Somehow, two weeks without Elliot have passed by. Everyone, including our cat Lola is doing better. At first, Lola would sit on the floor of the guest room, seemingly waiting for Elliot to emerge from under the bed where he’d spent a fair amount of time in his last days. I discovered that Lola expressed her displeasure at Elliot’s passing by depositing a small turd onto the area rug in the room we refer to as “the library”. This is precisely why some people I know have no pets. Another reason being that as I went to pick it up, Georgie swooped in as if seizing upon a tasty treat.
“Gross!” I groaned, adding, “I miss Elliot too, Lola. But you don’t see me crapping on the rug!”
Last night, in the middle of the night, Andrea awoke me saying, “Lola has a mouse.” This is my cue to wake up, get out of bed and deposit the small corpse as dead animals are NOT on Andrea’s list of household chores. Those fall to me.
I scooped the small, deceased mouse into a Dixie cup and squinted at another object on the floor of the dark room, “What’s that?!” I pointed.
“That’s a tampon.” Andrea said. (Clean, people). And I recalled one having fallen out of my bag earlier.
“Ah.” I said, shuffling out of the room with the small, Dixie cup tomb.
This morning, I heard a ruckus from upstairs. Lola was sleeping on the guest room bed, a marked improvement from her floor stakeout. I crept up the stairs where her sister Dex seemed a bit more alert than usual. I found another mouse – alive and seeming to catch his breath. Into the Dixie cup he went and out the door. “Gotta live one!” I called to Andrea.
“Don’t show it to me! Dump it over the fence!” Andrea ordered and I obliged.
I take Lola’s role in the mouse hunt to mean two things: 1) She’s feeling better after Elliot’s passing! He would be so proud! 2) I have to get Marlboro pest out here because clearly we have baby mice cohabitating with us.
Back in January, I came across an ad on Facebook from the Patch newspaper offering pre-sale tickets to Hamilton. I bought the tickets for more than I’ve paid for any other theater production and the months flew by. As July neared, I began to question the wisdom of randomly purchasing tickets like this and messaged the Patch to learn that the tickets were through a 3rd party ticket reseller that I’d never heard of so I tried phoning them. I’d perpetually be on hold. They did respond to an email and I received the tickets to the Saturday production via FedEx. Then I began to think, “Great! Tickets! I hope they are legit!”. Thankfully, they were. I’ve been a theater goer since 1979 when I took a train into Chicago with my parents to see Annie (which I later acted out in my bedroom, playing all parts in my one woman rendition of the show). Hamilton is unlike any show I’ve ever seen – it’s extraordinary. This made me feel much better about my overpriced, non-fraudulent tickets.
It took Lin-Manuel Miranda seven years to write Hamilton. I read he’d, understandably grow discouraged and consider giving up and his wife would encourage him to stay the course. It’s interesting to think about who the people are in our lives that encourage us to not throw away our shots (reference to song My Shot - which took Miranda a year to write). Who do we encourage?
