, only dogs, so I was rather vigilant with his health because everything was new to me. Like his parents, he received overpriced propaganda food, so maybe that helped keep him in optimal health for his genetics up until recent events. Aging takes its toll. But the last remaining sibling who passed this week had been the most robust of the litter, large, confident, the ringleader. And female. So the strongest and the weakest survived this life the longest. And the runt is the last of the red-hot lovers!

I’d still love to eke out more time with Peeps. I’ve always said I hoped to get him past age 20. Can diet and supplements and occasional fluids keep him in a good life for awhile? Time will tell. The vet knows that it’s not my plan to keep him alive if he’s ever suffering. And we’ve all put pets down before and know how this goes. But I was unprepared to find out how different cats are than dogs. For example, in conversations with friends I volunteered with at the cat shelter, and other cat owners, it seems this sub-cutaneous fluids thing and appetite stimulation is a common thing with cats. So God apparently made an animal that will curl up behind a chair, filing its nails in boredom, and say, “nah, that food isn’t what I want, and plus it’s all the way across the room, so I will instead just die here.”

He’s here with me, curled up on the bed in the spare bedroom while I type. I’m exhausted emotionally from all the self-talk of being willing to let him go, but also listening to more experienced cat people tell me this ain’t (yet) that tragic and he may have some good life left in him. I never thought of myself as impatient, but his improvement (behavior-wise, like wanting to jump on the refrigerator or drink out of every sink in the house) is slow in coming. And maybe it will come, maybe it won’t. It’s the not knowing, the being patient, that apparently keeps me stressed. I’m not a stressy person. And I’m still in denial that this situation caused my hives or my recent illness. I’m pretty sure a dad with dementia was more stressful than this, but no hives then.

And I tread lightly in saying this, because it’s ridiculous to compare my cat to a sick child, but all I’ve been able to think of since this started, since I wake up every day and first check on where he is and how he feels before I can proceed with my day, is how the hell do people with chronically ill family members survive? How do they go to work if their sick child is having a bad day, a seriously bad day with pain and suffering and dire consequences? And not even how do they GO to work, but how do they un-preoccupy their mind enough to even drive to work? To put a bite of food in their mouth? To brush their teeth?

A sick pet for a couple of months and I ate like a trash can and stopped flossing. Like there was no room in my psyche for mundane details while this was going on. So I’m not saying it’s even close–I’m saying that from now on I pray fervently for people going through worse. Who still have to cook and work and carpool and pay bills.

Now let’s talk about joy. I keep hearing this new year about how to purge the clutter from your home by touching items and seeing if they “spark joy” in your heart, and if not…it’s file 13. I like it! It has helped me. I keep things I don’t love, often, because I love the person who gave them to me. But that’s stupid. Because most of the time, unless it’s a memento like a piece of jewelry, ain’t nobody gonna remember the sweater they bought you or notice if they’ve seen you wear it, and they certainly aren’t going to go through the closet to see if you kept it. So I’m going with it! Except I will keep the traffic-cone orange hooded rain jacket my husband bought me, because it’s simply so ugly that it has become a story. And that does give me joy.

My car gives me joy, and today I had to take her to the dealer for a blinker to be fixed. (Yes, I know this is a small chore some people take care of themselves, and in fact I’m pretty sure one of my sisters has done this for herself on her car. But this is me we’re talking about. But before you judge, I DID take the back off of my dryer a couple years ago to be sure it wasn’t just a blown fuse before I purchased a new one.) When I have to take my car in, it’s always a scramble because my car is basically an apartment. Today’s efforts to tidy up were actually not that taxing, mostly because it’s winter. So I had to move someone’s Christmas gift (thought I’d see her over the holidays and still haven’t) to the trunk, move the bottle of champagne I keep hearing rolling around the floor in the back to the front passenger seat, ditch bank deposit slips in the trash (because, do I really want them to see the size of my deposits? Some people may think this would incite theft or bitterness because a person has huge bank accounts. But seeing the $50 deposit for teaching two yoga classes at an adult day-hab facility may actually spark pity, and I don’t want that.) Come to think of it, maybe they saw one today by accident, because when it came time to check out, the service manager told me she wasn’t charging me because it took a little longer than expected.

This month was my book club meeting, and I have to confess I read that book in the eleventh hour because I assumed it would annoy me. Late to the bandwagon, I may actually cop to being a fan of Rachel Hollis (Girl, Wash Your Face, among other successes.) A good friend was reading/listening to the book on Audible, and she was a bit irritated by Ms. Hollis’ vocal quality, which is EXACTLY the kind of thing that I’m easily annoyed by (if you know me, you know which local weather chick drives me nuts with her affect!)…so, I promptly went to my cable television remote, having recently discovered I could say “YouTube!” into and watch videos on my television…and watched a few interviews with Rachel Hollis. And I was not irritated. I can absolutely see where the annoyance would occur, but it didn’t work on me. She just seems too sincere to me for it to matter. Plus, she said a few things on a podcast which seemed to be directed right at me. So, I’m on that bandwagon for now. I’m not part of her “tribe,” all the rage, that buzzword…and I don’t feel like we have much in common, because she’s pretty much the antithesis of me. But I like her. Which makes this all the more serendipitous.

Speaking of speaking into my remote, I found myself this week on the couch, under a blanket, with a spoon in my jar of homemade peanut butter…watching power yoga on YouTube.

Other bright spots in my week:

Seeing a guy on a riding lawnmower drive out to get his mail, on a not-very-long driveway. I decided maybe he had a busted hip. Or a hangnail.

Walking out to get the mail myself on a different day, between black-as-night hailstorms, and noticing the warm sun…saying to myself, “but another storm is coming,” (having been told that by my iPhone) and then replying to myself, “No. Just notice the sun. Full stop.”

Realizing I’m definitely like a grandmother (and, in fact, AM a grandmother) because I have two pairs of pajamas that stay in the drawer unless I’m traveling. To “keep them nice.” Too much stuff, yes, but having decent pajamas when traveling does “spark my joy,” so they made the cut. The rest of my pj’s are bleached, ripped, stretched pants, often flannel, or having cats (my best friend swore years ago to keep me in line by allowing cats on only socks and pajamas, not real clothes) or shoes or wine patterns, and worn with old shirts whose sleeves have been cut off carelessly. Why? Because my annoying ample bosom makes sleeves feel restrictive for me. Like when I reach my arm for something, I feel like the whole shirt tightens and my neck feels choked. This is the same reason I can’t practice yoga in any sleeves. It’s not because I think my arms are sexy.  So now you know.

Speaking of acting like a grandma, I ran into a grade-school friend, the boy–because we were the same height–who was my boy/girl line up partner from Kindergarten to First Communion to 8th grade graduation at St. Bartholomew. I ended up in line BEHIND him for a change, at the CVS. Where I was buying cat food. And ice cream. I’m not making this up. It was Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. And gravy-lovers chicken feast.

I will probably never blog to list things that were UN-bright spots of my week, but finding out after two decades that my husband eats a Klondike bar with a plate and a spoon was unwelcome information. It might have even been a fork. I couldn’t watch, so I’m not sure. But I forgave him, because he also wordlessly handed me the very last dregs of the leftover mashed potatoes before putting the bowl in the sink. Oh no, I’m sorry–NEXT to the sink, because he apparently thinks it looks better to have dirty dishes on the counter than in the sink.

Hey, follow Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter. I don’t think you’ll be sorry.