The More Things Change

Like clockwork, at 5:45 this morning, Sascha padded across my belly, peeping her little kitty peep, which sounds more like a cricket than a cat, nudged her fuzzy gray head insistently into the curl of my elbow, and demanded a massage. In the daytime, people time, she avoids me entirely—darting out of reach so I can't ambush her for a nail clipping, scanning my every movement with one green eye cocked as she drapes her lithe little kitty body across the catnapper in the living room window. Stay away, Kitty Mama, she orders.

Sascha wakes me up every morning. Right, I know: Why not close the bedroom door? It would make things easier, but I’d miss the connection and the sweet joy of knowing that, for those few moments, she trusts me. It’s a morning pleasure, a rhythm that pulses as a constant amid the inconstant rhythms of daily life.

In three days, my TV will stop working unless I install an RCN-mandated digital converter box. I like my TV the way it is. I like knowing all the channel numbers and being able to record Jeopardy! and watch the Red Sox simultaneously. On Tuesday, I will have to learn all new channels and figure out how to work a big, clunky remote with 59 (count 'em) buttons. And I won’t be able to watch a show while recording another unless I buy a DVR or pay $14.95 a month to rent one. I don't want a DVR. It’s not that I’m a technophobe. It's just that I want to watch TV the way I'm used to, with my own idiosyncratic viewing habits. Now I have no choice.

In the scheme of things, of course, it’s not important. I can roll with change, I can adjust to new and sometimes even welcome it. But sometimes, like now, I just want to stop the clock and say enough. Enough new. Enough change. Enough disruption and uncertainty.

When lightning struck my friend Susan’s apartment a few weeks ago, her world was disrupted in a random instant. No home. No furniture. Gone are the Broadway scores, textured throw pillows, and hundreds of CDs. No more Murano glass. No more stuffed animals. With the exception of Marshmallow, her very favorite teddy bear with a red satin ribbon around the neck, who, propped at the head of Susan’s bed, somehow survived, having witnessed the fire, the collapsed walls, the charred ceiling beams, the powerful spray of the fire hoses. Other things survived, even some clothes that are now arriving from the cleaners, washed of the smoky smell, souvenirs of a former life.

Susan has no constant. She’s in recovery and attempting new routines, all of which seem wrong and unfair and unwanted. Her time, as she says, is "emotional time," an awkward, surreal nightmare where nothing makes sense, and from which she can’t wake up. I did hear her soprano-laugh on the phone just now, though. It’s been a while.

Our friend Jody is near death, now out of the hospital and at a hospice, unaware of her surroundings. Visitors report she responds to singing, turning her head slightly. Maybe she’s singing along deep inside her time. Funeral preparations are underway as her husband and their families and the Zamir Chorale family wait, not knowing when we’ll gather to mourn and pray and sing for Jody the songs she requested when she was awake.

A bolt of lightning can strike and steal Susan’s home, and cancer can spread and steal the life of a woman my age, and nature, too, can render its ineluctable verdict on my aging parents, who are blessed with sound minds but ever-slowing bodies. Disruption. Inconstancy. Rhythms I can’t control.

And so I watch the Red Sox and Yankees and glory in the beauty that is Jonathan Papelbon’s delivery and boo at the beauty that is Mariano Rivera’s precision. I get breakfast and go to yoga and breathe and take a walk and admire the midsummer gardens in full, startling bloom. I pay $3.99 a gallon for gas (cheap!) and check YouTube for new Spring Awakening videos. I watch Sir Obama in Berlin and Mr. McCain at the Fudge Haus in Podunk, Ohio. I go again to the shore to gaze at the ocean’s steady pulse. And tonight, I’ll crawl into my own bed, with my own sheets and pillows, and gratefully sleep, waiting, hoping, to wake up to the pads of Sascha’s paws on my belly, precisely at 5:45.