Sherry Chandler

Mythical cats and cats in their cups

Photo by TR Williams

. . . he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus—the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleeping.

—Stephen Booth, Scared to Live (Bantam, 2008)

Cat with femme fatale

I lifted myself out of the pool and walked to the guest cottage to shower and dress. I heard her laugh behind me. When I came back out she was sitting on a cushioned, scrolled iron chair with her legs crossed. I sat down on a dry mat on the back edge of the diving board.

“You make me think of a cat that’s trying to like sitting on a hot stove,” she said.

— James Lee Burke, from A Morning for Flamingos (Little Brown and Company, 1990)

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P.S. I’ve considered this date and decided I don’t have much I want to say about it except that it’s D. H. Lawrence’s birthday. You can find a selection of Lawrence poetry at the link. Here is a link to my all-time favorite Lawrence poem, “Snake.” A video here but I don’t guarantee its quality.

Cat with Cajun

When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun’s heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor’s orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clover, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before. [p.160]

— James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues (Little, Brown, and Company, 1989)

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Hardboiled detectives are all fitness nuts these days. Philip Marlowe must be turning over in his metaphorical grave.

Meanwhile, here’s a “sobering” headline from the NYTimes. It just breaks my heart. Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall.

Cat with a cocktail party and a lake

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. Voices were fading, cars were starting, goodbyes were bouncing around like rubber balls. I went to the french windows and out onto a flagged terrace. The ground sloped towards the lake which was as motionless as a sleeping cat. There was a short wooden pier down there with a rowboat tied to it by a white painter. Towards the far shore, which wasn’t very far, a black waterhen was doing lazy curves, like a skater. They didn’t seem to cause as much as a shallow ripple.

— Raymond Chandler, from The Long Good-Bye, text from The Midnight Raymond Chandler (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)