Living with cats

I don't mean men. I mean Floppy (formerly Fluffy until his hair began to shed), Hop-hop (for Hope) and Pepper (for his black and white markings) who shared my writing space today. I was at the tailend of grading first-quarter writing exercises done by 12th graders when these cats, who belong to a friend, took turns pleasantly "distracting" me. They could've enjoyed the whole house to themselves, but they seemed to have conspired to fence me in after I had just declared I was happy to have time and space to myself.

Here I am caught at the pre-breakfast hour working on something. Floppy parks himself on the narrow side of my work space. He's looking out at the neighbor's. Photo by Yasmin Almonte

Next to occupy the same space is Pepper. He may have liked the music of the Cello Guys. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Definitely won over by the music. At some point he pads across my keyboard. I didn't dare shoo him away. I just clapped my hands and shouted. He took his time, of course. I should be so grateful he didn't pee on the computer. *Sigh*

Hop-hop helps himself to my drinking water while Pepper sprawls on top of the rest of my stuff, including the cell phone.

Partnering

When your collaborator is a four-year-old kid, expect pleasantness in an activity you both aren't rewarded to do. That's how Kai of the Curly Tops and I found ourselves on the afternoon of her Mamay Kimi's birthday working with paint, paper, canvas.

She has freely painted several abstracts weeks ago and put them aside when she discovered it was just as fun to cut old notebooks or doodle human figures, odds and ends, or sound out the names of the people and pets she lives with to practice the writing of words. Most times though, the ruled notebooks feature gibberish--clusters of consonants with a number at the end like "Wqwk Fhjjufjheybvjhfjkfhj...6."

After I was done with my so-called mixed media work called "It is only a paper moon / Sailing over a cardboard sea", I looked for Kai's old works, leafed through her doodle book, then enlarged her figures with a pencil, copying as accurately as possible the way she shaped faces, eyeglasses, stick-like arms and feet, flowers, etc., then I used her abstracts as background for the, uh, creative collaboration before finally outlining the figures in black. These exercises felt more fun because my own work left me a teeny-weeny unsatisfied. Calls for retouching tomorrow

When she saw what I had done, she first had this doubtful expression on her face, then showed the works to her mother and told her Grumpa Tats to have these framed.

I trust her instinctive moves so inevitably I asked if she could help me with the background for the work I intend to do tomorrow. I explained to her I needed daytime sky, green and orange below that sky. The figures I will pencil in after I implant a dream tonight. Meanwhile, Curly Kai dived into the activity like a pro.

Okay, Teacher Kai, you can relax tomorrow while I figure something out of the beauty you had created. In fact, your biased mother said it's already a stand-alone work, and I needn't touch it even. Touché!