My sister’s friend Pete died last Friday. About two years ago, in the earlier days of his illness, Pete converted to Buddhism and became a monk, which I now realise was ingenius forward planning on his part. As a Buddhist he believed in reincarnation. In the face of death, or even life, reincarnation is a superb concept. It’s comforting, for you and your people to see dying as a metamorphosis… an evolution… or even just a change of outfit!
You have to hand it to the Buddhists. Not only for reincarnation, but they also believe in peace (as opposed to violence), a concept that Christians, Muslims and Jews seem to have dispensed with altogether these days.
My sister urged Pete to come back as a Burmese cat. What a life! Of course in Buddhist philosophy you don’t get a choice, but seeing as it’s not a request to come back rich, powerful or beautiful, or even as a person, then I don’t see there’s any harm in an appeal to the people at front desk to come back as a cat.
The Burmese cat’s lifestyle is far better than an human one. Basically it’s a bit like being a rich and spoilt retired supermodel. You sloth about, with slaves at your beck and call, and everyone thinks you’re gorgeous.
If you’re thinking this might be a bit dull, think again. If you’re the adventurous type you can make the rounds of your territory outside, with all the security of a premium guided tour but no compromise of jungle safari danger and daring. For a cat, the world is extremely big, so there’s no pressure to climb Everest or go wingsuit flying to get your adrenaline fix. A trip out to the car park is thrilling enough. You might even meet a dog out there.
But to the Burmese, the outdoors is a bit common, really. There are superior pleasures to be found inside the home. If you’re bored by deep sleep in front of fireplaces, you can find any number of cosy hiding spots that change daily like a blackboard menu. There also might be warm bodied people to sit on, or even a light or a computer left on, ready to be exploited.
Sports? Burmese are famous for fetching; you throw, they bring back. They also have a pronounced imagination and revel in private fantasy games: sometimes humans might be invited to join in a game of chasings, invisible mouse hunts, or a battle against unseen monsters.
Burmese also have a rich intellectual life. They like reading and they especially enjoy surfing the net, especially on a Mac. You think I’m being silly now. It’s a fact.
I don’t want you to think it’s a life without some responsibilities. But they’ll only take on a task if there’s something in it for them. My Mao has a taste for bugs, so when we lived in the city I put him in charge of pest control. He would willingly eat 5 large cockroaches before I left for work each morning. Now we’re in the country, he keeps the mouse population subjugated, but he’s excelling himself as heating policeman. If the ambient temperature in the lounge room drops below acceptable comfort levels, he’ll come to the kitchen and say “Mao!” thus alerting me it’s time for another log. It’s a system. It works.
Speaking of communication skills, the Burmese can be very persuasive indeed. Like Siamese, they have a tendency to be verbal, whether it be just enjoying a chat or expressing their concerns with your relationship. The good thing is, if there’s a problem, they won’t bottle it up. Take for instance a friend of ours called Moet, who is not at all a whinger or a noisy pest, but in fact an excellent communicator. When, at 1am she had an issue that needed addressing, she let her mother know by saying “Ma”. Ma opened the window, and Moet went out. But the issue wasn’t resolved, so she came back inside, and said “Maa”. Her mother got up, went downstairs and gave her some food. “Maaa”. Her mother gave her some of the other food. “Maaaa”. But her mother hadn’t been listening properly so Moet said “Maaaa!” and then, finally, at 1:30am, her mother had the idea of changing the kitty litter. Before the final pellet had left the bag, Moet’s needs were met.
It’s being sociable that the Burmese likes most. They love company. If you’re around they will be with you. They like to share the love. And that’s not a bad principle for life.
So if you happen to be adopting a Burmese today, I already have the right name for you. Lozang Dhondrup.
For Pete, safe travels, brave monk.
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Walls Built: 1 Injuries: 0 (!)
And now for the weather:
Yes it’s a royal flush of sunniness; we are having a very proper summer and so far, not many fires. Being an australian I am paranoid about bushfires. The smell of dry eucalypt reminds me of the apprehensive summers in Sydney of my childhood. When I ask sweetly if the neighbours wouldn’t mind cutting the scrub on their land they snuffle and shuffle and say there won’t be any fires here, like they’ve had a message from god. Bloody hope they’re fair dinkum, or we’re all up shit creek.
I’ve built another drystone wall in the garden. I’ve finished the drainage on one side of the annexe and have started on the other side. I’m stacking up bags of lime ready for some serious wall building next week. And I’m on the search for decorative iron gates.
“Drunk-tired on heat, the pets are happy.”
“The rabbits have bunnies and the dogs have puppies
but the guppies just have little guppies.”
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Haven’t been posting for a while because I’ve been busy dying. Almost.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up and then walked a few steps to the kitchen. Suddenly the floor fell out from under me and I was lying on the concrete yelling at Wookie to get his wet nose out of my ear. I thought the dizziness would pass, but as I sat with my head between my knees, a searing pain shot up my neck and into my head. Migraine. I crawled back into bed somehow, but I can’t remember much more except being hung up on by Emergency when I called them an hour or something later.
For those unacquainted with migraine: plucking out your own eye seems like an appealing solution to stop the pain. I would have been quite happy for someone to drill a hole in my head with the Black & Decker there and then to give me some relief. It’s like that. You’re insane with pain.
I rang Emergency not just to avoid self-harming with power tools, but also because the world was whirling around me like I was a 14 year old with a cask of Fruity Lexia. Except there had been no dancing beforehand. I did feel like spewing, but.
It’s a bit of a bummer for the ambulance people (Bombeiros, they’re called here: Portugal has the American system of combining ambulance with fire fighters. So you could have a Firey deliver your baby, which is an interesting idea, to me at least. Hi to my Colorado friends Dom Pedro and Vasco, if you’re out there). Anyway, bit of a bummer as I was saying, when you don’t have a street name or a house number. Basically they had to wander around the village looking for someone to ask where an urgently sick person might be living (or dying). It took quite a while, but they got here eventually.
And then we had to have a Portuguese lesson. Can’t imagine why, but the words Migraine, Dizziness and Vertigo had not entered my vocab databank. I think I got there in my little verbose way by explaining that the world was rotating and I had a really really big headache. Three new words that I’ll never forget! Enxaqueca, tounturas and vertigens!
Fortunately for me, but very unfortunately for her, my mother suffered an attack of Vertigo last year. It is a rare, very debilitating and very strange condition. Basically you completely lose your balance. Like being incredibly drunk but completely lucid at the same time. You can’t walk, can’t see, you want to vomit. Even when I’m lying down with my eyes closed, I still have a sense of being on a boat on the high seas.
Anyway, if Mum hadn’t had it and hadn’t told me all about it, then I’m sure I would’ve been terrified. I can handle the feeling that someone left a sharp axe planted in my head, but having an uncooperative body as well is just a bit too much to take.
The Bombeiros really sucked. They weren’t that cute and they didn’t have gas! It’s almost worth being critically ill in Australia just for the hotties and their nitrous oxide. This scabby socialist country wouldn’t even give me oxygen on the house. Buggers. So I writhed about on the pointless voyage to the health centre, where, lo and behold, they took one look me and said “too hard” and off we went to Coimbra Hospital.
I’m not going to give a blow by blow account of the whole hospital thing. It wasn’t nice. The veryold were there. The dying were there. And the groaning were there. There were flirting frivolous stupid people who stuck needles into me without even introducing themselves. There were big machines on me at 3am. There were some drugs, but I needed them too much to enjoy them, if you see what I mean. At the end of it all, they said “too hard” and sent me home.
My arrival in the village was a soft fuzzy warm one: all the neighbours were out to greet me, including the dog-killer suspects. They were all being really sweet, just like people who care! I was really touched! (but I was also on drugs). I was forcibly removed from my home and taken to Tia Maria’s for some proper TLC.
But it wasn’t to last. Once the hospital-strength drugs wore off, the migraine came back- this time in my sinuses, all sharp and pointy and nasty. I was already verging on an overdose of codeine, so I had no option really but to call back the Bombeiros. And now I had a new, alarming symptom: half of my face had gone numb. I thought I was having a stroke.
The Bombeiros were delightful this time. A very nice person called Anna held my hand and stroked my hair on the way to the “still too hard” health centre where I had a fight with a couple of people for jabbing needles full of paracetamol into me without asking if perhaps I might be allergic to anything, like, say, paracetamol? My mother is, you see. If the stroke wasn’t going to kill me, a hapless nurse would. Thank god for Anna, who put in a good word, got me a shot of something strong, and then whisked me back to Coimbra. Another night of state sponsored torture to make Salazar proud.
Some of the same suffering people were there, ranting in that special dementia way. But the staff were a different horrible bunch altogether. One little charmer, raised on a diet of House and Grey’s Anatomy, tried arranging a date with a nurse-boy while attempting to extract blood from an arm of mine. She slipped with the needle, provoking a suitable flow of blood and a flow of words from me suggesting that she should pay a bit more attention to what she was doing. She replied by saying she could do two things at once (!) provoking another flow of words that included Fuck and Bitch. That put me at the bottom of the morphine waiting list for the rest of the evening. It didn’t really matter, as approaching death kinda feels similar to morphine anyway.
No one had a clue what was going on with my head, but seeing as they’d cleverly ruled out a heart attack, a stroke and swine flu, they decided that a forced discharge was the next proper course of action.
Disclaimer: Don’t misread me, people, I love socialism. I believe in free health care for all. I’m grateful to Portugal for allowing me access to the health system. It’s just that I’ve had better care in Africa. It’s also free in Australia and the care is of an infinitely higher standard. Why not charge non-citizens a surcharge so you can pay the nursing staff more or invest in better training?
So after I made sure that my surviving pets were still fed, medicated and watered, I went back to Tia Maria’s 5 star nursing home. It really was awesome. Big comfy bed, enormous and yummy meals brought to me in bed three times a day. Regular entertainment brought to me via children and naughty dogs. And two mobile phones running hot with international text messages. Top quality TLC. With furry visitors taking full advantage of the situation too.
Considering I was lying like a useless lump in bed the whole time, it was actually an action-packed week. Tia Maria’s is something of a transit point for all the neighbours so I got to see way more of all of them than I wanted to. They were all morbidly interested in the progression of my illness. In someone else’s house you inevitably get exposed to their dirty laundry, and here it was like the whole village was queuing up to use the washing machine. As a captive audience, I became in-confidence to everyone’s blunt little prejudices and grievances and ancient inter (and intra)-family quarrels. Reconfirming what I learnt when I first came to this little village, everyone has it in for everyone else. Even old granny got a serving. Forget Telenovelas: this here is a seething hotbed of hate and dirty little secrets, and everyone is a villain dressed as a saint.
As far as the Case of the Missing Babywookie, accusations were flying left and right: the accuser’s motives were more of interest than the accusations themselves. Once I could stomach the truth, it was pretty obvious. In three weeks, three dogs disappeared; first Dingo then Max then Baby. As I’ve said before I don’t really want to know the ugly details – but everyone has had their part to play, either by giving the orders, carrying them out or keeping mum about it. I feel sorry for the kids here, though. Old enough to know what’s going on and old enough to know it’s wrong. Silenced and confused, they are doomed to grow up just like their parents.
Lest we forget the little guy, here’s an encore pic of Baby at his fuzzy finest:
There are those who think we bring illness upon ourselves, and for those who think that illness is a manifestation of unprocessed emotion, I have this to say. I couldn’t properly grieve for my little pet, nor spit out a torrent of snowballing fury, because I just didn’t want to believe that a neighbour would kill my baby. In short, stress brought this on. These people give me a headache. But a victim, I ain’t.
The other night I had the sweetest dream, (in Portuguese they call them pink dreams) that Babywookie came home with six little puppies. In the dream, no one had realised that he was actually a she. When I woke up I realised that I had been waiting for Baby to come home. But he isn’t coming home. Under the influence of a potent pharmaceutical cocktail, I got really angry and confronted a few people and told them what I thought of their stupid, uncivilised, cruel little lives. Now I feel sad, but better, and more determined to get the house done and get the fuck out of here as soon as possible.
Meantime I’m still stumbling around like a hopeless drunk. Wish I was. It’s a good cover for ranting whenever I feel like it.
So as not to leave you on a bum note, two slightly amusing things happened while I was in my sick-bed: a chook got out (I love it when there’s a chook free on the streets) and the rabbits had babies. Check out the newborn bunny-kitten!
…and Wookie enjoying the spring weather.
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Mao
Mao is a 7 yr old brown Burmese and he is the love of my life.
Mao’s interests include chasing imaginary monsters, fetching small mice, smooching and sunbaking. Mao also enjoys travelling… I brought him here from Australia. He’s never been happier, fatter or smoochier.
The Wookies
…were born in December 2007 while I was on holiday in Australia. The day I got back, the neighbours appeared on my doorstep with this brown puppy wondering if I wanted to adopt him. Mao wasn’t even off the plane. There was no way I could consider having a dog until Mao was settled and happy. Just No Way.
But Mao did settle in, and the caffé latte pup was very charming. He clearly stood out from his brothers – more confident and outgoing. We liked each other. So when he was about 10 weeks, I took him home for a trial.
It didn’t go well. He cried constantly and pissed and shat everywhere. He wasn’t ready. I sent him back to his mother.
But then, after a couple of weeks, he came to my house all by himself. It’s about 250 metres over steep and winding cobblestones, but this little guy had the goods. He’d stay with me during the day, and then go home at night to his mum and brothers. It was perfect. I had half-adopted a little brown dog. I named him Wookie because he’s brown and hairy. Like Chewbacca.
After a while he gave up going home at night, and then a funny thing happened. His little white brother made the trip to my place and never went home. I took him home several times, but apparently my house, with Wookie, is where he was determined to be. He was the smallest of all the dogs in the village, and maybe he was tired of fighting for his food. I denied being his owner for quite a while, which is why Babywookie hasn’t got a proper name. But Baby has stuck, because he is one.
Dingo
Dingo is not my dog. He just lives here. Dingo comes from the next village, and when his old owners became ill and went to Lisbon, Dingo decided to come and live at my house. For the first 6 months I fought him. I shouted at him, I threw stones at him, I stuffed him in the car and took him back to his village. I tied him up. Nothing worked. He always came back and sat on my doorstep. So eventually I gave up fighting and realised that he was quite a nice dog. He’s a loyal and enthusiastic guard. No one gets anywhere near my door without a serious warning from him. If the other dogs jump on me he’s always there to make sure they’re not hurting. He sits on your feet. He leans on you when he’s cold. The Wookies love him.
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Attacks by baby moles: 1
In an amusing diversion to sticking cement in holes, Babywookie caught a baby mole. I would’ve thought of all the dogs he would be the least adept at hunting, but there you are. Perhaps he too was surprised because he brought the mole in his mouth to show me. Naturally I stole it from him immediately with the idea of making a toy for Mao. The little bugger showed his gratitude for having been rescued from the jaws of death by biting me on the little finger. Or maybe he was trying to say that he preferred being swallowed by a dog to being battered by a cat.
I put the mole in a shoebox, as you do. Mao was initially terrified, but soon saw the potential of a pet mole when he escaped from the box and started running around the lounge room. This was fun. Then he bolted into the kitchen where Babywookie was waiting. Cat and Dog momentarily forgot their differences to join forces rooting out the scurrying furry turd together. But the cracks and nooks of the kitchen played to the mole’s strengths and…
He made it to the front door unmolested…
He paused on the brink of freedom…
Then he was met head-on by Dingo who, in a blinding flash, snatched him up and…
It was all over.
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Injuries: 0. Cups of tea: 8
The weather has deteriorated. The day started with snow, which might have been nice except it was so unbelievably cold. Then came fierce winds, more rain, sleet and hail. Apparently now it’s officially the worst winter in 15 years. I heard this from two different sources on the same day so it must be true.
The dogs had to go to the vet to be chipped so we rugged up and went out. Only once we were about half way there I realised that I actually didn’t have the €120 that it was going to cost so I took the dogs for a galão e bola de berlim instead. Only the café didn’t have any bolas de berlim nor the milk required for the galão (caffe latte). Radical compromises had to be made. The dogs were having fun at least.
On the way home Babywookie did a major vomit between the two front seats. Not only was it on me and my seat but it oozed down onto the floor and very nearly got into my handbag. The handbrake was covered, so there wasn’t going to be any using that, and with every movement of the car it oozed around more so that every last orifice of the floor was filled.
Did I mention that I got out in the rain yesterday and washed the car, inside and out? Looks like I would be doing the same thing today. It snowed again while I was on my hands and knees scraping half digested batatas fritas from the tracks under the seat.
Which reminds me of the day wookie vomited eyes.
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When Wookie was a puppy, he took some getting used to the car. I used to go out prepared with the dog equivalent of a sick bucket and towel, just in case. But this time, nothing could really prepare me for what he was to bring up.
I’m trying to navigate the winding twists and turns of the Serra do Espinhal (Espinhal Hills), where one false move could put you off a cliff, and Wookie starts making vomiting gestures. I’m begging him not to, but there’s already this huge intestinal looking lump coming up his throat and out of his mouth. It looks like he’s giving birth rather than vomiting. It is one solid mass, a slimy salivery bloody fleshy gargantuan slug.
I almost immediately start heaving myself and slip onto the road shoulder in a brake- locking skid. I turn to look at the horror beside me just as Wookie starts up again. This time it’s a big white ball that lands at his feet in a puddle of masticated offal. It is an eyeball.
I can’t get out of the car fast enough. Nor can Wookie. After a few deep breaths I charge in to grab a plastic bag or anything that might help but I recoil at the smell. It is so intense, but all I can think about is that stuff soaking into the seats. I have to get two hands around the warm leaking pile of puke and in shifting it slightly I see there are actually two eyes, and they are looking at me in a just-died kind of way.
I had plenty of time to review the images in my mind while I hosed out the car that afternoon. Maybe I was in shock or something because I just couldn’t work out how this cute little puppy had been able to get a pair of human eyes into his belly. Certainly didn’t come out of my tin from the supermarket. After repeated recitals of the story to the neighbours (they took a while to be convinced I wasn’t babbling incoherently) all was revealed: Tia Maria had slipped them a rabbit that morning. I choose to believe it was an already dead rabbit. 
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