The Dinner Guest

The Dinner Guest
Part 1

This story follows Weekend in Boston and its predecessors.

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Eleanor sensed that something out of the ordinary was about to happen.

She knew I had already vacuumed our apartment last week, because she always remembers those scary days when I wheel out the monstrous vacuum cleaner that she detests so much. All cats seem to have an inborn hatred for vacuum cleaners despite the fact that felines existed thousands of years before those machines were even conceived. Eleanor seems to think that the vacuum is some kind of a vicious animal that wants to grab her, so she is very careful to keep a safe distance between herself and that infernal noisemaker. She never takes her eyes off the vacuum as long as it continues its roaring, and she doesn’t really seem comfortable until it is shut off and put away.

And so she knew something was going to be happening soon - since here I was vacuuming again, just five days later. Now I won’t say in a public forum exactly how often I usually vacuum because I don’t want to get anybody upset. I can only tell you it isn’t twice in five days.

After I vacuumed, I used one of those combs like the ones my daughters use on their hair, except that I use my comb to straighten out the fringe on my oriental carpets. I don’t really see how it can do anything to a person’s hair since the teeth are so far apart, but that’s what my daughters say they use those combs for. Maybe I should ask for a demonstration some day. It’s a strange new world, I guess, and I must not be keeping up. Once I gave my son-in-law a hairbrush with natural bristles, and he asked what it was for. When I told him, he patiently explained to me that “people don’t use old-fashioned things like this anymore.”

Eleanor also knew that I had recently bought a new tablecloth and some cloth napkins, because she always checks out everything I bring in from the outside world - especially if it’s in a shopping bag. If I just put down the bag somewhere, and don’t take out all of the contents for her to inspect, she goes into the bag herself to do the checking. Nothing ever comes into our apartment without her noticing. She figures she’s supposed to approve everything that enters. She wears a tag with her name and phone number on her necklace, which is the right way to go. I once thought about adding to her tag the title Official Package Approver but there wasn’t enough room without making the tag a lot bigger.

Eleanor especially likes it when I come back from the grocery store and she sees me stacking her new cans of Fancy Feast. She looks to see if I bought all the right flavors and if I got the grilled, sliced, flaked, or marinated morsels version of each flavor. Since there are probably one or two people out there who aren’t cat lovers and are rolling their eyes right now, or who have already abandoned this story, I won’t get too deeply into the details of Eleanor’s preferences for Fancy Feast meals.

I give her half a can of Fancy Feast in the morning, and the other half when I come home from work in the evening. She really gobbles them up. The only time Eleanor meows is when she knows it’s time for Fancy Feast.

Very often, when it’s not time to eat, Eleanor moves her mouth like she is meowing - but no sound comes out. Sound only comes out when she know it’s time for one of her gourmet dinners. Now don’t worry - I don’t starve her - she also has some Iams dry food in a separate bowl near her Fancy Feast. She weighed eight pounds when I got her as a full-grown adult from the shelter, and I’d like for her to keep her girlish figure. Before I got Eleanor, I think I let Franklin get a little too heavy by indulging him too much in his love of food, and he didn’t live as long as he should have.

In anticipation of the big upcoming event that forced me to vacuum again so soon after I had already vacuumed, I had considered polishing all the fountain pens in my collection. But fortunately I had just learned in the nick of time from someone on the Zoss List (an internet-based fountain pen collector discussion group) before making that fatal mistake, that all the different finishes on various pens call for different kinds of polish, and that there’s no single polish that would be safe for all of my pens. I decided it would just be better just to leave the pens as they were, because if I ruined any of them just trying to shine them up, I wouldn’t be too happy about that.

Now you’re probably sitting there scratching your head and wondering what the big upcoming event was, because with all this incoherent babbling about superfluous stuff like Eleanor, Fancy Feast, and polishing fountain pens - topics that aren’t even related to the event itself, I never even got around to telling you what it the big event was.

Maybe next time.

The Dinner Guest
Part 2

Some of you may be great armchair detectives and have already figured out just from the story’s title that the unexplained big event was that a nice lady would be coming to dinner. I apologize to those of you who are not armchair detectives, and who spent all this time wondering what the event could possibly be. I didn’t realize it would take me as long as it did to finish that first chapter. It just never seems to be as easy as it should be.

Now the following might sound confusing, but I have to explain something important right now or you’ll really be even more perplexed as the story proceeds. This nice lady who was coming to dinner was not The Nice Lady who had once been a prisoner in London under the care of The Original Iron Lady. That particular nice lady, the one who had been a prisoner, as well as The Original Iron Lady who was an avid photographer and pen collector, appeared in some of my previous stories, but they are not going to be in this one.

No - the nice lady coming to dinner in THIS story was ANOTHER nice lady - a DIFFERENT nice lady - a nice lady who lives in the same apartment building that I live in, except she lives on another floor. You are probably wondering why don’t I just give her another name and thereby avoid all this unnecessary confusion. Well, I thought about doing that, but I didn’t do that. So there.

Now I had carefully planned out, well ahead of time, exactly what I would be serving. In this way, I wouldn’t have to figure out what we would eat while the nice lady was sitting there in my apartment. Flying an airplane by the seat of one’s pants usually works, or so I’m told by those who would know, but cooking by the seat of one’s pants is way too risky. I mean, like, what would I do if I found out that I had forgotten to get some of the things I needed for dinner, while she is right there waiting to eat it, just because I didn’t plan ahead carefully? What kind of fool would she take me for? So I determined all of this before she even arrived, and I went to the grocery store with my list of things to get three days beforehand.

Now you probably think I’m going to give you the exact recipes for everything I made, so then you can go out and open your own restaurant or something, and make a million dollars. But I’m not going to give you enough details for that. I’ll just give you a brief description of what we had. And then you can wonder exactly what goes into each dish.

There were two main courses - London Broil with my secret marinade that has to be soaked up for at least two days, and chicken in wide flat egg noodles with my secret combination of cream of chicken soup and pesto.

Now Franklin, who was my beloved cat before I got Eleanor, used to go berserk when I was cooking things like this because he really liked people food better than cat food. Of course I hadn’t discovered Fancy Feast as yet, back then in the days when I had Franklin. He could smell the beef or the chicken cooking in the broiler or the oven respectively, and would be meowing his head off the whole time. I would carefully explain to him that we had to wait until everything was ready to eat, but I don’t think he would pay attention to my explanation. He just kept meowing like he hadn’t eaten in two months.

But Franklin would be out in the kitchen meowing only if there weren’t any other people in our apartment, because he was afraid of everybody except me. If any strangers ever came to visit us, he would be off and running to his spot under my bed before they even knocked on the door. He could tell they were coming before they even got close.

Eleanor, on the other hand, likes her Fancy Feast so much that I don’t have the same problem with her in the people food arena. In fact, she really doesn’t even like people food, which is probably for the best. I now think that all the people food Franklin ate did him harm, but we won’t go into all that.

Eleanor keeps teaching me new lessons. For example, she taught me how to put out open Kleenex boxes - which apparently was something I never really understood until she came along to teach me.

TWO nice ladies? My goodness, Mr. Z., you're a regular
Lothario!
I like the tone of the narratives. Reminds me of stories by
Frank Sullivan, an American humorist who should have been better-known and better read.

Well, thanks for commenting, Auntie. Your suspicions are pretty well grounded, as one of the two nice ladies is actually fictional. I have to admit I made up the nice lady who was once a prisoner in London - the one who sat next to me at a baseball game, and then appeared in several subsequent adventures.

But the nice lady who is about to be a dinner guest is real.

And I'll have to check out this Frank Sullivan you mentioned - he sounds like a great guy.

The Dinner Guest
Part 3

Shortly after Eleanor came from the animal shelter to join me in my apartment, which is now our apartment, I put out two open Kleenex boxes the same way I had always done before. But all those prior times were before Eleanor gave me her lessons on the proper way to do it. You see, I mistakenly put the boxes with the openings facing upwards, so the next Kleenex to be pulled out was sticking up and out of the boxes a little bit. That’s what I always thought was a big advantage of Kleenex over other kinds of tissues, but I don’t want to start sounding like a commercial for Kleenex or anything like that.

Anyway, as you already suspect, when I came home from work that afternoon, our living room looked like someone had held one of those ticker tape parades that Times Square was so famous for after World War II ended. I didn’t think that I had given the key to our apartment to anybody representing Times Square, but sure enough, our living room floor was knee deep in ticker tape. When I got a little closer, I could then see that the ticker tape was actually Kleenex. So after I cleaned up that mess, I decided it might be better to put the Kleenex boxes with the open side facing downward.

Oh, by the way, Eleanor owns the face you see in my LitNet profile. Just don’t be fooled by the fact that she is pretending to look very innocent, because that’s a trick of hers just to throw people off their guard. This picture was taken shortly after Eleanor’s ticker tape parade and even though she looks quite harmless, she was already plotting her next escapade.

But I keep drifting off the topic, like I sometimes do when I tell my other stories. I should get back onto the subject of the dinner I was cooking right here and now, and stop with all these sideshows that detract from the story - like Eleanor’s ticker tape parade that you really don’t care about anyway. By the time I get around to telling the story, you will have forgotten what it was supposed to be about. And so will I.

Besides the London Broil and the Chicken with Noodles main courses, I was also going to have spinach with almonds. I have a nice vegetable steamer that steams spinach or green beans or broccoli or asparagus, and it also handles rice very well, but I wasn’t making rice for this meal, since we were having noodles. I also had some store-bought rolls and some real butter - not the margarine like I get when it’s just Eleanor and me. Not that I give Eleanor anything with margarine - don’t worry about that.

Now I have to stray from the dinner part and get back to the apartment preparation phase again, but just for a minute. We’ll get back to the dinner part as soon as we can.

I had finally finished vacuuming, and it pleased Eleanor to no end that the vacuum was back in the closet. Then I started dusting. Now back in the days when I was married, which was a long time ago, we had these things all over our coffee table and end tables and bookcases - things that were called “tschotschkes.” They made dusting, which is a lousy chore anyway, even worse. So now that I’m on my own, I don’t have any more tschotschkes.

Besides, I think I may have told you about how Eleanor once demolished the Mother of All Tschotschkes - my model of the Colosseum in Rome that I made out of my empty ink bottles. It was sitting there on a cherrywood game table near my front door - that is a table I could play bridge or chess on, if Eleanor wasn’t in our apartment. Since Eleanor is in our apartment, I can’t play bridge because she will just lay down on the dummy’s cards, and I can’t play chess because she will run away with one of the black knights in her mouth. Anyway, when I came home from work one day, I found that Eleanor had rearranged the magnificent Colosseum to look like a pile of rubble. And again, when I walked into the room, she was sitting calmly on the living room rug looking like the picture of innocence - like absolutely nothing had happened during my absence.

As I mentioned earlier, I had decided against polishing my pens due to the Zoss List warning that I might ruin some of them by not using the correct polish. I just went ahead and dusted my wooden lazy Susan pen rack that holds 12 pens. I took each of the pens out so I could dust the whole thing and not miss any spots, which I don’t do in my routine dusting sessions - only those when a dinner guest is coming. I also emptied out my leather covered pen cup that holds 15 more pens, and made sure that was clean. Then I took another 10 pens out of my little miniature beer stein and dusted them. My daughter brought this miniature beer stein back from London when her soccer team got to go there when she was about 14 years old. She is about the same age as David Beckham, so I now wonder if he was playing in the same tournament, even though I’m sure they kept the boys separate from the girls. And finally, I dusted the wooden photo cube that has a little extension with holes to hold four pens, including Uncle Hymie’s gold-filled Wahl from 1925, two of my treasured Parker Vacumatics from 1942 and 1945, and a nice Parker Duofold black and pearl model from 1925.

Now we’ll get back to discussing the dinner, because you can probably can’t take too much talk about dusting or fountain pens without getting sick.

For dessert, we were going to have cheesecake, but it was the kind that the grocery store made. I actually made cheesecake myself once, but it wasn’t all that great, and I didn’t want to risk having the nice lady think I was a lousy cook or something.

Besides, I can get just two slices since they have that kind of a package for people like me. I assume that since they make this two-slice package, that I’m not the only one who prefers that to bringing home an entire cheesecake, which just sits there and screams at me to keep eating it until it’s all gone, and I oblige. I have very little willpower, so the only way I can avoid guzzling an entire cheesecake in less than 24 hours, is not to have an entire cheesecake in my place at all.

Now speaking of cheesecake, I don’t know if you heard the following news item since you probably don’t live in the Washington, DC area, which is where I live. It was on our WTOP radio but maybe it was also on some other stations around the country. The story I’m talking about was “Cellphones Will Help You Lose Weight.” I was really surprised when I heard that - since there is no obvious connection between cellphones and losing weight.

The Dinner Guest
Part 4

The way the ‘Pounds Off with Cellphones’ works, according to WTOP radio, is that you take a picture with your cellphone of whatever it is you’re going to eat, then you use your cellphone to e-mail the picture to a nutritionist somewhere, and within five hours this nutritionist sends your cellphone a calorie count of what it’s going to cost you to scarf this thing down.

I don’t know about you, but if I took a picture of a hot fudge sundae and sent it off for analysis, I sure wouldn’t sit around waiting for five hours, letting the hot fudge turn cold and causing the ice cream to melt, until they tell me it’s more than the 32 calories I was estimating – that it’s more like 2,500 - in which case I should then push the entire cold fudge sundae down the garbage disposal. What a waste that would be! I wonder how many pounds will actually be lost using this absolutely brilliant technique.

Now I have cooked this particular meal of London Broil and Chicken with Noodles on previous occasions, but I had never taken pictures of it with my cellphone because all I can do with my cellphone is talk. I don’t have the cellphone model that takes pictures. My cellphone probably has some games on it, but I don’t know how to play them, nor do I want to play them. It’s probably a lot more dignified to do other disgusting things that I won’t even describe explicitly here, than it is to play games on my cellphone in public. Have you ever seen anyone who didn’t look like a total idiot playing games on their cellphone in public?

And besides, I don’t think the nutritionist has set up shop yet for e-mailing pictures in. So I decided we were just going to go ahead and eat the thing, regardless of how many calories there might be. After all, how often can I expect a nice lady to come over for dinner? For all I knew, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We’d just consider this to be a special occasion and wouldn’t worry about calories for just this one evening.

Before the nice lady arrived, I put out my new tablecloth and set two place settings. It was just the two of us plus Eleanor [note that I didn’t say it was the just the two of us plus the nice lady, which is what I said before I corrected myself, and long before the nice lady saw this story]. Because it was just two of us, I didn’t think it was necessary to add the extender leaves that permit the table to accommodate more diners. I was pretty sure that even with all the serving platters and our own place settings, everything would fit on the table sized for four chairs. That’s one of the reasons I don’t put out flowers on the table, even though I have a couple of nice vases - one even comes with my good bone china.

I used my better stainless steel silverware, even though I have another set for everyday use. But my everyday set is not really good enough for company, so I have a separate set for when I have guests. I never wanted to have sterling silver because I’m too cheap to buy it and I’m too lazy to polish it.

Eleanor got up on the table and checked to make sure I put all the pieces on the correct side of the plate – I have a picture in my buffet’s top drawer that shows where everything goes that so I can refer to it as I’m setting the table and then I don’t have to be embarrassed about putting things in the wrong places. And Eleanor checked to make sure that I didn’t put out anything with water spots or fingerprints like some people do when they don’t pay attention to stuff like that.

Eleanor helped me put the dinner plates out, with the cloth napkins and the silverware. She gave me a funny look like ‘where did these cloth napkins come from?’ She could tell something unusual was going to happen since I don’t usually set the table like this when it’s just the two of us, because she just eats out of her bowls on the kitchen floor. I think Eleanor thought the second place setting on the table was actually for her, and she probably expected to see some Fancy Feast turkey marinated morsels on it in just a few minutes.

When Eleanor was satisfied that the place settings met all of her required standards, she decided to take a little nap. Eleanor really likes to take naps – in fact once I put an ad in the paper offering her services at taking naps for $3 per hour. When nobody answered the ad, I lowered the price to $2 per hour, but there were still no takers. At that point, I decided that Eleanor would never make it as a professional sleeper – I mean like what’s the point of offering her services for $1 per hour, or even less?

Eleanor was all zonked out under the dining room table – that’s where she was for that picture in my profile as well - and the time was fast approaching for the nice lady’s arrival at our door. Every now and then, Eleanor sleeps on her back with her paws going in all directions, and she really looks funny like that. But this time, she was lying on her belly, with her chin resting on her forepaws.

I put on a Celine Dion CD and waited for the nice lady’s arrival.

The Dinner Guest
Part 5

Now I’m going to tell you something that’s sort of confidential, and I hope you’ll promise not to pass this on to the nice lady if you run into her someday. If you don’t think you can promise to keep your lips sealed, then please don’t read the next paragraph.

I was slicing tomatoes for the salad, and I’m not a very experienced cook like some of you out there. I kind of sliced one of my fingers – but just a little. I know that you have never done this, so I hope you understand that I still need lots more practice at this cooking stuff. Well, I went straight to my band-aid box immediately, and I don’t think I got anything into the salad that wasn’t supposed to be there. But if I did, it would have only been the tiniest bit, and besides, there were tomatoes in there anyway, so who could possibly tell? Certainly not me.

Anyway, mum’s the word, or I’m not going to confide in you anymore.

While Celine Dion was in the middle of My Heart Will Go On from the movie Titanic, Eleanor suddenly jumped up from her nap. She seems to be as perceptive as Franklin ever was at detecting the approach of strangers coming towards our door. Whereas Franklin would always run under my bed when he heard someone coming, Eleanor instead runs to the door. I don’t know what her background was before she came to the shelter where I found her (she was marked as a stray, but of course nobody knew how long she had been a stray), and I’m always intrigued about what determines whether a cat will be bold or frightened with strangers.

Whenever Franklin had to run under my bed to avoid being seen by strangers, he would slink very close to the floor for the entire distance of his escape route – I guess he figured he couldn’t be seen when he was slinking – like he was The Invisible Cat or something, as long as he stayed low to the ground.

Eleanor went running off to greet the nice lady at the door, well before the nice lady even reached the door. Eleanor had spent four days at the nice lady’s apartment when I went to visit my brother and sister in San Antonio, so Eleanor and the nice lady had gotten to know each other very well. However, I don’t think Eleanor was as crazy about the nice lady’s cat, Coco, as she was about the nice lady herself. Coco is more like Franklin, and she doesn’t trust strangers.

While Eleanor was staying with the nice lady and Coco, Coco stayed in her bedroom and didn’t come out. There was only one exception to this over the four days. We don’t know what caused this, because I was away in San Antonio and the nice lady was busy in her bedroom doing something, but apparently Eleanor somehow meandered into Coco’s room. The nice lady didn’t realize this until she heard some loud meows and saw Coco whiz by the door going eighty miles an hour, with Eleanor close on her heels. Coco wound up under the couch in the nice lady’s den, and Eleanor apparently couldn’t figure out how to get under the couch. I guess it was lucky that Coco knew how to get under that couch, and Eleanor didn’t.

Anyway, back in my apartment after the nice lady arrived for dinner, Eleanor greeted her and stretched out on her back for some belly rubs. After giving her the belly rubs, the nice lady took a small container of treats for Eleanor and put a few in Eleanor’s bowl in the kitchen. I told the nice lady that Eleanor might not eat the treats right now, because she was used to getting her treats only in the morning, but sure enough, Eleanor gobbled them up. But she gobbled them up very daintily – because that’s just how she is – a very dainty and dignified cat.

Eleanor likes the Friskies soft treats that come in a foil pouch – she thinks the foil helps keep them fresh - they include the chicken, fish, salmon, and beef flavors, as well as a hairball version (I don’t know what that one is supposed to taste like). But there are all kinds of different treats out there, as I’m sure you people know – even the one or two of you who don’t like cats as much as you should.

As Celine Dion moved on to The Power of the Dream, I brought out our wine – the nice lady usually drinks white wine and I usually drink red – which is good because then we never get our wines mixed up as to who is drinking what – and to top it all off, neither of us is color blind. We sat down on the couch, and Eleanor jumped up onto the coffee table just in front of us. She sat there for a while wondering what the heck was going on here in our apartment. She only knew the nice lady from that apartment upstairs where Coco lives.

Excellent story,especially there is a vast amount of parts of it.I am impressed.

Thanks, Wilbur, for taking the time to comment. Usually Aunt Shecky is the only one who does that.

The Dinner Guest
Part 6

After Eleanor watched us have a little wine and eat a few hors d’oeuvres, I guess the shock wore off and she started acting more normal. We listened to a few more Celine Dion songs, and I occasionally excused myself to check on things cooking in the kitchen.

It was a little difficult sitting there with the nice lady, keeping my left hand in my pants pocket so she wouldn’t see the band-aid on my cut finger and get suspicious and then start looking for things in the food to see what the heck was going on here and thinking she was going to get poisoned and wondering if she had gotten herself into a big mess or something like that by even coming to my apartment in the first place.

But with Eleanor’s help serving as a distraction, I don’t think the nice lady ever noticed that my left hand was in my pocket. Then Eleanor went over to the recliner where we usually sit when it’s just Eleanor and me, and she decided she was really pooped from all these investigations she had to conduct, what with having to check out the silverware and china placement and the nice lady and the colors of wine we were each drinking and all the things on the hors d’oeuvres plate. She went back to sleep, on the recliner – this time on her back – so her orange belly was facing straight up.

There’s not really much work required for the meal I was making, but it still required numerous visits to the kitchen just check on things happening at different times. So I was constantly getting up and going into the kitchen, but then I would come back as soon as the situation allowed it.

Now I don’t have one of those little metal triangles like they used to have in the chuckwagons during cattle drives back in the olden days of the Wild West, where the cook would bang a stick around inside the triangle which made a loud noise like a bell, while simultaneously bellowing “Come and Get It!!” Besides, I didn’t know what the nice lady would think about an invitation to dinner like that – she’s not from the ranchlands of Texas, but rather from downtown Cleveland. So I just said something to the effect that dinner was ready, and I brought out the salad bowl to the dining room table.

This immediately woke up Eleanor, who wouldn’t really sleep soundly through anything. When the nice lady and I took our seats, Eleanor thought she should join us on the table as well. Well, to be more precise, Eleanor was the only one actually ON the table – the nice lady and I were sitting in chairs NEXT TO the table.

Now a lot of people would be turned off by the sight of a cat on the dining room table, but fortunately the nice lady has Coco, who spends a lot of time on the nice lady’s dining room table, so the nice lady was used to this. But Coco only went up on the table when Eleanor wasn’t there for a visit, because when Eleanor came to visit, Coco stayed in her own bedroom which didn’t have any dining room tables in it. I probably told you that already, but maybe you forgot about it, so I’m just reminding you, so you’ll understand why the nice lady didn’t object to Eleanor’s being on the dining room table.

I didn’t understand exactly what Eleanor was looking for, because she had already made sure that all the place settings were arranged properly and that all the china and silverware were presentable, before the nice lady even arrived at our apartment. Then Eleanor started to put her nose into the salad bowl to check out the inside, but I told her she wasn’t supposed to do that. She doesn’t always listen to me, but that time she did. Either that, or she just didn’t want any salad.

We ate our salad, which was OK since I didn’t have to cut anything, which would have been difficult to do since I had to keep my left hand in my pocket to hide my band-aid. I was already wondering what I was going to do when I brought out the London Broil, since that was something I would have to cut as I ate it. I considered cutting the meat up into pieces while it was still out in the kitchen – like I used to do for my kids when they were really small, but there weren’t any small children at this dinner to give me cover, and I didn’t want the nice lady to think I had lousy table manners or anything. The chicken in noodles would be no problem, because it featured chicken which was cut up into small pieces, and it was easy to eat with my left hand in my pocket.

At about this time, the nice lady accidentally dropped her napkin from her lap onto the dining room floor. I don’t know how Eleanor realized this had happened, because Eleanor doesn’t have x-ray vision and can’t see through the dining room table because it’s made of solid wood, and it has those pads on top of the table, and there was a tablecloth sitting on top of the pads.

I had these pads on the table so I could put hot dishes out. Now keep in mind that the salad wasn’t hot at all, so we didn’t really need those pads at the moment. But I had put the pads there so that the table wouldn’t be ruined when I brought out the really hot stuff because my London Broil can be pretty hot and I don’t have any of those fancy gold things that hot dishes are supposed to sit on – trivials – or whatever they call them.

Anyway, you don’t really care about the pads on my dining room table or my tablecloth or how many trivials I have, but I’m just explaining all this really boring unrelated stuff so you won’t just think that Eleanor saw the napkin fall by looking through a glass dining room table or something, because I don’t even have a glass dining room table.

My daughter’s mother-in-law has a glass dining room table, and lots of glass pieces of furniture in her house, but I really prefer dark wood to glass. But we won’t get into an argument here about that – which is better – dark wood or glass – because there are probably some of you out there who prefer glass dining room tables to wooden ones. I understand there’s been a running battle for several years between the Glass Furniture People and the Wood Furniture People.

The Glass Furniture People think we Wood Furniture People are idiots, but we Wood Furniture People know that the Glass Furniture People are too stupid to make a meaningful assessment of anyone else’s mental abilities.

The Dinner Guest
Part 7

In the last episode, I somehow got myself sidetracked on some superfluous detour about wood and glass furniture that doesn’t have anything to do with this story, and I didn’t even get around to finishing the part about Eleanor jumping down from the table to get the nice lady’s fallen napkin.

Eleanor jumped down from the table within two seconds of when the nice lady’s napkin hit the floor, despite the fact that Eleanor couldn’t have possibly seen it fall. Since it was a cloth napkin and I had a rug under the dining room table, the napkin didn’t exactly hit the floor with a loud bang – like when someone drops their bowling ball in their bathroom. So we don’t know how Eleanor realized that it had fallen. And while I’m on the subject, I could never understand why someone would have their bowling ball out of their bowling bag while they were still in the bathroom anyway.

Well, regardless of whatever told Eleanor that the napkin was on the floor, she laid down right on top of it – like it was her baby or her blanket or something – and she wouldn’t budge.

It was kind of funny, thinking back to when I had gone to Macy’s to get the tablecloth and the napkins. At first, I was only going to get two napkins. But I told myself “you can never have too many napkins” so I got three instead.

I took the spare napkin out of the buffet for the nice lady, and we could let Eleanor keep what was now apparently her own precious bundle. She didn’t run off with the napkin, but she just stayed there under the dining room table, laying on the napkin and daring anybody to take it away from her.

Well, I had been thinking and worrying for so long about hiding the band-aid on my cut finger, that when I took a peek during my next visit to the kitchen, the cut was just sitting there – doing nothing. In other words, I didn’t need the band-aid anymore – that wretched band-aid that would have triggered the nice lady’s worrying about whether she was going to get poisoned from eating my cooking.

So I tossed the band-aid into the kitchen trash can, and brought out my serving dishes with the London Broil, the Chicken in Noodles, the spinach with almonds, the rolls, and the real butter. I was now home free, as long as the nice lady didn’t gag on any of my cooking.

I hoped she would like all these dishes, because I thought they were always pretty good, if I do say so myself. The nice lady said she thought all of the courses were great, but I don’t know if she really meant that or was just saying it because it was the thing you’re supposed to say. I watched while she swallowed some of the things, and I didn’t notice any obvious grimaces or shudders, so maybe she really meant it and wasn’t just saying it to be nice.

Eleanor stayed down there underneath the table for the rest of the meal, trying to hatch that napkin or something. We still didn’t know what she was doing.

Now Eleanor has a lot of toys – certainly a lot more toys than I had when I was little. But we won’t go into just how hard I had it way back then during my childhood. You’ll fall asleep just like Eleanor does when I try to tell her about it. Despite all her toys, which include various kinds of toy mice, teddy bears, stuffed socks, and tiny soccer balls that have bells inside them so they make noise when Eleanor bats them across the living room floor, Eleanor seemed to be favoring the napkin above all her other toys.

The Dinner Guest
Part 8

Now I hope you weren’t waiting for an explanation of why Eleanor was so attached to the napkin. If you were waiting, it was my fault for inadvertently planting exactly such a seed in my last episode. We never did find out what it was all about, so I can’t provide an explanation. When I was cleaning up later, after the nice lady had gone back to her own apartment, I just put the napkin in my laundry bag with no apparent objections from Eleanor, who had moved on to something else by that time. When it comes to things she doesn’t eat, Eleanor’s attention span leaves a lot to be desired.

Anyway, we finished our dinner without anybody getting sick at the table. I forgot to check later on how the nice lady made it through the night after she returned to her own apartment where Coco was waiting for her. However, she has since been back to my place for many other meals, so I guess nothing terrible must have happened.

Now don’t worry – I’m not going to tell you about all those other meals. I can see you rolling your eyes, thinking that there’s going to be an endless series of stories about our different dinners, all with superfluous rantings about things that don’t relate to the story that will drive you nuts. But this story is the only one about meals in my apartment that you’ll have to suffer through.

Now let’s get back to the night of our story, and I promise to stop with all these detours through other fields that you don’t care about anyway because they make you forget what’s happening in the main story. I’ll just stick to the meal itself and the happenings of that same evening – and discussions of how I went shopping at Macy’s and got three napkins instead of just two won’t work their way into this story any more. I promise.

I put the coffee on and took the cheesecake out of the refrigerator. We would drink our first cups of coffee as soon as it was ready, but we would wait a while to eat our cheesecake until some time after the movie started.

I got out the movie I had selected for our after-dinner treat and put it into my VCR. Now, I’m sure some of you are already gasping at just the mention of a VCR. As one of my daughters once said to my face talking about one of her brothers, which of course would be one of my sons, “Mike doesn’t even have a DVD player!!!” As if that were some sort of a major crime.

And this happened about five years ago. Since then Mike has atoned for his evil ways and has gotten a DVD player. But I still haven’t, and I continue to use my faithful VCR.

I have lots of VCR tapes so if I switched to DVD, I would be starting from ground zero again. Most of those VCR tapes are my favorite movies and a lot of them aren’t even on DVD yet. Plus I have several of my favorite episodes of The Waltons in VHS. Also, I taped all the games in the Red Sox eight-game winning streak in the 2004 post-season, and I watch those games every now and then. They are especially welcome now, since the Red Sox have folded their tent for the 2006 season.

[Author’s note in August 2008: I wrote this story in September 2006, and I’m leaving it as it was written then. However, I should tell you that I have since acquired a combination DVD-VCR so I can handle both of these media now. I have several DVD shows, but not nearly as many as my VCR tapes. On DVD, I have the first two seasons of Seinfeld, the first two seasons of Barney Miller, the first two seasons of The Waltons, the first three seasons of Taxi, and I’m beginning to get some movies on DVD. I won’t tell you what I have on VCR tapes because it would be too long a list, and besides, you probably don’t even care what movies I have.]

I could continue to amaze you by saying that I don’t have surround-sound either. My kids don’t understand how I can possibly survive without things like surround-sound. And it’s not just audio-visual home entertainment that I’m still in the Dark Ages with. But the only thing surround-sound is good for is those special effects that come with the new movies that I don’t really care for anyway. What will be just as bad to some of you as not having surround-sound, or maybe even worse, is the fact that I have a Mister Coffee drip style coffeemaker and I use Maxwell House Decaf French Roast coffee that I buy in a grocery store – it comes in a metal can with a plastic lid.

You coffee gourmets who roast your own special blends and have all kinds of neat coffee processors, and join clubs to buy exotic coffee from, and join other clubs to discuss the comparative rapture elicited by Super-Exotic Blend X versus Ultra-Exotic Blend Y, should probably stop reading now or you’re going to really get disgusted with all of this.

While the coffee was pouring through the filter, Eleanor went over to her scratching post and started working it over. She is very good about using her scratching post instead of my furniture. Franklin wasn’t nearly as good as Eleanor about this. Eleanor scratches her post many times a day.
Franklin used to scratch one of my couches and I had to put lots of clear tape over his favorite spots to discourage him and to keep my couch from looking like it had been sitting in the lions’ den at the zoo for a couple of years. Franklin thought the scratching post was just something to smell on occasion, or something to lick if I had just rubbed it down with catnip. He ignored all my personal tutoring for him on how he was supposed to scratch it with his claws. He watched while I showed him how, but then he just looked at me like I was some sort of a nut. And I probably was some kind of a nut, since I was trying to show him how to use his scratching post.

The ten-year old scratching post looked almost brand new when Eleanor joined me a little less than two years ago, and it is already starting to look old. If I’m at home when Eleanor is working over her scratching post, she watches me closely while she’s doing it, as if to say “Look at how well I’m doing on this scratching post and I’m not messing up any of your furniture – not that your furniture is all that great in the first place.”

But I’m getting sidetracked again, and I promised not to do that any more. You certainly don’t care any more about scratching posts than you did about my Mister Coffee coffeemaker or my Maxwell House that comes in a can.

The movie we would be watching was an ‘old’ one from 1985. Maybe some of you younger folks haven’t even heard of as yet because it doesn’t have any of the great modern stars like J-Lo or Ben Affleck or Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt.

The movie is called Out of Africa.

This thread continues to show your personal writing style.
Couple of comments (in the hopes they don't mess up the continuity):

At one time we had a device that enabled the user to copy broadcasts and VHS tapes onto DVD discs. Many movies, especially those of recent years have "imbedded" codes preventing such copying, but some older VHS tapes could be transferred, but not "easily" because one needed to be a
mechanical engineer in order both to hook up the machine and operate it properly. Another negative was the fact that the DVD copy couldn't be played on any other DVD player except the one from which it was originally copied. So I can see why folks invest in TiVo and similar services, but it's not for me as it's way too expensive. Frankly ,the recent movies and TV shows aren't all that great to begin with, not even worthy of an initial look rather than piece would want to add to one's collection.

Secondly, Out of Africa is noteworthy for its beautiful cinemotography and professional acting by Ms Streep. However, when it comes to Karen Blixen (sister of Donner and Vixen?) --
her fiction, such as Seven Gothic Tales and Winter's Tales, is far superior than that autobiographical work.

The Dinner Guest
Part 9

Out of Africa has a stirring beginning. A woman with a Danish accent says “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills….”

I liked the movie so much that I later read the book. Usually it’s the other way around, but in this case, I saw the movie first and read the book afterward.

I had heard of the book when I was young, many years before they made the movie, but I never got around to reading it back then. While both the movie and the book are great, they are great in vastly different ways. They are nothing alike, even though they both start out with the same haunting words, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills….”

The movie shows the marriage of the book’s author to her husband, in Denmark. It also shows beautiful scenery filmed in Kenya, which is where most of the story took place.

The author’s real name is Karen Blixen, but she used the name Isak Dinesen when she wrote the book, just the way Mary Anne Evans used the name George Eliot when she wrote Silas Marner and a few other books many years before that. The reason for doing this is that women had to pretend to be men or else nobody would publish any of their books back then in those olden days before women developed the wonderful qualities they have today, but which they must not have had back then, I guess.

Well, I could probably get sued by someone for saying that women couldn’t sell books back in those days so they had to pretend to be men. So I’ll stop talking about that, because I don’t even have a lawyer and if someone sues me, I’ll be in quite a pickle. And besides, who would take care of Eleanor? I don’t think they allow pets in the Arlington, Virginia jail system.

Anyway, Karen went to Africa in 1914 just after being married, and lived there until 1931, when she had to return to Denmark after her coffee farm failed. Well, in the movie, her husband played a prominent role in the story. In the book, he was only mentioned in passing. We know for sure that their marriage wasn’t one that could be called happy, but that they were still on friendly terms nonetheless, even after their eventual divorce.

I don’t know the whole story behind the story, but apparently much of the movie was based on a series of letters that Karen wrote to friends and relatives, letters that described incidents which never appeared in the book. I won’t bore you with all of this because you are more anxious to get back to the cheesecake that I was going to serve after we were about halfway through the movie. It was an ordeal to sit there for for all that time knowing full well that there was going to be cheesecake later, but the movie is so good that I somehow managed.

But just in case you’re interested in the movie, Karen had a long romantic affair with a man named Denys Finch-Hatton who would appear at her home every once in a while, stay for a few days, and then disappear back into the jungles where he earned his livelihood going on safaris. At least I think they had an affair – the movie didn’t actually show them fooling around or anything like that.

While Denys is certainly mentioned in the book, he was almost always in the background behind other things. The two major exceptions to this in the book would be the airplane ride and his eventual gravesite. If you don’t know what this particular airplane ride was, then you’ve never seen the movie, and it would be impossible to explain it to you in black and white words.

Now Eleanor watched the movie quite attentively with the nice lady and me, sitting on the couch with us for much of the time. I think it was at the point that Karen and Denys had to shoot two lions that were attacking them, that Eleanor lost interest in the movie. I don’t know if she figured she was the next target, or what, but after that scene, Eleanor went to the bedroom and didn’t watch any more of the movie.

Three very memorable parts of the book that weren’t in the movie were the chapters on the baby antelope, the wild animals in cages aboard a ship bound for Germany, and the abused oxen. The author had a particular sensitivity to the animals that most other people didn’t have when they wrote of this time and place, or of other times and places.

She adopted a baby female antelope in one of the earlier chapters of the book. The baby’s mother had just been killed and the baby was obviously helpless. She took the antelope into the house, nursed it with a bottle, and experimented with other foods to supplement the milk as the baby started to grow. The antelope stayed in the house for many months, living like a pet dog or cat, but everybody recognized before long that it would be better to let the wild creature go as soon as she could take care of herself.

If you ever saw the Waltons’ episode entitled The Fawn, you have a good graphical idea what this was like. The grown antelope was released to the wild, much to the chagrin of the household members, but she continued to return for a few days every year for many years – with a mate in tow. The returned antelope did not come back into the house, but just checked to make sure things were going all right in her absence. The mate was hesitant to come as close to the house as the little lady who had grown up within its comfortable walls, so he stayed in the area at a safe distance for as many days as the visit took.

Another story of particular interest to me was the description of some captured wild animals in cages aboard a steamer in Mombassa, Kenya, that was going to take the animals to a zoo in Germany. The reason it’s of interest to me is that many years after her story was written, I was on a Navy ship in that very same Mombassa and there was a ship moored near my destroyer that had caged lions topside. I could hear them growling from their cages, but didn’t really give a lot of thought to them. Karen, seeing exactly the same situation that I saw, penned a lengthy discussion about what these animals might be thinking in their cages, having been wrenched from their wild habitat. She also described what they might be thinking later during the trip to Germany and after arriving in their zoo.

Another fascinating chapter came near at the end of the book, where Karen vented her feelings on the abuse of oxen that was widespread in her small corner of the world. Reading it, one would surmise that the same kinds of abuse must have occurred all over the world, wherever the unique capabilities of oxen were required. But nobody that comes to my mind had ever bothered to discuss the brutal ways in which these animals were overworked and abused. Nor had anyone given enough thought to consider the simple remedies that Karen suggested. I won’t give specifics on this because they are very upsetting, especially to people who love animals, but it is important to note that she devoted considerable effort to this subject. It wouldn’t come across all that well in a movie, but in the book it added a lot to the picture one would form of this great lady.

The Dinner Guest
Part 10

Now I got so wrapped up in talking about the movie and the book, that I forgot to tell you about our intermission for dessert. It was New York cheesecake, and I had gotten the plain kind, without cherries or strawberries or blueberries, which are other options that are available at our supermarket.

The cheesecake section of our supermarket (the nice lady goes to the same supermarket as I do, but usually on a different day) is not all that far from the Fancy Feast section, which is where I have to spend most of my grocery store time, just to make sure I get all the right cans. I can’t just randomly pick up any old can that says Fancy Feast, because that would be too easy and I could be on to other parts of the grocery store in just a few seconds. But it is very important to be selective about which cans I get, and which ones I don’t, although I have never seen Eleanor walk away from any Fancy Feast meal I put down for her. She still has some of them that she likes better than others, and to me at least, it’s important to recognize which ones she prefers. But some of the LitNetters out there aren’t as crazy about cats as they should be, so we won’t go into much more details on this since I’m sure they are getting sick of all this cat food talk.

Eleanor took a whiff of my cheesecake, but apparently she must have wanted the one with strawberries, because she didn’t even try to eat any of the plain version that I had. So the nice lady and I ate our cheesecake and drank our coffee, the same kind of coffee that disgusts some of you more sophisticated exotic coffee gourmets, since it comes from a can that you buy in the grocery store. Then we started the movie up again.

Since all good things must eventually come to an end, the movie started to approach its closing. Denys was killed in a fiery airplane crash. The book doesn’t describe the funeral at all, but the movie does it beautifully. Karen read the stirring poem To An Athlete Dying Young by A. E. Housman, which laments a death that comes way too early. Some of its better lines are:

. . . . . .

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

. . . . . .

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

. . . . . .

----------------------

The closing words of the movie, written after Karen had returned to Denmark, were as follows.

“Mail has come today and a friend writes this to me. The Maasai have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong that many times at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave. A lion and a lioness have gone there and stood or lain on the grave for a long time. From there they have a view over the plain and the cattle and game on it.

“Denys will like that. I must remember to tell him.”