Mix, Taste, Dump
It isn’t often that I depart from writing about the city to explore matters of a personal concern, but I find it necessary occasionally due to the nature of traumas I am forced to endure. Being home alone, for instance.
We’re not talking here of being alone for just a couple of hours, but for five nights. No big deal, I hear you say, you’re alone all the time because you’re a widow, you’re unmarried by choice or you’re simply too disgusting for anyone to want to be around.
I was forced to be alone due to a holiday taken by everyone else in the house. While not beset by the kinds of felons who pursued Macauley Culkin in “Home Alone,” I was confronted by horrors of equal magnitude.
They go by the name of . . . shudder . . . Domestic Chores.
I could take, say, feeding one dog and one cat and throwing away the paper plate off of which I ate, but our household operates on a much grander scale.
We have two dogs, seven cats (well, actually, five cats now), two roosters, one hen, an undetermined number of baby chicks, eight fish, a mouse named Dinkey or Donkey, a bad-natured cockatiel and I think that’s all.
There may be something dead in a closet I haven’t fed, but I’m not going to worry about it now.
My wife, Cinelli, called every day, not so much out of concern for my welfare but to be certain I was home taking care of the animals and not off somewhere raising hell.
I’ve always been a lot better at raising hell than at caring for the needs of something that meows, rubs against my leg and expects to be fed.
On the fourth day, I was forced to report to Cinelli that two of our cats had refused to come in one night and were now missing.
“You let the coyotes get them,” she said unhappily. “Which ones are gone?”
It occurred to me that I don’t know any of their names and have never been certain that animals even ought to have names.
“Fluffy and Teeny?” I said, making a wild guess.
“We don’t have a Fluffy or a Teeny,” she said, sighing. “You lost two cats you can’t even name.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “Two cats in four days amounts to only half a cat a day. Not a bad average when you . . .
Click.
She didn’t ask about Hoover, our oldest dog. I had to give him three pills a day, I’m not sure why. This required putting my hand in his mouth.
The dog drools constantly and being covered with his saliva is no fun. I tried holding his mouth open and dropping the pills in from a distance but he spit them out. I ended up jamming them in while Hoover stared up at me with hatred in his eyes.
When I was feeding the chickens one day, a neighbor came by and wanted to know if she could rub her baby mouse against my hen.
It occurred to me she might be suggesting something Cinelli wouldn’t approve of until she explained that her son’s snake wasn’t eating and a vet had prescribed feeding it live mice rubbed against a chicken. Sometimes it’s really strange living in Topanga.
Of all the creatures under my care, feeding the fish was easiest. They don’t scream, meow, howl, cluck, tweet or otherwise demand immediate attention, though I suppose evolution would create screaming fish if it became necessary for survival.
I don’t make noises when I’m hungry and alone, I just search around until I find something edible and eat it. One night I created a dish the recipe for which I will share with you today.
Into a white plastic bowl you blend one can of butter beans, one can of fancy white hominy, one can of tuna, four small tomatoes, two squirts of soy sauce, one squirt of hot mustard, a dash of onion flakes and something in a red, label-less jar I thought was oregano but wasn’t. You warm it in a microwave for 4 minutes, mix, taste and dump.
Actually, I didn’t know whether I liked it or not when I took a bite, but decided that anything I wasn’t sure of probably ought not to be eaten.
The cats were the toughest to care for. Cinelli said to be loving and they’d all come in, but hollering “kitty, kitty” is as loving as I ever get without two martinis and dinner.
I called so hard one night a neighbor hollered for me to shut up, and I hollered into the darkness that he could go to hell. Thereafter, every time I called “kitty, kitty, kitty,” he yelled “stupid, stupid, stupid!”
Oh, well, Cinelli will be home in about two hours and I’ve survived, too bad about Fluffy and Teeny. But I can’t sit around chit-chatting anymore. I’ve got a final chore. The fish are screaming for dinner. They’ve come a long way in just five days.
