who gives life

Instead of our usual Christian approach to prayer as an opportunity to ask God for something, a Jewish formula of prayer as praising God for something, bread, wine, life itself, seems most right and good - - baruch ata, Adonai Eloheinu, Melek ha-olam: blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who creates little animals that fill our lives with companionship and our hearts with love, and breaks them too. 

Kristen named him Pacey, a Maine coon cat whom she loved all his years. Pacey was seventeen, Kristen is thirty-two, he was a kitten, seems to me they chose each other on her fifteenth birthday. They saw each other through the critical years of growing up until yesterday; baruch ata, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed are you.

Kristen asked for a photograph that hangs in our dining room, Pacey as she holds him. I will miss the picture, which makes it even dearer to give it to her and for her to have it.

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Our own last cat - - he was Tassy's cat actually, from her teen years in Apalachicola and into her twenties. Along with two other cats, he came to Panama City with us and lived to eighteen. One day at the old place I saw him on the back porch, lying lethargic on the floor. When I went out and sat down on the floor near him, he crawled slowly and perhaps painfully over to me and up into my lap. He's a memory.

Pacey will always be Kristen's memory.

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Linda and I had it on calendar first to drive over to Apalachicola for the day, then to look after Pacey while Kristen was in Atlanta for her college reunion, tenth anniversary: she may yet go, but her desolation yesterday was such that she was sure she'd not go. Plans change when we least expect it, so I'm shifting and adjusting to always expect it. We will have no plan and accept no commitment for this weekend except to be here in case Kristen needs us again.

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Life itself. Though I do not hate anything about life, I do not appreciate the body's waking me to get up in the night. Usually I go back to bed and often back to sleep, but someTimes sleep does not come again and after giving it an hour's warm, comfortable chance I get up, brew the hot & black, and stay up for the duration. Just so now, this morning. Stirring me to wakefulness was some worry about Mark and Luke, or maybe it was Mark and Matthew, an inconsistency with Mark that I decided to get up, research and blog about: it has evaporated now and I can't remember what it was; I think it was something nonsensical in a half-awake dream that on waking cannot be put back together. And in the half-dream it was so clear and urgent. I liked that intellectual challenge better than now realizing that it was some kind of absurdity.

Awake now into Friday. 

baruch ata, Adonai Eloheinu, Melek ha-olam; shehecheyanu 

who gives us life

and sustains us

and has brought us to this Time.

T90