River: Remembering the FlowerCat: 49

[mdlbear]

If things had gone differently in July of 2021, Colleen and I would be celebrating our 49th anniversary today, and embarking on our 50th year of marriage. Things didn't, and we're not.

I never know just how it's going to hit me. This year -- yesterday -- I hit an emotional landmine on the last page of Cordwainer Smith's story "The Game of Rat and Dragon.

... as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.

“She is a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is⁠—a cat!”

But that was not how his mind saw her⁠—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, [...]

Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

Colleen was always some kind of cat to me. Objectively, she didn't share all that many attributes with the Lady May, but there it was, and objectivity has nothing to do with it. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed silently for a few minutes.

Comments

[acelightning73]

Two of my favorite Cordwainer Smith stories were always The Game of Rat and Dragon and The Ballad of Lost C'mell. (My baby nickname was Kitten, because I was a premie and I looked no bigger than a newborn kitten.) And D'Joan, a dog-woman who was the reincarnation of Joan of Arc. He really had a lot to say with the stories of the Underpeople. Yes, that was a lesson we were trying to learn back when those stories were written. And we still haven't gotten it right.

[mdlbear]

Agreed -- The Dead Lady of Clown Town (Where D'Joan comes from) is another of my all-time favorites. He wrote so many memorable characters...

[acelightning73]

And in "Clown Town", the cow person who bakes a brand-new ceramic drinking cup to offer a refreshing drink of water to a human visitor,so there'd be no "animal" contamination on the cup or in the water. And I always liked the Dead Lady, who had had her personality imprinted in the brain of a robot who looke just the way she looked when she was alive.

[mdlbear]

One of the things I liked best about "Clown Town" was the framing narrative, looking back on events in the distance past and mentioning the later artistic interpretations.

(Edited to change the icon to the lightsails on the cover of Space Lords, from "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul". Which is another story with a good framing device.)

[acelightning73]

Smith was very good at describing a setting in a way that lets us know why these people are doing these things. And his "day job" I think I remember he was an expert in Asian languages for the CIA. And the bits of doggerel he included to make his characters easier to understand; "C'mell"; "She got the which of the what-she-did; Hid the bell with a blot, she did. But she fell in love with a hominid..."