radish times

So, I am back in New York where the garbage cans are enormous, the toilet paper very soft and the time is six hours earlier than it should be. The cats and I got back after a long but uneventful flight. Everything was smooth from Prague to NY.

The only excitement was when BoBo got diarrhea just when they were serving dinner on the airplane (about two hours after we took off). I cleaned it by using all the paper towels in the bathroom and horrifying a stewardess by doing so in the “galley” which is where they store the food. She asked me to remove my dirty animal immediately, which I did as I was already done.

After that BoBo slept all the way until the final descent into JFK when he started to cry. He cried through landing, taxi-ing, immigration, and baggage pick-up. He stopped crying for a little while when I gave him some water and then for good when he was reunited with his brothers and sister.

A very nice security guard helped me gather all the cats and bags and go through customs. Without him I would still be somewhere near the baggage claim in JFK airport - because they have a very peculiar kind of cart there… carts which wont move until you push the big cart handle down about a foot. If you let go of the handle for the smallest second, the cart stops immediately causing any loose objects on it to go flying forward. Also, it is impossible to move the cart backwards. Now, with two carts, one laden with four cats and the other with 150 lbs (64 kg) of luggage, it is very difficult to move far fast. The difficulty is further complicated by the crowds of irate travelers who can’t believe that some dumb girl has two carts sitting directly in the middle of the last stretch before they will be free of the airport. All to say that without this guard, things would have been much more difficult.

The customs people didn’t care at all that I had four cats with me. They only real thing the woman there did was peer inside each cat carrier to make sure they were really cats. Then, for show, she opened their little health books containing the Czech government certification that all the cats are healthy. She never did see the page with the certification. She was clearly not interested. Actually, she didn’t even ask for the heath certifications but as I had carried them with me for three thousand miles not to mention tramped all over Prague to get them that as soon as I got to the counter I shoved them at her. She probably had no choice but to at least pretend to look at them.

So after customs, we were home free. Mom and dad were waiting. We drove home, freed the cats, ate dinner, and then I went directly to sleep.

There are many important things to think about during the holiday season but when you are in the supermarket trying to find a beet, what a beet looks like is perhaps the most important thing to think about (especially if you do not know the word for beet in the language of the land in which you live). Of course, if you don’t know what one looks like you can think a long time and never actually purchase one. This causes problems when you would like to make a beet and apple salad for Christmas dinner. I did see something that looked kind of like what I think a beet might look like but I didn’t buy it. The only thing I remember very clearly is that beets are ugly and hard and this thing I saw was soft. Last year, Peter found the beets and bought them.

Last year was much harder for me on the whole. It was much more stressful and impossible seeming. Today I did Christmas shopping with no problem at all. I even found rye flour (pretty clever, huh?). Now I just have to figure out how to substitute for molasses and I will be able to make Limpa bread.

Well, it seems that Peter and I will be moving back to NY sooner than we had planned. We will be there this Winter. I will come in mid-January. Peter will come when his contract expires at the end of February.

We are having great trouble with our NY landlord, who, it seems, would like to do everything in his power to get us out of the apartment. Surely we wouldn’t like to lose the apartment but if that were the only thing we might chance it. However, it also affects our residency status in NY and possibly Peter’s status in the US. This we cannot chance, although we thought about it for an absolutely blissful 15 minutes. We imagined just giving the finger to all these big bureaucracies and doing exactly what we want. But we soon realized that this is not what we really want. Once Peter gets permanent permanent status we will be able, without chancing anything, to do just what we want. That will not be so long from now, if we go back to NY and figure everything out. If we stay here and end up having to start the INS applications again from scratch we will have much less freedom.

So we will be back. We will be looking for jobs. We will (possibly) be looking for an apartment, depending on what our landlord does. It is possible that he might try to start something in January. It is also possible that he will wait until May or June when our lease comes up for renewal. Right now we don’t know what he will do.
What is the issue, you ask? Well, we think he will try to challenge my legal right to succeed to the apartment. In the common sense world, our case is extremely strong and it is hard to imagine a clearer case of legal succession. In the legal world, it is not so clear and it seems to depend on all sorts of things over which we have no control, such as which judge serves on our case or how the term “permanently vacated” is defined. If we had nothing to lose we would definitely fight to the end. However, we would have a lot to lose if we lost: we would have to pay all legal fees (ours and theirs) AND the difference between our rent and the legal rent for the duration of the case. If you conservatively estimate the market rent of our apartment, this difference would be $2,500 a month. An astronomical amount that I cannot even imagine paying for one month, let alone for all the months of a potential court battle.

So that is where we stand right now.

I am getting the cats ready for another transatlantic trip. It breaks my heart!! But I can’t do anything about it. We are really lucky to have a vet’s office right in our own building where both vets speak beautiful English. I think I am something of a notorious customer there though. I went there yesterday to pick up some antibiotics for Pippin who will have his teeth cleaned. I had never before set eyes on the second vet. I started trying to speak Czech. I got one poor sentence out when he said “English?” I said “ok.” Then I started trying to explain who I was. He interrupted me mid-sentence and said “oh, I know who you are.” My fame preceded me. I have to awful fear that he knew me as something like “the weird American girl desirous of all kinds of weird treatments for her FOUR CATS!”

We are also trying to figure out what to do with all our stuff. We can’t carry it all back. So we are beginning to make little bags with people’s names on them containing things we borrowed and things we would like to give away. Peter, who is in Moscow for the week, took a large load of things there.

By the way, speaking of my illustrious husband, you should all check out this web site http://www.allaboutjazz.com/gallery/shkin.htm. It is an exhibition of Peter’s photos in an on-line jazz magazine, All About Jazz. Tonight he will go to a 5th anniversary celebration for the web site he founded, Jazz in Russia.

And today, I will write my personal statement for graduate school. I have been procrastinating for ages, telling myself that I was preparing in my mind. Alas, today I must prepare on paper.

I have a two year old winter coat. It is black. It is made of wool. It is from Jones New York. When I bought it, one of the pockets had a huge hole. It still has a huge hole. Last year one of the buttons fell off. It is still off and by this time the button is probably somewhere in never-never land.

I went to the vet today. The vet is VERY close by. I took two cats at a time. They got their yearly rabies shots. The vet doesn’t have a handler, so I helped him with everything. I was wearing my coat. By the time I was done my coat was completely covered with cat hair, most of it Krolik’s as he objected most fiercely to entering the cat carrier (there is a reason for this that I will tell you later).

Now I am trying to clean the coat (in moments I am not writing this e-mail). It is not so simple. The vacuum cleaner doesn’t help. It just makes a lot of noise. Our three shoe brushes and our cat brush don’t help either. Our hair remover thing is one of those rubber gadgets that is supposed to become sticky after you wash it with hot water. Ours is at the end of its life. It doesn’t get sticky anymore. So, I have tape. Tape works. But tape is slow. Sitting next to my tape is a bag with needles and thread. I am going to fix the button and the pocket.

Funny that I had to go to the vet in order to fix my coat. I wonder if I went to the vet last winter like I should have done if I would have fixed my coat then.

Krolik was the fiercest objector because he was the only cat that had to ride in the same kind of cat carrier that he was in on the airplane. I have four cat carriers but two kinds. Three of them are the strong plastic type. The other one is the sports bag type. BoBo rode in the bag type on the airplane. The other three were in the plastic ones. Going to the vet, BoBo rode in a Plastic and Kisco rode in the Bag. Then I let them out and put Pippin in the Bag and tried to put Krolik in the Plastic. He wouldn’t go in. I tried both the head-first approach and the butt-first approach. Neither worked. Finally I had to take the top off (at which point the door falls off too). I was ready for the door thing. I had that part of the carrier against the wall. I put Krolik and slammed the top on quick as lightening.

In the vets office, of course there was no problem. There all the cats want to stay inside their carriers for the whole time. If you let go of them while the are on the table they will run right back in their carriers - especially if they have just been stabbed with a needle.

Animal care is terribly cheap here. For shots for four cats, I paid 400 koruns - something less that $15. In NY, there is no shot for your cat that costs as little as $15 for ONE. And you usually have to pay for the visit too. I estimate that this visit would have cost us around $200 in NY. I may have them clean Pippin’ teeth here. It will cost between $10 - $20. In NY, it costs over $100.

I just learned something about being an American - or actually about being a Something as opposed to being Another thing. It doesn’t really have to do just with Nationality. It also has to do with age and a whole lot of other things. But here it is as I learned it.

Baking Powder. To my mind, one of the most basic types of ingredients in a muffin, a cookie or a cake. Not basic in that every muffin, cookie and cake must have it, but basic in that it was never a fluctuating or controversial ingredient. The recipe called for it, almost always one teaspoon, and you put it in and that was that. You never had to think about how to cook it just right (like melting sugar)or how to combine it with the other ingredients (like cold butter) or how it might change the taste of the cookie if you put too much (like cinnamon). I never heard an argument about lowering your “baking powder” intake or reducing the amount of “baking powder” in your diet. So, baking powder, in the deep recesses of my mind, figured as a constant, trusty, if a little boring, ingredient.

And then I came to the Czech Republic. Ahhh, the things I did not know. When you come to a new country, there is a tremendous collection of things you know you do not know and must learn. So I learned the language enough to get around. I learned who Czech and Sharka were. I learned the transportation system and how to buy vegetables in the supermarket. I learned to find cheap but good beer. But I did not know, and therefore I could not learn, that baking powder here is not the same.

In New York, the job is simple. Buy the little yellow packet bearing the words “double-acting baking powder” and put a teaspoon into your apple-walnut muffins. Ah ha, you think there might be a clue here. “Double-acting”… you think that in Czech the baking powder might be weaker and therefore each recipe would need more. But, alas, no. That would lead you in quite the wrong direction.

The truth is that baking powder has a bad taste, real baking powder that is, real unadulterated baking powder. If you use a teaspoon, or worse yet a tablespoon, your muffins will taste BAD. Not so horrible that you can not eat them, but just poor enough to seriously damage your pride in cooking them and joy in eating them. The special little yellow packet they sell in New York contains a special little acidic ingredient to neutralize the bad taste.

How, I ask you, could I ever have foreseen such a thing? I can’t fathom it. I never ever thought about baking powder. I grew up with “double-acting baking powder” and never ever thought, even on the edges of my mind, to question it or how it worked. It just did work and that was enough for me. Many times I have run into things like this, some more philosophical and important, but never-the-less with the same origin. I was used to it. It worked. And I never questioned it.

So we are left with a lonely little pan three-quarters full of poor tasting apple-walnut muffins which will probably sit there until we are forced to throw them away due to mold.

But I won’t leave you with such a sad ending. The truth is that when I made the apple-walnut muffins with the bad tasting baking powder, I also made two apple cobblers and Peter made little apple cakes all of which were delicious (we, at the time, were in the possession of a great superfluity of apples). So the fate of the apple-walnut muffins also has to do with the fact that it was simply beat out of the contest - and there is no reason to eat it until the other better tasting sweet things are gone.

I am now off to learn how to make Russian pilmeni (or dumplings).

So the GRE’s went well. Yesterday morning I arose at 7 am, got ready, ate breakfast, and set out to squash this test which I have been studying for for some great amount of time. So I got on the tram and I was headed towards Taboritska street, number 23. I arrived on Taboritska street with little trouble. I realized I was on the beginning of the street, so I walked down it. I was on the right side - the one with odd numbers (which is actually the left side). These numbers were satisfyingly increasing, 1….3…. and a little later 13….15….17. It would have been super if they kept increasing seeing that I had only ten minutes and I needed number 23. But alas, all that is super does not always occur. As it was, the numbers stopped at 17. Across the street there were no numbers, only a mammoth hotel. I walked past the hotel hoping that the numbers continued after the hotel but I already knew deep in my heart, with seven minutes to go, that this would not be so. And it wasn’t. In fact, after the hotel even the street changed.

So I walked back. I thought there were several possibilities: either Taboritska street abruptly turns somewhere and the numbers continue there or the office I needed was somewhere in that giant hotel, or I had the wrong address, the street I really needed was Taborska which is in some completely different area of Prague. So I walked back past the hotel looking at all the signs. I didn’t see anything related to what I needed. Then I walked back up Taboritska for a while trying to see if it turned. But it didn’t. So, I stood looking at my little piece of paper where I had written the address. After some moments, I realized that also had a telephone number. I promptly called. Someone answered. I said “Is this the GRE office? WHERE ARE YOU?” The woman said “Inside the hotel on the second floor.”

Relief.

I walked into the hotel and tried the find the second floor. The first staircase I took led nowhere, so I came back down. The first set of elevators I saw were broken. So I asked the lady at the desk. She directed me to another set of elevators. I took one of these to the second floor. I got out. There were five unmarked doors. I looked at the signs on the wall. I saw the one I needed. It said “Fullbright Commission, 744″ Great. I looked around. There were no numbers on the doors. Just at that moment, the elevator brought three more people to the second floor. They were also looking for Fullbright Commission. They walked through one of the unmarked doors. I followed. It brought us to another hallway with about 10 unmarked doors. They kept walking. I kept following. They went through an unmarked door at the end of the hallway. I did too. It brought us to another hallway full of unmarked doors. Finally, after we walked through the unmarked door at the end of this passage we found a hall way with several marked doors. They were the very ones we needed.

So, I sat down in the GRE, GMAT, TOEFL waiting room. Everyone else there was taking the TOFEL, except the girl who I had walked down all those hallways with. She was taking the first medical exam to practice as a doctor in the US. One of the girls taking the TOEFL had come all the way from Slovakia to take the test.

Since I had arrived the last, I had to wait the longest. Everyone else seemed a mite more nervous than me too. So I thought it was better for them to go ahead of me. Finally at about 9:20 the woman came to bring me to the computer which would test my GRE skills.

I wrote an essay about the evils of technology. I analyzed an argument about employment companies. I read a passage about Mexican-American writers and another one about the bacteria which biodegrade oil. Did you know that oil is very similar to the substance pine trees drop into the ocean? Yes, very interesting I know. And I did math like a bandit.

At the end I received my score. Not so bad. I got 650 Verbal. Not as high as I had hoped but respectable. And, to my complete amazement, I got a 780 Math (out of 800). So, the composite score is 1430 (out of 1600) which is pretty good. Definitely better than I ever did on the SATs. The writing part won’t be graded for a couple of weeks. I will probably know my scores in about a month.

Afterwards, I was pretty tired. It took me a while to stop thinking about the test. Mostly I was thinking about the essays, because that is the only part I don’t know how I did on. But, overall I am very pleased.

We just returned from Salzburg. What a super city! We had a great time! I HIGHLY recommend to anyone traveling to Europe who has not been there before to stop by Salzburg for at least a couple days. We liked it much better than Vienna. Salzburg from the top does not compare with Prague. If you look out over the city it doesn’t look so beautiful. But inside the city it does. Salzburg’s beauty is simpler and more direct than Prague’s, which is delicate and intricate and crowded.

Some of the things that were so cool:

1) They have much better music than Prague (in terms of jazz). We saw an excellent concert the first night we got there. They were American musicians that we had seen before, but it was still fun to see them. More of the jazz musicians we like go to Salzburg than to Prague. The place where we saw the concert was a mix between the Knitting Factory and Makor (two music venues in NY). They are very informal. Peter made the reservation as “Peter from Prague.” When you walk in you go downstairs where there is a little bar with super extraordinarily attentive bar men and the performance space which is large and comfortable. If we had stayed through Sunday, we would have been able to see another NY band there.

2) Dom zu Salzburg, the main church, which is dedicated in honor of St. Rupert and St. Virgil. It is really very beautiful. It is early baroque style, spacious, airy and light. Everything is tasteful and simple in its way. There are really pleasing frescos on the ceiling. There if a very modern chapel downstairs in the morgue (it is not the morgue but I can’t remember this word that means the underground place in a church where they bury important people behind or under large stones). This chapel is decorated with very modern stained glass pieces. Of course, it is not all so old as it might have been if the church had not been bombed in World War II. The whole ceiling fell in and it took them until 1959 to restore it. In any case, I think it is the most beautiful church I have seen in Europe so far (not that this is sooo many).

3) We saw several Sound of Music sites. We saw one of the gardens they run around in while they are singed “Doe, a deer, a female deer…” In this garden is the long ____ (I am really missing words tonight! I can’t remember what this thing is called - it is the long hall way like thing that is made by arching vines overhead in a garden. It is something like a tressel but my spell-checker does not think so.) So, you know this thing they ride there bicycles through while singing.(Aha! I think it is a trussel - although my spell-checker doesn’t acknowledge this word either!) Also in this garden is the fountain they walk or skip around while singing the same song and the stairway where what’s her name (Julie Andrews, that took me a while too) sings “Doe” in the three octaves and when she reaches the last one dramatically slaps her hand on top of her head as if helps her sing high notes.

We also saw the abbey where Maria Von Trapp actually went and where they shot some of the scenes of the movie. Most notably, we saw the gate that the children come up to when they want to see Maria. It is the same place where the police park their cars and the nuns pilfer important but small parts of the cars. We didn’t see the inside courtyard where they sing “How can you solve a problem like Maria?” because it wasn’t open to the public - or we just didn’t find it;

We didn’t actually walk around looking for these sites. We would be in a place for other reasons and all of a sudden I would recognize it and clear as day images and sounds from the movie would pop into my head. I think this is what made it fun. A friend told us this summer that she had gone on the “Sound of Music” tour only to find that it was very disappointing. So I didn’t want to take this tour (also because my husband would have ever gone with me for anything in the world). Recognizing the places on my own was extremely satisfying.

4) We stayed with an old friend of Peter’s, Irisha, who is a cell biologist. She works a little outside Salzburg in an biological institute. We got to see it. I thought it was really interesting - as I have never worked as a scientist. She showed us some of the slides of her work and one of them illustrates her most important accomplishment to date. She didn’t have time to explain what exactly it meant - but it looked really cool. Irisha is also the owner of a superb dog named Marta. Marta is a miniature dachshund, a highly adorable type of animal. Marta is also very smart. It was a surprise for both Peter and I to come into contact with an animal that really understands humans and acknowledges its understanding. It was also kind of surprising to me when I pet her for the first time and found myself immediately thinking that she didn’t like it because she wasn’t purring. We have been to much around cats. Marta went almost everywhere with us, including on a 3 hour hike and to the only brewery.

5) We went hiking in the real mountains, the Alps. On Saturday it was warm in Salzburg, so we decided to go for a hike. We drove into the mountains and walked up the side of a mountain to the top. It wasn’t really hard hiking but some of it was pretty straight up and I had to stop several times on the way up. It was actually much warmer than we thought it would be. I wore a tee-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, a sweater and a coat. We thought it would be cold up high. Peter wore something like the same. We also packed two extra sweaters just in case. We hadn’t gone 100 ft. when we stripped down to our tee-shirts. It caused some hilarity when Irisha realized that not only were we going to put our two coats, two sweaters, and one long sleeve shirt into the backpack but that we were putting them in on top of yet another pair of sweaters. So Peter carried all our clothes from the bottom to the top of the mountain. It was a very beautiful pine tree snow-tipped mountain type of walk.

6) We had the enlivening experience of realizing after dark that the normal headlights of Irisha’s car didn’t work. She had just had her whole car checked out and tuned up. It was the first night we were there. We had just been to the concert and were stopping by the biological institute to pick up Marta (who couldn’t make it to the concert). Everything was fine on the way from the concert to the lab but when we got back into the car, Irisha noticed that the head lights didn’t work, that is the normal headlights. The brights worked. There was really nothing we could do but drive. It was late at night. Buses had stopped running. It was cold. We were extremely tired and we were hungry. So, we did. The first part of the way was lit by street lights. The second part of the way was not - so we just used the brights. We undoubtedly annoyed many drivers but it was far better than driving with no lights at all.

7) There is an Augustinian Brewery in Salzburg, meaning a place where monks make beer. It is GIGANTIC. It has four huge halls. Peter and I found it when we were looking around the city. We had just been to a church and saw a small sign a little up the bloc that said (in German of course), Brewery. So we went to explore. I had the feeling that we had discovered something really interesting and hidden - since there was only that little sign. That made going in even more exciting. We went in and down the stairs. At the bottom we saw a row of food places, one selling sausage, one selling bread, another selling salads, and so on. We saw one large hall with people drinking beer. We realized that people got their beer and then went for food. So we did this too. We each got a liter of beer in a great ceramic beer mug and then went to buy sausage and bread. It was an extremely satisfying meal.

When we were ready to leave, we asked for the bill and paid 12 Euro - which is kind of reasonable for 2 liters of beer in Salzburg but not cheap. We were a little surprised - but what can you do? So we walked out the other way. There we stopped to look at beer mugs. When we were reading the prices, we realized that on the sign beer cost only 4.60 a liter - not 6.00 like we had paid. After several minutes of being irate, we realized that all the locals were taking mugs from the shelf, paying the cashier, getting the mugs filled and taking them into one of the (we now noticed) 4 halls. A man noticed the look on our faces and explained what we had just that moment figured out: if you order beer from the table it will cost more than if you get it yourself. Then we left on the opposite side of the building from where we entered. We realized that it was an enormous building and besides the tremendous brewery sign hanging in front of it, the whole side of the building was an ad for the brewery… not such a difficult place to find as we had first thought. But everything together, we really liked the place and in fact returned the next night for a beer. And certainly, we got it ourselves!

So… it has been a long time since I have written anything about life. Here in Prague (and I guess where you are too) things are moving toward Winter. Our little park across the street is almost bear - only a few trees are still clinging to their leaves. The trams are louder than ever and the sky stays gray and low.

We’ve been cooking more than usual with all the cold weather. This weekend we made a toasted walnut pie (the walnuts were the gift of some of my friends in the refugee camp), an apple pie, some apple sauce and last night Peter made a cabbage-sausage thing.

I’ve been studying for the GRE’s. Surprisingly enough, it is the math section that is giving me trouble. On the verbal section I keep improving - today getting a 700 out of 800 on a practice test. The math section is hard mostly because there is so little time - but also I keep making STUPID mistakes. Today I am especially discouraged because I did badly on the two practice tests I took. I think it is something in my attitude. Now on the verbal sections I feel the challenge. I look at the reading comprehension and think “ok, you sucker - I’m going to figure this out!!!” On the math section, I look at a complicated problem and think “oh no. oh no. There’s not enough time. What am I doing? oh no. oh no.” So, somehow I’ve got to change this in the next two weeks!

I am now teaching English to three people at the camp. It is great. I really like it. I have about 2 hours of conversation with two of the students and then 1 hour of grammar with one of the same students and a different student. After that I still go to see Mr. Kadum, the man from Iraq, and we talk mostly about religion and philosophy. So, I spend the whole time we are there doing something useful - which was not always the case. I may start teaching English to one asylum seeker that lives here in Prague. I will go see her tomorrow at the Jewish Museum where she works. She wants to be able to speak English with the tourists that come to the museum.

I started working on Amnesty International’s campaign on human rights in Russia. I gave a presentation to our English speaking group last week - and about 7 or 8 people are interested in working with me. I may give a presentation to the Czech speaking group as well. The infrastructure of Amnesty here in Prague seems to be falling apart though. They used to have a full-time office director, a part-time press officer and a part-time campaign coordinator. The director and the campaign coordinator left in the early Fall with no notice at all. They failed to submit a grant proposal for the next year - so there is now no money to hire their replacements. And, the people who are there are doing things like publicizing a press conference two weeks before it will take place, then cancelling it without notifying anyone - including the press. It doesn’t make for good publicity!

We’ve been going to movies and concerts. We saw two jazz piano concerts last week. Of the movies available in Prague right now, the best one is Hollywood Ending. I usually don’t like Woody Allen movies but this one was pretty good.

We will go to Salzburg next weekend to see a concert and go sight-seeing. We rode through Salzburg on the train this summer when we went to the jazz festival in Saalfeldon. I am excited to go. We spend about four days - two traveling there and two sight-seeing. We’ll stay with an old friend of Peter’s. And this time I will buy and German-English phrase book before we go!

I’ve also been reading a lot lately. I’ve just read two Bukowski books, “Women” and “Hollywood.” They were both very good. He’s an interesting guy - very down to earth but kind of philosophical in his own way. I seem to be able to read a book about every three days.

The cats are doing well. Last night Krolik kept us up until all hours. I wasn’t really sleepy when I went to bed - so I laid there for about an hour thinking and trying to sleep. When I was just falling asleep I heard “BANG! BOOM BOOM! drag drag BAND BOOM” Sleepily, I shouted “Krolik! Krolik STOP!” He would stop for about five minutes - or enough time to for me to start falling asleep - and then he would start on something else. Peter got up to find and stop him about two or three times. I can’t tell whether he does it every night - but usually we sleep too deeply to be disturbed by him - or whether he just goes crazy some nights.

I changed cat litter again. With the other cat litter (the one that I wrote about before and said that it had solved all our problems) we got into the regular routine cleaning cat pee off the floor every three days. After three months, this routine became OLD. So now I am back to one of the first clumping cat litters I tried last year. So far it is better than cleaning the floor every three days - but I am back to scooping it every night. Ahhh, trade-offs!

Peter has recently gotten many requests to use his photographs of jazz musicians. For those of you who don’t know, Peter has a database of photographs of jazz musicians on the internet. He takes pictures at every (or almost every) concert we go to. His photos have appeared in magazines and on web-sites. So, just today he got three requests. He was amazed when the third one came - he was like “what’s going on?”

The story which follows was created by our nephew, Alex, this summer while he was visiting Prague. I just wrote it down. The main ideas are his. I added a few flourishes and some of my own ideas.

Discovering Agent B

It was not so many years ago that I became strangely entangled in world espionage. Oddly enough it was only several months ago that I became aware of it. I live with my husband in Prague. We lead a quiet life. He works. I look for work. We listen to jazz. Our friends invite us to drink beer. Sometimes we accept. We search for our greater purpose and look for answers in the clouds.

This past summer we were visited by our nephew, a young man living with his parents in Maryland (he will remain nameless for security reasons). He goes to high school and visits his relatives abroad during the summer. He is intelligent and quite perceptive. While he was visiting us, he noticed some odd goings-on in our house. He conducted an investigation (quite thorough and dangerous from what I can tell but I would never want that to come to his mothers ears!) and this is what he told me:

“Several years ago,” he said, “in a land far away, you acquired something of great value, although you weren’t aware of it. This priceless thing is what brought you to the attention of some very powerful actors who now control what you consider ‘your life’ And, I said ‘acquired’ but this is not quite correct. It would be better to say that this thing was bestowed upon you.”

I racked my brain to figure out what he was talking about. He encouraged me to sit down, gave me a drink and began from the beginning.

“Many years ago, as you were just graduating from college, you were attacked by a madness to own a cat. You felt that it was just an extension of a general longing you had had for a long time. However, I can tell you now, that was not the case. You were actually attacked by a madness emanating from a source other than yourself. Now I can’t explain exactly how it was done. There are still things we do not know, but it would appear that they are able to do these things.”
“Who are able to do what?” I asked.

“Don’t interrupt me please. So, you had to get a cat. However, to their consternation you had some of your own ideas which they had not forseen. One of these ideas was that you needed TWO cats. This did not fit their purpose at all and they weren’t prepared for your obstinacy. Needless to say they failed in their objective.

“For some years they let you be. For one thing, the madness didn’t work quite so well on you anymore as you already had two cats. For another, they looked far and wide to find a person as appropriate as yourself to work their business upon. Unfortunately they failed in this also.

“So, three years later they began trying again in earnest. You may remember your sudden desire to take home every kitten you saw. Your relatives surely do. However, once again, they found that you were not as receptive to the madness as they had hoped. You never acted on your desire. They actually placed the precious ‘thing’ quite near your house, but for some reason you never walked by or looked at it. They were about to give up when one of their lowliest stupidest informants let drop a piece of information that caused your downfall and sealed your fate.

“He, quite innocently, yelled one day in the middle of the morning that he couldn’t believe that your close friend had many times been to see this precious thing when you hadn’t even been within 100 feet of it. He had been gathering background information as it was usually quite useless in cases such as these. However, here was a nugget of gold. Not only had your close friend seen this thing, but she was also incredibly talented at getting other people to buy things for themselves. So, all they had to do, they realized, was spread the madness a little to encompass her and she would do their business for them.

“And they were quite right. The very next day she called you and told you there were some incredibly cute kittens at the local vet’s office who needed homes. She told you that she knew you wouldn’t get another cat under any circumstances, but what was the harm in just looking? So, you set out together to see the cats. They were indeed very very very cute. The madness worked so powerfully on her that in the end she even paid the kitten’s vet bills and gave you the cat as a gift.
“When you got home with the cat an hour later, he immediately hid. You felt that this was normal – as he had been homeless for four months and seemed afraid of people. However, it gave you time to recover from the madness and begin to wonder what in the world had come over you. And it gave him time to contact his people and let them know the mission was accomplished.”

“Him who? What people? What are you talking about?”

“OK. Here we come to our first major difficulty. Sit back down! You must recover from your amazement. Plainly, your third cat, BoBo as you call him, is actually an internationally renowned secret agent. It would be more respectful to call him Agent B… but for now, as you are more accustomed to it, you may continue to call him BoBo.”

Silence reigned for a stunned moment.

“As you know, all government research is not publicized. It has been several decades since government scientists discovered the secret of communicating with certain species of animals, dogs and cats among them. Dogs, they soon found, were too honest and loyal to be of any benefit to the government and they discontinued their work in that area. Cats, however, were something completely different. Sly, selfish, generally unconcerned with honesty and loyalty but very trustworthy if the rewards were sufficient. Also, cats generally dislike any change in their commanding officer – so once a cat has done one job for you it will work for you for the rest of its life. This is one reason that kittens are so important.

“While the government found cats to be very helpful, they were also confronted with a range of problems that the secret service had never dealt with before. For example, cat agents are very particular about their human ‘owners’.” For them to live and serve faithfully they must have a certain positive chemistry with their ‘owner’. At the beginning when the secret service disregarded this seemingly ludicrous demand, the results were disastrous. When they realized how important it was, they began trying to figure out how to predict this chemistry. They couldn’t keep on introducing cats into households and then removing them after a short time – it was expensive and emotionally draining for the families and the agents, not to mention that it began to arouse suspicions amongst the populace (not any correct assumptions, but they were damaging enough). So, they began a line a research in which they brought together as many people and potential agent cats as they could. Incidentally, this was the beginning of public animal shelters. They tried not to accept dogs, but public pressure was such that…ack! I get off track.. where was I?

“Oh, yes, so they began to research the chemistry between potential cat agents and people. They found that certain families of cats had the same kind of chemistry with certain families of people. Therefore, if they found one good fit, they knew that all the relatives of that person would also fit. They also found at around the same time that certain strains of cats were particularly talented at certain things. In your case, these two findings added up to the fact that your family was found to have excellent chemistry with one of the most talented cat agent families.”

“How did they find that out?”

“I’m sorry but that’s classified. Any how, Agent B, errr I mean BoBo, comes from a long line of very talented agent cats. Your family has excellent chemistry with him. How they came to choose you was easy. You lived in New York, were young, mobile, able to travel overseas. You also have a characteristic very rare among those people found to have good chemistry but absolutely indispensable – you are the type of person who would travel around the world WITH your cats. At the beginning, they thought your other two other cats might be a liability. Even among people willing to travel with a cat agent – there are very very few that would travel with three. But you lived up to their every crazy expectation: when the time came you packed all four of your cats onto the plane to Prague.

“Just as a side note, you know when they cancelled your flight that night? While you were waiting for the plane, Agent B got emergency notification that he was needed in Westchester. They had no other choice but to cancel the flight.

“You thought he was just afraid of people. Actually he is incredibly brave but he needs the personal space from you to be able to do his work. You thought that you were crazy when you looked every place in the apartment but you couldn’t find him. You were right. He wasn’t there. He was just out on assignment.

“Kind of strange, huh? Well, think about it. It really explains a lot of things. Did you ever wonder why it was Peter who moved to New York, instead of you moving to Prague, before you guys got married? Actually it’s quite obvious – Agent B still had work to do in New York. And do you know why the Radio in Prague offered Peter that job when they did? Simple. Agent B was transferred.

“Do you wonder why BoBo always hides when people come to your house? He doesn’t know who they work for. Until he is completely sure they are safe, it would be folly for him to show himself. Who knows who might recognize him?

“Do you wonder why you and Peter had such a desire to get a fourth cat? Also simple. Agent B needed a body guard. Think about it. Pippin and Kisco aren’t cut out for it. They were born in the suburbs. Never really been outside on their own. Pippin is very smart but far more interested in kaleidoscopy and refraction than the vulgar physical sciences. Kisco is a princess and prefers sunbathing in the shade to the effort involved in moving in the sun. But Krolik! He is big, muscular, active, not terribly intelligent and he can be completely vindictive. Perfect body guard for Mr. B.

“Do you remember that time you went up to your parents house and took Mr. B with you? You didn’t see him for the entire week. Think about it. It was just after the Clinton’s moved to Westchester.

“If you think, I’m sure you’ll see how it all fits in. During the floods in Prague, did you see a lot of BoBo? How about the time that Mrs. Bush visited the Radio?… Anyway, I’ve got to get going. You should get some rest. You don’t look so well. Maybe we can talk about it some more later.”

Studying for the GRE is most amusing. If you are clever, you will combine all the study techniques you ever learned to come up with something engaging, entertaining and effective. For example, The Kaplan Test Preparation Book suggests that instead of studying the definitions of individual words you should study word lists. These are lists of words that all have the same general meaning. A language study course I used for studying Russian last spring suggested that you make situations come alive in your mind, so that you don’t just memorize words but incorporate them into your brain’s language center automatically. The collusion of these two study techniques produces the following types of dialogs in my head:

Jim: John, I find the pile of food you are eating to be fetid. It is full of festering fauna. It is fulsome, invidious, completely noisome. In a word, it is foul.

John: Well I find your comment abstruse, arcane, obtuse. Your logic is enigmatic. The entire idea is inscrutable, obscure, opaque. You tend toward this kind of rarefied, recondite, turbid idiocy.

Jim: I tell you the food is foul, you intractable, obdurate fellow. You are the most implacable, obstinate, pertinacious person I know. You are completely recalcitrant and untoward. You are inexorably linked to your intransigent refractory opinions.

John: Why are you being so churlish, you irascible curmudgeon? You are a malevolent misanthrope. Your words are antithetic, truculent and vindictive.

Jim: Ha! Where did you learn to be so bombastic? I find your circumlocution and grandiloquence to be in poor taste. I have ever known you to be garrulous, but this type of periphrastic prolixity is quite turgid.

John: You are a depraved person. Not only do you insult everyone you know, but you do so while maintaining a dissipated, libertine, licentious life-style. How dare you speak words of censure to me, you bacchanalian reprobate? You have indulged in every kind of iniquity. Your very aura radiates your libidinous, sordid turpitude. You are a debauched, ribald, salacious fellow.

Jim: How can you throw such aspersions at my head? You dare to belittle, to berate, to derogate my very person? What is this calumny? This defamation? It was quite a diatribe! Do you enjoy haranguing me? Does it make you feel good to inveigh against me, to pillory, rebuke, remonstrate, reprehend, reprove and revile me? What did I do to deserve such excoriating castigation? You lambaste me with such vituperation that I know not even how to chastise you for it.

John: You know well how to chastise me, you are just craven. You are a diffident pusillanimous timorous creature. You are recreant and filled with trepidation, you coward.

Jim: Of all the injurious and inimical things to say! You are a perfidious, pernicious man. You words are insidious, deleterious and minatory. You very presence is baleful. You are the bane of peaceful men.

John: You are just trying to enervate me. You are trying to obviate the force of my words. If you could, you would stultify me, undermine my reason and vitiate the strength of my arguments.

Jim: Well, I admit that you have an acerbic tongue in your head. You throw out caustic acrimonious words with asperity. In makes nothing to you to be acidulous, mordant, mordacious and trenchant.

John: Ha! You are quite out there, fellow. I have been known, when circumstances deserve, to be quite laudatory of my fellow men. It is in my nature to extol the beauty of the world in soft words. I can express veneration easily. It is my natural way to constantly eulogize, aggrandize, spray forth accolades and encomiums to the world. It is very difficult for me to do otherwise.

Jim: That speech was quite beautiful but absolutely apocryphal. How can you dissemble in such a way? I hadn’t even suspected you of such duplicity, of such guile. What crazy kind of equivocation are you engaging in? For anyone, such as I, with knowledge of your character, your statements are obviously erroneous, fallacious, mendacious, specious and spurious. You prevaricate with such ease. Your persona is clearly ersatz.

John: And yours is clearly banal. Do you always spew such fatuous, hackneyed, insipid comments? I find you mundane, pedestrian, prosaic, trite, in other words, quotidian. Such platitudes, indeed!

Jim: You know, you are beginning to annoy me. I feel distinctly perturbed, vexed, irked, irritated, aggravated. I must go. I will leave you to your fetid food. Enjoy!

No matter how you fashion these dialogs in your mind - they are always extremely negative. All the important words for the GRE seem to have negative connotations. I wonder why.