Bear, With Me

Way back in 1994, I became an inaugural subscriber to Colorado Central magazine, the brainchild of Colorado’s most popular pundit ever, Ed Quillen, and his wife Martha. I even had a piece erroneously published early on — Ed heard me read an excerpt of a short story I’d written, although he thought it was non-fiction and I didn’t realize, since it was a young magazine, that he didn’t publish fiction.

Colorado Central went along for these many years, although at some point Ed and Martha turned over ownership to Mike Rosso, who maybe three-ish years ago in turn handed the reins to Cailey McDermott, a young woman with a husband and toddler. Last August, Ms. McDermott sent out an issue with the news that she had taken a job as editor of Salida’s weekly newspaper for financial reasons.

She thought, in her letter to her readers, that perhaps the newspaper might be assisting with production and ad sales and that she would still marshal editorial content and the monthly magazine would continue on.

And that was the last we Colorado Central subscribers heard of our magazine.

I imagine, with my veteran experience of a newspaper that was variously weekly, twice weekly and daily (finally settled on weekly), that perhaps Ms. McDermott believed there would be plenty of time to still tend to a monthly publication with a stable of writers that produced most of the content but that she found out otherwise. I don’t think she ever even managed to put something on the magazine’s website saying, “Sorry, closed.”

Or maybe, every month, she thinks she will get something together for the next month. Maybe she plans it all out in her mind, mentally assuring her readers that no, she hasn’t forgotten them and that any ol’ day she’s going to get it back on track.

See where I’m going with this?

I last posted to this space in November, after already sliding to a bi-monthly schedule. [A meeting of the mindless resulted in the decision that twice a month is semi-monthly while every other month is bi-.] I don’t know if there’s a term for every four months: quadratic? (It would have the benefit of incorporating “erratic.”)

I meant to write, honest. But I didn’t. I’ve even mostly failed miserably in e-mail replies and, most egregiously, sympathy notes. The only good time for me to write — me, who always used the hours from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. as key writing time but now who goes to bed around 9:30 — is in the morning, and although I have a five-hour cushion between waking and working for cash, I have that all filled with very important things that don’t include blogging.

Sometimes I’m hard-pressed to identify these “things,” although there is my ever-expanding game/puzzle time. First it was just Wordle, then it was Wordle and Quordle, then Wordle, Quordle and Waffle, and now my dang niece Ellie has got me hooked on Connections, which irritates me with their rather stupid categories even as I continue to play. Oh, plus my Washington Post quiz, which asks one current events question four days a week and then 11 questions that can be answered any time Friday through Sunday.

There are plants to water twice a week, which maybe doesn’t sound like much but then you haven’t seen our plant collection. I’ve also, recently, gone back to my photo project, converting my picture collection to digital, and I think I am finally doing this correctly, grouping photos, tossing duplicates, scanning at the higher 600 dpi, labeling (since in many of them I’m left wondering who that one person is among all my friends) . . . it’s a labor of love, but still labor.

I need to get myself washed and fed and informed (I have ZERO idea how I ever used to read two complete newspapers every day, although there never used to be thousands of comments below each story, so maybe that’s my answer right there).

And there are animals, three of them, with the needs of many.

There’s Na Ki’o, the diabetic cat who may have recently reached 16 years of age (we only have his foundling day, the day he came to live with us 9.5 years ago, for certain). He’s a pretty easy, mellow cat with a ton of health issues who needs lots of small meals. He walks more on his forelegs than his front feet; his back legs sometimes shoot out sideways; his poor eyes are mostly cataracts, but if you give him food, a warm lap and regular home visits from the senior-care vets, he’s a happy camper.

Marrakesh at initial glance seems like he’s the one of the three who needs the least attention, but that turns out to not be true: he wants plenty of attention. It’s just that he wants it exactly his way, and we’re still figuring out, almost eight foundling days later (which probably puts him anywhere from 13 to 16 years of age), what his way is. It involves a lot of opening doors and rage against bad weather.

He disappeared on us for two days right before the winter solstice, and I’m afraid I lacked the faith all my friends maintained. In a solstice miracle, he returned that night, smelling like laundry soap. Now that he has a tracking collar on, we know that he makes regular forays across the highway (or perhaps under it through irrigation culverts) where there is a trailer park, and I’m guessing he got locked in their laundry facility.

[Having just read a lengthy discussion about the evils of letting cats roam outside — and we are certainly not thrilled to learn that he’s been crossing a busy highway probably for four years now — I will tell you only this: Marrakesh’s spirit would be crushed completely if he could not get outside. I know this is likely to result in more miserable days like those before the solstice for Lynn and me, but he arrived in our care as a mostly outdoor cat and we have reached a compromise that he isn’t supposed to go out at night, and I’m not willing to make him be something he’s just not, an indoor cat.]

Then there is Bear, our 12-year-old dog of not even two years yet. He looks a lot like Oz, who died two years ago today, but he’s definitely a different animal. When Bear is inside, and sometimes when he’s out, he’s just like Visa: he’s everywhere you want to be. But while Visa sees that as an asset, with a dog it just means a tripping hazard.

I actually thought Bear was going to be Lynn’s dog. She’s the one he went up to and rested his chin on her knee when we met him. But he came to work with me mornings and Lynn, whose schedule is pretty much unscheduled, was not home with him in the afternoons, so maybe that’s why he decided he was going to be my dog. Who is everywhere I want to be. Unless he’s tripping someone else at work or snuggling up to Blake, our UPS delivery person who has five dogs of his own at home but still has plenty of heart, scratches and snacks to give Bear.

Bear, who didn’t make a sound for the first three weeks he spent with us, turns out to be a barker. I don’t think he barks when he’s home alone, but he certainly does in the car and, to the dismay of my colleagues, sometimes when I leave him at work, where he’s surrounded by people who will love and feed him but who are not me. It’s called separation anxiety and Bear, who sticks to me like Visa, has a serious case of it.

I hope, if I have any readers left, that you do not suffer the same sort of anxiety. I am done promising anything, because every time I promise to do better I do worse. I’m still here, but so is life, and lately it’s been getting in my way. Or at least my blogging way. With Cailey McDermott firmly in mind, I will say only: I hope to see you here in the future.

[Update: while trying quickly (and failing) to find my fictional non-fiction at coloradocentralmagazine.com, I saw a banner announcing new ownership and a return of the magazine this summer. That makes me feel better right there.]