mandy
August 7, 2011
Page Seven
sehnen posted on Jun 06, 2008 | views: 87 | Tags: aschlöcher seid verfluchtx
(from the blogs; originally in german)
friday 6 june 2008… greenfield
Time to talk about Mandy today, another of the fourteen who were stolen from me. He came to us in late June of 1995, thirteen years ago, and was a year or two old already. He appeared in our neighborhood, on the canal – clean, very friendly, already neutered – and never left it again, until he left it with me. Clearly such a friendly and neutered cat was not a humanless stray, but belonged to someone. I advertised for two or three weeks in the paper and on the radio, but no one ever claimed him. He stayed a part of our family from then until he was stolen on 12 March 2008 — nearly thirteen years. The canal in turners falls, I would soon learn, was a place that some people sometimes used to dump animals they didn’t want anymore, and this seems to be what happened to Mandy.
Though I’ve had a great many cats in my life, I’ve never known another one who carried friendliness to the dizzy heights that Mandy did. He loved all living things, and in all my years with him I saw him be mean to only one animal, a cat who belonged to my mother. And she was the most inoffensive thing going, so I don’t know why he picked on her. All else Mandy loved. When he was “hunting,” he would park a few feet away from his prey, fix them with what for him was a mean look, and talk, talk a sound in his throat likea purr but with the high pitch of a meow. I constantly remonstrated him to the effect that if he really wanted to catch something, he needed to shut up. Sitting there talking away at the prey was a bad strategy, I told him, unless he planned on talking them to death.
He thought nothing of walking up to strange animals and people, rubbing against them, and talking a blue streak. Huge dogs, skunks, woodchucks, whatever. I firmly believe he wouldn’t have hesitated to walk up to a bloody wolf and attempt to rub against it. When animals reacted meanly to Mandy’s advances, he would dash away making little cries in his throat, wearing a confused expression as if to say: what the hell was that all about? His extreme friendliness meant I always had to be wary of people stealing him. Many people over the years asked me if they could have him. More than once I caught children walking away down a street with Mandy in their arms, and I would have to go after them. What are you doing with that cat, I’d say. I’m takin’ him home. He likes me. To which I’d sourly reply: he likes everybody. but he’s my cat and you can’t take him. I wonder how many new grey hairs I got worrying about people stealing him.
His face in this picture shows the precise way Mandy always greeted the world: full-on, fearless, and honestly; eager to make a new friend or have a new adventure. Every furred animal in the house — dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs — was happy to lie down and have a cuddle with Mandy, to be groomed by him, to receive the generosity of his generous love.
And yes, he talked. Mandy was driven to communicate. Talk, talk. Everybody who ever knew him commented both on his friendliness and his talking. They referred to him as the Talker. This drive for communication is something he and I had in common, for I am also an inveterate communicator. People who have little to say bore me real fast. But as much as Mandy liked to talk, he also liked to be talked to. All the talking I did around the house with my animals over the years was appreciated by all the animals, and certainly by Mandy too. Often he answered me.
So how did he get a girl’s name. When he first arrived, I thought he was a female. His hair in his nether regions was thick and fluffy. It was difficult to see what was going on back there without finger-probing, which on my first examination I didn’t feel like doing. I thought he was a she, and because he looked so much like my cat Bandit who had died earlier that year, I wanted him to have a name that rhymed with Bandy. Result: Mandy. After a few months, when Mandy failed to come into heat several times, I did the finger-probing and found the evidence of a neutered male. But he had his name by then, and we were all used to it, so it stayed.
Update 16 June 2009: A year since I wrote this post. Is he still alive? The animal “shelter” was very secretive about where Mandy and Judah had gone. They had been placed in a foster home, but again, I was not allowed to know where that home was or to visit. I was given a deadline of May 14 last year to reclaim them, and since I was not able to find a place other than a rented room by then, they were adopted and swallowed up. Never any visits, never any small bit of comfort for my pain. Do I have to say that I despise that animal “shelter”? They had murdered 3 of my cats on March 24 last year, just two weeks into their “foster care.”
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read… Cutting the pie… Shadowpoems…
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which words
May 8, 2011
Page Six
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken thread to you, For my returning. ~~~ elwyn brooks white from: natural history
I have never discovered, since the day these animals were taken from me in 2008, the words that are accurate for the rage and for the grief. Or for the loneliness. I don’t expect I’ll ever find them, if I haven’t by now. Either I simply don’t know them, never met them, or they don’t exist at all.
They were my children. Anyone who has loved and lived with an animal knows very well that that is your child. They’re also friends, and companions, and for me at least, a source of endless study and learning and laughter and tears. They were my sharing, the only beings who shared life with me. But they are always children. Because they’re not in the wild fending for themselves, we need to care for them as children who will never grow up and move out. They can’t open the cans, the doors, the cages, the bags, by themselves (in most cases), so we need to do it for them. They can’t get themselves to the doctor, or administer their own medications. We do these things. We give treats, baths, nail cuttings. They stay babies in particular ways, and we, the mummies and daddies, if we love them as we should, take care of them.
And there I was…. plodding along in my own life with my children/companions/friends, when enough aggressive and conscienceless people did (and failed to do) enough mean-spirited things that a day arrives when I am tossed out of home to the streets, and animals are taken away and hidden in various places. Fourteen children gone all in a moment. Maybe you’ll sneer back that losing an animal isn’t as bad as losing a human child. For most people I know that’s true, but it isn’t as true for me. If I generalize it, can you come up with some empathy? Imagine that you had in the world only fourteen beings who loved you, whom you loved. Maybe they were people, maybe animals, maybe a combination. You had fourteen beings whom you considered your family and your best friends, and someone bangs on your door and takes them all away. You never see them again. You don’t know if they’re dead or alive. Every living being to whom you were of value, who was of value to you, all gone at once. Say you leave the house one day and your wife and dog and cat and kid stay behind. You return to a house that has exploded, no survivors. All in a moment, every single one is gone. We expect that we will lose the ones we love one at a time. We don’t expect cataclysms, but sometimes they happen.
Three years now, since these events that tore me and my animals/children/friends apart forever. The fourth mother’s day today without my family. Can you know how much I think of them this day, and every day? Can you imagine a cataclysm in your own life? Do you have that level of imagination or empathy? Probably not. In three years, I’ve rarely encountered it. What I’ve encountered, for the most part, is people who want me to stop whining about animals and just get better. Stop grieving, stop hating my days, stop hating the human race. And most of all, don’t bother me about a pack of animals. They’re only animals, after all.
My guinea pig is here for her second mother’s day with me, the first child to be dared after the cataclysm. She’s having her playtime now, while I clean her cage. She gets playtime anyway, whether the cage is being cleaned or not. And the echoes of the stolen family are all around me, and inside me. Their photos are on the walls. We listened to a radio show I used to listen to with them, a show I haven’t listened to for several years. How familiar and normal and right it was to listen to that show again. For a second or so it was so very normal that I forgot I wasn’t still in my own life, with my own family around me listening to the music too. But then of course memory kicks in, and you realize it is not your own life after all. The one you had. The one that was stolen. Stolen not by an act of nature, which is awful enough. No flood or earthquake came to take your home and loved ones from you. No, it was the deliberate and planned actions of vicious human beings. Worse. As horrible as it is to lose it all to an accident, it is far worse, I can tell you, to lose it because others purposefully and savagely planned to take it from you. Yes, they are, among other things, savages to me, these beasts who destroyed my family.
This page is for my fourteen children, on the fourth mother’s day without them. One in a long line of futile attempts to find the words.
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read… All my stars… Mugsy’s book…
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lizzie
March 14, 2011
Page Five
sehnen posted on Jun 09, 2008, greenfield | views: 131 | Tags: Ix, in company withx
(from the blogs)
Lizzie was the oldest of the animals taken on 12 March 2008. For several months I was told she was being kept by an extremely slimy priest in Turners Falls. In early 2010, when my therapist at the time spoke to this same unholy christian on the phone, he was told that the priest had kept the parrot “for a while,” and then he’d given her to “someone else.”
One of the fourteen stolen, Lizzie was a Senegal parrot, and the only parrot I’ve ever had. She was three when I got her in 1991, and is now twenty, if she’s alive. She had yellow eyes, which never ceased delighting me.
I’ve been told recently by two different humans that she’s living with that unholy, smarmy, lying priest in Turners Falls, but both of these people have lied to me before, so who knows? Senegals are not talkers, not in human style anyway, but Lizzie always spoke perfectly fine Senegal parrot. She learned cockatiel pretty well, and for several years spoke a very respectable cat. Lizzie was definitely an oddball, like me, and through the long years we had our adventures, especially when she decided to exit her cage without permission. Parrots are very prone to this, anyway. She gave me one excellent bite in January, not long before we were destroyed. Got infected and everything. Parrots are prone to biting, too. But over seventeen years Lizzie only bit me four times, and only badly that once. Maybe she knew we were finished, and wanted to give me one hell of a bite to remember her by. I remember it, Lizzie Bean. But I would have remembered you in any case, bite or no bite.
For all our shared years, there was the continuing and never-solved mystery of the top of Lizzie’s head. It was bare as a boiled egg when I got her, and for more than seventeen years I tried to get those damned feathers to grow in and stay in. They grew in scores of times. They were perfectly happy to grow in. They just never stayed for very long.
I tried everything. Things I read in my bird magazines, things I talked over with the pet shop owners, things other parrot-keepers told me. Everything. No, I didn’t take her to the vet, but I did ask vets about it when I had another animal in their exam rooms. My small amount of money had to stretch for a lot of animals, and I never could pay for vet visits that were for something harmless. The first theory for bald birds is always nutritional lack, but I offered Lizzie a huge variety of things. Most of them she declined to eat, being always an extremely finicky eater. Next I tried vitamins in the water. All of my birds got these for at least half of every year anyway, starting with spring molt. Second after nutrition is always the anxiety theory. Anxious birds often pull out their feathers. I gave Lizzie more time out of her cage, etc. I set her up so she had no other birds too close beside her, etc. And still her head would fill in and look nice, and then go bald again. I would occasionally catch her eating a feather she would hold in her little birdie hand, but it was almost never a head feather. Wing and tail were the kind she liked to munch on, and only when they were falling out anyway. She never yanked them out herself until they were already loose. Nor did I, in more than seventeen years, catch her pulling out a head feather more than two or three times, and I was home a great deal of the time.
I never solved the mystery. The day Lizzie was taken from me and hidden inside the sleazy priest’s house (I wasn’t allowed to go inside and see my birds), the top of her head was bald again. This priest, and some others he’s palsy with, started passing malicious and patently false gossip about me and my animals two days after the eviction; gossip relating to what “terrible condition” they were in and how I was “a hoarder who didn’t take care of them.” One hundred percent nasty, bullshit gossip, and very typical of the filth in this town. Lizzie’s head wasn’t one of the slander items brought back to me from Turners by the friend I was staying with in Greenfield, but I’m sure it must have been passed around as further evidence of my cruel neglect of my animals. May all who passed this stinking dirt rot in the fiery hell that they believe their made-up god will send them to if they sin. They sin.
If Lizzie (and supposedly four cats too) are really with this priest, why didn’t these people who were only too happy to tell me this, offer to take me to visit them? Because cruelty, taunting and teasing, are a whole lot more fun than mercy and kindness, it seems. Even to self-desribed christians.
Update 22 June 2009: Is Lizzie dead? She would be 21 if she were still alive. Is she still with that priest? Was she ever? I was told so many things about my animals last year, some of them conflicting, that I still more than a year later don’t know what to believe. And if that priest truly did have Lizzie and four of my cats, why was I never granted the kindness of being allowed to visit them? There are people in Turners Falls who know the answers to these questions. Church-going “christians” who keep these secrets from me for over a year, despite the pain and grief for me. I want to know how christian that is.
The lyrics I wrote here on this post last year are something I can only glance at, they tear at me so. I was with you, since you were babies, and human cruelty tore it all apart.
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eccentricity
March 14, 2011
Page Four
14 April 2008, Greenfield (animals, books, lousy mental health care, photos)
Tags: animals, books, my family, photos
What’s so wrong with preferring the company of animals to that of people? It’s not average, it’s not mainstream, but I don’t think it’s any worse than “odd” or “eccentric.” Maybe you’d be surprised if you knew how many people over 55 years have mocked me, treated me like a flaky child, or outright attacked me in some way over my love of having a lot of animals, and my obvious choosing of them over most human beings. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. You’d think I was a child molester or a drug dealer, or some other reprehensible beast. I prefer animals to most people. That has made me a target — many times.
These are their names, the fourteen family members, friends of mine who vanished because the Department of Mental Health couldn’t be bothered to find us a place to live:
Mishi and Brainse, my dogs
The cats: Shiloh, Chan, Ziidjian (killed)
Mandy, Judah, Chailin
Aram, Abel, Chani
The birds: Lizzie, Tuuschi, Canajoharie
I’ve been told a variety of different stories about the eleven animals who haven’t been reported as killed yet. There isn’t much truth being told to me by anyone in this personal devastation. I begin to wonder if people even know what the word truth means. I don’t what to believe about their locations, and about what’s going to be done with them. I have never been allowed to visit them in the places where they’re being kept.
A week ago, one of my doctors patted me on the shoulder and said with a happy smile, “We’ll have to get your animals back for you.” What did she mean by that?
(pearl at www.gaelsong.com)
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in the rabbit hole
March 14, 2011
Page Three
In the remaining months of 2008, I was a creature I’d never expected to be, and one I never hope to be again. I’ve said in many of the early blog posts that in 2006, after the mob-connected tenant moved into my building, my animals and I fell into Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole. The animals are dead now, and out of that hole, but I remain. The surreality and absurdity of the world I exist in are still there, but the intensity and shape of these things has changed over time. Early on, though, it was fiercely powerful and totally alien.
Part of me felt like the Energizer Bunny, propelled onward like a little dervish by a heartless, soul-less motor. One step after another, one word after another, one meal after another; a robot. Another part of me walked about completely dazed and baffled. How can this be that at age 55 I’m thrown into the streets like some airy twit who didn’t pay her rent? That for the first time in my life I have no home, have no animals? How could the agency that was supposed to help me be so negligent? I already had post-traumatic stress disorder before these events. After them, after the worst trauma of my life by far, I was in a state of shock that lasted into the beginning of 2009.
Just about everything and everyone was hollow. Just about everything was repellant. Sleeping and eating in strange places. I, the recluse, thrust out into a world of constant humans, constant bodies and voices on the streets and in the restaurants, the libraries, the stores. I also have Asperger’s Syndrome, and that condition makes me just as resistant to constant dealings with people and herding with people as the ptsd does. I was completely in that pervasive state of shock, and the world was just as illogical and untruthful and mentally loopy as Wonderland. And I was still being told lies by social service people, so that aspect of the surreality never stopped.
I was, and remain, the failure mommy, who failed to save her family and keep us all together. And the incompetent mommy,who had become too physically ill to work for a living and buy us any old little shack of a house, to free us from alcholic Turners Falls landlords, and psychotic ones, and just plain stupid ones. And the stupid mommy, who trusted social service workers who were totally untrustworthy and duplicitous and lazy. And as this dazed, shocked, and failed mommy, I repeated over and over for months in my mind: they’re gone. my animals are gone. Trying to get myself to see it as real.
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gone
March 14, 2011
Page Two
sehnen posted on May 05, 2008 | views: 69 | Tags: failingx (from one of the blogs, less than two months after the eviction)
Still, still Monday 5 May 2008… Turners
It’s a failure Mommy who can’t protect her children. It’s an incompetent Mommy who has such a raging immune system that she can’t work and buy a house in which to keep her family safe. It’s a stupid Mommy who trusts the wrong people. It’s a chicken Mommy who is so afraid of things that other people do all the time, that she couldn’t be tougher against the world of humans and maybe save her family. Whatever else I am, and I am some very good things, in my own opinion, I am also a failure, and incompetent, and stupid about people, and a person with a whole lot of fears about other people. 
Update 30 May 2009: Oh, they’re gone. It hurts so much, I can’t desribe it. My failure to be able to make it with people. My failure to be able to butter up the landlady, even after her erratic emotions and prodigious lies had come to frighten me. My failure to get the idea of pills: maybe the pills I’m taking now would have helped me bear up better in an emotionally charged situation. I really fall apart in situations like that. My failure to hang on to the letter of complaint I wrote about the mafia-chick. If I’d done any of these things differently, there might not have been an eviction, and I might still be living with my family now. But on the other side, if the landlady disliked me so much, why couldn’t she just have ignored me and collected my rent? No, she had to be so vicious as to destroy me. People who choose vicousness and cruelty always could make a different choice. They choose aggression because they enjoy it, it gives them a feeling of power. And if there’s one thing my ex-landlady loves, it’s power.
(r.monti sculpture at www.toscano.com)
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to begin
March 1, 2011
Page One
without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. ~~~ aristotleHow does one begin? To describe how deeply fourteen animals (dogs, cats and birds) were loved, and how deeply they were needed. How vital they were to this particular person with Asperger’s Syndrome. How vital they were to this person with post-traumatic stress and depression and a physical illness that can be diabolically painful at times. I don’t know.
I know that what most people feel for their animals — and these are good people who love their animals — doesn’t quite reach the depth that my love for animals does. I know this, because these good people who love their animals have told me so over the years: I love them Anne, but I don’t love them quite the way you do.
In 2008, as the result of an illegal eviction and a gross failure of service by a huge “helping” agency, my fourteen animals were taken from me, hidden in various places, and presumably eventually euthanized. I was told ever-changing stories about where they were. No one said, except on one occasion, that I could visit them. I walked down a hill on
Wednesday the 12th March in 2008, where some of my animals had already been hauled off and others were waiting for such a fate, and I never saw even one of them again. Every single creature I loved, every single member of what was my very real and very necessary family, gone forever in the time it took me to walk down a hill.
I already had post-traumatic stress disorder on that day. What do I have now — PTSD times fourteen? Unless you have lost everyone you love on the same day, how can you know what I’m feeling, what I felt that day?
(photo is from a greeting card. i’ve reduced it to the point where you can’t see that there are four stars shaped like circles, and those shaped with five points number fourteen)
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The lines below are from a song I wrote in 1994, fourteen years before the decimation of my life and my animals’ lives. Looking at them now in the light of what has happened, these words make me wonder if I was having some kind of a premonition. Lots of people I’ve known believe they have them, and that others have them, but I never really put myself into that group. Yet I find it eery in some way that these words would actually be reflected back at me by true events, fourteen years later.
where her stars on this night why this moon alone mourning here stolen stars spirit lost and goneThis book will be a pastiche of blog posts from the last three and half years, and pages newly written. All of the writing I have done since the eviction began as a hope to find some help somewhere in cyberspace: a sympathetic lawyer or journalist, or both. When that didn’t happen, I still kept writing. To fill empty, ugly, alien hours. To have something to do, since for the first time in my life I had no animals to care for. To get it out somewhere what had been done to us. To state the truth. And finally, every page written about animals in what is at this moment nearly four years, as a tribute to them. To who they were as individuals, who they were as my family, and every single good thing, every single moment they gave me.
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read… Spite and malice… All my stars…
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