Sherry Chandler

Cat with Charlie Resnick and Ovid

From John Harvey, Cold in Hand (Harcourt, 2008):

. . . he went into the kitchen and stood for a moment staring into an almost-empty cupboard. Time to restock. The smallest cat nudged against him, and he picked it up and felt the soft fur of its head against his neck, the quick beat of its heart against his hand.

What would Lynn say, he wondered. Jack it in or carry on?

He though about poor blood Ovid, mired now in bird shit, stranded and alone.

Later that evening, curtains partly drawn, glass of good Scotch at his side, he put the first of the Bessie Smith CDs on to play. Bessie’s voice was full and raw and strengthened, it seemed, by adversity. “After You’ve Gone,” “Empty Bed Blues,” and Resnick’s especial favourite, “Cold in Hand,” the young Louis Armstrong’s muted cornet shadowing her phrase for phrase and note for note.

Cold in hand.

How had Ovid put it? Freezing his balls off in Constanta. Something about snow?

One drift succeeds another here.
The north wind hardens it, making it eternal;
It spreads in drifts through all the bitter year.

Bitter. That wasn’t going to be him. Old and bitter. He smiled. . .

__________
A little bonus cat blogging: yesterday reading the Orwell Diaries for Christmas Day, 1938, I learned a new term. “Cat-ice” is ice forming a thin shell from under which the water has receded. Just in case you ever need to know that.

Orwell got 4 eggs on Christmas 1938. A big event, if you happen to be following the diaries.