And they were all asking themselves the same question

Really, I aten't dead. It has been a very exhausting week with a lot to do. Things that occurred which I wanted to mention and didn't have the mental wherewithal at the time—

R.I.P. Mickey Rooney. I had just finished writing about my day with Charlotte when I heard. In high school my mother mourned bitterly when she grew over 5'2", because now she was taller than Mickey Rooney and he'd never ask her to dance. I don't know if I saw him first co-starring with Judy Garland or an animated dragon. I wish he had never played Mr. Yunioshi. Mi Taylor is the character I remember him for, the one he still looks like when I think about him. He's not handsome; he has a kind of small compact toughness, like an acrobat; he was just twenty-three and a little creased and beaten-in around the eyes, with a wary, mulish mouth, as if he's considered and already rejected whatever the world might be offering. He has reasons; they're his backstory. Rooney does a good job with them, including the drunk scene (which are almost impossible to play) and the scene where all the reasons come out at once (which should have been equally impossible; it works). When he lightens up, he's no more good-looking, but he's lovely. I will rewatch National Velvet (1944) for him.

I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) for the first time in high school; I'd never seen it staged until Friday night, when derspatchel and I went for Theatre@First's tenth anniversary production. It would have been nice of me to remember to say something before it closed, but you will have to take my word for it that if Jason Merrill and Mike Haddad weren't John Wood or Edward Petherbridge, they were really, really good, and Johnbarry Green's Player was extraordinary. After the first act, I said to Rob, "I didn't know I wanted Tim Curry in Pippin, but now I really do." He could make a final consonant linger forever, provocatively, menacingly. Bonus points for everything about the play-within-a-play, including the cigarette.

On Saturday, Rob and I visited kittens. It was a beautiful day, the first really springlike one of the season; it was full of walking. We picked up hot dogs and several different kinds of sausage from M.F. Dulock for my father's birthday observed; we returned by way of Ball Square and Lyndell's, which we have not visited lately with anything like the frequency of last spring; we walked to Harvard Square with stops at Paper Source (wrapping paper and a card), Ward Maps (they had no timetables for the Boston & Albany Railroad, but we admired a bunch of other stuff), Cambridge Clogs (socks for Rob), and Evelyn & Angel's (chocolates which lasted some matter of nanoseconds from purchase to bite). The kittens are being fostered by Dean and his family: five tiny black polydactyls and their beautiful yellow-eyed mother, a rescue cat from an overcrowded house. She's sleek and pure black, very attentive to her kittens, protective of them, intelligent, with paws that can grasp like hands; I watched her bat at a feathery toy ball, then simply reach out and grab it—not hook it with her claws, fold her extra toe around the wickerwork like a thumb and hold it like a softball. Almost all of the kittens have at least six toes to a foot and are still young enough to be figuring out how quadrupedal locomotion works anyway, so they clamber around a lot and occasionally trip. They stretch and unfurl tiny fans of claws, their paw-pads as polished brown as apple seeds. Some have white ticking along their arms or underbellies, one a little white blaze at the throat and white-haired brows and whiskers; most show a kind of submerged tabby pattern in their coats, like the watered-silk rosettes of a black jaguar. The tiniest has a black mackerel forehead. I was warned that it cried whenever anyone picked it up and I should not feel insulted when the mother cat came and rescued it from me, but instead it gave one or two squeaks and then settled itself on my lap and started grooming. Eventually it felt secure enough to start climbing up my knee, tangling and unhooking its seven-pointed paws at every step. Rob was nipped by the most aggressive of the kittens, the one that started fighting with the air when it couldn't get its littermates to play along. I can't remember the last time I was around two-week-old kittens. I think it was very de-stressing. Like human children, they are amazingly themselves from the start.

Yesterday was my father's birthday observed. We were supposed to have a cookout with the entire family, but my niece was not feeling well, so instead Rob and I went out to Lexington and enjoyed homemade burgers and milkshakes—my father's birthday request—and the seriously amazing knockwurst sold by M.F. Dulock. We brought my father a little color-coordinated ziggurat of books and Burdick's chocolate and walked around the Arlington Reservoir.

And this is about where I had gotten in this post when I found out that Luis Ellicott Yglesias, my beloved teacher at Brandeis, died in March. I am just feeling shocked. He changed my life. It's not praise or hyperbole; it's a fact. He taught me that I could tell stories. I was taking his class on santería, spring of my freshman year; I'd gotten to know him in the fall, after Professor Walker told me, "He knows more mythology than God." We talked for the first time sitting on the stone steps outside Schiffman. He wore rainbow-striped suspenders and an eleke for Shangó; he had a warm, gritty voice and a greying ponytail and I don't even remember what we talked about, except that he invited me into his class the next semester and from the beginning it was one of the best kinds of learning I had encountered and one afternoon in mid-March he asked if I would like to tell the class one of the stories we were reading. I don't know what made him ask. I knew about singing and writing; I didn't think I had any skill with spoken words. I had never told a story to an audience, formally, before. Because of him, I told the love affair of Oshun, the sweetwater queen whose two faces are the sexpot and the Virgin Mary, and Shangó who is lightning and thunder and drums, whose other face is Saint Barbara, and it was something I had never known I would love so much. I was a storyteller every week for the rest of that semester. For the rest of my life in college and even a year or so after, it was something I did professionally. I don't know that I would never have found out without Luis, but he was how it happened in this line of time. He had two strokes that spring, and it was devastating—I visited him at MGH, all through that summer at Spaulding Rehab—and by my junior year he was teaching again. I was a TA for two of his classes. I wrote the title poem of Postcards from the Province of Hyphens for him in the spring of 2002. He used to say that Peter and I bookended his life as a teacher: Peter was his first student, I was his last. I loved visiting his house in New Hampshire, with its library stacks and altar and the Odysseus-oar over the door of the barn; he knew he had come far enough inland at last when one day a passing driver asked what he was doing with that giant spoon on his barn. His wife ran Lilly's on the Pond for years. His son was a musician and a writer and a DJ. Even when I lived in New Haven and couldn't easily visit, even after my health collapsed and I moved back to Boston, we talked on the phone. The last time I spoke to him was right around the holidays, before New Year's: I was newly married and my husband had just broken his foot. I told him I was happy. It doesn't make up for missing him now. I miss him.