One-eyed cats, plants with crewcuts, and witches

I had a terrific evening last night. When I got home, I drove down to the mailbox and got the mail, and there were two boxes in the big, "extra," mailbox: one was from a yarn store, and one was from Amazon. The one from the yarn store held two skeins of Opal sock yarn that I'd ordered, and the Amazon box held a copy of Bell, Book and Candle that Joanna had bought for me from my Amazon Wish List.

Bob and I ran out to the grocery store for a few things, and I got Chinese food from the little Chinese food kiosk there, and we came home and ate and I watched my movie and knitted.

It's been a long time since I'd seen it, and while I remembered most of it very well, there were parts of it that I didn't remember at all, so it was a lot of fun to watch. It's a story about an urban witch, Gillian (played by Kim Novak), who runs a gallery of primitive art and yearns for something more, something different. Her life is boring, and she wants to meet someone new.

That "someone new" turns out to be a book publisher named Shep (played by James Stewart), who is engaged to be married to Gillian's college nemesis. Gillian had found Shep intriguing before, but now, finding out that he's going to marry the girl who tormented her in college, she decides to cast a spell and take him away from her.

The movie is wonderfully typical of the time--1950's--when it was made, with beatniks and bongo drums and capri pants. A very young Elsa Lanchester plays Gillian's scatterbrained aunt who is also a witch, and Jack Lemmon plays her bongo playing warlock brother. There is also an older, more professional witch (as opposed to the others, who mostly practice witchcraft for fun--turning off streetlights and opening locked doors, for instance) played by Hermoine Gingold, and Ernie Kovaks as a wonderfully confused, drunken writer doing research for a book about witches.

Watching it made me remember how much I love the movies from that era. I'll have to keep an eye out for more, like Harvey, also with James Stewart, this time as Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic with a 6 foot invisible rabbit as a best friend.

While I watched the movie, I finished the first sock of the current pair:

I'm really a sock knitting machine lately. I haven't decided which ones to do next, maybe the Bumblebees. I wanted to get a few pair under my belt before I used that yarn, since it's so difficult to find.

Lunch yesterday was fun, too. It was Cello's birthday and his mother came down with Cello's baby boy, Dominic, who is just shy of one year old. So Gard and I went to lunch with them, which was really nice. As Gard said, we got baby face time without actually having to have a baby.

As we were walking back to the office, we were approached by three street people in front of our building. They had been going through the trash can on the corner, and when they saw us coming, one of them said, "Oh, have you got leftovers?" and I gave them my box with half a tuna melt and some fries, and Cello's mom gave them hers, too, and they immediately sat down on a bench and opened them and ate. They all thanked us--there were two young men and a young woman--and the girl thanked me twice . . . I was glad I gave them something, but it made me feel like I should have done more, given them money, or bought them more food, or, I don't know, taken them home and given them showers and tried to find them jobs . . .

Eugene came back from lunch today bearing a gift from his girlfriend, Karen, who used to work with us. It's a little ceramic pot with wheat and rye grass; he said I'm supposed to water it a little every day, and give it a haircut with scissors! It's a perfect little springtime plant. I keep wanting to play with it; it's like someone with a crewcut, you just want to feel those soft bristles.

Adding to my guilt factor, Dave called to tell me that he had been watching the local news, and I guess Wayside Waifs, the local animal pound, has a spot, and today they were featuring a 16 year old male cat with one eye, Tiger, and Dave thought I should adopt him. I declined; I think two cats is quite enough for our small house.

It made me think of Bob's old one-eyed cat, though: Conan. I had found him on the street one day when I was working down on the Plaza years ago. He had been hit by a car. Well, actually, this time, too, it was someone playing on my love of cats--someone had come in to the office and said they had just seen a cat get hit by a car, and of course I had to go see if I could save him.

I picked him up and put him in a box, and took him to a nearby vet. I was kind of surprised when the vet declined to take care of him for free, but I scraped up the money and they fixed him up. He had a broken leg. I still didn't know what I was going to do with him, because I already had Doña, but fortunately Bob agreed to take him. He had him for years, and at some point he developed a tumor behind one of his eyes, and the eye had to be removed. He ran away when Bob's family moved, and was, hopefully, adopted by someone else. He could also, of course, have been killed, but I prefer to think that he was adopted.