I Take Pleasure in a Great Many Things

Toys2.jpg Or I used to anyway. So many things made me happy I used to make lists. This is a picture of something that hangs in my bathroom. Scotty, a former boyfriend of mine, found this type-drawer and painted it for me and gave it to me as a place to store toys.

These days, if I want to do something nice for Finney I pick him up so he can bat one of the toys out of its slot. It’s part of a ritual of ours. I’ll pick him up and we’ll take a tour of the house, where he will alternately sniff and mush his head against things normally out of his reach, or knock them over, his absolute favorite thing. He loves this ritual. He purrs the minute I pick him up and cranes his neck out immediately to start sniffing and knocking things over. He just can’t wait. If I miss something he wants to knock over he will squirm and reach for it. “No, no. You missed something!” And we go back.

Anyway, it used to be that the number of things that made me happy far outnumbered the things that didn’t. For a while it’s been neck and neck, with the sad outnumbering the happy from time to time, I have to admit. I’m not complaining, life isn’t always great, what are you going to do? But for the past couple of days I’ve been feeling a little bit how I used to feel, and the only way to describe it is, “I take pleasure in a great many things.”

Stacy Horn

I've written six non-fiction books, the most recent is Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York.

View all posts by Stacy Horn →

3 thoughts on “I Take Pleasure in a Great Many Things

  1. what a neat lil activity… I hope it makes you feel happier that you are bringing a little happiness to finney with the shared routine…

  2. What a great little ritual. Funny how we come up with these things to do with (and for) our pets. I love the image of you and Finney walking around the apartment, him reaching out to guide you where to go 🙂

  3. Finney weighs just shy of 20 pounds and my arms ache
    by the end. It’s weird, because 20 pounds is not a lot, really, in terms of weight. At the gym it would be nothing. But when it’s lugging around a cat it feels like more.

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