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If you like kitty "wearables", don't miss this site,
featuring lovely shirts depicting TCM subscriber Sue's favorite cuddly cat, the Maine Coon.
We think they're 'the cat's meow'!
There will be more of Sue's clothing featured in our upcoming Holiday goodies on our website.

We've had an interesting time, this past month, at The Cat's Meow.
As some of you know, our host server was hit by lightning a few weeks ago,
which resulted in our site being offline for 3 days.
But, even this catastrophe was a blessing!
We were able to rebuild quickly, with only a few glitches.
(One of these was that we lost our mailing list.)
Our fabulous host, Bright Byte, has instituted several safeguards to prevent this sort of thing from recurring.
Many unneeded files that had been left in storage were deleted.
And, because we had to review everything to make sure it showed properly,
several heretofore unknown errors were fixed.

We DO still have one problem, however....
While there was a backup address list for the year on the TCM computer,
it was only current through September 17. If you subscribed after that date, you'll need to resubscribe.
And, please, if you've forwarded our ezine to your friends who may have subscribed within the last 6 weeks,
tell them to resubscribe, too!

We're remodeling, again.
We've got lots of special stuff coming for the holidays!
But, to give us time to work on things, there will only be two issues of The Cat's Meow in November.

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall
at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time,
painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair.
Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play. By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs.
They wait until he is ready to play.

But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke. You could hear it snap - it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves: We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage,
to either find another violin or else find another string for this one. But he didn't.

Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as we had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to acknowledge that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point,
it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.

When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said,
not boastfully but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out
how much music you can still make with what you have left."

What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows?
Perhaps that is the way of life - not just for artists but for all of us. So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have and then,
when that is no longer possible, to still make music with all that we have left.

--Source Unknown

In his book STANDING ON THE PROMISES OR SITTING ON THE PREMISES
(Dimensions for Living, 1995), James Moore relates an experience that occurred in a New York art museum. One special thematic room exhibited paintings only of roads. There were depictions of busy modern interstate highways, big city crowded thoroughfares, attractive landscaped parkways, happy neighborhood streets,
remote mountain trails and quiet country roads.

On one wall hung a large painting of an unusual road that had an ethereal, spiritual look, done in soft pastel colors. The caption beneath it read: "The Road to Happiness." Two women approached the painting.
One of them was visibly moved and said, "Isn't that beautiful?"

But the other responded sadly, "Of course it's beautiful. The only problem is, there's no such road!"

I suspect she may be right -- happiness is not a place. It is not a destination. It is not a future port of call.
The problem is...we want to "arrive" at a point when we are happy. We think "If only I could do such and such" or "When this or that happens, I will be happy." When we think like that, happiness becomes
a condition we hope to experience in the future.

Writer Barbara DeAngelis says something different about happiness
(REAL MOMENTS, BDD Audio Publishing, 1994):

"Happiness comes from the old English word 'hap,' which means 'chance' or 'fortune,' either good or bad. In other words, what happens to someone. Happiness literally means the experience of being with whatever is happening. Although when we say, 'I want to be happy' we are usually projecting ourselves into the future, happiness, by definition, can only be found now, in this moment.

"If you can't be happy now with what you have and who you are, you will not be happy when you get what you think you want. If you don't know how to fully enjoy $500, you won't enjoy $5,000 or $500,000. If you can't fully enjoy taking a walk around the block with your mate,
then you won't enjoy going to Hawaii or Paris. I'm not saying that having more money
or more recreation won't make your life easier. It will. But it won't make you happier because it can't."

You are already on the "road to happiness"! Look around. Breathe deeply. Enjoy. You can be happy NOW. Indeed, happiness can only be found in the present.

This is a good time to pause in your pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

© 2001 Steve Goodier