juergen

wednesday 8 december 2010, turners tesseracts

Juergen Jergen Oppenheimer was his full name. I was eighteen when I got him. And if you find his full name a tad too much, think on the fact that the one before him was, in full, Jeffrey Jeremy Hilary Boob Jason Julian Chaucer. I was a teenager, for heaven's sake, and a teenager with Asperger's at that. Take a gander at some of the names Opal Whiteley gave her animals: Peter Paul Reubens, Lars Porsena of Clusium, and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus. And she was just a little KID with Asperger's. By comparison, I wasn't that bad. And by comparison to Jeffrey, Juergen got off easy.

He was a gift, of sorts, from a sibling. One summer day, 1971, I'm there in the livingroom, and sibling squeaks open the heavy front door, tosses something onto the rug, and says "Here's an orange cat for you." Orange was my favorite color for male cats in those days, and the previous one, the aforementioned Jeffrey, had died earlier in the year. Then sibling shut the door again.

Juergen was probably less than six weeks old at that point, very puzzled to have landed in this strange place. He would prove to be calm and quirky, and almost all the time an introvert.

So who's the kid in the photo with the interesting face treatment? I'll call him Joey. He lived nextdoor and was great pals with Juergen, the only one of my cats who was laid back enough to be friends with a four-year-old. As I myself had been, Joey was not what you'd call a mainstream sort of a four-year-old, but he and I were different from the norm in mostly different ways. Joey was often very serious, even moreso than I was at seven, but once in a while he would come out with something that was a howl.

One spring someone buys Joey a plastic fishing pole, with a plastic and magnetized worm on the end, and a separate, magnetized plastic fish. Joey was bored with the plastic, lifeless fish, and seemed to find it much more fun that Juergen came along one day and went after the bait. After that, it was THEIR game. One day my father saw them at it and said "Catfishin' Joey?" And with a completely straight face, staring down at Juergen in the puddle, Joey says "Yup." And the cat, despite his general dislike of water, never hesitated to roil around in the puddles to catch that damned plastic bait.

Another of Juergen's much-loved games was to sit in my lap while I ate and be passed goodies from my plate. His favorite hand-outs were plain donuts. The old-fashioned kind, made in an old-fashioned donut shop.

Joey's about 42 now, with kids of his own. I don't keep in touch with him and couldn't ask permission to use his picture, so I've concealed his face. I'm 57. Juergen, of course, is gone a very, very long time, having died on 8 December 1984 at the age of thirteen.
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(photo by l. billard)

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read... All my stars... Braon...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

chloe

Page Seventy-five

No picture of Chloe today, though there may be one or two in my storage unit. Many times I wonder, really wonder, if I will ever indeed SEE my own belongings again. See them, touch them, and live in all the memories that they will waken, both in my mind and in my heart.

Chloe was born on 7 August 1992, along with her five brothers and sisters. Like almost everyone in the litter, she was grey and white, built small and compact. She lived with us until the first week in January 1993, when she and her brother Brucie went off east to live with my parents. Like Mugsy and some other animals, Chloe would become a victim of my mother's extreme psychological changes in the year 2000, and there would be a sad ending to a life that began so happily.

Before that time, though, Chloe had a good life. She was adored and pampered by me and my daughter, and by her feline mother and grandmother. She was the most shy and reticent member of the Maman family, and always had to be treated with a bit more delicacy than the other cats. As for the outdoors, in those first five months of her life that she was here in the Turners miasma, she didn't care much for the outside. A little time outdoors was fine for her, and after that she liked her creature comforts. She was especially close to her sister Zoe, who also didn't need much of the outside world until she got older, so they chummed around together a lot in the apartment.

I loved Chloe and Brucie in the same way that I loved all of my other animals, and the only reason I could let them go at all was because they were still going to be part of my family, though at a distance. I would never have given them to anyone but a relative, and I knew they would have a great life with my parents. Whatever else my mother was before her terrible crash in 1997, she was almost always excellent to her animals, and I had no worries for my two kids on the day they drove off with her (though I still cried for days for missing them).

I had no crystal ball. I couldn't see the big black wall of shit that was to come. Many times since 1997 I've attacked myself, wondering, SHOULD I have known that such a thing might come? I'd surely seen certain traits in my mother all my life that hinted at danger. SHOULD I have figured out that such a day could come?

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read... Sehnen... Lifelines...

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.