Oh. Well. My brother named her. It was, uh, Puma. Puma Thurman.
(YESSS.) (Couldn’t love it more!)
(What about the parakeet?)
Oh, the parakeet? His name was Rick. He’d died the yearbefore. We’d gotten him from our cousin when she moved to California. He was super old when he died. Anyways, my mom liked the cat and so did Raff. My brother. And me? I really liked the cat. She slept on my bed, played with a feather on a string that I made for her. She ate high-quality cat food I bought for her with my pocket money, and she got to lick the extra tuna from the can when my mom made tuna sandwiches. It was a good life.
One day, when I got home from school, though, she wasn’t there.
(Oh no. The title of the story wasn’t ironic!)
Yeah. Well, I looked everywhere, but she’d escaped somehow. So I went looking for her in the neighborhood. And I found her in the bad news bodega. The guys there were mad at me for taking her, but she was wearing a collar now, so they didn’t give me too much trouble. And she seemed happy to see me, in that cat way. I took her home.
A few weeks later, the same thing happened again. And again. And again. We never did figure out how she was getting out of the house. But every time it had been a few hours since we’d seen her, it would be time to go down the street to the bodega and get her again.
I didn’t get it. She had tuna from the can and a warm bed at my house. And me.
At the bodega she had to hide under the chip display so she wouldn’t get stepped on and a bowl of dry food they kept on the sidewalk that she had to fight other cats for. She never fought me when I brought her home. In fact, she’d twine around my legs whenever she saw me. Purr when I picked her up.
It was Raff who had the idea. “Let’s see if she’ll come back on her own,” he suggested. So the next time she disappeared, I didn’t go get her from the store. I waited all through the night. And the next morning. And then I couldn’t wait anymore. And I went down to the store and got her. Maybe if I’d waited longenough, I’d have gotten to learn that the cat comes back. But also, maybe I’d have learned that the cat comes back…to the bodega. But not to me. And I didn’t want to learn that.
So what did I learn? I learned that she would leave, again and again.
But I also learned that if I went and got her, I got to have her.
So, what’s worse? Having a cat that leaves you? Or having no cat at all?
Thank you.
(Woot woot!) (Okay, Vin!) (Damn good cat story, Vinny!)
Six
I wonder whothe first person to ever sayLife goes onwas. What an asshole. Well, regardless, they’re right. And so even though my beer-stained shirt leers at me from where it hangs on my closet door, even though Vin’s closed door leers at me from across the apartment, even though my apartment leers at me from across town, I do, in fact, sit at my desk, at work, ignoring all the leering. Because yes, life goes on.
When Vin and I first got together and combined lives, I used to bring home the bacon. I was the head cook at one of The New School cafeterias and it was a seriously good job. But I hated the waste. We were told to overestimate on our ordering and our prep, because it’s a private college and the worst thing management could imagine was running out of pesto penne on a Wednesday. The result? Trash cans full of pesto penne in the alley on Thursday morning. There are all sorts of regulations about what you can and can’t re-serve, and I’d come home every night after work with tears in my eyes over the waste.
So, when he graduated electrical school five years ago and got hired on as an electrician at Mauricio Electrics, he told mehe’dbring home the bacon for a while and I quit at The New School. Now I spend about twenty-five hours a week at Harvest NYC’s office, spread across a few different days.
For an org that does such cool work, Harvest NYC ishoused in a very sad office building in East Harlem. If it weren’t for my coworkers with purple hair and big smiles and loud voices and tats and their bikes parked in their cubicles and their rescue-produce salads in the fridge, this could be any other boring old company selling business cards to other boring companies. But it’s not! It’s a 501(c)(3) that is doing honest-to-goodness God’s work.
“Sweetie, Kitchen B is open today, if you want to do some testing,” Cherise, my boss, says with an air-kiss as she whisks past me.
“What’s going on in A?” I call after her.
“All the 101s got moved to Tuesdays!” And she’s gone, around the corner.
I peek into Kitchen A, on my way past, because I love to watch Deb, the resident nutrition educator, teach. She’s got a no-nonsense sensibility and was born to feed people. Seriously. She once put a hot dog in my mouth when I was in the middle of saying something.
Today must be the New Moms Nutrition class. There are strollers and car seats next to rows of students taking notes, and Deb is at the front burners lecturing and effortlessly flipping pancakes while she balances someone else’s baby on her hip.
Like I said, it’s God’s work.
I sneak back out to my desk. And now for the part of my job I could really take or leave: the volunteer coordinator part. Once a week (tomorrow), I lead an orientation for any new volunteers. It’s generally very sparsely attended (except for the first two weeks of January when everyone remembers that they do, indeed, want to go to heaven). But today, I’m here to make the volunteer schedule. Which is basically a game of Jenga played on an Excel sheet. I send Jaylen to the Union Squarefarmer’s market on Wednesday but then have to figure out how Warren will get the produce from there to the Bronx in time for the soup kitchen to use it. Et cetera, et cetera. I’ve never once planned a week with zero hiccups. Everyone knows that this part of my job could very well be done by AI, but no one mentions it because I do fine enough, don’t bill for extra hours if I make a mistake, and we’re all just trying to keep bread on the table.
After I work through the schedule, I decide I need a pick-me-up and head into Kitchen B. Which is old and shabby compared to Kitchen A, but it’s clean. And honestly it’s better to work in the least flashy and outfitted settings possible, because the recipes we’re trying to create should be able to be replicated in anyone’s kitchen. Not a chef’s kitchen.
I like to keep my “make something from nothing” skills sharp by practicing here as well as at home. And there are about five hundred old cookbooks here. So once or twice a week, I use the kitchens to pad my recipe-creation skill set. Basically, I open the Kitchen B fridge, see what we have on hand, and then search the cookbooks for ideas.
