Django the Art Cat

Once again a stream of water flows across the kitchen floor. Thankfully, it's not due to a leaky pipe under the sink or an overflowing dishwasher. It's just a sign that Django the Art Cat has been hard at work.

Django is a big, fat, lazy, tuxedo-clad cat who spends most of the day snoozing in ridiculous postures in various parts of the house. He's an easygoing, mellow fellow--doesn't mind if the clumsy yellow Lab licks his face, doesn't think twice about sleeping flat on his back with his paws curled over his white-cummerbund tummy, doesn't object (and, in fact, purrs happily and closes his eyes halfway in contentment) if my daughter dresses him up in hats, frocks, and underwear.

He does have one passion in life, however, and it's called a bowl of water.

For the first two years of his life, he indulged his fascination with water by playing in the ceramic water bowl shared by all three of our cats--Pebble, the tortoiseshell female with whom he grew up, and Ceilidh, the ancient calico who resented him and Pebble with equal distaste.

When we got a fountain-style waterer to encourage the elderly calico to drink more water, Django thought he'd died and gone to heaven: now here was a waterplay park most cats could only dream of! Not only could one scoop water out of the bowl with a paw, one could also remove the lid, extract the charcoal filter from the reservoir, and leave the mess on the floor for an unsuspecting human to step on early in the morning.

Then Luna the Lab arrived. About 75 pounds of thirsty dog, requiring a stainless-steel water bowl large enough to bathe two guinea pigs in. Django was quick to see the artistic possibilities offered by this enlarged canvas.

Throughout the day, he dabbles in drowning, floating, and soaking objects in the water: paper napkins, dish towels, paper towels, pipe cleaners, pompoms, wire fasteners, ribbons, receipts carelessly left on the sideboard, ponytail holders, flowers, and candy wrappers a certain person has not thrown away (you know who you are). For Django, it's a great day if an ice cube is placed in the bowl: he bats at it, gazes at it, licks it, and then reclines by the bowl, leaning his head on its rim, dozing as he fondly remembers the good old days, before the ice cube melted.

Greatest coup: pulling the dangling paper towel at the bottom of the roll so that all 9 remaining sheets came off and stuffing the entire wad into the dish. Yes, all the water was absorbed. (Bounty's the quicker-picker-upper, after all, though I doubt the manufacturers ever imagined their product would be used in this manner.) Yes, the dog was puzzled when she returned to the bowl for a drink, though I think she's learned to expect the unexpected, having found so many items floating in it in the past.

There's little we can do to contain his activities except mop up the mess (which often sends rivulets of water into the cabinets and under the bookshelf, especially if he's draped a paper towel over the bowl's edge so that it siphons water out for hours). A waterhog-type doormat placed under the bowl helps, as does a jelly-roll pan.

And hey, perhaps he's not just canoodling with toys. Perhaps Django is living up to the artistic standards set by his namesake, just in a different realm. Perhaps he's the Andres Serrano of felines. Perhaps he's actually arranging the disparate objects in the water to make a Statement. Perhaps the ephemeral nature of his work is a commentary on...something or other.

He's not sayin'.

Anyway, here's one of his latest works, which we call "Chrysanthemum." It had the added benefit of dyeing the water pink.

Bump on a Blog

"How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!"

(with apologies to Emily Dickinson)

Right. So here's the first blog post. OK. Here we go. (?) (Psst, what do I do now?) (Not sure. Just write something.) (What?) (Dunno.)

Well, since the first animal of many to be mentioned in this blog happens to be a frog, we'll just continue the frog theme and link it to something that's just as fine as frogs, namely, a book. Specifically, the book I'm reading right now, which is Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher.

This book was the inspiration for Scott Weidensaul's book Return to Wild America, in which he retraces the steps taken by Peterson and Fisher as they spent 100 days trekking 30,000 miles around North America, beginning in Newfoundland, looping through the United States and Mexico, and ending in Alaska's Pribilof Islands. My father gave me this book on Christmas 2005, and immediately I was seized with the desire to track down a nice copy of Wild America so as to read that first.

And as luck would have it, I found an original copy, first edition, for next to nothing at a local thrift store. Dustjacket and all.

The two travelers are just now wending their way through the mid-Atlantic states, and Fisher, who is from England, is listening in amazement to the spring peepers and other frogs, not quite believing Peterson when he tells them that "these sounds that pipe and trill from a hundred throats on evenings in spring are love songs of the swamp" made by frogs as they "bleat, trill, peep, click, quack, or croak."

No frogs calling in my city neighborhood, but spring is slowly nudging the garden back to life, and birds are flinging their energies into song; there's a scrappy Bewick's wren who alternates between warbling beautifully and letting loose with grating, angry buzzes; a few robins advising one and all to "cheer-up, cheerily," and a starling who sits on the roof beam pouring out notes while whirling his wings like a feathered wind-up toy. Saw a bushtit flit by with a beakful of fur for its hidden nest. Black-capped chickadees whirl from one birch tree to another, and the crows sit in judgment on the powerlines out front.

The vegetable starts are all in and have benefitted from several days of chilly rain interspersed with "sun breaks"--a weather term I never heard til I moved to the Pacific Northwest. There's one coming now--time to get outside.