The afternoon is as empty as the house but for two old cats.
I watch as they meander from the food bowl in the kitchen to the water bowl in the hall. Aimless and essential. The older one's spot is the couch where I sit.
She clambers up with difficulty and with an extra pull and a slight buckling of her legs, right onto my lap. She curls up and purrs with an echo that floats quietly across 18 years.
A part of me could sit there for hours
but after a few minutes I gently lift her onto her pillow in the center of couch and head off.
It is a vast cavern of a space, a place my father would have loved, with seeming every tool and gadget and nut and bolt known to man. I have never seem them here, never looked for them here, but I know they are here.
I stop a woman in the orange apron. 'You have cinder blocks ?' 'Yes sir we do, aisle 3 all way down at the end.'
Yes they have cinder blocks, multiple sizes and shapes, all heavy enough to build a fort.
I hoist a few different types, sketch out a few different designs in my head, pull a few down to visualize how it can work. And I buy 6 of them, roll them out to the car and lift them into the trunk.
It is late afternoon of Rosh Hashanah and the lot is empty. The sun shines early fall and I stand beside my car alone and sad and serene, building a small thing of small use. Inhale the benevolent quiet and emptiness of this lot, of this mind.
Here I have been.
Back home it takes me a few minutes to assemble at the far end of the couch and then I drape a towel over it and stand back.
It looks about as sturdy as 30 or 40 pounds of cinder block will buy you. But I realize that my son will sit at one side with a lamp, she will sit at the other with another lamp, and I will be marooned in the middle, in the dark.
It's happened before.
I pull it apart and reassemble in the middle of the couch. We will straddle her.
She approaches and sniffs around the towel. She touches a step and then is up quickly and easily to her pillow.
I sit beside her, lightly, she rests her head, lightly, purring.
-- September 2011