My Tiger Misty

My tiny tiger Misty is a brown tabby cat. Her coat is desert camouflage embodied in warm, soft velvet.

Being a cat, she sometimes seeks my lap when I'm engrossed in something on my ipad. She wreathes herself around the device, trying to substitute herself for it. But I'm stubborn. She succeeds only in scenting it as hers.

Soon, though, I develop a free hand and the desire to stroke her fur with it. Like an old Greek fisherman with his worry beads, I soothe my fingers and mind with her luscious coat. She purrs her approval and writhes to present more itchy sites to my fingernails.

Tiger she is, and I her plaything. She's the boss and I her serf. She's the favored child and I her playground. My cat's companion and I, and she the queen of all she surveys.

Dana's Harp

Nancy and I met in music programs at our synagogue. We both sang, as service leaders, and for fun. We also both enjoyed reading, and we explored the Jewish novels of Chaim Potok.

His book Davita's Harp featured a female leading character, which appealed to both of us. The title harp was not a Celtic lap harp or a tall orchestral harp. Instead, it was a door harp, which is a musical instrument that plays itself. A wooden box with tuned metal strings stretched across a sound hole, a door harp has metal balls that hang next to the strings. The balls hit the strings when the door is opened and closed, making them sound. It's kinda like a wind chime for indoors.

Some months later, Nancy gave me a door harp for my birthday. Its sound hole was in the shape of a Star of David, the six-pointed star of Judaism. I greeted it with glad cries and mounted it on my front door as soon as I could. It hangs there, sounding its major triad when I open the door, to this very day.

Sealed with a Stamp

I left Berkeley towards the end of my tenth grade school year, because my father had suddenly died. Even though close friends had offered to keep my brother and me until the end of the school year, our mother decided that we needed to move down to live with her in Santa Monica immediately. So move we did, and started a new life in a city we only knew as a vacation spot.

At first, letters from my Berkeley friends were my lifeline. I drank in each letter over and over, for the bittersweet pleasure of the familiar past viewed from my barren new present.

I sent letters back sharing my new circumstances -- my new classes and teachers, the indignity of sharing an English class with my older brother, my lungs' painful adjustment to the smoggy air.

I decorated my letters with sealing wax in various colors. One seal featured my initial; another was a pattern of some sort, maybe a flower.

I put effort into my missives and appreciated every word I received. Gradually, though, the events of my friends' lives became increasingly distant, I dug into my own concerns, and we drifted apart.

My Book/s

My Book/s

I couldn’t possibly choose just one book I will always remember. I have always been a reader, first and foremost. I was reading so well by the first grade that I was skipped into second grade in the middle of the year.

Reading was the core of my education and career. I read pretty challenging stuff in law school, as a judicial research attorney, and as a writer, editor, and publication manager of legal tomes.

So when I read for pleasure, it’s usually mind candy. Unlike candy, though, books are talismans essential to my well-being. When I’m alone with myself, I’m in very bad company. Often anxious, I have at least once spiraled into a full-on panic attack when out alone without a book. Nowadays, I never leave the house without a library in my pocket.

When I was in elementary school, I inhaled Nancy Drew mysteries, Hardy Boys mysteries, Tom Swift adventures, and Robert Heinlein juvenile science fiction.

I lived with my father in my junior high years, and raided his library. The science fiction, James Bond thrillers, and Peanuts comics were the most accessible of his books. Every now and then I’d tackle something different, like Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum. I managed to reach the end, but had no idea what the book was about. I had more success with Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, which was the scientific version of his best-selling book Games People Play. His division of our interior mindscape into parent, adult, and child has lingered with me – as well as the game he entitled: “Why don’t you …” “Yes, but ...”

My mother got me hooked on British murder mysteries written by women: from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh through Josephine Tey and  P.D. James. Her A.A. literature didn’t appeal to me.

While in college, I got into children’s literature and Christian authors, especially The Chronicles of Narnia, where the two genres intersect. I also loved Wind in the Willows, the Little House on the Prairie and Little Women series’, and anything written by John Stott.

In San Francisco I explored the Jewish side of my heritage by reading Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and the Chaim Potok novels. Later I got into Buddhist books by Sylvia Boorstein and Pema Chodren.

I occasionally read non-fiction, mostly self-help and popular science. But my pleasure reading consists mostly of novels with women protagonists (preferably by women authors, since I’m a devout female chauvinist): cozy mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. I made an exception for the Harry Potter series, since the author is a woman and she is so good. I loved the Sookie Stackhouse vampire series and the Kitty Norville werewolf series. Knowing that a book I enjoyed is part of a series makes me feel warm and wealthy, since that means I can spend more time in that world, with those characters.

If I were forced to choose a single book I would always remember, it would be Aunt Dimity’s Death, by Nancy Atherton, because I love it so much that I reread it every several years. The book is charming and easy reading, and it combines several of my favorite types of stories: rags-to-riches, fish-out-of-water, cozy mystery, ghost story, and romance. It also presents a mother/daughter relationship that I wish I’d had. The book is the start of a series, so new adventures with my friends are published every few years.

OK, I read to escape reality. You gotta problem with that?