The evisceration

Almost immediately after Kamala Harris' takedown of adjudicated rapist and 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump following their presidential debate Tuesday night, one of the first things I thought was how easy it seemed for her to politically undress and expose this incredibly weak and immoral blowhard.

The second thing I thought was why couldn't this have been done eight years ago? Why did this nation have to endure for so long Trump's lethal incompetency while he was president and his hateful poison when he was out of office?

I guess it was because eight years ago, Harris wasn't available back then for the evisceration. She was honing her skills as a U.S. Senator, not as a presidential candidate.

But on Tuesday, Harris cut through Trump like a hot knife through butter. No, wait. Too cliché. Like a weedeater through dead grass. No, wait. Like a Shakespearean soliloquy through a vacant soul. Something somewhere along those lines.

It looked too easy. Harris, the former prosecutor, set the bait all night long and Trump, a true narcissistic simpleton, just couldn't resist. Herewith: his campaign crowds are small and bored; he has no healthcare plan ("I have the concept of a plan"); his immigration policies are criminal. And so is he.

You could almost physically see her digs burrow under his thin skin and see his orange makeup turn white around his mouth and eye sockets like a sorry clown. It was incredible television.

No wonder Trump doesn't want to debate her again. Coward. Must be those bone spurs acting up. As each minute of the debate passed, he became angrier and more rattled. She became, well, more presidential.

The absurdist moment came when Trump insisted Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of people living in Springfield, Ohio. The planned attack, inspired by neo-Nazis, serves nothing more than to illustrate his innate racism, particularly against black and brown-skinned people. His xenophobia knows no bounds. How is this presidential?

Why is this cockroach even allowed to run for office?

I have no idea how the election is going to turn out 51 days from now. Republicans in power in key states are doing their best to purge voter rolls and other acts of voter suppression reminiscent of Jim Crow days.

But Harris seems to be building momentum.

Can she do it?

There are two inherent strikes against her: she's Black. And she's a woman. In this country, where it took women 131 years to get the vote after the Constitution was ratified, gender politics is still a thing. And so are the politics of race where the vestiges of America's Original Sin (slavery) still lingers in the air like lingering swamp gas.

Moments after the debate ended, the Trump campaign was delivered a blow when megastar pop singer Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Harris for president. In the real world, star-powered endorsements are nice to have but usually don't move the political needle one way or the other.

This might be different. Within 24 hours of her announcement, there were more than 300,000 newly registered voters in the books.  And most likely, they were probably voting age females, which is significant in a world where women have lost their constitutional right to an abortion after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

As a side note, I'm going to take a guess here. Swift is from Pennsylvania. West Reading, in fact. I'm guessing her endorsement of Harris could coalesce a bloc of young females from Allentown to Harrisburg and maybe push Pennsylvania and its critical 19 electoral votes toward Harris.

We'll just have to wait and see.

 

 

Pet grief

Kim and I have entered into a strange, colorless and empty land where we are grieving for the passing of our cat, Halo.

It's been nearly two weeks since we made the decision to put her down. She was suffering from arthritis, 100 percent renal failure and quite possibly lymphoma, which probably accounted for her drastic weight loss in her final months. There was no coming back from this. 

Halo

It's not as if this kind of grief is anything new for us. In our nearly 44 years of marriage, we've had cats in the house for about 41 of those years. Five cats over that span, actually. And now we've buried all five.

But the grief we feel for Halo is somehow subtly different for us than it was for the others. We made the deliberate decision that we will no longer have any more pets. I am 73 years old and Kim is 64, and we just don't want any future pets to outlive us.

I asked Kim if she was feeling the difference in grief we felt for our other cats in the same way I was, and she said yes. We tried to put our finger on it.

The grief we have for Halo seems sharper – harder – because we know there will be no more pets in the house. There's a finality in that.

There are times when I feel a sense of guilt because my grief for Halo – as well as for our previous cats – sometimes seems to transcend the grief I've felt for some humans, even family members. I've talked with a few other pet owners about this phenomenon and they pointed out that we are with our pets nearly every day. We are their daily caregivers, almost from their birth to their death. If you do have any emotional ties to your pet, it's almost inherently impossible to divorce yourself from them.

Having a pet is both a total commitment and an unspoken promise. You do that because in return you receive an unfettered loyalty and – dare I say it? – an unconditional love.

And as Kim pointed out, Halo was a solo cat. At no time in her nine years with us was there another cat in the house. Maybe that's what made her seem different to us. She was her own cat. She was independent, as cats are, but she also needed us as her stewards, as pets do. I call it independent dependency.

So now Kim and I are in that colorless, empty land where the urge to get another cat is starting to pull on us.

I kind of knew this could happen. A day after Halo passed, I collected everything in the house that belonged to a cat – scratching posts, litter boxes, toys, food, medicine, anything – and donated them to a local cat rescue. I'm hoping that by giving that stuff away it reinforces our decision not to get another pet. It's removed a lot of the household triggers to our grief.

We do have one reminder. We've kept an old cloth basket that at some point all of our cats have curled up in. That stays. For some reason, there is no hurt in that basket.

There are neighborhood cats around, so it's not as if we can't get our cat fix.

And I can sense with each day that passes, the grief is diminishing. I guess that's healthy. I don't think we'll require counseling.

As with anything that passes, we have our memories. We know we kept our promises to Halo. That will be enough. 

Halo wants her chair back.