Kat’s fascination with musical instruments continues apace: here she is playing with Zak’s new resonator guitar.

She also said her first sentence this week: on Wednesday, she stood at my knee, looked up and gesticulated with her arms and said quite clearly, “Baby up.”

And I said, “Do you want up?”

And she nodded her head vigorously, and after I picked her up and hugged her, she laughed with glee and clapped her hands. She was so proud of herself.

She is also learning to stand on her own, and can stand up from a squat without help or without holding on to anything, and can stand for about thirty seconds now.

Here you can see her dancing over the guitar. She loves to dance, and dances with music all of the time. She especially likes R&B and blues and will dance and clap her hands when we put music on. She also dances to Zak’s flute music.

Speaking of dances, Morganna’s senior prom was last night.

She dropped in at Salaam before going to the prom, and everyone thought that she and James looked so cute.

Here is a picture of the two of them–looking adorable.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of Morganna dancing with Leah, one of our bellydancers and Hilarie last night at Salaam before the prom. That was priceless. (Now you know why I love to work there so much–we have fun, even when we are slammed!)

Yesterday morning was the end of an era. It was the end of the benevolent reign of the King of Cats in our house.

The day dawned sunny and warm as Zak sought out Ozy and put him into the dreaded cat carrier.

It was a measure of how tired, old and sick the King was that he didn’t complain, struggle, nor attempt escape. He despised confinement, and every time Zak and I took one of our “across the countryside” moves–from Ohio to Rhode Island, from Rhode Island to Maryland, and from Maryland, finally back to Ohio–we had to tranquilize Ozy and crate him with his best pal Tristain, the ever-flighty Siamese, so as to avoid the His Big Grey Highness ripping out his teeth or claws as he tried to dismantle his carrier from the inside.

But, this one time, he didn’t struggle, or fuss. I think he probably knew it was time.

It is hard to conceive of our household without Ozymandias, King of Cats. He came into our lives by showing up on my doorstep as a scrawny, underfed street kitten in Huntington, West Virginia. Zak had just said that he wanted a grey cat, for they were superior to all other cats two days before, so I called him and said, “Your cat is here on my porch. Come get him.”

So, he did. He put the then nameless kitten in an unused ferret cage to transport him and was horrified at the crazed attempts the little thing waged to gain his freedom.

Ozy then got sick and Zak feared losing him, as he had his other beloved grey kitten, Mojo, to some dread disease like feline leukemia.

So, it was then that he bestowed upon the kitten a mighty name, a strong name, a name fit for a great king, which he hoped the little scrapper would grow up to be.

Ozymandias.

It turned out that the little critter was just constipated. After a mighty stench-filled series of rocks was released from his gut, he was fine, and went on to grow into a lanky, insane adolescent cat whose destructive potential was limitless.

He always had the propensity to show his displeasure by urinating on something–one time right after we flea-dipped him when he was a half-grown cat, he bounced off every bathroom wall (we locked him in there for the procedure), dashed out the newly opened door, and before Zak could close off the bedroom, he dashed in there, leaped on the bed, then squatted and soaked Zak’s pillow, while staring balefully at him.

Luckily we laughed, although there were times when we would threaten to put him back out on the street for his antics.

We never did throw him out, at least not permanently–we loved him too much.

And he finally grew to be a large cat in his maturity–twelve pounds, all of it lean, sinuous muscle. He was a very manly cat, although he was silly when he was younger, and could never hold his ears erect and centered–one was always cocked off-kilter, giving him a comical expression. He also was endowed with a low criminal forehead and somewhat beady eyes, which when he was younger made him look untrustworthy, but as he aged, it only gave his face character.

After about five years of life and many adventures, he finally attained some measure of gravitas, and was able to look calm, collected and dignified. (Except when the ferrets were loose–he never lost his absolute terror of those critters, and would flee instantly upon their approach.) He became a tremendous mouser, and ruled all the other cats of our household with an iron paw–well, not really. He was the King, however, and while he seldom had to cuff any of his subjects, he still would throw down and wrestle one or another of them to floor if they became too uppity.

Morganna cannot remember a time without Ozy, but sadly, Kat will never remember him at all. (Nor will she know Liriel or Nan, or dogs, nor any of the other wonderful cats who went before she arrived on the scene.)

Ozy slowed down over the years, of course, but all the other cats, even the ones younger and stronger, respected him, and bowed to his superior feline nature. Our friends imagined that he spoke with either Elvis Presley’s or Johnny Cash’s voice, and elaborate monologues were devised on his behalf. Many songs were sung in his honor and many fond names were given to him over the years, as he only grew in stateliness and stature.

But, over the past few years, he had begun to shrink and wither before our eyes. Old age was finally taking its toll, and he began to slow down, his eyes dimming with cataracts, his once silvery-sheened fur dulling and thinning. His purr still rumbled like thunder and rain, however, and whenever any of us cried, whether it was Morganna, myself, Zak or Kat, he would come running, and butt his head against us, purring his mighty purr in consolation.

In recent weeks that purr had quieted to a pale whisper of its former glory.

And now, it is gone forever.

It is hard to cry now, knowing that the rumble purr won’t be there to sooth my tears.

But then, I look at this picture of the King and Kat, from just a few months ago, and I cannot help but smile. He isn’t here in body, but his spirit remains in my memory, just as his fur is still sticking to the back of the loveseat that he claimed as his throne. He’ll always be the King to me, the greatest cat who was with Zak and I through the best of times and the worst of times, and brought us much joy and laughter over the years.

And so, in memory of our beloved King of Cats, I paraphrase Shelly:

Hail Ozymandias, king of cats: Look upon his works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Americans need to go back to the land.

I don’t mean this in a 1960’s, leaving the city for a commune in the country, complete with goat milk, wheat grass and sprouted lentil loaves, kind of way.

I think we all need to get back to the land wherever we are.

We need to touch whatever bit of earth we have at our disposal, whether that means a planter on the deck, a grassy front yard, or an empty lot at the end of the block. We need to do more than touch that earth–we need to till it, plant seeds, tend them and watch them grow into food for ourselves, our families and our neighbors.

America used to be a nation of farmers, and we need to remember that and return to our roots.

Why?

Because of rising food prices, and looming threats of food shortages.

Because of lack of availability of fresh vegetables and fruits among the urban poor.

Because of soaring obesity rates, and lowered nutrition among the country’s poor.

Because eating locally is good for us and the environment, and our local economy.

And because we need to remember who we are, as a nation.

Gandhi once said, “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves,” and he is right. As Americans have turned away from the land, as we have allowed farms to be turned into strip malls and condominiums, as we have turned away from self-reliance and embraced consumerism as a lifestyle, we have forgotten the soul of our nation. We have forgotten what once made us strong, and that was a deep connection to the earth, to our homes, to our neighbors.

We need to rebuild that connection, and in doing so, we will be better able to weather the coming economic recession, high food prices and possible food shortages which loom over our future lives.

And the thing is–gardening and growing at least some of our vegetables and fruits–can be accomplished anywhere. You don’t have to have forty acres and a mule, or even one acre and a rototiller. A small urban yard will do, or a series of containers on a rooftop or balcony or a vacant lot.

Urban agriculture is finally coming back into its own in the US, after last being seen as a real movement during WWII with the “Victory Garden” campaign when rooftops and backyards were planted in cities and larger gardens were dug in the country by people from all walks of life.

The New York Times features an article on the growing trend of urban farming in the US where individuals not only grow food for their families on vacant lots, but also grow enough vegetables to sell to their neighbors. Not only does this bring in extra cash for people in poor neighborhoods, it also brings much appreciated fresh food to people who have little choice in where to shop.

The Times reports that co-ops have been formed, CSA;s have gone urban and restaurants have taken to buying produce grown within their own cities.

Of course, none of this is new–there have always been urban farmers. What is new is the idea that urban farming in the US could help to substantially feed citizens while also boosting local income and microeconomic systems. (Cities in the UK and other countries are also embracing urban agriculture as well, but I am primarily talking about the US for now.)

For proof that city-based agricultural ventures, from backyard gardens to community gardens to full-fledged urban market farms, can produce a significant amount of food in modern times, we need to look beyond the US, however. We need to examine the current urban agricultural system of Cuba.

Cuba’s successful experiment in urban agriculture started as a means to feed Cuba without relying on food imports after trade embargoes caused food shortages. Currently, urban farms occupy around 86,000 acres, and in the past few years, these farms have produced 3.4 million tons of food annually. Urban farms grow 90 percent of the fresh vegetables for the city of Havana alone.

Considering that these government-led and supported urban agriculture programs only started a few decades ago, their success is astonishing, and to me, enticing.

Just think of what Americans could do with our abundance of land, in comparison to the smaller acreage available to Cuba.

Why don’t we do it then? Why don’t we all start planting our own “Victory Gardens” again, and take the time to learn how to grow our own food, and take back a measure of self-reliance once more? Why don’t we claim our own victories–against poverty, against processed foods, against corporate control, against our own complacency–and relearn what we have forgotten: how to dig the earth and tend the soil.

Let’s join other Americans and do it, in big ways and small ways.

Let’s remember ourselves.

Author’s Note: Our backyard is finally being terraced this year, and the first things we will plant in it will be asparagus crowns, strawberries and a bunch of annual vegetables. The ornamentals–the flowers and shrubs, and hopefully fruit trees–will wait for next year. The food comes first.

Opening the story with examples from the latest episode of Bravo’s “Top Chef” where the contestants melt down and fling curses and imprecations at each other, a March 24 New Yorker profile of Chef David Chang (a great article, by the way–if it was online, I’d link to it), and of course, the notorious Gordon Ramsay of “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Kitchen Nightmares,” Wells’ readers are deluged with a barrage of video and print evidence that chefs are angry, foul-mouthed individuals who apparently cannot express themselves verbally without tossing expletives into their sentences like croûtons into a salad.

And, apparently, not only does the public like it that way, they now -expect- it to be that way. In the new mythology of television reality shows, chefs are swaggering bad boys, badder than rock stars, and ten times tougher, in large part because they carry knives and play with fire twelve hours a day under working conditions that would make the average testosterone-laden, hard-drinking, heroin-shooting, groupie-banging lead guitarist run away, crying like a little girl for mamma.

And if there is one thing that is true, we humans like our myths.

Especially if they are based in part on truth.

Because, the truth is that most restaurant kitchens are stressful and hellish workplaces in the best of times. They are most often cramped, filled with dangerous equipment which may or may not work properly, open flames from various sources, both fixed and movable, inadequate ventilation, open vats of boiling oil, not to mention loads of very sharp objects which are meant to cut, rend and otherwise disassemble ingredients, but which are equally capable of taking off a finger or portion thereof, or ripping open an arm, a hand or any other body part that gets in the way. (No I am not just talking about knives, but also electrical equipment like bone saws, food processors, immersion blenders, and meat slicers, all of which carry immense destructive potential.)

And the stress–the necessity of working impossibly quickly and accurately, of neither wasting valuable raw materials, nor sending out inferior product, and of putting out sometimes hundreds upon hundreds of plates a night–all while working in close quarters with similarly stressed out people–it is enough to crack anyone one at least once.

When you put human beings into work conditions like these, and push them to perform perfectly, you cannot expect them to not blow off steam somehow. That is where the swaggering comes in, the gallows humor, the profane banter, and the camaraderie where insults become terms of endearment and where sexual innuendo and blatant sexual harassment of both men and women becomes the norm. (This is why many restaurant kitchens are considered to be hostile workplaces to women–a situation which is changing, and which is not the focus of this essay, but which I will talk about in the future.)

You have to understand that most kitchen workers are overworked, underpaid, and often have very little life outside the kitchen. They don’t get enough sleep, they often eat too little, and they cannot relax in any normal way, so they turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, and yes, foul language, to make it through the days and nights of their existence, all so they can turn out endless plates of gorgeous food for people who have the money and leisure time to spend on it, people who most often would never sit down to break bread with these cooks, and even if they would, might be dismayed at how the cooks would act and talk at the table.

This sort of adaptive behavior–reacting to extreme stress with foul language, dark humor and consumption of various inebriating substances–is nothing to be ashamed of, but nor should it be lionized, either.

I mean, it used to be, and still is true, that when chefs were called out to the dining room to speak to a table of guests, they would behave graciously and with courtesy. (There have always been exceptions–Marco Pierre White, the original chef from hell who once made a young cook named Gordon Ramsay cry, for example, is also said to have thrown customers out of his three-star restaurants for requesting salt and pepper.)

But now, it seems that we Americans expect all chefs to be the way we see a few of them act on television, that having a foul-mouthed, bullying persona is normal and natural to the life of a chef.

A lot of people might blame all of this reverence toward the irreverence of chefs and cooks on Anthony Bourdain, because his best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, laid bare the seedy underbelly of the culinary world, and was for most people who had never stepped foot into a professional kitchen, a revelation. It was a look inside the harsh, hard life of line cooks and chefs, a look at what kitchens are really like for non-celebrities and it did whet readers’ appetites for the gritty ugliness that supports and creates the glittering facade of haute cuisine. But, the truth is that all Bourdain did was tell the unvarnished truth of his life and the lives of fellow cooks and chefs. Yes, he glorified that life, because he was living it, he loved it and he loved those in that life–but that is because you cannot possibly live and work in that way without loving it. You -have- to be tough, you have to be strong and you have to have a thick skin to get by and ultimately succeed in a professional kitchen.

But what American television producers have also ignored when they show Gordon Ramsay heaping abuse on the hapless, untalented victims who volunteer to be terrorized on his show “Hell’s Kitchen”, is that in order to be as successful a chef as Ramsay (who has a total of twelve Michelin stars to his credit, which is no mean feat), you not only have to have a thick skin and a load of talent.

You have to have heart.

You have to have passion.

You have to have love.

And not just for food, either.

You have to love people.

You have to love the people you work with and for, even if you sometimes lose your temper and yell.

You have to love the people you are feeding, because that is what being a chef is truly all about.

It is about feeding people, body and soul, the creation of your heart and hands. It is about giving them love in the visceral form of food that has been elevated beyond simple sustenance into the realm of art.

It is about giving them a piece of yourself.

That is what I find most disturbing about the recent insistence upon portraying all chefs as bullying, ego-driven martinets who seem to revel in treating their cooks and each other as verbal punching bags. It bothers me because I know that in order to cook from the heart and make food that will make grown men weep with joy and longing, you have to have a heart to cook from.

And that is the truth that Bourdain knew and knows, that Ramsay and White both know, but which I fear American television producers ignore and misrepresent in the name of ratings.

And it is a god damned shame.

We picked up Kat’s quilt from the woman who does the professional long-arm quilting (machine quilting on a large machine that allows easy, free-motion designs full of simple or complex curves and whorls) in Nelsonville on Wednesday.

As you can see, Kat loves it, and has been cuddling it at least a little bit every day.

She has been developing by leaps and bounds all week. She has been bouncing up and down, holding on to furniture or our hands, working on standing up. She doesn’t do the “bear walk” where she gets up on hands and feet, and then climbs upward. She squats and in a very controlled fashion, pushes upward until she is standing.

And yesterday–she did it without holding on to anything. She just popped up for a few seconds, and then, instead of falling down, she eased herself down using her leg muscles. She is so close to walking!

And then, last night, the nightmare–I was at work, expediting and cooking during a huge rush, my mind racing with a bunch of split second details, running back and forth between dupes (the papers orders are written on) and the line, the oven, the rice cooker, the bread griddle–when Zak called.

And in measured, very even, and to my ears, hideously SLOW (when your mind races as fast as mine does during a rush, everything that has no urgency to it is slow) words, told me that Kat had fallen off the bed onto her head. He was just outside the door with the baby monitor when it happened, and she wasn’t knocked out, and she was acting fine, but he didn’t really know what to do.

I at first told him to watch her, to check her pupils for dialation, to feed her and see if she is nauseous, watch for vomiting or extreme sleepiness, inconsolable crying. I got off the phone and went outside just to, well, calm down for a minute, because I could feel the panic rising in my throat, and the tears gathering, and Becky, one of our best waitresses, and Leah, the bellydancer, both of whom are moms themselves, saw my face, and asked what was wrong, so I told them, and Becky said, “Don’t be stubborn–go check on her, and if you have to take her to the hospital, go. We have two cooks besides you, and we will be fine.”

So–I went to jump in my car, but it was blocked in by two other cars–one of which was Leah’s, which was fine, because she could move it–and the other–belonged to another person who worked at Salaam who was not on shift, but was somewhere downtown doing something, and so wasn’t available to move the car for me.

So–I got pissed. And I cursed, not too loudly. Stacia, one of the other waitresses, let me borrow her car to get home, which I did, and I checked on Kat.

Looking at her, I figured it was just a bruise on her head and a scrape on her nose, but I didn’t want to take that risk. Zak and I decided to take her to the ER. So, I drove back to Salaam, dropped off Stacia’s car–God bless her–and told everyone what was up, and then Zak picked me up outside and off to the hospital we went.

And it turns out–we were there for about three hours, it being a Saturday night at the ER–that Kat was fine, just as I thought. And she did lots of standing–supported and unsupported, and laughing and smiling. She was good when the doctor examined her–she didn’t cry or freak out–and she did a lot of supported walking. And dancing. And jumping up and down.

We came home and she ate some pizza with us for dinner (there was no way I was going to cook, or Morganna was–she had to expedite after I left, and it was her first time!), and then refused to sleep. Until long after five in the morning, she refused to sleep. I think she got an adrenaline rush from the terror of falling on her face, and literally couldn’t sleep.

But, after eight hours of sleep–she woke up smiling and happy, and has been in a great mood all day.

She just has a red nose–she basically got a case of rug burn on it.

So, all is well. But it was really scary, as any parent can understand.

The whole incident also reminded me of why I love working with restaurant people–they are like your family, and when something bad happens, they are right there for you. Not every workplace is like that–not every restaurant–but most of them are. The best restaurant workers, both front and back of the house, have a genuine love of people–and it shows not only in their customer service, but in how they treat each other with respect and love, and will pitch in to help out when something goes awry.