The Road to the White House

The Road to the White House:
A Mid-Atlantic Road Trip
November Outs 2011

Ellen Jo Roberts



Despite having seen the '80s box office bomb DC Cab nearly 100 times, I’d only actually visited Washington DC once. The District of Columbia, a parcel of land snuggled along the mighty Potomac and comprised of parts of Maryland and Virginia, has been our nation's capitol since 1790.

Most of my feelings on our nation's capitol are generated from movies.
The myriad political espionage films. Aliens blowing up the White House. The bratty yuppies of St Elmo's. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson crashing weddings. Marches on Washington. Secrets hidden in faded ink on the back of the Constitution. Hippie Jenny running across the Reflection Pool to Forrest Gump. A silly 1983 comedy about cab drivers starring Mr T., Gary Busey, Max Gail, Paul Rodriguez, Adam Baldwin, Whitman Mayo, a pair of bodybuilding twins known as "The Barbarian Brothers", DC Cab also featured an early role by a young stand-up comedian named Bill Maher. It was a cult classic in my household.



Washington DC is a place we see non-fiction news of daily, almost always in a negative light.
It is our national underpinnings, holding everything in place, like a girdle about to burst at the seams. Though it remains one of our country's most popular tourist attractions, I'd somehow avoided it for 25 years.

This summer I went back, on a road trip with my Mom, and my globe-trotting Chihuahua, Floyd.



My Mom was born on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th, 1941. "A day that will live in infamy!," my brother and I've always joked, "the DAY that MOM was BORN!" And like World War II, she'll turn 70 this year. She's a Sagittarius, fiery and quick to laugh. She's a shutterbug, a writer and an opinionated rabble rouser. She’s impatient and excitable. My Mom sees the joy in the world and she runs with it. All of my best and worse parts are inherited directly from her.

A widow at age 35, she raised my brother and me with a great deal of energy and good humor, always encouraging my creative pursuits. We live almost 2000 miles apart, and I miss her every day. To supplement phone calls and yearly visits, we plan a lengthy road trip together every few years. This year’s trip was a bit ambitious. Chicago to Washington DC: A big loop through Pittsburgh down into the nation’s capitol and the return trip a low slung arc through Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky.

While I may be an avid road tripper living in the grand scale of the open west, thinking nothing of eight hours spent in a car, this kind of commitment to the road might could potentially cause my mom to go haywire. On a visit to Arizona she once said, "I can drive for two hours and be in Milwaukee. Out here, you can start in the middle of nowhere, drive two hours and STILL be in the middle of nowhere!" A year was spent planning this DC trip, reviewing routes, timelines and making arrangements, so she knew what we were getting in to, at least on paper.

In the end, we survived a 2,000 mile adventure, through typhoon rains, record-breaking heat, and a near miss of Hurricane Irene and a very rare 5.6 earthquake.



Our road trip began during record-breaking rains in the Midwest. Floyd and I barely squeaked into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in between 11 inches of rain, and so much lightning it felt like a bad 1950s Dracula movie. The three of us hit the road the next morning and made it to picturesque Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the night. There we drank Irons (Iron City Beer) and ate "Primanti sammiches". The famous sandwich was invented in Pittsburgh so that steel workers could eat a complete meal one-handed. The Primanti Brothers ambitiously stuffed a bun full of meat, cheese, sauerkraut and fries. More than 75 years later, the sandwich is a Pittsburgh institution, much like the historic Monongahela Incline.



We rode this small cable railcar to the top of historic Mt. Washington, named for the point where George Washington first surveyed the area bound by the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers. From one Washington namesake to the next, by early afternoon we arrived in DC via Maryland, following a shady old canal chock full of weekend kayakers. We checked into the excellent Quincy Hotel at L and 19th Streets. A pet-friendly, chic boutique hotel born from a historic apartment building, the Quincy was within walking distance to both the National Mall, and Georgetown.



Its location was ideal for locking the car up in the adjoining parking garage, and touring the city by foot.

The Mid-Atlantic was experiencing a record-breaking summer heat wave during our visit. Arizona girl, acclimated to jogging in 100 degree desert temperatures, did not ace the oppressive humidity quite so easily. My jeans dyed my entire body blue with sweat. Yet we walked dozens of miles around town, braving the crowds, visiting all of the monuments. I got my National Parks Passport book stamped nearly 30 times! And everything is free! All of the monuments and museums are free.



New monuments since my last visit include the eerie and cinematic Korean War Memorial, and the Tom Hanks-endorsed World War II Memorial.



Right after our visit, an earthquake damaged the Washington Monument. The 555 foot tall obelisk, omnipresent in the city's skyline, was completed in 1885. The stone tower suffered cracks that are currently being assessed by engineers.


My first visit to Washington DC, in 1986 with my church youth group, was during a completely different era. Marion Berry was the beloved (and later ingloriously discovered to be crack-smoking) mayor. Prostitutes lined 4th Avenue. At age 14, I spent a week assisting in soup kitchens throughout the seedy neighborhoods hidden behind the gleaming white marble façade of DC.

When our group visited the White House it was along with 1,000s of others lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue handing money to paid tour companies. Security was so lax back then I'm pretty sure I grabbed a handful of Ronnie Reagan’s Jelly Bellies® from his desk in the Oval Office. In 1986, Pennsylvania Avenue was open to regular automobile traffic like any other street. In the post 9/11 world, Washington DC is a much different place. Tightened and polished. Concrete bumpers block off entire streets to traffic. Snipers guard from the roof of the White House. The sex workers might not be truly gone, but they are no longer lining the tidy streets. Marion Barry, arrested and incarcerated on drug charges in 1990, returned to capitol politics not long after. Elected to city council and later re-elected mayor from 1995-1999 ("Mayor for Life" they've dubbed him), he remains a very popular figure there. Barry is currently a councilman for the city's Ward 8.




Seeing the Vietnam Wall again struck a deep chord in me. Designed by Maya Lin, a Chinese-American architecture student at Yale, and dedicated in 1982, the wall slices into a grassy knoll with sharp shock of gleaming black stone inscribed with over 58,000 names, listed in chronological order from the war’s start in 1958 to its finish in 1975. Though I knew no one directly who had died there, I know many veterans of that war, and have great respect for them. During this visit to the monument, I was on a mission to accomplish something I’d failed to do at age 14. Orrin Cassata was the only person I knew of who had died in the Vietnam War. He was the son of family friend Mrs. Bridget Cassata. She had his photo on her wall and a little shrine to him at her home in Chicago. I never met him, of course, because he was killed before I was born. Yet he was the only person I “knew” who died in Vietnam.

In 1986, while touring the National Mall with my church youth group, I tried to find Orrin Cassata’s name by reading the wall one name at a time! (Only a 14 year old thinks she could possibly stumble upon her goal by reading through all 58,000 names.) I wanted to get a "rubbing" of his name for Mrs. C. It wasn’t until we were leaving that I realized there was a directory, looking like a giant phone book, listing all of the names and their locations!



But we couldn’t wait. We had to leave. A quarter of a century later, here I am back at the Vietnam Wall.
I head directly for that big book, find his name and go right to it on the wall. Snapped a photo of it.



All of a sudden I was overcome with emotion and started crying. Maybe because I was not able to find his name until after Mrs. Cassata died. Maybe because I’d been dreaming of this moment for 25 years. Maybe because seeing his name was just a tiny piece of something much, much larger, and the visual display of how this war decimated an entire generation. How we seem to repeat these mistakes, and the list of names lost in wars to follow continues this ongoing tally.





Seeing the Lincoln Monument also got me choked up, as my Mom and I stood arm-in-arm reading aloud the Gettysburg Address, engraved on a wall in front of us 50 feet high. She’d had to memorize it in grade school and had never truly forgotten it. The more you read about political history, and the trials and tribulations of our nation, the more you realize any of the issues of the past easily translate to similar issues today.

We strolled Georgetown for breakfast one morning, ducking up and down side streets to take photos of interesting homes in this fancy and historic neighborhood of Washington DC. All the chi-chi shops and picturesque townhouses line the M Street corridor.





DC is not so surprisingly diverse in population, with myriad ethnicities, a strong African American population, high powered dignitaries, and a many foreign-born residents. The morning rush-hour crowd bustling on the streets all share one trait, however. They all stop to smile at a tiny Chihuahua walking past.



Our plan to tour the White House began months earlier. No longer can you simply show up like a herd of cattle. Back home, you must request a tour via your local congressperson, and your credentials must be cleared and approved well in advance. You must be on The List. We had a special connection directly with the Secret Service via our family in the Chicago Police Department, and they processed our request for a tour of the White House's East Wing.



You cannot bring anything into the White House today. No purse, no comb, no lipstick, no wallet, no phone, no camera. No dogs, no guns, no beverages. Though, inexplicably, you can bring a knife, as long as the blade is smaller than 3 inches! (?!) Our tour of the East Wing was scheduled for a Tuesday morning. My Mom had never been to the White House, and had been koo koo bananas excited about it for months. We were met at the 15th street side entrance by a handsome, square-jawed Secret Service agent. Our very own Secret Service agent! The guards checked our identification and made sure we were on The List. We passed through the security check points, and into the East Wing, the residential section of the White House.

Our official escort was assigned to Michelle Obama’s detail, and previous to that, had been assigned to Laura Bush. “Laura Bush was far more anonymous,” he told us, “She could go about her business most of the time, and people often didn’t recognize or notice her. But Michelle Obama, she’s 5’11’’ and very much a star. People recognize her everywhere.” We passed through the Green Room, Red Room, Blue Room, Yellow Room, along with a steady stream of fellow visitors, all who had to jump through similar hoops to get their feet in the door. Fresh flowers decorate every room because the White House has its own in-house florist. A staff of permanent butlers, chefs, housekeepers, electricians, ushers, curators, beekeepers and many more keep this historic building (c.1800) in ship shape.

A plastic path protects the floor, and velvet ropes keep visitors from touching any of the art and artifacts. Docents well-versed in the portrait collection share details of the artists, years, and bits of historical trivia.

The official portrait of Bill Clinton captures his casual roguishness, leaning against a mantel in a come-hither pose. Suddenly a handsome curly-haired black and white dog trots down the steps in front of us, with a handler holding a clipboard and a cup of coffee.

“There’s Bo,” says our Secret Service Agent. “Bo?” we ask, nonchalantly.

Suddenly it hits us, “BO! OBAMA! You mean, The First Dog, Bo?” I restrain myself from hysterics and calmly ask the handler, who’s stopped to share brief morning chit-chat with our Secret Service Agent, if we can pet the dog.

“Yes, but make it quick,” he says taking a swift sip of his coffee and glancing around the hallway for signs of sudden mobbing. My mom and I both pet The First Dog, a handsome Portuguese Waterdog who probably sleeps in the bedroom of the First Daughters! Never was there a softer, sweeter-smelling dog!

Eager to get outdoors, his interest in our adoration was limited, and off he scampered, leaving me holding my hand aloft in disbelief. “I am not gonna wash this hand until Floyd gets a chance to smell it!” When we got back to the hotel, after a breakfast at the DC classic Old Ebbitt Grill, I let Floyd sniff my hand and he seemed completely unimpressed (though he did seem to know I’d had Eggs Benedict for breakfast.)

Checking out of the fabulous and friendly Quincy, we loaded back into the car and headed across the Potomac into Arlington, Virginia, location of Arlington National Cemetery and the Iwo Jima Marine Corps Memorial. Since my last visit, the Kennedy family plot has added two new graves: Teddy and Jackie now lay in eternal rest at Arlington.



We spent a night with my cousin and her family near Richmond, VA, and the next night with Aunt Joyce, my Mom's sister, and Uncle Fred in Charlotte, NC prior to making the long journey back west.



Through the Appalachian hills along the French Broad River, we made a pit stop in Marshall, NC, in honor of friend and long time Noise contributor Natasha Shealy who has split her life between small towns in Arizona's Verde Valley and Marshall. A handsome one-road town nestled along the river, Marshall seems like a movie. We arrived in Louisville after dark, checking into a creepy bed and breakfast in the historic "Old Louisville" neighborhood.



The area was just seedy enough to keep my Mom on alert, but I spent the next morning wandering the blocks of handsome brawny brick homes. Local weirdos smoking cigarettes on street corners. A wild-haired dude walked up to me and asked me if I had a light. "I'm sorry, I don't smoke," I say, and he walks with me, back towards his porch. He mumbles something about Floyd, and says, "Dog…Chihuahua."

"Yep, he's a Chihuahua. He's mean. Aren't Chihuahuas always mean?” I say, cautionary because the fellow seems like a bit of a loose cannon.

The weirdo pondered this a moment and said, "He's got a BIIIIIIG HEART.....but NO ASSSSSSS."

(Later I tell my brother this story. "That's all you, Ellen," he says, "You are a weirdo magnet").



After a brief midday stop in Seymour, Indiana, home town of Johnny Cougar Mellencamp, my Mom and I made it back to Chicagoland just ahead of rush hour on a Friday afternoon. Welcoming us back are my Mom's husband, and my brother with his wife and young son. We have just a couple of days together before Floyd and I board the airplane back to Arizona, and we make the best of it.

I’d encourage all American citizens to tour Washington DC at least once in their lives, to soak up the great archive of information, and stroll the streets of our nation’s history. It’s not just about what you see in movies and on TV. Rolls of spent film and a book filled with Polaroid photos are my treasures of the trip, along with the many new stamps in my National Park Passport Book. But the biggest treasure of all is the time spent on the road with my Mom.



Ellen Jo Roberts will be happy to watch "DC Cab" with you any time.


She lives in Clarkdale with Chad, Floyd, Ivan and Ned.


Read more about it at ellenjo.com




  

Chibo

My Uncle Len was a loner, and he died alone.
He was a complicated and brilliant man, the oldest son of the family.
My Mom, the middle child, said she always felt like Lenny got the attention for being the smartest, and Joyce got the attention for being the cutest.



Uncle Len was tall and gangly. He wore glasses, and leather loafers without socks.
In every family photo he looks like he’s remembering a joke with a sly smirk on his face and a slight tilt to his head. He had a trailer in the woods but lived in an apartment in the city. Surrounded by “gypsies” who might steal your Thanksgiving turkey off the grill if you weren’t watchful.

My memories of Uncle Len are tied up in cigarette smoke, woolen plaids, hunting artwork of Labrador retrievers, and Steely Dan’s “Aja” album playing on the stereo above the mantle. His forever license plate “FO 84”. There he is, hanging back on the outer edges of a conversation at Christmas, sipping his beer and laughing in that whistley snicker. His deep baritone piping in to share humor, or tell long tales of the Florida Keys, the gulf coast, the “Blonde Bomber” and wild adventures he shared with his buddy, T.C. Funny stories about the babes at Old Orchard where he worked as a Pinkerton guard.
He liked to camp out, travel, escape.
My great grandma Ana Komlenich always called Lenny “Chibo”, which meant something in Serbian. We all called him Chibo.



“Helllll-LO”, he greeted us on the phone or at the door. Growing up we spent a lot of time with Uncle Len. Holidays and barbecues and random Friday night dinners.
His apartment, where he raised two kids with his ex-wife, was a famous mess.
Papers and books piled everywhere, stale cigarette smoke dusting everything.
He was like Hunter S Thompson, my Uncle Len, in style and comportment.
Cynical and poetic. His younger cousins all adored him, looking to him for amusements. My brother and I loved to banter with him at the dinner table. He made us work our brains harder, challenged us. His children, Tim and Susie, cultivated his same sense of irreverence and humor, laughing at the absurdities of life.

Chad and I moved far away West in 1995, and due to our distance I can count the times we saw Uncle Len on one hand since…. Christmas 1997. My Mom’s wedding in 2005. During a favorite special visit we saw him for a whole week in 2001, when he drove cross-country with my mother, to visit us in Arizona. My Mom cannot fly, so she cajoled Uncle Len into a road trip to the southwest, summer monsoon rains filling New Mexico with the sweet smell of wet sagebrush. When his “FO 84” license plate pulled up out front of our Clarkdale Arizona bungalow I couldn’t believe my eyes. I jumped for joy.
The two of them, brother and sister, were funny together, like an old married couple, bickering. In the sweaty Arizona sun Uncle Len smelled exactly like Grampa.

My Mom spent the trip being excited and fidgety, Uncle Len poking fun at her, and all but saying “Keep Cool” like how Grampa always said to Grandma. Uncle Len worked for the Milwaukee Road Railroad for many years. I’m not quite sure what his job was there, but I think it was in the offices, being a genius. We rode the Verde Canyon Railroad, a scenic wilderness train (where I later got a job and have now worked for since 2002). I remember Uncle Len’s broad smile on the train ride, and how it was a “highlight” for him. Bantering with the engineers afterwards as they buttoned up and tucked the train in for the night.

People say something changed in Uncle Len when his only daughter died of a rare cancer when she was a senior in high school. Something broke inside him. From that point on, a slow retreat began, until eventually nobody saw him much, not even his son or grandkids. He did his own thing. He didn’t come to Serbian Christmas and there were no more random Friday night dinners. He missed funerals and birthdays, and my brother’s wedding. He was invited and included but seldom participated, much to the chagrin of my mother. Tim’s wife, Anna said he’d never come over for a spur of the moment meatloaf, but if they ever needed help he would drop everything and come over to help. (Because he truly did love them, and he was a good man.)

Despite his lack of family participation, my Mom never gave up on Len, and tried to reach out to him. He rarely reached back. He died alone, my Uncle Len. Even though I’ve not seen him in years, and he lived nearly 2,000 miles away, the world seems different now with him gone. I wonder if my grandparents welcomed him into the pearly gates. My grandma probably wagging her finger at him about all the events he’d missed out on. I wonder if he’s there on the other side reunited with Susie again.

Being at the depot comforts me now, thinking of Uncle Len riding on that train that’s parked outside. What a kick he got out of it. He went on and on about the train ride.

I always appreciated my uncle’s great storytelling, and his "c'est la vie" attitude. I never heard him raise his voice in anger. Uncle Len had a positive influence on me growing up, without my own dad, and that will always stick with me, as will my fond memories.

Clyde. 2000-2011

Clyde. He arrived about a month after we bought our house in Clarkdale, in February 2001. It was a few months since we'd lost our wild woolly Raoul, in Jerome, where he was killed on the highway in front of our apartment by a fast moving car.


(Raoul,1998, Jerome AZ)

As freshly minted homeowners, with a yard of our own, and finally recovering from our mourning for Raoul, we agreed to take this young cat named Clyde (he came with the name). The Jerome Humane Society said he needed "special owners" as he was getting himself into trouble where he lived, with an elderly lady/Veronica Lake lookalike in leopard print jumpsuit, in Cottonwood's Verde Villages.
He'd been getting into scraps with wild creatures and nearly lost his tail in a battle. We'd made a poster commemorating Raoul and had posted it all over Jerome. The kind folks in Jerome remembered the poster, and tracked us down. Soon this beautiful creamy colored flame-point siamese mix was in our living room. He was just under a year old.



Clyde was kinda wild at first, but soon mellowed into a lovely pet. We kept him indoors because of Raoul's death by car, and also the abundance of coyotes in our edge-of-the-wilderness neighborhood. He came to us with a history of scrapping with wild critters, so we wanted to protect him from future dangerous encounters. Sometimes we'd walk him on his harness and leash, or leave him hooked up on it, on a lead, in the protection of the yard. We kept his harness in a end table drawer by the door, and when we opened the drawer and pulled out the harness Clyde would come running, and hop up in the table, ready to put it on and go outside.



In 2002 the wacky Veronica Lake looking lady came over to visit her Clyde. She was eccentric in a most amusing way. Apparently she had a daschund named "Regis" that Clyde liked to play with. She also said "He likes coffee. See if I say 'coffee-coffee-COFFEE' he looks. Lookat 'im. He's licking his lips!" We repeated that phrase for a year, chuckling. (Footnote: Clyde has never asked for a cup of coffee.)

Sociable and mouthy, Clyde liked other animals, and on the times he escaped the front door we'd nearly always find him on the next block with neighbors who had several cats, dogs, and a pot-bellied pig named "Chuckie". He seemed lonely for some company.

In 2003 I did something crazy and impulsive. I stopped for a sign that said "Chihuahuas 4 Sale". Clyde could have easily killed tiny 24 ounce puppy Floyd, but he didn't. Clyde, with all of his claws in tact, and pointy fangs, could have made a quick end for my rodent-sized puppy. But he didn't. In fact he loved Floyd like he was his very own pet. Always gentle and playful with him, teaching him manners as best he could.

The next year we ended up with another dog, Ivan, and though Clyde was never as fond of Ivan as he is of Floyd (he mainly liked bopping Ivan on the face or batting his butt and waking him up from sleep), he was good with him too. Clyde was indeed the king of the house, and the dogs both answered to him on just about everything.











Clyde was always in the same room with all of us. We would sometimes joke how all 5 creatures of our house, canine, feline, and human, would sometimes be inhabiting the same 5 square foot space, snuggled up together. A very happy lil' arrangement indeed!





In early 2011, around the 10th anniversary of us buying our house in Clarkdale, Clyde stopped eating. He stopped pooping. He didn't jump on our bed anymore. He got very quiet. We took him the the vet and were crushed to learn that he was going into kidney failure from something called Polycystic Kidney Disease.



The veterinarian said this was something genetic he's had since he was a kitten, and there was nothing we could've really done about it. She also didn't know how much longer he would live. We took him home. It was like "hospice" care, being fed liquified mix of baby food and special kidney care formula in a kitten bottle, being injected every other day with subcutaneous fluid between his shoulderblades to help flush the growing toxins from his blood, groomed with wet washcloths, and brushed by me, as if he were a baby and I was his momma.

We'd always fed Clyde the best most expensive holistic organic meat-based feline diet. He drank filtered water and got premium treats. We even brushed his teeth and got him dental care from the vet. He was kept safely indoors. We did everything right, everything you're supposed to do. We certainly didn't think he'd be dead at age 11.
Losing Clyde was like losing the last 10 years of our life. The foundation of our life in Clarkdale was built on his back, and with him leaving us it was like he was taking 10 years of our lives with him  Like the end of an era. A door forever shut.

After we found out he was dying, we let him outside into the yard every day, because he didn't go much farther than the front porch or the shady grass. He enjoyed basking in the sun, and loved our field trips to the Verde River. First time I'd heard him meow in weeks.



There were a tough few days at first, right after his diagnosis, when we were instructed to flush him with IV fluids twice a day. It was daunting all the needles and the tubes and the medical equipment.We didn't think he'd live through the night. He seemed groggy, drunk, uncoordinated.

Then, we were allowed to cut down the fluids to once a day, then every other day.
He suddenly seemed to get a little bitty bit sparkier, clawing on logs in the yard, and climbing on the couch to sit by the dogs. Some days he almost seemed to show a wee glimpse of his old self.
Taking him to the river was a fantastic time machine. He'd roll in the sand, walk the trail, meow, claw at trunks, almost like his old self.



Vet follow up report said his blood numbers were better, but still terrible. Where they used to be off the charts, higher than the machines could even read, a week later they were merely "very high". He was maintaining, moving, drinking water, peeing in the litter box, looking out the window. And still hanging out in the same room with all of us, maybe hanging in there a little bit longer.
As it was like we'd already mourned his death, any extra day we got with our Clyde was bonus points.

"As long as he wants to be here with us, he can be here with us," we'd say.



On March 14th, 2011, Clyde took his last breath in the sunny tall grass and shade of a yucca in our yard. The vet came to our house and gave him an injection to put him to sleep. I had my hand on his chest as his heart took its last beat. Clyde didn't fight the doctors, or me, he just lay still and quiet. And then he was gone.

Despite a few steady weeks (and even some glimmers of hope he might make a comeback--like a sudden reinterest in eating food in his own), in his final couple of days, Clyde took a turn. He lost all interest in everything, food, water, us. He was suffering it seemed. Crying. Green snot in his eyes and nose. His mouth and tongue were suddenly full of ulcers. He would just hang his chin in the water bowl and not drink. If nothing else bothered him, I was certain that his mouth was bothering him and it was cruel to prolong the inevitable. All the life was fading from him. He even lost enthusiasm for going outdoors, which had been something he had always really enjoyed. Time had come to say a final goodbye and let him go. We were hoping we'd just wake up to find him peacefully curled up dead somewhere in a favorite spot, but this is not the way it went. We had to make the call.



His exit was very peaceful for him, though of course we were bawling our eyes out. We foolishly thought we'd already done all our grieving, when we first found out he was dying. But we were wrong.

Clyde is buried next to our eucalyptus tree, in a grave Chad spent all day digging. Chad made him a custom built coffin out of two shoeboxes. In his coffin: a tiny pillow for his head, Verde River clam shells, Sedona red earth, Mexican beach sand, big basin sage, kitty post cards from his pin up gallery, favorite toys, locks of our hair (including the dogs'), and a polaroid of Floyd and Ivan. Lisa gave me some daffodil bulbs to plant in the grave, and we set them right above him.

After the vet left, we said our last goodbyes to Clyde and Chad positioned him in his cardboard coffin, ready to lower into his grave. We let the dogs out into the yard to pay their last respects. Ivan was kinda clueless, and gave a perfunctory sniff before trotting off elsewhere, but Floyd was very concerned and intense. It was really touching my heart seeing Floyd, sniffing Clyde's head and ears, and watching him so intently as we closed the lid on him. Floyd seemed almost like he knew what was into going on and seemed very affected by Clyde's death.

"Of course," Chad said, "Because Clyde raised him."

Sad day, but peaceful and special.
As we carefully shoveled the earth back over Clyde's grave we joked about the crazy cartwheels and somersaults he used to do. And how he would always fall asleep on his back, legs up, not a care in the world. Clyde, you were the best cat ever.



Beautiful boy, you will be forever loved.
Thank you for the 10 wonderful years of affection, noisy wake up meows, entertainment, humor, and devotion. His memory will live on in paintings, photographs and the tales we tell.