My cat Juno likes to sleep in a laundry basket on our kitchen table. If you are not an animal person, or you are a meticulous housekeeper, this probably alarms you on multiple levels. However, black tumbleweeds of fur rolling across the placemats aside, it is clear that this laundry basket, with just a couple of layers of Nels’ jeans in the bottom, serves as a refuge for Juno. It is here that she feels safe from any threat, the chief one being her adopted brother, Mr. Spock.
Mr. Spock is twice her size, and can’t seem to figure out that Juno is neither prey nor predator. A year of separate feeding stations, litterboxes on two different floors, copious amounts of Feliway (designed to calm cats), and small dosages of Prozac have not alleviated his anxiety and aggression toward her.
Regardless of whether Spock is around or not, Juno spends most of the daytime hours in her basket. Sometimes Spock lies on the table outside the basket, all stretched out, but that doesn’t seem to bother Juno. She’ll open her green eyes, yawn hugely, and then snuggle even deeper into the jeans. The basket is a safety zone.
When my friend Jenn came over to work on an accreditation report on a recent Saturday, we decided that we wanted our own laundry baskets. A place where there are no demands made, no emails to answer, no list of tasks to be checked off. A place to curl up and observe the world outside, or maybe just relax.
But a recent conversation with one of my favorite teachers got me to quit looking at Juno with envy when I leave the house for work. This teacher said that she just recently went to Iggy’s Doughboys in Warwick, and in spite of living in Rhode Island for 25 years, that was her first time at that venerable institution. She said, “I just keep going around and around on my donkey path on the East Side.”
Those words resonated with me. I have my own donkey path up and down the I-195 corridor. Home-RIC, RIC-Home, visit some schools as needed, occasionally go out with friends, usually in Providence. When I have to go over to South County, I get nervous because the way is unfamiliar. Part of my anxiety stems from the fact that Rhode Island is chintzy with street signs and I have no sense of direction. I often feel uncertain or lost, even with my GPS.
My donkey path, though, is not just literal. It’s metaphorical too. I used to have a friend who would say “I’m a slave to my body” when I would tell her about some crazy diet I was on. Her point was that she was going to eat what her body wanted, while I was trying to force mine to eat more cabbage and less chocolate. I’m still not a slave to my body (it gets all the chocolate it wants, though), but I’m a slave to my routine. I wonder why I can’t think of anything to do on Saturday or Sunday afternoon but work, and then I blame work. As the saying goes, though, “It’s not you, work, it’s me.”
Yup, it IS me. As emotionally demanding and time-sucking as this job can be, I can still choose to have a rich and productive life, and say no to things that I don’t really need to do. Nobody is keeping score but me.
Somehow, I have to break my weekend pattern of resisting going anywhere that requires makeup or extroversion. I want to go to the beach. I want to go to the zoo, King Richard’s Faire, and the Factory of Horrors. I want to go to plays, movies, museums, drinks and dinner. I want to go to Boston, Mystic, and Concord, MA, to visit my old friends the Transcendentalists, or maybe just Iggy’s. So let me know if you are interested, and we can go together.
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