A Very Gentile Holiday 2024

Originally published in  Dec 2022

A very Gentile holiday season to you!  

Well, that was a year and then some. Of course I have to start with the event of the season, David and Hannah's June wedding at her parents' home in the northern Chicago suburbs. Their wedding day was perfect, falling  towards the end of the broods XIII and XIX  cicada emergence, which last occurred synchronously in 1803 (each brood sticking to its own 13-17 year schedule). It was a lovely service (the wedding, I mean, not the cicadas but the cicadas were cool too) performed by the couple's dear friend and former professor and advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Mike Siff.  They honeymooned in Barcelona & Sevilla afterwards and brought home a couple of cases of ... COVID. They were fully vaxxed and their symptoms were shortlived, thank goodness.

Geof returned to Greece for the summer, but during his hiatus stateside bought a house an hour outside Houston. He still splits his work time between  Thessaloniki, Greece and Medford, OR (the synchronicity of which always makes me smile) but for winter 2025 will be working in Ancona, about a 3-hour drive from Rome on the Italian Adriatic . Some life!

Clara had the most uneventful year of all of us, and Abigail lived pretty large by comparison.  Originally feral, she never had much time for toys and is not very playful. I left a box by the front door to recycle but before I had a chance to (who am I kidding? We both know it was at least a week later and I just hadn't bothered moving 3 feet into the hallway to be picked up) Abigail discovered the concept of The Box. Originally she just loved sitting in The Box, but by some fluke she noticed her tail in there. She put 2 and 2 together, and came to the very logical conclusion that chasing her tail was only allowed in The Box. So a couple of times a day she'd get up from her nap, saunter over to The Box, do a lap or two with her tail, then return to  what she was doing like she was punching back onto the clock after lunch. This went on for weeks until tragedy struck, and the cleaner recycled The Box. I did my best to replace it (I even wrote Do Not Discard in sharpie on a new one) but like a hamster with the wrong markings she was not fooled, and our lives are all a little emptier without The Box. Poor Abigail had most of her teeth extracted in November.  FIV+ kitties are particularly susceptible to infections, and gums are a particularly vulnerable spot, and so the teeth had to go. She had a couple of low energy days, which Clara took as an invitation to exert dominance, followed by a full ten days of hissing and swatting on both sides before the balance of power returned, and peace reigns once again at The Home.

Wishing you a wonderful and prosperous new year. See you in 2025?

Love, Linda

96 & Dr. Ombré. Yes, that’s a cicada on her dress

98, Linda, Dr. O, 96

If I have a lap, Clara is in it

Abigail's action shot

David Gentile & Hannah Bates: 318 Rindge Ave #205, Cambridge, MA 02140

Geof Gentile: 275 Road 66121 Dayton, TX 77535

Linda: twoboysfourcats.com

January 17, 2011

I have struggled with how to recognize today: what would have been, and what should have been, Tom's 58th birthday.  So I thought I'd share some more moments. In no particular order:

This was Agent 96's first cous cous dinner. About a half-step lower on the spectrum than a Thanksgiving feast, cous cous dinners were a ritual at our home. In fact, on Kwaj we once had a cous cous feast instead of a Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Tom loved himself some Moroccan food. Tom loved himself food, and sharing it with his friends.

We had to put Neko to sleep in 1998, when she was 18 years old. I knew we'd be going to the vet later this day, and my heart knew Tom wouldn't get to hold her again. Poor little Neko looks comfortable in this photo, but she could barely stand, and could no longer walk. A few months before she died, Neko, who had taken to hanging out with Tom in the office (where Tom had jury-rigged a running water fountain out of a plastic box, an aquarium pump, and tubing) and increasingly tired of walking up and down two flights of stairs to the litter box, had taught herself to use the toilet. We were alone in the house one day, just Tom, sleeping 96, and I, when from the kitchen we heard someone using the bathroom upstairs. We looked at each other, and remarked upon it, but it wasn't until days later that we actually saw that little kitty sitting up there, assuming the position.






Oh, how we loved our tropical Christmases. And what better way to spend Christmas Eve than teaching your 4- and 5-year-olds how to drive? 

 This might be my actual, official wedding portrait ...

  ... but here, my friend Laura caught Tom speaking his vows  -- proof!  This is my favorite wedding photo.  In our church service a few months later, Fr. Hehir, unhappy that we used the same vows, tacked on to the end that God had put Tom in charge of family security, and put me in charge of the household. So whenever I'd ask Tom to take out the rubbish, he had to do it  ... because God said so!

About two weeks before we pcs'd from  Kwaj in 2002, Tom and I spent a long weekend in Pohnpei, FSM, where we visited Nan Madol. We met our friends Mooch and TOO (short for "The Other One") who let us stay in their thatched hut at The Village as long as we fed them.  I don't remember which is which, but I know they were fatter when we left than when we got there.

Our first visit to the Big Island, 1999.   Don't you love  96 & 98 all matchy-matchy like that?  I'd still put them in matching t-shirts if I could! This was moments before the dotcom bubble burst, and if we had had our checkbook with us the day we stepped off the plane on that vacation we would own a little piece of paradise today. And we would never have left.

Lake Mooselookmeguntic, Oquossoc, Maine. Tom had been going there with friends for years before we met, and I was quite honored the first time he invited me along. We went once with the kids in the early days, but were so mortified by "the great magic marker debacle of '99" that we were afraid to make reservations again until the summer of 2006. Ever wonder what to do if you find an unattended black magic marker?  Stop.  Don't touch.  Leave the area.  Tell an adult.

I don't know which was more of a chick magnet: the cool Daytona, or Maxwell. They're both pretty hot. Hmmmm ... all three of them were pretty hot, actually!

I treasure every moment, every memory.  The lifetime of moments that make the life of a man.