Crazy Stable

Yesterday was cool, crisp and gorgeous, perfect weather for entombing my $50 worth of bare-root astilbes and hyacinth bulbs in the autumn garden--but when your little girl wants to go to the CFA Cat Show in Madison Square Garden, you refuse at your peril. Actually, it's an extravaganza that, like Vegas, should be experienced by everyone at least once--well, okay, once might do it.

Picture a phantasmagoric scene that's sort of half backstage-at-Fashion-Week,  half bar-scene-in-Star-Wars, with kitty litter. The people-watching is as good, if not better, than the cat-watching;  I can't decide whom I love more, the people who are exactly what you expect when you picture folks who travel around the country on the show circuit with fluffy kitties, cosmetic cases, and theme-decorated cages...or the folks (like this beefy-T guy with a genuinely red neck) who are cast totally against type.

Here, because I cannot but share with you, our personal all-stars of the day:

Meet "Reddie Eddie," a redpoint Colorpoint Shorthair. People with these guys like to push their ears back to show their resemblance to Roswell aliens.

This is "Sumo," a grey Persian. His name is self-explanatory. There is more of him that wouldn't fit in the frame.

These are the scrawny freaks that draw stares at cat shows--the Nicole Richies of the cat-fancy universe...the hairless Sphynx.  Some call it a breed; I call it a sad mutation. And I don't know what you call the pink-sweater thing.

A dog-person familiar with the agility and obedience trials at the Westminster Kennel Club show once asked me, "What do cats at cat shows do?" Well, mostly they sleep in overdecorated cages for hours; then they are briefly hauled to a show ring where a judge checks out the bod for perfection of breed standards, and the temperament by waving a little feather on a wand. If they go cheerfully nuts, like this Maine Coon champion, that's good. If they slump there like Kate Moss after a hard night's partying, points off. If they physically assault the judge like Foxy Brown, game over.

On the runway, don't ever look for a plus-size model to rule the day; and at the CFA, don't bet on anything but a flat-faced fluff monster to bring home top honors.* Monsieur Smiley-Face here doesn't seem to share the joy of the moment--but if you'd been sprayed with as many grooming aids as he has, you might glower too.

*Update: This year's champ was a recognizably cat-looking Japanese Bobtail!

Finally, no fashion show is complete without a bit of celebrity gossip: thus, The Ragdoll and the Rapper.  Set-up: Ragdoll cats are notoriously gentle and tractable. As a kitten, this Raggie did modeling, her owner told me, and an animal agent hired them for a shoot with thug-posing rapper Fifty Cent. Something about "softening his image."  

But it turned out that tough-guy Fiddy was too freaked out by the fuzzball to pose; handlers apologetically hustled kitten and owner away and paid them for the whole day. As they left, a posse member was heard to say reassuringly, "It's okay, Fiddy, the kitten's gone."

This amazing image is a mouse embryo, shown in both visible and ultraviolet light to show the biochemical difference between the embryo (pink) and its yolk sac (green). The picture, by Gloria Kwan of Memorial-Sloan Kettering Institute, won first place in the Nikon 2007 "SmallWorld" competition. (The others are cool, too.)

Why a mouse embryo, you ask? Well, it spoke to me on several levels.

1. I really, really wish I had a camera that could take great ultra-close-up shots like this.

2. "Mouse fetus" is an incredibly funny phrase, especially since Spouse and I used it years ago to refer to our erstwhile New York Senator, Al D'Amato.  (Although there is some physical resemblance, we coined the term after searching for some perfect expression of his moral smallness. )

 2. We're overdue for the first cold snap, when the mice will come in and look for winter quarters in the CrazyStable. Now I will feel even more guilty when the cats get one (which isn't very often, but then Charlie is untried--so far, his skills with a catnip training dummy have been impressive).

3. When you live in a very big house, as in a very big cosmos, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and insignificant. Some people get depressed after a space show at the planetarium--impressive, sure, but who am I when our whole solar system is just a speck in the known universe? And who are we to contemplate refinishing three thousand square feet of wretched flooring? Chesterton assured us that it was, in fact, a "cozy cosmos," but when that wisdom escapes me, I go microscopic in my metaphysics. The mighty and unfeeling God who tossed off the Milky Way also figured out how to layer the keratin on my hair shafts and regulate the passage of calcium ions across my cell walls to keep my heart beating. When I stare down the throat of one of my "Grandpa Ott" morning glories, His glory leaps out at me--without that numbing sense of my own littleness.

4. I attribute part of my fascination with things "micro" to my own superpower--"Supermicrovision." I am legally blind without my corrective lenses--we're talking "couldn't cross the street"--but I have astonishing visual acuity at the end of my nose. I can practically see freakin' cells divide. One joy of being stuck with glasses again after years of contact lenses is the ability to whip them off and indulge in stuff like the glistening globules of an orange section or the hairs on a bee's knees. Dead mice are cool, too, especially their toenails (although I have fortunately not had the chance to examine any unborn ones).

5. Speaking of unborn, I love unborn critters. I was one myself, once. No word on whether the scrupulously tenderhearted folks at PETA have taken Nikon to task for any possible "cruelty" involved in harvesting this little fellow for his photo op; I suspect they'll back off, given the "slippery slope" involved. (Nat Hentoff once famously asked his fellow liberals to "think of the [human] fetus as a baby seal.") Perhaps my passion for things microscopic and meticulously constructed (dare I say designed?) has been the driver for my pro-life passion; all you need is a microscope to see plenty of "inconvenient truth" about the smallest and most vulnerable among us.

(Thanks to Dappled Things for the tip on the Nikon contest!)

Do you know what we baby boomers want as we head toward retirement? Thank God it's Thursday, so that the New York Times' Home and Garden section can tell us! According to today's Times, "they want challenging hobbies like astronomy, and have enough cash stashed away to afford to build their own observatories." That's a quote from a busy builder of home observatory domes, which run between $10,000 and $40,000 for the basic equipment and between $50,000 and half a million for the whole stargazing shebang. Here is the observatory-crowned home of a certified public accountant named John Spack. Mr. Spack clearly prefers stargazing to more earthbound pursuits like gardening, but I digress. He says he found it a "pain" to haul out and set up his telescope, so he built a dome atop his Chicago house. "Now if I want to get up at 3 a.m. and look at something, I just open the shutter," he crows.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Heck, if I want to get up at 3 a.m. and look at something, I can flip on an infomercial for that Ronco rotisserie, where the guy roasts the leg of lamb and the whole audience loves the smell and learns about the free tools that come included in the same great price. Well, we decided awhile back to aim our sights higher, ahem. Yes, it's true: We, too, have a home observatory atop the CrazyStable. It was a challenge, given our steeply pitched roof, but nothing a half-million wouldn't fix.

Unlike some of the whiny neighbors described in the Times article, who pestered their visionary neighbors about the cosmetics of a domestic dome, our block has been fine with it--thank God we're not in a designated New York City landmark district!

This being an old house, we went for a vintage vibe in the interior, carefully chosen to mesh with the circa-1910 CrazyStable. Here is Spouse seeking a peek at the Milky Way after a hard day at the Planetarium.

We've encountered just one problem, however. Despite our use of all the latest digital technology to reduce the urban light pollution, we have yet to see a single star. Our Home Observatory Consultant says he's stumped, but is continuing to tweak the hardware and the programming. You see, no matter what setting we use, or where we point our telescope, we see only one strange and disturbing image:

We are hoping it is some distortion caused by solar flares.

Today is the feast day of a saint who has a strong claim to be the patroness of the CrazyStable--the decidedly unbalanced St. Therese of Lisieux.

I think she looks a little like Reese Witherspoon in this shot. But the youth and touch of mischief are deceiving. By age 24, this sweet-faced French Carmelite nun would be dead of TB; in a few short decades, she would be canonized; and by century's end, she would be declared a "Doctor" of the Catholic Church--an honorific (not unlike "Doctor Who") reserved for the most towering mystical Time Lords of Catholic teaching.

All this from a small body of devotional writing that, frankly, can read today like a kind of demented Catholic chick-lit. Going back to her famous autobiography, I was struck afresh by the fact that she qualifies, to modern sensibilities, as a full-blown psychiatric train wreck. Motherless at age 4, adored by her doomed-to-dementia daddy, the petted baby in a hothouse family of fervently devout sisters who flocked one by one behind the wall of a cloistered convent...no wonder the poor kid was having fever visions of a smiling Mary statue at an age when today's little girls are playing Barbies. Like the middle-class daddy's girl she was, Therese "wanted it all"--but what she wanted was stuff like suffering, martyrdom, and mystical union with God. Oh, and the convent--she very much wanted to become a cloistered nun, even pouncing on the Pope during a tourist audience to beg for early admission. (The Pope was equivocal, but eventually she got her way.)

Not surprisingly, generations of devout Catholic girls have taken Therese to heart; her name is my Confirmation name, and my aunt's. (My mother chose "Celine," the name of her younger sister.) Rereading her "Story of a Soul" at midlife, as the mother of a daughter poised on the brink of adolescence, I step into a different river than the one that shaped my own spirituality in my youth. The medical writer in me can't resist tallying up the number of diagnoses that jump out from the DSM-IV. Borderline personality...bipolar...obsessive-compulsive...and that's just the stuff she told us about. What's even more harrowing is that this crazy masochistic adolescent let herself be swallowed up by a crazy sadistic milieu--a convent that wouldn't spring you to attend your own father's funeral, a Mother Superior who denied the girl morphine as she coughed up her lungs, for the good of her soul. Therese wrote passionately of how she welcomed trials and suffering; I just want to go back in there and beat up those old nuns who tormented her for pearls of wisdom in her last hours.

Yet Therese's strangest and most radical statements, shorn of the saccharine sentiment piled onto them over the years, retain a mystical power that is more Doctor Who than Drama Queen, more zen than zany. The girl who begged God to toss her around like a ball, to consume her like a fire, to pluck her up to Heaven in an elevator--what does she have to say to us today? Is it so impossible to believe that a headstrong, lonely and sexually terrified bourgeois teenager could evolve in a few short years into an ascended spiritual master when she got all the agony she asked for, and more?

Legions of Therese devotees find it easy to believe, partly because Therese seems (as she promised in life) downright profligate with miracles. In another girly touch, she promised to shower "blessings like rose petals" on the earth after her death; Therese-ophiles love comparing their "rose stories." (Her iconography always shows her with an armload of roses, although your basic plaster St. Therese never looks anything like her--why not, when we have photos of her? Huh?)

I've got my rose stories; they range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Just like this house and its patroness.

No, I do not believe that I am a great saint! I believe myself to be a very small saint, but I think that the Good Lord was pleased to put in me things which created goodness within me and in others. --St. Therese of Lisieux