Laura Davis Hays Blog

Laura Davis Hays writes fiction that pushes the boundaries of ordinary reality. 

Laura Davis Hays
  • Home
  • About
  • Excerpts
  • Praise
  • Blog
  • Media Kit
    • Press
    • Appearances
  • Contact

CATS!

8/14/2017

1 Comment

 
PictureLaurie and Peachy
​I didn’t have cats growing up, just chickens and guppies. The guppies ate their babies, and the chickens eventually met sad ends. My first pet chicken, Peachy, died when his nighttime cage came down on his neck—he was trying to get out for a little more petting which he got every evening at the dinner table. The others, a pair named by my dad Egg (Eager Eagle) and Fuff (fearless Falcon) had to be given away. They caused disturbances in our suburban California neighborhood, crowing and flying over the fence into the neighbors’ yards, and the rooster sometimes attacked guests who came into the back yard wearing bright clothing. Or maybe it was because my dad died and we had to move far away. Egg and Fuff were sent to a nice farm nearby, or at least that’s what I was told. Anyway, that was the last of my pets until I met my future husband, Jim, in college.

PictureBaker Commons, Rice University
Jim and his roommate Larry lived in an upstairs room in Baker college at Rice University. Right before I got involved with Jim, a pregnant cat (named Mama Kitty) moved into their dorm room. Her pregnancy was likely the result of an encounter with Mr. Baker, the un-neutered male cat who wandered around the dorm and the grounds. Mr. Baker had a jowly face, the result of many skirmishes defended his territory as the feline master of the most historic and beautiful of the residential colleges on campus.
We enjoyed Mama Kitty and those kittens while we fell in love, and a year or two afterwards, we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and got the first of our own series of cats, a black male we named Kitty. Kitty enjoyed the same free masculine status as Mr. Baker. He had nightly catfights on Johnson Lane where we slept with the screenless windows open in the summer. Often the catfights came inside. I was not too far past the birth of our son, so I when the cats set up a howl in our living room I was jolted awake from much needed sleep. Eventually, Gabe, our newly mobile baby, started crawling after Kitty, catching his tail, lying on top of him, pinning him to the ground, squealing with delight. Kitty didn’t make a fuss about it. I suppose he had accepted his diminished status from Kitty Baby, to just plain bothersome cat.

PicturePepper
After we moved to West Manhattan Ave., we adopted Pepper and Mittens. We didn't yet believe in spaying and neutering, so Mittens was impregnated by her brother. Poor Mittens was so hungry during her pregnancy that she once jumped up on the table and licked the frosting off the Easter Cake. Their  kittens were born in  our bedroom closet. Missy, the runt of the litter, stayed with us too. She enjoyed nursing, long after her kittenhood, mainly on Mittens, her mother, but sometimes on Pepper.
When we moved to a new house on Gonzales Rd, Pepper got caught in a car engine and had his leg burned and mangled. He had to go to the vet for some expensive and extensive kitty surgery and a long recovery before he came home again. Mittens ran away that same night, obviously scared off by the trauma in a new and terrifying neighborhood. She showed up two month’s later on West Manhattan Ave., skinny and purring. She had crossed several miles of city, hunting, and finding water where she could, navigating by some magical kitty radar. 

PictureWild Bobcats
Down on our luck, we sold that house and moved again to a small rent house on a busy street. After Mittens was hit by a car, she came home to die in the crawlspace under the house. We called to her for days. Finally, Pepper led us to her body. By then, we owned the lot where we eventually built our house and now live, so we buried Mittens in the orchard. 
​Now, that orchard houses other kitty graves. The cats died from varying causes, anything from old age to coyotes. Coyotes regularly prowl the neighborhood, coming down from higher ground by way of arroyos. I’ve seen them outside the bedroom, in the yard, on the driveway, and in arroyos. We also have deer who come down to eat our roses and drink from the neighbor’s bird bath. Last winter I saw two bobcats out the window.

PictureDexter and Rufus on Jim's truck
When adopting a cat, we believe in the interview process. We go down to the local animal shelter and take them to the special room to see how they behave. I have been known to respond to cats choosing me, as well. Our smaller cat, Rufus, definitely made a pitch to me every time I walked past his cage.
We got two black cats this time for safety sake. If out at night they are less visible to predators. Our friend, Barbara, Aamodt, a very special nonagenarian, says if she can keep a cat two years, she can keep him twenty. I hope that will be true with our beloved two.
Dexter is big, strong, lithe, and likeable. His companion, though not litter mate, step-brother, Rufus, is easily spooked, runs from most people, except me, whom he adores. He hunts quite well, but is definitely the submissive, and Dexter, the dominant cat. If Rufus is on my lap and Dexter comes anywhere near, Rufus will jump down and slide under the couch. Then Dexter jumps up for his petting.
 We have erected a very nice cat fence around a portion of the back yard with small openings in several places, so the cats can run in and out. I call them in at night to feed them a treat--wet cat food from a can--and lock the kitty door. Then I feel safe to go to sleep, even if I hear a pack of coyotes howling.
However, Jim has confessed that Dexter asks to go out every night, and Jim usually lets him. Dexter is his favorite, after all.
 
You got to love a man who loves a cat.

Picture
Gabe and kitten Dexter
Picture
Dexter, posing
Picture
Misha and Dancer
Picture
Sadie and Gramma interviewing chickens at the Aamodt farm
Picture
Rufus, aka "cute stuff"
Some Treasured Cat facts:
  1. There are about 10 million more domesticated cats in the US than dogs.
  2.  A cat’s normal body temperature is around 102 degrees. Hence the pleasant cuddle factor.
  3.  Men and women are equally likely to own a cat.
  4. Cats sleep 70 percent of the time, or around 16 hours a day.
  5. Cats can jump up to five times their own height in a single bound. Some sources say seven times.
  6. Domesticated cats have been around since 3600BC. One source said 9000 BC. 
  7. A cat’s purr is a form of self healing (as well as a sign of nervousness or contentment.) The frequency of a cat’s purr is the same as that at which muscles and bones repair themselves.
  8. The world’s richest cat inherited $13 million from his owner.
  9. Female cats are typically right-pawed while male cats are typically left-pawed. (Gabe’s friend Evan once did a school science fair project around right and left-paw-ed-ness in cats. )   
  10. Cats are smarter than dogs, but dogs have a higher social IQ.
  11. “Cat people” are 11% more likely to be introverts
  12. Cats bring home their prey, not to share, but to teach their person, how to hunt.
  13. Cats dream.
  14. Cats dropped from a variety of heights can right themselves and land on their feet unharmed. This phenomenon has been studied by NASA as well as thousands of scientists and household experimenters. Thankfully, most of the experiments were conducted over a soft landing place, like a bed.
  15. August 8 is World Cat Day.
1 Comment

A brief encounter: Sam Shepard

8/1/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
​If I were a painter, I could capture the moment. A young woman, a mother perhaps, perhaps younger, slight, wearing a flowered shirtwaist dress. She is leaning against a fencepost and her feet are hidden by the dry grasses. The perspective is distant, the figure suggested, her dress and hair pulled hard to one side by the wind. She seems to be bracing against the fence, against the sudden gust. She has one hand in her hair, forgetting her skirt.
 
On the other side of the frame, a man sits on a concrete step in front of a dilapidated structure, perhaps an old tool shed. He is long-limbed, lean, wearing blue jeans, a leather jacket, and cowboy boots. He holds his hat, which he was wearing a moment ago, against his long slim legs, stretched out in front of him. A longish piece of his hair, dark with a slight wave, perhaps uncombed, perhaps mussed by the hat, lifts in the wind. He is darkly handsome, a Western man, concentrating, squinting, as he stares at the girl. His gaze is unflinching, razor sharp, penetrating her secrets. His lips part.
 
Enjoy this moment for it catches the essence, the seductive stare, the girl, conscious of being watched. Nothing more passes between them, just the acknowledgement of her prettiness, his desire, her thrill to be seen that way for one brief moment out of an ordinary day of work.
 
Now superimpose the Gas-a-mat on St. Francis Drive, a Subaru, not a fencepost, and Sam Shepard the actor, famous, handsome, knowing it, waiting on the step outside the carwash. The year? Possibly 1986, the windy month of March. I was that young mother holding my hair instead of my skirt while I pumped my gas. He got a glimpse of my stockinged legs, and his lips parted.
 
Sam Shepard, dead at 73 in the summer of 2017. Thanks for the thrill.
 

0 Comments

Write Your Bestseller in a Weekend with Tom Bird

12/10/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
​It took guts.
 
It took guts to sign up to write a book in a weekend. It took guts to show up at the end of a work week and begin writing full speed. It took guts to keep that ink flowing, the pen moving, to keep on when tired and sore, to not let up on the speed, never let up on the speed, to get to that emotional point and say the unsaid. It took guts to give up caffeine, noon lunchtime, weekend naptime, to sit back down, and go again as hard and fast as you could. It took guts to reach inside and find story that you knew was there all along.
 
Tom Bird’s workshop is based on the premise that the soul knows the book that wants to be written, and that by letting the right brain have its way that book will come out fast and full of heart.
 
About thirty of us met on a Thursday evening at Body Café in Santa Fe, were guided into a meditative state and began writing longhand on unlined pads. We were elbow to elbow, a group of strangers, some experienced writers like me, some novices, and a group of Unity clergy Tom had invited.
 
We wrote in fifteen minute increments, taking one minute breaks in between to count our words, sip some water, or eat a little of the snacks we’d been encouraged to bring. All the while the CD of soothing music, punctuated by a coyote’s howl, and subliminal encouraging messages played non-stop.
 
I had the idea that I would not make it because it had taken me 30 years to complete my first book. Good for me, I’d persevered around raising a child, doing bookkeeping for my husband’s business, starting a couple accounting consulting enterprises of my own, and working careers from real estate to landscaping design to stone masonry. All the while, I found stolen mornings to write that 1200 page first draft, to figure out I needed to break it into a trilogy or more, to attend writers conferences to pitch the book to agents in terrifying 10 minute sessions, to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and finally publish Incarnation.
 
With a little help from my friends.
 
The second day we met at 7:30 and continued longhand until about 10 AM when we switched to computer. I used a spreadsheet to calculate my word count and clocked in at up to 664 words in each 15 minute session. We broke for a 45 minute breakfast at 10:30, and that’s when we started talking to each other. People had traveled to get here, some were locals, everyone friendly and determined. Then we were back at it. A brutal session that lasted until a second break for lunch at 2:30.
 
All this was well organized, by the way, with the staff of Body Café delivering our food orders to our places at the appointed hour.
 
I was writing at a wobbly table with a man sweet-faced man named Mike who always said bless you if I sneezed, who accommodated me with gentlemanly politeness and a few well placed comments. We had a balance going, bracing the table with our feet and knees, Mike often standing to work, me on my pillow with my back support, Mike with his trail mix, me with my cheese and apple and protein bars. Neither of us stopped or took a break except that one minute to count our words.
 
It took guts.
 
Somewhere in that long session I got the tittle to my book, the sequel to the sequel to Incarnation, a story that had been in my head (or my body, or more likely my soul) for a really long time. Rain. I typed that in at the head of my document and kept writing.
 
I was in an altered state when we stopped to eat again. The community table was full, so I found a little two-top and sat down. That’s when Jen joined me. I was light headed, weepy, open, and when we started talking, and I realized Jen was a therapist who did past life regressions, and I had written a whole novel about past lives, and that now writing about Atlantis and star-seed beings called, Ari, we were in the same zone. Little by little I came down to earth and made a new friend.
 
Not long into the final session of the afternoon, I got the last line of my book. “And then it rained.”
 
I was stunned. I got up and went into the bathroom. Alone in the stall, I thought of my two year-old granddaughter Gemma, who, when she does something new or brave, like jumping off the couch says, “ I do dat.” I do dat, I thought, and then I wept. I had not only done it, I’d done it before the halfway mark of the weekend.
 
I reported to Mary, Tom’s ultra-capable assistant who was writing her own book and keeping the timer going, that I’d finished. She sent me to Tom who told me to take a 5 minute walk and see if I was really done. I was not the first to finish by any means. We all met in a yoga room at the back of the spa and Tom taught us the emotional mapping method of book design. Here’s where the pink, blue, yellow, and orange post-its and the poster board we’d been told to bring came in. His proprietary method involved re-designing the story along screenplay lines, pulling the emotionally laden sections to the top of each of five columns (designated by pink post-its), following by the cool blue narrative, back-story, expository, then building back up with yellow and orange. Tom gave this speech multiple times during the last two days and each time it sank in a little more. We set to work taming the monster, writing the cryptic notes designating scenes onto the post-its and arranging them on the board. In between, we went back to the writing room and started in on our 2nd book, using the same method, the CD playing, the timer, Mary calling us to write down our work counts.
 
The last afternoon, Tom talked to us, had us write, encouraged our process, looked at boards. Unexpectedly, it started raining. As we left, covering our boards so as not to ruin them, I felt the wash of that rain, reflected in the title of my new book and the cleansing effect of getting it out.
 
I came out of the workshop with a mess of book, a plan for putting it into shape, and daily inspirational thoughts of how it would connect, what it would mean, things to put into it. I’m feeling the dance my new book will make with its predecessor, Chosen. I came out with a huge respect for everyone involved, from Tom and Mary, to the Unity group, to the writers who were delving into their deepest wounds to tell there stories. All that time Mike, standing across from me, typing into his computer, was writing about the death of his child. Oh, my God.
 
It took guts.
Picture
Mike with his completed board
0 Comments

Dunlap Street, Santa Fe New Mexico, 1977

5/29/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
My not-yet husband and I moved to Santa Fe in November of 1973, shortly after spending Thanksgiving with my Mother in San Antonio, Texas. I’d lived in San Antonio for the last three years of high school; my mother, a widow, had sought out family in our series of moves from California, my home state. We’d gone first to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she’d grown up the seventh child of Finnish immigrants, and then to San Antonio, where my father’s father had a post-retirement career teaching math at Trinity University, and had established a press in order to publish a number of his own books.



I, too, followed my passions from mathematics to writing.  When I landed over my head at Rice University, I turned the math major into a double major in psychology, with a lot of English Literature thrown in. That was the start of my shift away from becoming a scientist like Gramps and Daddy.

Baby-boomers on the tail end of the flower child movement, Jim, my future and present husband, and I abandoned our likely big oil opportunities in Houston. Over the protests of his parents, we left the city driving a bomb of car, our 1963 Ford Galaxy, and pulling a U-Haul trailer. Our plan was to head to Santa Fe where we’d heard one could get good-paying jobs in restaurants. As we drove away, a double rainbow formed behind us. Encouraged by this omen, we pulled into Santa Fe two days later and searched the want ads for a place to live.

At that point, Guadalupe street (today a thriving neighborhood full of restaurants, boutiques, and alternative cinemas) was dirt, lined with auto body shops, and the area west of it was clearly non-gentrified. Anglo residents were a rarity. We were young enough not to worry much about infiltrating the old Hispanic neighborhood, and the price of a rental was right. Fifty-five dollars a month.

This picture was taken in 1977, a month after our son was born. By then we’d gotten married in a mountain meadow, cleaned up the condemned upstairs portion of the house, and I’d given birth there by kerosene light. We’d probably already been told we needed to move out, infant or no. The improvements we’d made, such as the carpeted ladder set in a downstairs closet that led to the still primitive upstairs where we slept, the murals on the fireplace, painted by Marek, an English artist we’d met on the plaza and temporarily adopted, the plastic solar greenhouse on the upstairs balcony—Jim’s first—and the vegetable garden, dirt improved with truckloads of manure and compost and double digging, were all left behind.

All but the garden dirt, that is. Jim filled his pickup and hauled it away to our new home. The landlord was not amused. He threatened to kill Jim if he ever set foot on the property again. 


0 Comments
    Picture

    Laura Davis Hays

    Laura Davis Hays writes fiction that pushes the boundaries of ordinary reality. She is driven by Story and a life-long quest for Universal Truth.

    Picture
    Available locally
    And on Amazon

    Archives

    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015

    Categories

    All
    Agape International
    Alice Monro
    Art
    Author
    Baby Boomer
    Baker College
    Barbara Aamodt
    Blogging
    Blue
    Bobcat
    Body Cafe
    Book Launch
    Book Review
    Brush With Fame
    Cat Facts
    Cats
    Cheryl Strayed
    Compassion
    Coyotes
    Daily Activities
    Edgar Cayce
    Ella Young
    Euphoria
    Everyday Center For Spiritual Living
    Extraordinary World
    Extreme Experience
    Faith
    First Draft
    Forgiveness
    Gentle Reader
    Grandchildren
    Grandma
    Guilt
    ID
    Incarnation
    Jonathan Franzen
    Julia Cameron
    Karma
    Law Of Attraction
    Lily King
    Linda Durham
    Love
    Margaret Mead
    Michael Beckwith
    Morning Pages
    Natalie Goldberg
    Nature
    New Mexico
    Nobel Prize Winner
    Pet Chickens
    Politics
    Psychic Agent
    Puano
    Rain
    Reese Witherspoon
    Rice University
    Sam Shepard
    Santa Fe
    Shirley MacClaine
    Soul Purpose
    Spiritual Living
    Story/Setting
    The Wonder Institute
    Thirty Days
    Tom Bird
    Travel
    TSA
    Uber
    Wild
    Wildlife
    Word Count
    Writer's Block
    Write Your Book In A Weekend
    Writing
    Writing Down The Bones
    Writing In Cafes
    Writing Practice

    RSS Feed

Home
About
Contact
Copyright 2015 Laura Davis Hays


Site Design by Artotems Co. 
  • Home
  • About
  • Excerpts
  • Praise
  • Blog
  • Media Kit
    • Press
    • Appearances
  • Contact