Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine.
~ Thomas Aquinas
The conspiracy against our getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep began around bedtime last night.
We'd been responsible in our eating and drinking, and were sufficiently confident that the Bills had things well under control that we gave up at halftime and crawled in bed to watch an episode of Wings on the computer, and perhaps nod off by nine.
And this is when the shouting from next door got our attention.
No, not from the assemblage of derelict addicts and Willie Nelson look-a-likes in the crumbling house to our east. This would be the steady stream of human noise emanating from the quaint old Victorian on the other side.
These people scare me a little, in their abject weirdness.
I first met Patience, the forty-ish matriarch, when I felt the temerity to ascend their steps to deliver some mail that had been wrongly delivered to Tara a few months back. Patience is an archetype that does not exist in the South--pale, thin-lipped, sporting a mannish haircut, with no discernible sense of humor or warmth. The very embodiment of northeastern feminism that rolls around in the typical Southerner's brain.
When she came to the door, she gave me the look of someone who'd been interrupted while conjuring demons in the basement, taking the handful of correspondence without comment except a flat "thank you" before closing the door in my face. Nice to meet you too, neighbor.
Mr. Scaryfamily, who projects the everyman vibe of most serial killers, has some sort of impulsive disorder that regularly compels him to run like a pilot meeting the claxon on alert into his 58 Ford two door ("Tudor"? I think they called them that once in a dreadful play on words) for a tire screeching trip around the block, menacing any child or pet in his path. Occasionally he brings his own kids along for an unseatbelted race around the quiet streets of Southside Hill. I don't know his name, this odd fellow. We've lived here on-and-off for fifteen months.
And those kids. There's Willow, the most normal of the two, a high-school-aged girl I sometimes see bounding down the steps on her way to school. I know little of her except that she seems to fight a lot with her brother, David, sometimes late into the night. David aspires to be a musician, it seems. Over the summer it was the saxophone, but in recent days he seems to have moved on to the jazz flute, or maybe the piccolo. He's also fond of screaming with displeasure at whomever shares his space, sometimes offering a stream of invective that would make a stevedore blush.
This Corning version of the Addams Family lacks central air, the same as the rest of us, and with four foot setbacks our houses almost touch, meaning we get to share in all their family drama, their impromptu music recitals, their children wandering the yard in the summer months caterwauling late into the evening. As I write this their dainties are hanging on a clothes line for God and everyone else to see. Their oddness is an ever-present annoyance. I've asked the landscape architect to bring back a design that will shield our guests from the spectacle.
And last night, around lights out, the kiddies were carrying on like it was Friday night at the honky tonk. Poor P has to leave for work at 6:15, so it's always an early one here, but last night the howling, swearing auditory show made sleep a challenge.
I considered pulling on trousers and walking next door to voice our protest to Patience and Ted Bundy, but sensed the danger of walking up those steps after dark. Folks sometimes don't come back from complaining to neighbors about the noise.
So instead we cranked up the Lost In Space robot air conditioner that almost touches my nightstand, and the droning white noise drowned out the chaos next door sufficiently to allow a few hours of blissful slumber.
That is, until Slane decided his needs weren't being met.
You see, while I was away this summer Slane embarked on a regimen of training Peg to perform a trick he hadn't yet mastered--turning a doorknob. Sometime around five his cat bladder will cry for relief while his sense of personal dignity prevents a simple walk down to the cat box. So instead, he stands at the foot of the bed, wailing like a baby crying for mama, until P would let him out.
And it's not just a nondescript meow; rather, it's like Slane is trying to make words, to articulate his demand in a way a human can understand. His voice has the creepy anthropomorphized feel of this classic video of a talking cat:
So at five this morning it began, first right outside our bedroom door until P arose and closed it in his face. Then he walked around through the bathroom and reemerged next to the bed, more demanding than ever. "Yeeoooowaaah. Yout. Wewahyout."
We shooed him, eventually getting him out of the bedroom and closing all doors, leaving him to wander the house moaning and probably annoying the Olcott ghosts who were also enjoying their last couple hours of darkness.
What to do about this? I looked online and found that, as I suggested to P in the predawn darkness, there really are unscrupulous veterinarians who will, for a fee, remove the little bastard's vocal cords. It's called a ventriculocordectomy, and is considered sufficiently barbaric that we'd probably have to fly Slane to Mexico or Indonesia to find a doc willing to perform the procedure. And P would probably consign me to the couch, permanently. So no cat surgery for Slane.
But if we're going to fly him somewhere, it doesn't really need to be overseas, does it? I posited to P that the Wee Guv may have shown us the way to a good night's sleep. We don't need to fly Slane to the third-world for surgery--we can just fly him to Martha's Vineyard!
But a quick survey of the law suggests this could pose problems for us. It seems that buying a cat a plane ticket and flying him to another state with no plan for his arrival there probably constitutes animal cruelty, and would land me in the pokey. If only Slane were a Venezuelan child fleeing a murderous Marxist regime--we don't seem to have any laws preventing cruelty to our own species, particularly if they're a different color or speak a different language. It's better to be a loquacious cat in twenty-first century America than a refugee.
So Slane will keep his vocal cords, and needn't worry about an unscheduled trip to the Cape. I'm wondering if I could lure the Addams Family onto a flight, maybe with the promise of flute lessons or some sorcery recipe recently discovered in Salem. We need to do something to get some sleep.
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