Well, now that Tony is back from vacation I can reveal that he was away for a week or so. Berlin and Warsaw. Now I usually call people from street phones when I go away. But Tony has one-upped me and emailed me from Deutchland and Polska. He has a penpal in Poznan and the hotel in Berlin had an Internet terminal. Thank god for free email from Yahoo!
Apparently they don't have a "y" on the keyboards over there, so Tony was forced to type normally as if there was not a "z" where the penultimate letter of our alphabet should be. So Tonz had a simplz wonderful time. Busz running around the capital of Germanz.
Tony is sure to write up a trip report, and I will link it to a future entry when he writes it. He is nostalgic for East Germany. Apparently the Germans, in a fit of Wiedereinegung (reunifications) zeal are tearing down every official trace of the old East Berlin as fast as they can. Faster than Giuliani cleaned up Times Square for Disney's Michael Eisner. I hope I like Berlin, when I get there. I hope to one day. But my personal notion is that I can only go to Berlin if a) I go to Israel first, or b) I visit my grandfather's Polish shtetl when I go to Germany. It only seems right.
Meanwhile, last night, I cat-sat for his fuzzy little dumpling, Koshka. She's a blessing. She's a lonely li'l puss and she literally curls up on my knee when I am there, and doesn't move until I do. She's so patient. She put up with both Melrose Place and Ally McSqueal, and my fending off her advances toward my veal parmiagiana sandwich from Chez Brigitte.
Still, she's a toothless wonder. A vet doomed her to the lethal injection four years ago or more, but a simple change in diet saved her life. And she is still with us, warming our knees and scratching the sofa and throwing up on the sofa and making a mess with her food and running around like a dumpling. And occasionally her prolapsed rectum pops out like a blood-red satellite dish. But we all love our little Koshka.
M and T feed her when Tony goes away, but I go there to love her. It's so odd. When Tony's away, it's as if it's not even his apartment. It's not like it's mine. It's sort of like it's Koshka's apartment and I am her friendly visitor. After all, she sort of looks like a 90-year-old Ukranian woman, especially when her jaw goes out of joint and she sort of resembles Popeye. She sits on my lap more than my own cats.
Everyone should know Koshka.
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