LOVE AND HATE July 7, 2015

Sticky wicket subject for a brief column. It’s Tuesday in Paradise. A heady blooming perfumed day. Always a beautiful day in paradise. I owe my editor a column and  really don’t feel up to it. The bank behind my house is alive with walking iris. Their little white heads are cheerfully bobbing in the early morning light. My feral flock is scratching and munching on bugs and other juicy chicken delights. A light breeze sets leaves dancing on the bank and slipping silently through the iris I see one kitten stalking. Reba. It’s a game. She never catches anything, but I love to watch her hunt. She think she’s a big deal. Head honcho feline in this neck of the woods. The chickens trickle off with a flutter and a wink. They blend in so well they disappear in plain sight.

So, what has this to do with the heavy theme: Love and hate? Well, at that  moment, I felt very loving, until a sudden sodden thought awry leaped in my mind and spoiled the revery. Is it true that love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, my mind queries? Is it true  you can never really appreciate–or feel–these deep human emotions without experiencing the other? Can one  know what it means to love, if one has  never known what it means to hate?

Love and hate are powerful–and potent–emotions. Love can be gentle and kind. It soars the human condition. I don’t think hate can ever be gentle and kind. I think it must always be aggressive and nasty. It sours the soul, if you believe in such a mysterious entity. It hammers the beating heart flat with bludgeoning blasts of red hot steel. The mad iron monger in the sky’s murderous obstruction heaved beneath the feet  of the human travelor.

One of my favorite people, my feed store man, made a  profound statement,  “Atheists just love everything,” he said one day. Out of the blue.

Think about it.

Can that be true?

And, anyway, what’s it got to do with chickens and kittens and walking iris? What does it have to do with a fragrant day in paradise? With a column over due?

Everything, I think.

I quoted a Biblical passage recently and sent it to the paper in response to a Christian teacher’s letter to the Forum in which he quoted a  passage concerning his interpretation of what his God had to say about gay marriage.

Here’s my quote:

“If any man comes to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sister, and yea his own life also, he cannot be a disciple.” (Luke 14:26) It’s writ in red. A direct quote  in the New Testament.

Well,  fortunately,  Jesus  didn’t say anything about loving kittens and chickens and walking iris and an editor who’s going to be cranky receiving a late column.

To wrap it up, may I say? “If you must hate, hate cancer.”

 

 

 

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Bettejo’s Cat House November 20, 2014

Cat’s are really getting a bad rap. Not only on Kauai-the largest and most infamous extermination island in Hawaii-where we want to extinct parakeets, feral chickens- ‘specially crowing roosters-coqui frogs, cats and other living things. (Not tourists, or rich guys in gated communities, or military personnel who shoot off rockets and stuff at Barking Sands.} But lately, cat surfing around, I’ve discovered they don’t make  good pets. Too independent, won’t come when called, hate to be petted, undomesticated, night prowling predators, and-for goodness sake- a health hazard.

Cat poop causes dread disease and possible death! Horrors!! Why didn’t somebody tell me? I’ve been around cats and cat poop for 84 years. My first cat, Helen, a yellow tiger, slept with me in my crib. When she and I outgrew the  crib, she slept in an overhead light fixture in my bedroom and once I put her in a flour bin, which startled my mother when she opened it to bake a cake and a white flash of angry feline fur flew out in her face. My mother screamed. My father, busy chopping the head off a fat rooster in the back yard, yelled, “What now?”

“Helen just jumped out of the flour bin.”

“How’d she get in there?”

Neither Helen nor I ever told. When Helen went to cat heaven, my father bought me a Siamese cat.  At that time we lived in an apartment in San Francisco  and she walked around a six-story ledge every night-rain or shine- red eyes scaring the neighbors. We named her Wishee.  We also had a Collie, named Lady,  who chased cable cars. My next cat was a black cat named Moses, who lived with us in Montclair, then Pleasanton, then Marin County. Mose would only enter the house on Wolf’s Grade through a living room window, and exit from my parents bedroom in the middle of the night. He’d put a paw under their closed-door and shake it.  It had a wrought iron handle that rattled down the hallway like an angry wraith. I don’t know that it awakened the dead, but it certainly wakened me and my parents. I guarantee you, one of us got out of bed and let the cat out.

Someone, in the cat bad- rapping scene, asked when and why we domesticated the damn things to begin with and, indeed, it is somewhat of a mystery.

What we know is by the Middle Egyptian Empire the cat as a fisher, hunter, and ratter was known and appreciated. Later on it was worshipped as a god.

So? Well, my two new kittens, Reba and Rosa, love to be petted. Come when called. Purr in harmony. Live in a three-story cat palace that probably cost more than most kid’s cribs. My house is a cat house. They romp in the rafters. Climb the walls. Jump up and down on counters and tables. Sleep in a lump in my water-bed. Eat like horses.

And, dare I ask? Why do you think they call it pussy?