WITH EVERY TRUE HAPPINESS

I should just admit this outright, I don't always know what cats want. Cooder slept way in this morning, happily and comfortably ensconced on her silk down pillow on the newly installed chair. Since she finally deigned to enter the world of the moving, she has been restless. Yes, there have been Greenies. And more Greenies. But could the gentle (yet incessant) scratching be a request for even MORE Greenies?

This was a post I began a few days ago, so I was kind of trying to write. Cooder is, of course, still in search of Greenies, although right now she's having some water. Emmylou just jumped into the just cleaned litter box. Oh, the simple joys.

I still have twenty pages or so of Proust to read tonight and it is 10:45 so I should get to it. Still battling the dementors and sidekicks, overeating and avoidance napping,(although my nap was very short, ending when the carillon recording did My Country 'Tis of Thee and The Lord Bless and Keep You).

My mother and I had a wide ranging conversation this afternoon about friendship, generosity, kindness, disappointment, and expectations, among other things. Subsequent to that, came across this related, if tangential, Proust musing on the subject of expectation, albeit expectation in a different context.

But it is not thus, in the bustle of daily life, with every true happiness, with every great sorrow? In a room full of other people we receive from the woman we love the answer, auspicious or fatal, which we have been awaiting for the last year. But we must go on talking, ideas come flocking one after another, unfolding a smooth surface which is pricked now and then at the very most by a dull throb from the memory, infinitely more profound but very narrow, that misfortune has come upon us. If, instead of misfortune, it is happiness, it may be that not until many years have elapsed will we recall that the most important event in our emotional life occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention, or ever to become aware of it almost, at a social gathering to which we had gone solely in the expectation of the event.

Trees reaching out in hope or expectation?

I've been watching a DVD, New Orleans Music in Exile, that I got from the library. I have some new musicians to check out. I am groovin' to Papa Mali. I can see why he hooked up with Bill Kreutzmann, formerly of the Grateful Dead, although I thought he was too deaf to play any more. And although I should go to sleep and read Proust, I just might watch a bit of Sing Me Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle on Netflix.