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| Seance by Neil Wedman |
This blog published 20 August 2022 I will put back into 6 July 2022 to fill missing holes.
Luckily my Blogger blog has a pretty good search engine. Now with my 5635 blogs I check to see if I have written on a subject in particular before. There are two for which I have. One has to do with the humanity of inanimate stuff and the other is about routine and how that plays in my life in this terrible 2022.
My friend Ian Bateson is constantly telling me that I am reiterating myself. He is right. But I like to do that and perhaps add to the mixture.
At night, when I get into bed, and turn off the lights, Niño and Niña get as close as they can to me. In these hot days I have brought in a fan and they sleep on the foot of the bed and not on me. Once the light is out I feel the presence (I call it absent presence) of Rosemary on the empty spot on the bed on my right. And I grieve and this has not changed since she died on December 9 2022.
To this idea of the absent presence I must now see it from another angle.
Weather permitting in late afternoon around 5:30 in the summer, I walk with Niño around the block. Most of my neighbours and passers-by know him by name. I take the same route that Rosemary took and I follow her advice not to shout after him when he lingers in some garded. “Be patient with him,” she would tell me. That absent presence by the bed here in a back alley seems to need a different definition.
I have told my two daughters that when I talk to them I remember Rosemary but not in the same way as when I look into the eyes of Niño and Niña. Rosemary, the two cats and I slept together. That is an important difference. I have written before how a dead cat when immediately replaced by a new live cat, that live cat inherits in some magical way the catness of the previous one. It is almost like cats have a Platonic essence that can be transferred in a way that humans are not able to. I do not believe in ghosts and yet when I walk with Niño, does he also feel that absent presence?
