America is a weird country. We got a call from our vet clinic the other night at dinnertime. They were calling to inquire how our big ginger cats, Gato and Neko, were feeling after their yearly shots.

At the time of the call, both cats were tangled up beneath our feet under the kitchen table hoping for some fallout from our dinner. We assured our clinic that all was well (except that we would have to be careful not to trip over our panhandlers).

My husband and I have cared for seven of our family elders. Not one of their numerous physicians- and some were excellent- ever bothered to call and follow up after serious procedures. In fact, no doctor even bothered to show up and provide comfort when these people were dying. Hospice workers, underpaid but remarkable nursing home aides and we cared for the dying.

In contrast, a vet came to our home in our cat Blaise’s last hour and stayed to comfort us. Is it time, perhaps, to question a system where animals get more compassionate care than people?

A remedy is at hand. I made a checklist the other day. I have a heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, skin and various bones, actually fewer bones than in a cat’s body. Other mammals have all these parts as well. I am at risk for a carload of diseases; heart, cancer, arthritis, respiratory, etc. Ditto for our pet mammals. Obviously, I should have a vet as a doctor.

Tongue in cheek, I discussed this possibility with one of our wonderful vets. She proceeded to tell us how hard she has to fight for quality, personal care for her own aging father. By using her medical skills, she was able to question the doctors med choices for her dad and get him on better medications.

Why aren’t the libertarians crusading for our right to choose a vet? I guess they are just too busy taking health care of any kind away from all of us.

Orioles will always be magical to me. When I was a child, orioles lived in our neighbor, Mrs. Kurtz’s, wondrous yard.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing in our alley holding the rusty wires of the fence that marked off Mrs. Kurtz’s large rectangular garden plot. I would stare at the beautiful world this elderly Czech-American widow created and be enchanted. To me, the Garden of Eden couldn’t have been more mesmerizing .

I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood  of  small  houses with an alley running down the middle of the block. Many neighbors tended gardens and flowers, but none could compare to the oasis that was one house over from mine.

Mrs. Kurtz’s house was completely unassuming; two story, frame and gray as all the paint had weathered off. The yard was the consuming joy and treasure of this woman’s life. She worked in it all day during gardening season, and the earth responded to her love tenfold.

I am sure it was the vibrant colors of her flowers that first attracted me, but the garden design was compelling as well. A grass path wound like a river through the rectangular garden plot. I imagined myself walking through that profusion of flowers. But in the 1950’s children did not rule the world, and I knew full well what the word “trespass” meant.

Pear and other fruit trees filled the yard not occupied by the garden. And only Mrs. Kurtz had orioles. Every year they would return and build a spectacular hanging nest in one of her pear trees. I anthropomorphized all animals and was certain the orioles knew that she loved them.

Yesterday, I bought an amazingly expensive bag of oranges and the largest jar of grape jelly on my grocery store shelf. I will never be a gardener like my beloved childhood neighbor, but I’m going to do my best to keep the orioles that are fluttering outside my window.

If I start to tell a joke, stop me. It is genetically impossible for me to deliver a punch line.

I know I’m not a humorless person. My husband and I frequently fill the house with laughter. We are, in fact, a perfect match when it comes to our taste in humor. We both love Garrison Keillor and his weekly Prairie Home Companion monologue. And neither of us can hit the off button on the radio fast enough when Garrison does his annual joke show. How many “Unitarians changing a light bulb” jokes can a person stand?

I got to thinking recently about what makes us laugh, and suddenly I was laughing out loud. My husband asked what was so hilarious. Since I was making the bed at the time, he knew that wasn’t the source of my mirth.

“Remember,” I managed to sputter out, “when we got the sleeper couch stuck upside down in the stairwell?”  Then, both of us were laughing.

The sleeper bed had lived a full life and was headed for the trash pickup. We debated which door to carry it out. Down the stairs to the basement and out to the driveway was our agreed upon exit route. We made it out of the bedroom, around a corner and almost down to the bottom of the stairs when the couch got wedged between the ceiling and the side walls. We did not panic, even though, as everyone knows, sofa beds weigh a zillion pounds. We both still had faith that with a little maneuvering it would be freed and out on the driveway a mere 12 feet away.

Ten minutes and 10,000 spent calories later, we concluded that we had indeed managed  to wedge the couch permanently in the stairwell. I was holding the back end up trying to mitigate wall damage. The wallboard at my husband’s end was already destroyed. We started to laugh. We had unwittingly put ourselves in an “I Love Lucy” skit. If the cats had been filming us, we could have gone viral on YouTube.

Simultaneously, we arrived at the only solution.

“Get the saw,” I said. A full hour of sawing ensued, and the couch was removed in pieces, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “sectional couch”.

I hate to admit it, but I do know what makes us laugh…it’s us. I’ll save the story of how my husband accidentally blew up the bathtub for another day.

“Wear a crown of eyes around your head,” was the advice of Joan Miro’s art teacher in Barcelona. That is wonderful advice for any student who yearns to be more observant.

“Do not put your eyeballs in your forehead,” is what I tell my middle school students in my best teacher voice. My younger students draw spontaneously and would be harmed by constant criticism. But by middle school, the techniques of art are appropriate subject matter, and a lesson in self portraits always includes warnings about eyeball placement. Then I add, “Don’t make me go crazy when I walk around the room in fifteen minutes and your eyeballs are where your brain is supposed to be…literally.” The kids laugh, knowing they would never do that.

The students start drawing and erasing, and I hold up examples of portraits by da Vinci, Rembrandt, Matisse, Grant Wood  and Alex Katz. I note that these masters do not situate eyeballs in their sitter’s foreheads.

I begin my walk around the room and stop at a desk. I quietly say to the student, “Look hard at what you have just drawn. Do you see anything wrong?”

A short period of silence is followed by a sheepish voice saying,”I put my eyes in my forehead.”

“Well, you did draw that eyeball beautifully,” I will add. “Now draw it again and try to put it where it belongs.”

This exchange happens all the time, and, almost always, the artist and I can laugh about it.

Getting the details right, but failing to see how the details fit into the bigger picture causes grief in more than art classes. That tower at Pisa has beautiful detailing on the outer walls. None of us is immune.

Brains are great things to have, but they can lead our eyes seriously astray.

Here are 2 kindergarten portraits, and 4 middle school portraits by my students.

I’ve always loved Fridays. I was born on a Friday and have been looking forward to these exceptional days ever since.

As a child growing up in a Catholic family in the 1950s, I asked the same question then as I do now: How can giving up meat be viewed as a sacrifice? My mother cooked all my favorite meals on meatless Fridays; home made macaroni and cheese, fish fillets topped with buttered crumbs, tuna casserole. And to top that off, bedtime was extended. I viewed staying up late as one of the best perks of adulthood.

Fridays continue to charm. The concept of a seven day week is, of course, totally arbitrary, being without any astronomical underpinnings. Nothing goes around anything. Perhaps the week was invented to accommodate the deeply felt human need for T.G.I.F. .

Friday is named after my all time favorite mythological figure, Freyja (fray ya),  the Norse goddess of love, beauty, battle and magic. She was the leader of the Valkyries and the strongest female figure in the Nordic pantheon of superheroes. Freyja was wife to Od (who mysteriously disappeared) and mistress to many. She broached no nonsense from guy gods but made love to four dwarfs who crafted her magical necklace named Brisingamen. Freyja wept tears of gold which turned to amber if they fell into the sea.

Freyja’s mode of transportation was stellar: she had a chariot pulled by two large gray…some say blue…cats. These fabulous feline totems were named Bygul (bee gool) and Trjegul (tree gool). Today’s popular image of a witch with a black cat originates from Freyja and her cats. She is the goddess of cats and those who care for them.

So when Friday rolls around, relax, anticipate the weekend, slowly eat a lovely dinner and raise a glass to Freyja and her cats. All those other love goddesses, Venus, Aphrodite, Lakshmi and Erzulie must be jealous. They don’t get a cat chariot.