The Queen B & Ginny Smiley

Finn McCool,
Chief of the Fianna

Once upon a time, there was a storyteller who lived with the King of her Heart and two cats in Pittsburgh. One of the cats was a BIG red tabby tom named StarFreedom Tailkinker, a former street cat who loved being an indoor cat, and another, slightly smaller and paler red tom named Finn McCool, who had lived in a fraternity house before coming to live with them in Squirrel Hill. Star was named after a feline character in a Star Trek novel; Finn was named after the great Celtic hero and leader of the Fianna, survivor of many battles, games of wits, magic, and Otherworldly encounters—but it didn’t take long to realize that it was a misnomer.

Finnie the kitty gave whole new meaning to the words “Scaredy-cat!” He was afraid of EVERYTHING, especially male humans, and spent the first eighteen months in this new household mainly hiding. The two humans could not pet him at all, despite Star’s reassurances that they wouldn’t hurt him.

The day that they moved to another home in Shadyside was awful for poor Finn, who was first shut up in a bathroom, then raced around empty rooms before hiding in the corner of a closet, and yowled and panted with terror as he was taken in a carrier to the new place. But gradually as he explored it, encouraged by Star, and realized that all the furniture, litter box, toys, and food/water bowls were intact, he began to relax a little…but still wouldn’t let the humans approach too closely.

Finn McCool the Cat

But Star got sick. From being a sleek, powerful, 24 pounds, he began to lose weight. A scratch on one eye wouldn’t heal, and after trips to the vet, the woman began putting ointment on the eye—which Star hated—and injecting insulin into the back of his neck twice a day for diabetes, and the humans were worriedly talking about something called “feline AIDS,” at that time epidemic among street cats in most large American cities. Poor Star had been infected long before he came to live with them. Good cat that he was, he did not infect Finnie.

One late November day, Star’s eye imploded. He was taken off to the vet…and didn’t come back. He had died there, of the AIDS.

Part of what made the next few days so horrible was that they had planned to board Star at the vet’s for most of a week, and have one of the wife’s students from her day job come in to take care of Finnie while they went to the wife’s family in New Jersey for Thanksgiving. The wife’s father was ill, and they didn’t want to miss the chance to visit him, so they went anyway.

Finnie was very lonely and sad, and so were the humans, even after they came back.

The student had left a note for them. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he wrote, “but Finnie’s had a complete personality change! He wanted me to pet him! I even picked him up!”

A week later, the man, John, said to his wife, “I walked by the Pet Pad on Walnut Street. They had some kittens in the window, and I saw one who was so beautiful! She’s a little Maine Coon cat, and you know how much I like them.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said his wife.

“I think that Finnie needs a friend to play with while we’re at work.”

“Uh-huh,” said the storyteller.

“When you’re ready, of course,” he added. “I know you’re still grieving. Star was your cat, even before we got married.”

He said it again the next day, and the day after that. All who love folk-tales know that when something is said three times, it’s significant. So the woman went with her husband to see the kitties in the Pet Pad window.

When they went inside, and Ginny opened the back of the window, one of the kittens came over and stretched up, putting her forepaws in their dainty white mitts up on John’s arm, asking very nicely to be petted.

The woman laughed. “Well, I can see that you’re completely smitten!” she said, and they brought her home.

She was named Bride—which is pronounced breed—Cloudshaker, because that is the Scottish variant for the name Bridget, after one of the three great Celtic saints of Ireland (Patrick and Colmcille, or Columba, are the other two). She was mostly black on her back, shading through brown, grey and cream to white on her stomach, mitts and boots, with a long, bushy black tail, and when she sat with it gracefully swept around her like the folds of a train, she looked very elegant and regal. She especially liked sitting on top of a clock on a washstand in the dining-room like a queen on her throne, alert for any really good human food they might be having for dinner.

 

Bride Cloudshaper

Finnie assured her that lap-sitting while listening to  the storyteller tell a legend or folktale about cats was a very cozy way to spend time with humans*, and that being groomed was a real luxury. But as a catling, she wasn’t too fastidious in her habits, and her fur became so matted that she wouldn’t sit still to be groomed, and finally the vet gave her a lion’s clip—shaving her body close but leaving her head, tail, and limbs still furry. Without all that hair on her body, she was tiny! She was also very embarrassed, so Finnie didn’t tease her (much) until after it grew back. If he tried to sniff at her, she’d swat him indignantly. From then on, she was much more fastidious about her appearance! It helped that Ginny suggested a new kind of clumping litter. Bride wasn’t getting as much of it caught in the fur around her toes or under her tail. A change in diet helped too. Ginny always gives good advice!

The humans soon found out that like Finn, the kitten had been misnamed, because Bride the cat was far from saintly. In true queen form, she preferred to delegate the mischief to her willing subject.

One warm day, the humans came home to find that the cats were out on the balcony, enjoying the sunshine. They had left the new heavy glass door open, and Finnie had figured out how exactly how to slam his body against the screen enough to hook in a claw and slide it juuuuust far enough to wiggle through.

Once the humans figured out how he did it, the wife called the door-installers, asking them to come back and put in a lock on the screen. “But you’re six floors up,” protested the salesman. “Nobody’s going to break in from that high!”

She sighed. “If any burglars got up that high, they’re pros and a lock won’t keep them out. No. What we need to do is keep our cats IN, and right now, they can open the screen door. We’re afraid that a siren might spook them and they’d fall, and we don’t want them to get hurt. If we were more than ten floors up, or less than four floors, they would have time to right themselves and land on their feet, but this high, they probably wouldn’t.”

The kitchen had a doorway but no door, which suited the cats. But the wife began noticing little pools of water on the floor. “Someone could slip and fall!”

A day or so later, she saw where they were coming from. Finnie was big enough that he could stretch up on his hind legs, and use one of his front paws to tap the lever on the refrigerator door’s icemaker to drop down an ice cube, and then he and Bride would play feline field-hockey with it. The woman taught them to play until they made a goal under the stove, refrigerator, or microwave stand, because if it melted under there, no one would slip.

Bride and Finn lived with their humans until the end of their last nine lives. The humans missed them so much that they got other cats—not that they could be replaced, because cats are as unique in personality as humans, but because the couple had learned how sociable and loving a cat can be. And they always made sure to fill the cats’ stocking at Christmas with new toys from the Pet Pad, as well getting the right food and other products.

Manager Brad & Ginny

By then Ginny had moved the Pet Pad to the Shadyside Plaza on South Highland Avenue, close to the little bridge that connects that street to Penn Circle. The trouble is, the bridge is being rebuilt, and detours have drastically cut into her business! We have known her and her staff for almost 25 years of the 40 years the store’s been in business, and they are the best pet store in Pittsburgh. As one of the two customer reviews we found of it said, it’s always good to support an independent store, and as another said:

During the "Snowpacolypse" incident, there was a period where every store in the area was closed. We had run out of hay for our rabbits but could not go anywhere to buy rabbit food. We called Smiley's to see if they were open and the owner said she was in to feed the cats there and that she would stay around for a few hours so we could make it down and buy rabbit food. We have been shopping here ever since. Definitely the best customer service I have seen from a store.

That characterizes Ginny’s professional, caring attitude. You don’t get that from big chain stores! While we always like going into the store and being greeted by Tonto the parrot or one of the shop cats, you can also shop online at http://www.smileyspetpad.com/.

 

Can one person buying one or two things at a time save a store like this? Well, as an old Scots Gaelic proverb says, "An lion beagan is beagan, mar a' dh'ith an cat an snadan." In English that means, "Little by little, as the cat ate the herring."

Please click here for a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about the Pet Pad; Ms. Jones makes some good points.

I will be posting about any special events on Facebook. Would you really like to live in a place that’s identical to every other? Bill Peduto remarked that the Pet Pad is like a tile in the mosaic that make up Pittsburgh neighborhoods and he’s right.

 If you have pets, which would you prefer: a big box store mainly out to make a buck and with questionable ethics regarding where they obtain the creatures they sell, or someone with deep roots in the area, who genuinely cares about your pet’s needs?

If you aren’t physically in the neighborhood, let your fingers do the walking to their website.

 

Ginny outside the Pet Pad in Shadyside Plaza

 

Please help us keep Smiley’s Pet Pad open!

 

 

Notes:

 

Although there are many famous folktales and legends about cats, two of my favorite folktale collections about cats are: 

 

 The Folktale Cat by Frank DeCaro (August House: 1993), August House Publishers; 1st edition (May 1993) ISBN-10: 0874833035  ISBN-13: 978-0874833034

and

Twelve Great Black Cats, and Other Eerie Scottish Tales by Sorche nic Leodhas (Dutton Books: 1972). There's also a Penguin edition (USA) with this ISBN: 0525415750. Her books can be found in libraries, Amazon and ebay.

 

 

Harp Grove

Harp Grove of Western PA



The day before yesterday, Saturday, was the third Saturday of the month, and that meant a Harp Grove session! I set off for Joyce Emery’s house in Crafton, because she was hosting the March meeting of the Harp Grove of Western PA, the Celtic harp ensemble we belong to. This is a (slightly) more formal version of an earlier harp circle, and was founded by Faith Stenning, Joyce and me in 1990 or thereabouts—I was an officer because I was the only member of the International Society of Folk Harpers & Craftsmen (ISFHC) at the time, and we wanted to organize as a chapter. We mostly play Scottish, Irish and Welsh music, and we get together in each other’s homes the third Saturday of the month at 2 pm to play together for a few hours, followed by tea and goodies; the host provides the tea. So I stopped off at Whole Foods to pick up my contribution, which today was assorted hammataschen. Not what I had expected to take, with us doing Irish music in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, but they are sooo good! 



Ft. Pitt Bridge over the Mon & Downtown Pgh

The love/hate thing about Pittsburgh topography is that while on the one hand, the hills, valleys and rivers make some beautiful scenery, on the other, it means that the old ‘Burgh adage that “You can’t get there from here,” is often all too true. Add to that geography an aging infrastructure, cash-flow problems, the beginning of construction season , and pot-hole season yielding a bumper crop after this winter, getting from Point A to Point B can be an exercise in creativity, flexibility, and stamina. Route 28 was out, because part of it is shut down for yet more construction, so I am currently avoiding that side of the Allegheny River.  I chose to go up through Oakland from Shadyside and across the Birmingham Bridge into South Side, and out West Carson Street. I could have gone over the Fort Pitt Bridge, but in my opinion, whoever designed that must have been a cousin of the idiot who inflicted the peculiar outbound cloverleaf at the Parkway East on Squirrel Hill right before the tunnels upon an unwary public. Ft. Pitt is a great introduction to Downtown, coming from the Airport through the Fort Duquesne tunnels, but going from the opposite end outbound, approaching on the Parkway East as it curves up onto the bridge (from the top right in the picture) means that you have to cross two lanes diagonally to (my) right  to take the off ramp (down in the lower left of the picture out towards Crafton, or you find yourself going through the tunnels. I-just-don’t-like-doing-it; I’m always worried that someone won’t be paying attention trying to go diagonally left wile I'm going diagonally right and plow into me.

Remarkably, I had almost all green lights going through the South Side flats. (100 years ago, when they were building railroads, they tended to put them on the flat parts by the rivers—and the mills, who depended heavily on the rivers to transport heavy goods like ore and steel—and roads were put up on and over the ridges.) I noticed a sign indicating a detour up onto Mt. Washington, which is what the Ft. Duquesne tunnels go through, via Sycamore because of work on McArdle Roadway, and spared the unwary out of towner taking it some pity. Sycamore is one of the seven steepest streets in the city, and also winding. When my dad went down it for the first time, at one point he thought the road had dropped out from beneath the wheels, because he couldn’t see it….When Pittsburgh used to host a big bicycle race, they’d go up it fourteen times—demonstrating that they were pros!

On Carson, I was cruising along, passing the Mon Incline on one side and Station Square on the other, going down the O-hi-o…and after passing under the Ft. Pitt, seeing the West End Bridge coming up on the right over to North Side, I braced myself for the Next Big Headache.

I mentioned the railroad being on the flats. In fact, there are two lines there; one by the Mon and the Ohio, that is right on the water…and another running along the base of Mt. Washington. On the south end of the West End Bridge, the landward one is elevated on a mostly solid base. This is interrupted by  two openings, for what used to be the West End Circle, a roundabout dating from simpler days of much less traffic when drivers went at slower speeds, that is complicated by the railroad bisecting it in the middle. Another design marvel! The circle has been a headache for just about everybody over there for decades, and periodically, Penn DOT takes another crack at improving it. This of course entails mess, detours, closings, lane changes, barriers, and an almost constant blue cloud of curses hanging overhead. Eventually everyone gets used to the current version and the construction mess is cleared away, until the next go-around. We have been in one of these for what seems like forever but is probably more like a couple of years. My thought processes went like this:

I don’t want to go in the right lane or I’ll end up going across to North Side. I don’t want to get into the right lane too soon past the bridge or I’ll end up going to McKees Rocks. I don’t want to be in the left lane, because then I’ll turn to the left too soon (first opening) and end up heading towards the airport. I’m not sure when to get in the middle lane—is that a middle lane, or a snare and a delusion? Is the sign indicating Crafton misleading or right?—to take the second, farther opening to get on Steuben Street which is what I want, to take me to Crafton, and it’s 1:36, we start at 2, and I need to tune once I get there.

So I turned, trusting the sign, once I got by a humongous truck on my left…and found that oh, curses, I am now headed towards the airport….

Luckily, it’s not a divided road, so I was able to do a u-turn, back under the underpass the opposite way, go left, then left again (after a big SUV decided it didn’t want to come snack on my aged PT cruiser after all) through the overpass's far opening, and onto Steuben, bumping over a spur line, and almost limp with relief, went onward, beginning the climb upwards. “Onward and upward” applies to a great deal of Pittsburgh’s terrain, come to think of it….

To my astonishment, I was the first one there! Parked, rejoiced in the purple and white crocuses creeping out under her fence and the lilac bush beginning to bud, and began extricating myself and stuff from the car: water bottle and purse from the front seat, set down by the rear tire, before opening the back door for the rest:

          --put the bag of harp stuff by the bottle, along with a string bag of hammantaschen;

          --pushed back the folding cart on the seat (with which I had transported the whole kit and kaboodle downstairs to the garage from home) back to give me room to

          --push aside the space blanket swathing the harp from sunlight (I am compulsive about taking my harp, Dreamsinger’s, safety seriously. Heat can severely damage it by softening the glue that partly holds it together) and lift the harp in its grey softshell case up and out of where I had it nestled between the seats. I lifted the long strap over my head so it was diagonally over my shoulder, and straightened. Gathering up everything else, I managed to shut the door and moved through the gateway and up the path, up onto the back porch and succeeded in opening the back door without hitting anything.

It’s not that my midsized harp is all that heavy—only 14 lbs. But it’s a rather awkward shape for my short size, and the harpbag is what's heavy. Most of that is from the folded music-stand; the rest is from the folding stool I set it on to play, and the bag of assorted bits (snap-on shelf for the music-stand, tuning wrench, tuner, spare set of strings, pencils, etc., and several binders, folders and comb-bound books of music.) At some point, most harperists vow that in another life, they will come back as piccolo players. Some even mean it at the time!

I handed Joyce the hammataschen, put my harp and bag in the living-room, and took the empty case and my jacket to her front hall, which doubles as her office and a sitting-area. Then Verna arrived and soon others followed, and for a while there was a happy hubbub while we opened up music-stands, Joyce and Melanie handed out copies of music, tuned our harps, caught up on who’s been doing what since last time and who was coming, and generally sorted ourselves out.

Joyce’s home has a small living-room, but we can and did fit in several: Gene, our token male and only professional harpist was on the sofa with his little Mideastern harp (which Jeff Stone of Stone Creek Instruments put levers on after Gene restrung it) in his lap; Melanie had her big Heartland harp next to Verna and her large Kortier; Carol  brought her Dusty 26, leaving her Dusty Ravenna at home (the only difference between mine and Joyce’s, and Carol’s [besides the wood on all three] is that hers has screw-on legs. Joyce plays hers set on a little cut-down table.; like me, she plays a Dusty Strings FH-26. Next to Joyce was Frances, who also left her larger harp at home but brought her green Ravenna, and there was just room for Margie, a newcomer who has yet to get a harp, to sit in a wing-chair and listen.

We enthusiastically introduced our harps and ourselves, and deluged her with information, after starting with “Brian Boru’s March Parts I, II, and III”, an oldie but goodie that we haven’t done in years. Several still had it in muscle-memory; it didn’t sound too badly, even though as usual we tended to speed up. When did we play it before? Back when I was sloooowly picking out melodies, wondering if I'd ever use my left hand...and this time I was mostly doing drone chords.

The nice thing about a group like ours, (and I’m sorry we didn’t say so to Margie), is that while we aren’t all on the same level, each of us can do something. A brand-new harper can play the first note in each measure, or chords, some only play the melody, some play the bass, some play both. Nobody gets upset by mistakes (well, I’ve been known to get thoroughly disgusted with myself for not having practiced sufficiently, but that’s standard and my own fault). What I really mean is that our goal is to have a good time together playing the instrument we love, and we always meet that goal.

“My Little Welsh Home” sneaked into our Irish day, but that’s one of those we all like. As Joyce said, it’s not difficult but sounds wonderfully harpy. That sounded good, because we all play it so much. And it’s one of those handy little tunes that fits into so many programs. We’ve changed the name on occasion to “Our Wee Scots Hame,” “Our Small Irish Cottage,” and once Frances called it “Our Holy House” when it was played in church.

We moved on to Judy Aslakson’s lovely arrangement of “The Water Is Wide,” which in Scotland is called “Waly, Waly,” but like so many tunes has traveled and changed names. Gene was wondering why she put the melody in the Harp II part and the accompaniment in Harp I. I was doing drone chords on that as well, so I didn’t care; I was too busy being happy about doing D7 chords more easily. A small victory, but I'll take what I can get! Not all the playing was ensemble; Verna, Melanie and Carol played Turlough O’Carolan’s “Fannie Po’er,” Frances played “Danny Boy,” Gene played an aria from Puccini’s La Boheme, and two songs from Finnegan’s Rainbow: “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” and “Look to the Rainbow.” As a group, we slowly sight-read our way through “A Fig for a Kiss,” a slip jig, and “Paddy’s Green Shamrock Shore,” which Melanie handed out and played for us first. We’ve tried “A Fig” before; I think Sue Richards gave it to us at one of her workshops at the Ligonier Highland Games, but Jennifer Pratt-Walter’s “Paddy” was new.

We were almost ready to break for tea and goodies when Faith Stenning, and Lorraine and her toddler son Darren Farnof arrived. They were harpless, so some of us played a little more, and I think Faith borrowed Frances' for one tune.

Darren is 17 months old, a happy little guy who saw that Gene’s harp was just his size  when it was set down on the floor, and he wanted to play it. After all, he’s used to Lorraine’s harp, and budding harpers should be encouraged! He was greatly diverted by Gene's opening and closing the bottom part of his music-stand tripod--what was that slivery spidery thing? And how long is it since I noticed how cool that motion of accordioning in and out can be?

Several kinds of tea, crackers and spreads, devilled eggs and salmon, the hammataschen, cookies…all presided over by some daffodils in Joyce’s big kitchen amid conversation, and after reluctantly packing up, we went home.

It was a lovely day! Personally I was pleased that in addition to playing chords I had done some fingering with my right hand on the newer pieces (mostly keeping up), was quicker on recognizing note patterns, that we met a possible new harper, and that I’d had the chance to play with several friends. This isn’t everyone in the group, so hopefully at our next meeting in April, more will be able to come. It'll be good to see them again.



Smithfield Street Bridge

The sun was still shining brightly as I crossed my favorite Pittsburgh bridge, the Smithfield Street one. Allegheny County has more bridges than anywhere else, even Venice, and to me, there is something very aesthetically pleasing  in its lenticular arches. Oakland seemed relatively uncrowded coming back, as I made resolutions about practicing more….and I arrived home a little after 6.

I love proverbs, especially Scottish ones. Here is one of my favorite music ones:

Everything will perish save love and music.