Hola and Welcome

Howdy everyone, welcome to my first little foray into the wide world of blogdom.

I am starting this site mainly so I can keep up with you all while I am on my journey next year - we're still about 10 weeks away (from when I leave Portland), but I wanted to get this up and get some practice on posting before I headed out.

So you may have noticed the title - Burt is My Muse - for those of you who know me (and, who else would be reading this?), you know that Burt is the name of my cat who roamed around with me for 20 years. He passed away on October 16th, 2001, but he is still very much a part of me. If I can get a picture scanned onto the computer, I'll put his handsome mug up here.

"Burt" was not his first given name. I actually named him "Spiegelburg" - or Spiegs for short - but it was a crappy name and my mother, who always came up with great names for everything, started calling him a couple of different things. "Velvet Jones" was one, and then "Humphrey" and "Mew" and eventually it all came together into "Mewburt Humphrey," and that's where we settle into Burt.

I just realized that he was named with a pun -- which cracks me up. My mother is amazing at puns. I suck at them. There was a guy named Bob Lacey (R.I.P. Bob!) who worked in our office. And he and my mother would get into these unbelivable pun-offs that would last pretty much all day long. It's an artform, if done correctly, to work words like that. I was never very good at them, it's why I can't write headlines - I always have my mother in the back of my head groaning at my attempts. Her mastery, and my inability is probably why I can't stand stupid business name puns. Salons, I swear, are the worst offenders. "Hair it Is!" "Hair for You!" "The Mane Attraction!" Ha, get it! Mane - like in Main - but it's hair, so it's...ugh.

Anyway, so back to Burt. He showed up in a cardboard box in the arms of a young girl on my doorstep in Mill Valley, California. He was one of about 4 or 5 jet-black kittens, mewling and scrabbling around in the towels in the box and trying to scritch their way out of the top. I was 15. My folks were out of town. I knew my mom would freak, but...I was 15 and so I picked up this little guy who was calling to me and that was that.

My mom always loves to tell this story. "And so, I'm home, Nik's at school and I'm having my coffee and a cigarette and I hear this ...(and then she kind of scrunches down and gets into a really high voice) 'mewwww, mewwww,' coming out of her room. And I go in there, (and then here she usually makes some derogatory comment about the sheer disaster of my room - hey, shear disaster! -and talks about always finding forks in there and stuff) and I see this little, tiny black ball of fur and I say 'Goddamit Nikki!"

But she fell in love with him immediately. We all did. He was a great, great cat. He accompanied me everywhere except the year and a half I lived in New York, when he stayed with my Mom. He was with me in San Francisco for a few years which he probably hated - but we moved back to the outdoors in Mill Valley and then for the rest of his life - another 14 years or so, he was an outdoor roamer. He was a Burmese/Persian mix - a longhair - fur that he kept meticulously groomed and purty. He came and hung out with me when I cooked at the camps in Mendocino; he would mouse in my kitchen at night and sleep on the roof in the daytime. In the morning he would join me on walks along the creek and sniff at the ferns, pretending not to be following me. He walked with me a lot actually, in pretty much everyplace we lived. I loved that. I loved how he pretended not to be with me; how he would lag way far behind, until I got nervous and then I'd call him and he'd trot up. I loved him very much.

He eventually died of old age, kidney failure. His last year he lost his eyesight, but he never lost his sweetness. I buried him along the sandy banks of the Klamath River, knowing that his bones would join the river and his spirit would be forever free.

And that's the story of Burt. I wanted to keep him close to me, which is why I named this site after him. I hope to do him proud!