In our neighborhood, baby great blue herons chitter and screech from their treetop nest, sounding, at night, like the worst kind of cat fight. Bloody and vicious. But it's only the chicks (hatchlings? nestlings?) ululating.
They are usually done before I go to bed, so they don't wake me.
It is Kitty Cat, with her bad dreams, that rouse me most often lately. Her mind
twisting innocuous, everyday things into shadows and meanness. Poor kid. Like
me. Who woke up crying in the middle of every night until I was five.
She called me from the tail end of a bad dream last night, asking if Andy was real.
"Candy?" I said, my mind fuzzy, still mostly asleep.
"No, Andy," she insisted.
This morning we figured out she meant Andy from Toy Story. No more for that book.
Then we were off to Children's Hospital for her endoscopy, the thing we've dreaded all summer. To Kitty Cat, it was a big adventure, getting up at 5:30 am, driving through barely lit streets, finding "Pteranodons" in the gray-pink clouds. And then the monitor wrapped around her finger and the pads taped to her narrow, milky chest and gas that the anesthesiologist made smell like bubblegum.
When I went to her in the recovery room she was groggy, eating a banana-flavored popsicle, but having a hard time steering it. She watched everything the nurses did and listened to everything they said. They told her she couldn't do anything to compromise her balance for the next 24 hours. She promised she would definitely not ride her skateboard. It helps that she doesn't own one.
"No Razor scooters either," I said, running my hand down the length of her thick hair.
It was odd being the parent. When I have always been the child in these situations: the one having my tonsils removed or my wisdom teeth pulled or my nose fixed, with my mom waiting when I came to.
Now Kitty Cat is eating and drinking and playing, lightly. Eat-lite. Play-lite. It's a lite kind of day.