Idea Garage Sale: Persistent Cat is Persistent

We're having a battle of wills in our house right now.

One of the improvements made during the work on the back of the house last year was a railing on the back porch directly under a window. When the screens were taken away for repair and painting, the cats found this to be an ideal arrangement, and when the screens were returned, they quickly broke through the screen to continue using what they had come to regard as their personal portal. We had the screen repaired with a more flexible mesh anchored more deeply.

The result is that they will now spend hours on that railing, or sitting on the cabinet under the window in question on the inside, glaring from window to nearest available human. When we open the door, they often refuse to go through it. Thai has gone so far as to grab me by the arm and lean her head against the screen. You don't have to be as practiced at projecting words into a cat's mouth as I am to get the drift here: "Mommy! How can you be so dense? I don't want to go through the door, I want you to leave MY WINDOW OPEN."

This is a picture book set-up. Cute cats (standing in for obstinate toddlers trying to impose their will on the world), human (standing in for parents trying to instill a certain behavior - in a picture book the human would almost certainly be a child), simple situation that can be elaborated to suit. Either the cat would come up with more and more ingenious and funny ways to make the human see reason and meet with more and more deliberately absurd obliviousness, or the obstinancy would spread around the house, with the cat also trying to impose her will on eating, sleeping, and playing arrangements. I can almost see it.

Almost.

Except for the ending.

In real life, sooner or later Thai goes through the door and there's no practical reason why this should not become one of our daily life rituals. In the story, there has to be some resolution which will satisfy the reader. Some compromise which allows the cat/toddler a degree of control over her own life at the same time that she learns she can't always have her own way.

Without the resolution, I only have a situation, not a plot. Nobody wants to read a picture book story without a resolution. That would be pointless.

So even if I could write picture books, it appears I wouldn't be able to write this one.

Idea Garage Sale: An Invasive Species

I was on the balcony writing when I heard that deep-throated ventriloquist "meow" cats use when their mouths are full, and out came Thai with a mouthful of bird.

Thai is a lousy hunter, so it wasn't dead. I know some people say when a cat brings you live prey that they want you to play with it and learn to hunt for yourself, but I assure you, Thai doesn't know how to kill things. So I would have had no choice but to take it from her, even if it had been a house sparrow, which honestly I'd as soon she killed as not. But it wasn't. I think it was a juvenile Carolina Wren, though it had an eye ring instead of an eye streak and the tail was missing. It was so small, and the beak was a wren beak, and the breast feathers were yellow.

Thus began the great pursuit. Of course I didn't succeed in taking it from her. She let it go before I could, and then I was running interference to keep her from catching it again and it was hopping and flying frantically, until it wound up in the bedroom between the wardrobe and the built-in bookshelves. So I shut Thai out on the balcony and tried to drag it out with a towel, but no dice. But the wardrobe is in an alcove created by the bookcases being built around a disused but not filled-in door to the study. So I went around to the study (having to shut Bruce out of that room and the bedroom, which is a more elaborate process than it sounds like), moved the full bookcase, and opened the door.

Now, I had been feeling lousy and moreover this was during the period when the desktop computer wasn't functioning and we were still trying dodge after dodge to bring it back. The wren had all kinds of dusty holes and corners in which to hide, and took advantage of them all, while I couldn't google "animal rescue" or "How do I get a scared wren out of my study?" But, being the old-fashioned kind of person I am, I had the phone book and a landline, and I used them.

Most of the animal rescue places weren't answering their phones for one reason or another, but I finally got one, where a woman told me to darken the room, open a window, and leave it alone for awhile so it could find its way out. I told her I wasn't sure it could fly. It was fluttering around about the height of the baseboards and had no tail. She said in that case when it tried to get out the window I should put it in a box and bring it over.

The study is not that easy a room to darken. I tried to hang a towel over the windows in the balcony doors, but it didn't work well. The wren had settled down behind the filing cabinets, which is near the corner with the open window, so I built a crude pen out of file boxes and stuff that could be set flush to the floor and were taller than the wren's demonstrated flight capacity. Concerned that she was probably overheated and lacking any other bait, I set a shallow dish of water in the middle, shut the connecting door, fetched an indignant Thai off the balcony through the bedroom, shut her and Bruce both outside, and had lunch.

After lunch, I came back up in time to see the wren perch on the water dish, fly from there to the window, and fly away.

So I swept the study (the doorway was filthy) and put everything back where it belonged. Thai snubbed me all day, making a point of being near me so I could see her doing it.

If you don't automatically think "picture book" after all that, you should reconsider whether writing for children is your true calling. The situation is accessible to small children, the action is visual and potentially funny, rife with ways to delineate in art and text the soft-hearted, muddle-headed, messy householder and the desperate but resourceful young wren who doesn't trust her, and it ends with a punch line. Depending on the emphasis chosen, you could imply morals about keeping your workspace tidy, courage and resource in the face of danger, or even training your cat not to hunt. Make the householder a dog to whom the visiting cat has brought a live bird as a present, to make up a quarrel (she says!) and you've got a Beatrix Potterish anthropomorphic social farce.

That's the obvious use. But why stop with the obvious? Especially when the obvious is a format I've never been much into. I never even read them much, advancing to chapter books as soon as feasible, and you may not have noticed this, but my wordcounts tend to run high for a picture book.

Couldn't I also use an anecdote like this as an anchor for an article for a nature magazine? As part of a work of non-fiction on urban wildlife and how to deal responsibly with the intersection of human residence with the animal world? Raccoons and possums in the attic, skunks under the shed, squirrels on the bird feeder, mice in the compost heap - I've got them all. Can I write about them? Could it be a fable? A cartoon short subject script? (Nope, not getting into scripting, either!)

With my productive work days averaging about four hours long lately, I'm not going to divert any energy into developing this idea in any of those formats. I need to focus on Len, and keeping the existing projects in the mail, and keeping the house and yard from smothering in neglect. It's not impossible I will use this someday.

In the meantime, having put it into a blog post, which is using it after a fashion, I can forget about it for awhile.

Idea Garage Sale: Heroic Guido Bros. & the Fairmount Hotel

I'm still recovering from TLA, but it's a matter of discipline to do an Idea Garage Sale on Sunday so here I am. This is part of my repertoire of downtown stories that I trot out when people come to town for events, the story of the Guido Brothers and the Fairmount Hotel. And I'm going to do it the way I do it on the tour, straight out of my head, factual fudging and all.

Once upon a time, developers bought up most of the land east of the Menger Hotel and west of the highway to build Rivercenter Mall. To make room, they tore down the existing buildings. However, one building, the long-empty Fairmount Hotel, was protected by historical statutes and the Conservation Society (known locally, with various degrees of admiration, affection, and irritation depending on circumstances, as The Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes. Though they no longer look as old to me as they once did, but that's neither here nor there.) They could not get permission to tear it down and they could not or would not incorporate it into the mall design. A buyer was found for the building, but the parties could not agree on a good way to preserve the Fairmount where it was and also build the mall. The only option was to move it.

This raised two problems. One, no one had ever moved a building the size of the Fairmount before; and two, to get to the new location, on the edge of La Villita and across from Hemisfair Park and the Convention Center, involved crossing at least two, maybe three, bridges over the Riverwalk. It was a massive job of engineering and few companies even bid the job - but Guido Brothers (yes, they've heard the jokes) stepped up to the plate.

They did a lot of math, reinforced the bridges, and took several days or weeks in preparation. When the big day came, the streets and relevant areas of the Riverwalk were closed. News cameras were everywhere, including the national news. Maybe some international, too, I don't remember, but probably. I was working downtown but I didn't get to see any of it; not willing to fight the crowds. It took all day long, easing the great bulk of hotel through the streets. But I remember this: As the hotel rolled majestically over each bridge, the senior Guido Brother stood beneath it, saying: "If it breaks through, I'd rather be down here than up there."

I tell this story a lot. I can sort of see the picture book in my mind's eye. Wouldn't it be a good one? The kind that inspires kids to become engineers? But it would have to end with the triumphant opening of the hotel, not with the punchline.

I'm not gonna write it. Picture books and non-fiction are not my genres. By the time I'd interviewed the principles, checked the quote (which is maybe less of a quote and more a summation of what people assumed to be his motivation), researched all the facts, and uncovered a couple of other anecdotes (because you always uncover more cool stuff when you research) it'd be too long for a picture book and the energy with which I tell it would be lost.

Telling a story in the oral tradition is one thing. You're in a dynamic relation with your audience and if you have to guess, fill in memory gaps, simplify complex politics, and generally pull the longbow on the fly to keep the story running without getting sidetracked, well, you do. When you put things down in cold print, you have time for accuracy; and because of this, people trust print. Most folks who aren't involved in producing printed text have this vague idea that somebody, somewhere, has the job of stopping writers from publishing inaccuracies. Especially in picture books, which are for children and, therefore, educational by default, right?

And if you're a Guido Brother and you're reading this - enjoy being a hero of legend, okay? Even if I never have bothered to learn your first names.