Secret Meetings with Cats and Birds

Furtherdad walks Mumi the Killer Spaniel on Sunday nights. Sunday is my wife Mira's "TV night". She has a lineup of shows she likes to watch, starting with 60 Minutes, and she feels justified in this indulgence insofar as we don't really watch much television otherwise. I sit and watch a couple of the shows with her, and wouldn't feel the least bit annoyed at any of this if she didn't have to wrap it up with "Desperate Housewives" at the end of the night. When this particular show comes on is when I make my hasty exit, and head out the door with Mumi for canine adventures in the dark streets. It is really saying something indeed, that I prefer the company of the hound to watching this particular show.

Speaking of walking, Teague is SO close to walking. Today, all day, he seemed to be making attempts, flirting just at the edges of this new ability. For instance, this morning when I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, he was standing there next to me, holding onto my leg, and he then slowly, tentatively, he took his hands off my leg to where he balanced on his own, looking at me then with a sly smile on his face, and finally taking one small step away, but suddenly he became aware of his precarious state of balance, and plopped down onto his diapered butt, looking up afterwards with a big smile, both of us laughing and my praising him extravagantly.

There is a crazy lady in our neighborhood named Sophi. Well, maybe not crazy, but perhaps old beyond caring, old to the point of decay, or something like that. She is always disheveled, with wild hair, her rumpled, worn clothes are stained with grease, her face is hirsute and typically flecked with crumbs of some sort, with only a few teeth left now, and always carrying around a few plastic bags filled with cans of food, bread crusts, and whatever else that she feeds to various stray cats and the legions of pigeons that terrorize the neighborhood. The way I came to talk to her in the first place is that she saw me walking Mumi the Killer Spaniel on the street and Sophi fell immediately, and deeply in love with the dog, and they have been illicit lovers ever since. Whenever Sophi sees Mumi on the street she coos with joy and they begin to kiss- I'm not kidding, to the point where Mumi's dog tongue is in Sophi's mouth, and Sophi does not recoil. It is truly a disgusting sight, I must say. But then I find it funny, because whenever we see Sophi, and I have Teague with me, say, in the backpack or stroller, Sophi fails to react at all to the beautiful, handsome, charming child, and instead immediately begins to molest the dog....

But then, one day I'm down in the public market, walking through the many stalls with the massive variety of prepared foods, delicacies, produce, cheeses, chocolates, EVERYTHING, and of course absolutely jammed with people, tanks of fish, neon signs buzzing, fresh aroma of bread, sushi on the left, burritos on my right, Amish butchers, kosher foods, Indian, Mexican, etc, and then through all of it I hear sweet piano music coming from nearby, and as I weave my way through the crowd, I look and behold...old SOPHI sitting at a battered piano, playing away, with a tip jar on top. Of course I walked up and dropped a bill into the bowl, and though I tried to catch her, eye, she didn't seem to recognize me- without the dog, I guess. Next time I saw her I asked her about her piano playing at the market, and we talked for a while about music, since I also play classical piano. She loves Chopin and so do I, and so now when she sees me, she still doesn't pay much attention to Teague, but after making out with Mumi the dog for a while, she'll typically ask me if I've been playing any Chopin.

The only reason that I'm thinking about this tonight is that I happened to pass by Sophi's house tonight when walking the dog. She lives about a block and a half away from us. I discovered where she lives because she has her piano situated right in front of her window on the ground floor of her house, and if you saunter by and look through the ground level windows (as I am helplessly drawn to do, as eyes in the dark are drawn to the warmth and light of unguarded interiors), one can't help but see her sitting there playing. Tonight, I was walking Mumi along the street where Sophi lives. The rain of the last few days had cleared off, leaving a light strata of clouds, just barely concealing a waxing moon, near full. From across the street I could see doddering Sophi through her window, hunched over at her piano. She was playing Chopin's second Nocturne, a piece that I also attempt to play, and the sweet and familiar melody tinkled crystal in the night air. So strange to think that this was the same woman I see with her crazy-toothed smile, peddling her bicycle at 2 mph down the street on the way to her secret meetings with cats and birds.