Tag: cats

You can’t shake your white cat because your white cat is you.

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I hadn’t planned to write a post about cat books, but I guess it was inevitable. I wrote a cat book myself a few years ago, so it makes a kind of psychic sense that I was sent a review copy of a new book from Rizzoli, publisher of beautiful books about art, design, and photography. It’s called Cats & Books.

Layla Wobbles, Princess of Darkness, West Yorkshire, England. Photo credit: Meghan Mcconnell

Like all Rizzoli books I’ve seen, this one is beautifully made, a small, hardbound collection of photos found in the social media hashtag #CatsandBooks (which I didn’t follow before, but might now, and which puts me to mind of one of my favorite Reddit communities, Cats in Sinks). There are two pleasures here: the cats themselves, whose “details,” likes, and dislikes are listed alongside their photos like the pin-up boys in the teen magazines of my youth. (Milky loves to play with colorful elastic bands; Caedmon, from New Haven, is named after the earliest English poet whose name we know; Posie’s hobbies include sitting on top of magazines.) The other pleasure is the books, or rather the fact that you can’t easily see them because they’re part of the background, always behind or underneath the cats who lounge on piles of them or perch inside bookcases. Visiting someone’s house for the first time, I love to look at their books, though I sometimes have to do this quickly or on the sly if the person doesn’t seem all that into the idea of me pawing through their things. Getting glimpses of books in these photos gives me some of that same pleasure—head tilted, scanning the spines, looking at colors and titles and authors’ names to try to get an idea of who their owner is. I think I’d hit it off with Caedmon’s human companion, who has a David Crystal book on language and a little volume by Edward Gorey. But just the fact of having books and cats is meaningful in itself, a clue I’d understand and like a few crucial things about the person behind the camera (or, more likely, a phone).

It happens that around the same time I received this book, I attended a reading at Giovanni’s Room, which carries both old and new books, and I spied beside the register a secondhand photo book called Metal Cats for 2 or 3 dollars. Yes, yes I’ll take this one too. This book is a sheer delight to look through—page after page of Alexandra Crockett’s photos of guys (all of them guys) in bands and fans of metal music, posing with their beloved cats. The thing I like most about the pictures is not the pairing of tough-posturing people with sweet cats (though that is the book’s obvious appeal)—not precisely. It’s more about the sweetness that the cats bring out in the men. In almost every photo the guy is smiling or laughing at his cat, cradling a cat like a baby, sitting down with one at a kitchen table, or posing with it on his shoulder or arm or head in a position that’s clearly habitual for them. The photos are a reminder, for anyone who needs it: some of the toughest looking dudes have the squishiest insides—and cats, as soft and small as they are, can be fierce as fuck.

The cover image from Metal Cats. Photo credit: Alexandra Crockett

I have hundreds of books in my house, and I know if I dug around for awhile I’d find a few others about cats. Just the other day I was tidying the tall to-be-read pile on my office floor and found The Cat Inside, a slender book of short pieces by William Burroughs. I’d bought this book a few years ago, along with a copy for my mother and one for my sister, with the idea that we could read it and have a little book club discussion about it, which for whatever reason didn’t happen. The only time we successfully did this was with the trash-memoir Mommie Dearest, and I might have been the only one who read much of the book, but we laughed a lot.

Burroughs wrote little diary entries about the cats who came to live with him in the 80s, when he was in his 70s living in Lawrence, Kansas. Some of the pieces are as strange as you’d imagine, but most of them aren’t, and only sometimes does he let his thoughts take him to a dark place. All the writing is gentle and insightful, deep and tender. Until now I had spent more time thinking about William Burroughs than I ever had reading his writing, and the conclusion I tended to draw was ick, based mostly on the fact that he killed his young wife in a shitty, careless accident. But in these pages he is sensitive, deep, and thoughtful—a cat person. He takes his stewardship of the cats seriously, even has a stress dream from which he wakes up crying that his dear cat Ruski needed help, but he couldn’t get to him. Some of his accounts are prosaic and familiar to anyone who has lived with animals: feeding routines, the sharp pang of loss when a cat slips out the door and doesn’t return. Other times Burroughs sounds more like the mystic he may actually have been.

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. … The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can’t shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can’t hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.

Like me, Burroughs digs the histories of cats’ importance to people around the world. He writes that the ancient Egyptians went into mourning for their dead cats and shaved their eyebrows, a fact I remember once reading on a placard at the Penn Museum. Like Burroughs, I find the idea of deep grief for a lost cat friend entirely reasonable.

When he does get dark, Burroughs rages about environmental destruction and our “doomed planet,” or grapples with the fact of violence in his life in a way I find refreshing and useful, if hard to read. He recalls slapping a cat with a book. (“I can hear the cat’s ears ringing from the blow. I was literally hurting myself and I didn’t know it.”) Later, he reckons that a completely honest autobiography could probably never be written. “I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was an Evil River.” Eventually, he reveals the truth about the cats and the stories and himself:

This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

On the catwalk

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Please enjoy this introduction I wrote to my zine Cat Party #7, which I put out in late December 2020. This issue of the zine, like most of the others in the series, is an anthology of work by a handful of people introduced with an essay by me. If you’d like to read more about the zine and/or order a copy, please visit my online shop over here.

During these last seven months of the pandemic, going for walks in my neighborhood has been a lifeline for me. I’ve always loved to go for long walks in the city (and the suburbs and the woods sometimes, too)—moving my body through space and taking in some new sights always, always makes me feel good, or at least better than I felt before I started. 

This year, however, going for walks has meant way more to me than usual. All these months into the crisis, it is still one of the only things I feel safe doing outside of my house, and I have leaned all the way in. Bored? Go for a walk. Taking a break from work? Go for a walk. Need to talk something out with Joe? Go for a walk—with Joe. Though actually, all of these walks have been with Joe. Everything I’ve done in all this time, I’ve done with him. I’m not tired of his company, I’m very happy to say, and I haven’t gotten bored of our walks, either. 

However, quarantine fatigue is a real phenomenon, and some days the stress of it all feels like it’s pressing down on us more heavily than others. We’ve found it useful to mix things up now and again. A couple months ago, while we were on one of our walks—talking about how much we hoped we’d see Steven, the indoor-outdoor tabby who lives up the block and who we call the Mayor because he’s such a badass, and then feeling victorious when we did see him, sitting there looking all stripey on the sidewalk in front of his house—the thought occurred to us to start keeping track of every cat we see when we go out. 

These little cat finding missions have really invigorated our neighborhood walks, let me tell you. For one thing, they encourage me to pay a kind of attention to the visual details around me that I tend to miss when I’m looking down at my feet or lost in my thoughts or conversation with J. There’s also something comical about this project, which brings a note of joy to the day that we sometimes really need. The cats are funny, and coming upon them in the middle of their activities is funny, too. 

There was the cat that was lying so sound asleep in the grass of a front yard that I swore was a large rock until we crossed the street toward it to get a better look and it stood up, stretched, and yawned. There’s the big orange tabby we sometimes see through his door, sitting happily on a cat tower that his humans have placed there. As we pass by we watch him, and he watches us. 

In this whole neighborhood, there is just one person who walks his cat on a leash, and we love coming upon the two of them, especially since they’re like celebrities to us because we’ve read the heated debates on the neighborhood’s amazingly petty Facebook group about whether or not this dude lets his cat poop on people’s lawns and doesn’t clean up after him. 

And it’s still a treat whenever we bump into Steven, all lean and muscular and beautiful. He rolls and squirms around on the sidewalk so that we’ll want to pat him, and the moment he’s had enough of our attention he hops up and swaggers away, cuz he’s just that cool.

We’ve even made a few new cat friends recently, like the beautiful little female calico who sits or sleeps on her front porch and comes running when we pass by. Her porch is set up high from the sidewalk, and when she see us—sometimes before we see her—she jumps up from her cushion and runs across the porch and straight down a stone wall to the bottom post, where she perches to snuggle and butt us with her head. I love that cat.

When we get home from our walks we tally up our results in a spreadsheet. Date, time of day, number of cats spotted indoors, number of cats spotted outdoors, and useful notes. (“Saw Steven chilling on his back patio”; “Three black cats on this October day!”) We don’t know yet who will find the information we’re compiling most useful (urban planners? cat behavioral scientists?) but we take our responsibility in collecting it seriously.

At this point we’ve got about 7 weeks’ worth of data, and as far as I’m concerned we’ve just gotten started. I mean, just the other day a house across the street got kittens, and the last time we went for a walk we spotted them sitting side by side, framed by two different windows, looking out at us with matching looks of wonderment on their faces. Things in the neighborhood are just gonna keep changing, cat-wise. Our work may never be finished! 

J, my cat-walk partner and partner in most other things as well, has helpfully arranged some of this data into charts and graphs. 

Lost & Found

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Hello, friends! I’m excited to announce a new issue in my Cat Party zine series: “Lost & Found.” This one anthologizes the writing and visual art of 5 contributors, all of whom reflected on cats who have come into their lives by surprise, or disappeared unexpectedly. It includes comics, drawings, and essays by visual artist and performer Julia S. Owens, musician Marina Murayama Nir, comics artist Ashley Punt, writer Alexis Campbell, and writer, baker, and activist Ailbhe Pascal.

Please allow me to share the introduction I wrote for the zine with you here, beneath the photos. If it sparks your interest, why not pick up a copy of the zine for $4, either from me or from Microcosm Publishing?

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the cat party! If you’ve been here before, welcome back.

My name is Katie, and I wrote a book about cats that was published by Microcosm Publishing near the end of 2017. Microcosm and I go way back. They’ve sold zines of mine for many years, and now that they’re a real-deal publisher, they’ve published three books I wrote, too. The first one was called White Elephants, and it was a memoir I wrote about palling around with my mother after my father died. The second one was Slip of the Tongue, a collection of essays about language. Last year, Cats I’ve Known came out. I set out to tell stories about all the cats in my life, and ended up sort of writing about my whole entire life, like I always do. But to at least some degree the book really is about the cats: family pets I had growing up, beloved cats I’ve shared my home with as an adult, strays I keep bumping into on the street, and the friendly bookstore cats I look forward to seeing whenever I stop in to browse. Each story was illustrated by a talented artist named Trista Vercher. When the book came out, I had a cake made by a local bakery that was based on one of their drawings; in both the drawing and the frosting, the cat’s fur was a lovely shade of grey that was actually quite purple. It tasted delicious.

In the months since the book was published, I have had many good conversations with people about the cats that they know and love. Each time I set up shop at a book fair or sign copies of my book at a bookstore, I meet people who want to tell me stories about a special cat they know who loves to pose for photos, or the adorable way their two cats curl up under the covers with them at night—and only occasionally growl at each other. Our cat friends are very dear to us cat people, and none of us can resist sharing our stories. Microcosm and I decided that a zine series would be a good way to keep on telling them, both mine and other people’s.

For this issue, I invited writers and artists to tell stories about cats that were lost or found—a cat who came into their life by accident, perhaps, or one that took off unexpectedly. The theme must have struck a chord, because I received many, many submissions. I couldn’t accept them all, but the ones I’ve chosen will make up two issues, this one and a Lost & Found #2, to come out in the spring of 2019. I am very proud to present this issue of Cat Party, with its collection of beautiful and touching stories. Thanks to the contributors for doing this with me, and thanks to you, readers, for joining the party. 

Until next time, I remain, 

your cat lady friend,

Katie

Buy the zine here or there.

2017 in Review

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Hello, all, and happy new year. I love this time of year, even though I’m usually sick with a cold. I had one last year when I wrote my year-in-review, and I’m coming down with one now. Thanks, holiday get-togethers, public transportation, and germy old civilization in general. Thanks a lot.

I dislike Christmas hugely, for a number of reasons, only one of which is potentially worth discussing in public (capitalism; oh yeah also the forced cheer and heteronormativity of “family” get-togethers), but I’ll spare you. I do love the week between Christmas and New Year’s, though. It’s like the heart of winter: the perfect time to draw in, rest, and reflect. It’s dark outside but it’s warm and bright in here, and I’m calming my shattered Christmas nerves by misting frankincense in my diffuser and wearing my fat cozy socks, both of which I did, admittedly, get as gifts for fucking Christmas, so whatever. All griping and kidding aside, I am grateful for all of this. Every bit of my life, even the parts I don’t like.

I do an accounting of my year every year, and make plans in the form of resolutions for the year to come. I did my accounting publicly on this blog at the end of 2016 and it was a nice way for me to organize my thoughts and express my gratefulness, so I thought I’d do that again. If you’re still reading after that irritable—and some may say childish, but I say those people are sticking their heads in the sand—outburst, why don’t you come along with me?

A lot happened this year, and though I tried to make my writing life a focus when I selected the photos above, I had to represent a few other things too, including the hurt and outrage and righteous anger caused by the miserable Trump administration, and the fact that J & I bought a house and moved into it. (That’s why all those houseplants are sitting in a cardboard box up there.) That was nine months or so ago, and I still love the feeling of settling in here, decorating and making small changes one at a time. Today I painted one “accent wall” in my “home office” a shade of “millennial pink,” so how’s THAT for having your shit together? I love that room and now I really love that wall.

In October, Cats I’ve Known, the book of illustrated memoir stories I spent last year writing, came out. I asked the famous internet cat Lil BUB to write a blurb for the back cover and she did. Joy! I did a number of readings and other events to promote the book this fall, and I’ll continue to do so in 2018. If I can swing it I’ll do a tour of the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado) in the spring, and I plan to do in-store events in bookshops along the Delaware coast this summer. Look me up if you live in those places, would you?

I find it hard to do, to give readings from something I wrote, or to promote my work in any way, really. I have to push through a lot of self-consciousness, guilt, and anxiety to get to the place where I remember that I am proud of my writing and want to share it with other people. But share it I did. I launched Cats I’ve Known at a day-long show at a basement show space in West Philly called the Waiting Room, where I read a selection of the book’s lighter, funnier stories. (That’s me doing this in the second-to-last photo.) I felt very warmly welcomed, as I have at the other shows and events I’ve participated in there. Thanx, punx! I also forced myself to read the longest, saddest story in the book at a show I organized with J called SadFest. We did SadFest for the first time last year—his idea—and people responded really well to it. I kind of thought it was a weird idea, to be honest, but people loved it, I guess because everyone has sad stories, poems, or songs that they’re too embarrassed to trot out at a group reading for fear of bringing everyone else down or being seen as adolescently emo or whatever. I practiced my sad cat story several times before I performed it to keep from crying in front of everyone, but I did cry a little at the end.

So far the book has been reviewed warmly by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Broken Pencil, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. I sold it at several fairs throughout the year, including the cheerful and well attended Lehigh Valley Zine Fest in Easton, Pennsylvania and the Philly Zine Fest, which has always been my favorite zine event and this year was packed to the gills: very gratifying. I threw myself a party (!) and got a fancy cake from a bakery that was decorated to look like one of the cats Trista Vercher drew for the book. I gave more readings, almost always with J, who can be seen in the second row of photos getting ready to perform at Coffee House Without Limits in Allentown. I signed and sold copies of the book at other events, too, including ones in Portland, Oregon, where my publisher, Microcosm, is located. One of those was, drumroll, a women-only cannabis party with a DJ and vendors, who were selling things like cannabis tinctures and sex lube infused with cannabis and … books. Since Microcosm has a few weed titles, we went and set up a pop-up shop of zines and books there. I accompanied a very capable and impressive young employee of the publisher, who incidentally could smoke any of you under the table, and we spent a pleasant, if unusual, evening slinging books to friendly, intelligent women who were all kind of high. (I’m a lightweight myself, and just tried a few drops of the tincture. It was nice.)

So—go me. Seriously. None of this was easy for me, all of this performing and traveling and meeting new people, but I did it anyway, and lo and behold it was fun and rewarding. Thanks, world, for your kind reception of my cat book. As for the portion of the world that has not read it yet, what the heck?

In other categories of stuff, I made music with my experimental noise band A$$HOLEKNIFE, taught zine workshops to children, college students, and adults, and gave interviews about my work to the podcasts Collecting Culture and Design Conversations and a Japanese art and culture magazine called HEAPS. (The second two are forthcoming.)

The music thing has been interesting for me. I am not a musician, though I studied the flute as a kid and some classical guitar as an adult. I don’t know that I have much of a knack for it. But some friends and I started fiddling around together on a regular basis, using whatever instruments we could put our hands on to make a tremendous amount of noise that somehow becomes musical as we go. This is largely because a couple of the people involved are real musicians, I think, but also because that might be what happens when people communicate in this, or any other, way. Someone makes some sort of sound and someone else answers it, and it goes on like that, becoming a noisy and cathartic conversation. Forget catharsis: It’s an exorcism. It’s so engrossing and relaxing to lose yourself in making music, and it’s a wonderful release to make it that LOUD. I had no idea. We recorded our sessions and J edited them into distinct songs, and we even put out a tape! Does this mean I’m a rock star now? or just a slightly more well-rounded weirdo than I was before?

Let’s see, what else. J and I continued organizing and hosting shows at the East Falls Zine Reading Room (the band Rabbits to Riches is shown playing the space in the top right corner) and we collaborated with a beautiful new performance space called Hauska that’s run by our friend Julia. The show at Hauska, which means funny in Finnish, was a comedy show in answer to SadFest, and both shows were lovely and lively and well attended. I have also undertaken the huge job of properly cataloging the EFZRR’s zine collection so that people can access it more easily. As I have in the past, I am enjoying being a hobbyist librarian. I love playing at things until they become real, or at least as real as I want them to be.

And last, I’m excited to announce that I edited a zine anthology of other people’s cat stories called Cat Party #2, which Microcosm will publish in the first month or two of 2018. It features both essays and comics and includes the artists Dame Darcy and Noelle Geniza, among others. It’s gonna be a beauty and I can’t wait to unveil it.

***

In the last week or so I’ve asked a few friends whether they make new year’s resolutions. One of them said she does an accounting for the year that includes the good AND bad things that happened, and another told me that she doesn’t do resolutions, exactly, but instead creates a mantra that she’ll try to live by in the coming year. I liked both of these variations and have incorporated them into my own practice. I probably shouldn’t share the bad things on my list (which I have named “bullshit and pointless stuff”) since I don’t want to make anyone feel bad, but for the most part they have to do with jobs. Quelle surprise. And as for a mantra, I don’t know yet. The words simplify and let it go come to mind, but maybe I’ll go with thank you instead. Just a simple thank you, for every good and lucky thing in my life.

Kedi

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The other day at a reading, I bumped into and talked to a sweet pen-pal friend of mine (who is also sometimes a face-to-face friend), a person who lives here in Philadelphia now but used to live in Istanbul. This friend told me about a new movie called Kedi, which is the Turkish word for cat. Kedi is a beautiful documentary about a few of the apparently thousands of cats who live in Istanbul—”free, without a master,” as director Ceyda Torun puts it. In the film’s description, Torun writes that cats have lived this way, in this place, for thousands of years. My friend told me about the movie because I wrote a book about cats, and then I told my mother about it because she once lived in Istanbul too, many years ago now. I asked her if she remembered seeing lots of street cats when she was there, and she said, “I don’t, particularly, but there was a lot going on in those streets.”

And that sure does seem to be the case. My mom and my husband and I went to see the film together, and all three of us found its images of Istanbul to be truly vibrant, in the mellowest and warmest of ways. Busy, ancient, twisting streets, all alive with people and trees, fruit stands and conversation, tea and food and CATS. Cats with their kittens in old cardboard boxes, cats sitting up high on the window ledges of apartment buildings, cats slipping under broken doorways to visit with one of their many human friends. If Kedi is a good measure of the city, it looks like any cat’s dream, with a hundred hiding places on every block and plenty of chances to beg for fish from the port and table scraps from sidewalk cafes.

In the film, the camera often gives us a cat’s-eye view, so we can follow the trotting cats along the streets to see where they go and what they do. But just as often we’re looking Torun’s human subjects in the eye, as they describe the way they met a cat who they now consider a friend. We hear people talk about the cats’ personalities, and how they’ve benefitted from meeting them. We see them feed kittens from bottles, throw scraps of cooked chicken on the sidewalk for them to eat, or smoke cigarettes as they talk softly to their chosen cat friend—even as they’re addressing the filmmaker and her camera. Their stories are reminders that, even when domesticated cats are “strays,” they do depend on human beings for survival—just as we depend on them to make our homes and cities more sanitary (as in, free from mice) and for the unique and almost psychic sort of friendship they can provide.

At the reading where I bumped into my pen-pal, I also met a woman who’s in a band that often writes songs about cats. !! It’s really got me thinking, all this talk (and art) about cats. Just as the rise of the internet has been a sort of validation for the introverts among us, it’s also the reason that cat-love is now at the forefront of the popular culture, I think. Everywhere you look, there are famous cats, wildly popular cartoon cats, and adorable, catchy songs about cats. (And this isn’t even the same band I just told you about!) The idea of the crazy cat lady, as an insult, doesn’t have much sting anymore. Cats are cool. They’re independently-minded, funny, elegant, and wise—and if I dare say it, this film offers proof that the people who love cats are in touch with something a little more sacred, and a lot bigger, than themselves.

I couldn’t help but notice, as I watched this pretty movie, that the production company behind it is called Termite Films. I don’t know the story behind the name, but I choose to interpret it as a reference to the idea of “termite art,” which was coined by the critic Manny Farber in the 1960s. According to Farber, there’s White Elephant Art, which likes to call flashy attention to itself, “filling every pore of a work with glinting, darting Style and creative Vivacity,” and then there’s Termite Art, which is small and easily overlooked but powerful because it works in secret, eroding boundaries. Termite Art is where it’s at, if you ask me. Just watch Kedi and see. The universality of the love between people and animals is a powerful message, even when it’s delivered on small, silent feet.

kedi-film-poser2

 

Worn Out, Worn In

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I’ve had my eye on this beautiful book, Worn Stories, since I first saw it in my friend’s shop last year. Well, I had my eye on it at the time, I guess, so I added it to my goodreads list, then kind of forgot about it. But yesterday I realized to my horror that CHRISTMAS was upon us, and I knew I’d need some books to comfort and protect me. If I have a good book I can get through anything. I consulted my list, looked up some of the books in the Philly Free Library catalog, and walked to the corner to catch the bus there.

I started Worn Stories today and it has not disappointed me. In fact, it’s surprised me by being much better than I expected. I spend a lot of time musing about clothing in an intellectual sort of way, and I have no objection to fruity, thinky, noodly pieces of writing on the subject. That’s more or less what I thought these pieces—contributed mainly by well-known artists and designers—would be like. But these stories have drama! People are talking about grandmothers emigrating from Sicily, and construction workers fighting off robbers, and Hurricane Sandy. They’re writing about silk ties and leather coats, yeah, but also about new babies and race horses and criminal court appearances. There’s a lot of life in this book. I’m finding it cheering and more than a little inspiring.

Now, when I was just about to move out of the first apartment I shared with my husband into the house we live in together now, I came across a pair of hair combs I’ve had for many years. I considered giving them away, but I didn’t do that; instead I just considered them. I wrote about them at the time, and I’d like to share that piece of writing with you now, in the spirit of Emily Spivack’s engaging, thought-provoking book.

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The Hair Combs

Well, it’s that time again. Time to clear out the clutter, sort through old memories, and decide what should stay and what should go. We’re about to move to a new neighborhood, and all this old stuff can’t come with me. With us. For such a long time it was just me living someplace, just me packing up my stuff to move to some new apartment or new life, but now it’s us. Things have changed and I guess they’ll continue to.

I’ve had a small pair of emerald green hair combs in my bathroom since I was 20 years old—for 18 years now. They’re art deco ones, made of celluloid or lucite in the 1920s in the “Oriental” style that was popular then, with cranes etched into the front. I bought them while I was still in college and exploring the city on my own, which was something I have continued to do in all the years since. Wandering silently, observing the life on the streets around me, then ducking occasionally into some cramped, dim little shop to dig through the old things there and drink in the mysterious energy that always fills those places. Sometimes I’d say hello to the person behind the counter, other times they’d never even see me there as I looked around and they worked, head down as they read or wrote something, their face hidden behind a stack of dusty books or some other fabulous junk.

I hardly ever bought anything for myself back then because I didn’t have much money, and I hadn’t yet grown into the, um, much more developed relationship I now have with the objects I own. I didn’t collect much, didn’t yet hoard things, hadn’t learned the way you can love and relate to an object almost as though it’s a person, with its own life force and set of memories. But one day, in one of those little shops in downtown Philadelphia, I saw these combs and they seemed to glow with the life they’d once seen. Right there in Philly, maybe, tucked into the hair of some beautiful girl who was still young and single and out having fun. The man at the shop was gentle and sweet and he liked that I appreciated what was special about the combs. He told me about their age and what they were made of. I bought them knowing I probably wouldn’t be able to wear them in my fine, slippery hair, and I haven’t. That never bothered me, either. The point of owning the combs wasn’t to wear them, but to begin building a grown-up life for myself, to become that beautiful young girl who was out living it up while her pretty things, her treasures, stayed at home, scattered around the bedroom and on the vanity as though they were half-forgotten, but not actually neglected at all. They were essential, and they played their role seriously and with great dignity, lying around pretending to be unimportant and waiting for me to come back home each night. You can’t be the character without the props. I needed the combs—and the funny wide-legged pants, and the old-fashioned handbags, and all the other stuff I’d eventually acquire that would help to transform me, on the outside, into the person I already knew I was.

The combs have stayed with me all this time, moving back home with me to my mother’s house after my father died, then into an apartment that was just mine—well, mine and Trixie’s, Trixie being the illustrious, glossy black cat who was my closest friend for years—and then here with Joe, where we moved to start a life together. When we were first settling into this place and I was decorating our bathroom, I placed them in the bone china teacup where I keep my earrings, and where I could see them every morning while I did my makeup and hair. It’s never occurred to me before now that I could not have the combs. Like, they don’t even really belong to me, but to the movie set of my life. Could I get rid of them? They’re a symbol of the kind of woman I wanted to become—independent (solitary, even), funny, smart, unflappable—which is an identity I’ve clung to because I’m so afraid to lose it. If I’ve invested all these pretty things with the hopes and dreams I’ve had for myself, would I be giving up on the dreams themselves? Do I need the things and the strength they give me, or could I manage without them?

Right now our hallway is filled with things we’re ready to part with—scarves and gloves and duffel bags, cookbooks and ceramic planters and a wonky little Hibachi grill that tips over every time you pour charcoal into it. Some of them are things Joe and I got together, and some are things we each brought to this new arrangement but don’t need anymore. I took the combs out of their teacup earlier, with the idea to give them away or try to sell them, but now I don’t know what to do. They deserved this little tribute and having written it, I might not need to hold onto them anymore. But here they sit, looking back up at me, almost a part of me now. I can’t decide. I’m a different person now than I was at 20, but that girl still lives inside of me, looks through my eyes, can’t quite believe what she sees in the mirror nowadays. I don’t know if I’m ready to stop being her for good, or to let go of my longing for a future that’s still unfolding.