Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz

Margotlog: Cats, Catz, Katz

The first that belonged to me was a small tiger cat who probably wandered into the courtyard at The Old Citadel and was adopted. I remember this tiger car more in losing it than in its care. But lost, it haunted my walks to school. I must have been in the second grade.

My calls echoed down narrow Charleston streets--Vanderhorst, was the one I remember, notable as much for its long and non-English name, as for what it took me past--the side of a large white church whose front had stout white columns; many ramshackled "narrow end to the street" Charleston houses, which hadn't been painted in almost a century.

All kinds of stray dogs and cats wandered that long street to the "lower school" of Ashley Hall. I called and called over many days, until one morning a little tiger cat, barely grown from a kitten, came bounding up to me. Though, even then, I sensed it was not the same cat, I scooped it up and carried it to Mrs. Watkins, my beautiful second-grade teacher with the white pageboy. She like my mother was a "Citadel professor's wife." I couldn't keep the kitten in the classroom, she said, but we could take it to the principal's house and the principal would call my mother. When I came home that afternoon, there it was in our huge Old Citadel kitchen with the dark brown painted floor, waiting and mewing its little pink mouth.

Only now do I imagine what my mother had to do to retrieve it: first, leave my younger sister with the neighbor across the hall, then walk herself down long Vanderhorst street, across the playing fields of Ashley Hall behind the row of two-story little houses where the "lower school" classes met, then stepping up onto a raised copse of trees, she entered the principal's little house. What was her name, this formidable woman with the iron grey hair pulled back in a bun, and the steel spectacles? Maybe it will come back to me. Whether she actually lived in that little house--dark green with white trim--or merely had her office there, I don't know. Only one other time did I take notice of it. That was in sixth grade. By then I had moved upstairs to the second small house and become one of the "big girls" in the lower school. For some reason my teacher then, Mrs. McCrae, sent me and another girl across the playing fields to the principal's house. I couldn't help myself: there on her desk (in her absence) stood stacks of achievement tests.

This was way before the years of No Child Left Behind--that Bush-era mandate for frequent standardized testing which so bedevils educators today. But Ashley Hall did test its students toward the end of every year, and I, one of the known "smart girls," had a yen to achieve so strong that I overstepped the boundaries between what was right and what was wrong: I looked at the ranking of the girls in my grade. There was my name, right at the top. As far as I can remember, it was the only strictly illegal thing I did until much much later.

The Catz kept coming, though not after a doggie period when we moved to Mount Pleasant, across the Cooper River Bridge, and owned first a red hound named Rover, and then a stray pooch my sister named Missy. Missy was sweet, with a round belly, and black ears and tail; her body tan like a Siamese. One afternoon I shashayed home in my starched crinolines and there in the shed, my sister sat with Missy and four puppies. My sister, with her soft heart, was weeping: she had seen the birth. I WAS way too far gone into teen posturing to pay much attention.

Margotlog: It's a Misty Moisty Morning

It's a "Misty Moisty Morning of real Chicago weather," my mother used to recite, except we weren't in Chicago but Charleston, South Carolina, and my mother, the Midwesterner, couldn't help herself. Midwestern weather and geography overlay her view of our life in The Old Citadel. Curled up together on the sofa, she read my sister and me the "Laura and Mary" books. The Ingalls' overland sleigh rides became real with her quick addendum about Papa Max, her North Dakota county auditor father who'd "give his horses their heads," she'd say, "and let them carry him over the snow-covered fences home." Not until years later did I glimpse that reality in my own overland (well, highway) snowy travels across Minnesota to writers-in-the-schools residencies. Just as my mother lived far more of her life in Charleston than she did in North Dakota or Minnesota--she graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1929 and immediately went east--so I have spent twice again as long in the Twin Cities as I did in Charleston.

Yet every summer, with that bliss of the unattached mind, I order Eudora Welty's quintessentially late summer Delta Wedding on audio disk from the library and take it north with me to our "big water." The huge expanse of Lake Superior easily carries me wherever I want to go, and though I've never visited the Yazoo Delta or Jackson, Mississippi, where the novel is set, I picture them with my Carolina eyes trained to wide expanses of marsh, and the occasional lone plantation house, a sentinel among its fields.

This morning, standing in my St. Paul kitchen staring out at fog, I muse on inherited geography and our preferences for certain locales. We rarely had fog in Charleston except in winter. Yet today, I can almost spy the battlements of The Old Citadel, rising out of the mist. That block-long complex of medieval-looking barracks and classrooms used to house the cadets who, famously fired the shots that started the Civil War. John C. Calhoun, great secessionist, still stands across Marion Square where my father in his Citadel uniform used to take me to admire the great orator's cloak.

With a daughter's detachment, I saw around the adjustments my parents made which allowed them to live for over fifty years as Yankees in a changing Carolina. I sneered, openly, at the politics my father adopted, and was rebuked. Eventually the enormous clang and strife of civil rights quieted, my father died, and my mother lived on, happy with her huge garden in Wappoo Heights, in a house with a Southern wrap-around porch. Visiting and caring for her, I remembered the early experiences that linked me to this climate and soil. Her house became an icon of everything the family had tried to stuff into its piebald identity. Yesterday, reading Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, I found myself alive again in my mother's upstairs bedroom, ready like Welty's optimist's daughter, the lone survivor of her family, ready to put my hand to the bureau and draw out my North Dakota grandmother's letters. Another version of connecting across the miles and years.