Stokey’s Last Sunset – Sunset, Sunday, 4 August 2013

William Van Doren, STOKEY’S LAST SUNSET. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Stokey, a beautiful short-haired gray cat born on or about 25 April 1992, passed away quietly and sweetly early this morning. He was with me when I first started paying attention to the sunset, in the spring of 1993.

Tiger Lily’s Twilight (Sunset, Thursday, 28 July 2011)

William Theodore Van Doren, TIGER LILY’S TWILIGHT (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

This is the sky that was left to me by our cat Lily, who died peacefully today in our living room at the age of 19 years + 100 days. Although she had a name suited to her great beauty as a tiger-striped calico (formal name Tiger Lily), she was most often addressed as ‘Yump’, ‘Yumpie’, or ‘Yumpie Chumpie’. These names had more to do with her being sweet and cute. These and, every once in a while, ‘Silly Lily’.

I fished Lily, along with alpha littermate Stokey (still going strong), out of a light blue Ford Fairlane station wagon that was jacked up on cinderblocks in the back yard of a house in southwest Orange County, Virginia, in April 1992. The owner of the house was threatening to hunt down the mother with his .22 – welcome to Ruburbia!

This photo, taken when Lily was about four, shows her very much as she looked today.

Lily. Photo by Laura Owen Sutherland.

Black Cat Perspective (Sunset, Wednesday, 18 May 2011)

William Van Doren, BLACK CAT PERSPECTIVE (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

I was feeding a feral black cat under a small barn where I currently go to catch the sunset, and as he ate he kept looking up toward the horizon.

Frightfully Clear (Sunset, Halloween, Sunday, 31 October 2010)

William Van Doren, FRIGHTFULLY CLEAR (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Just a little smoky haze on the horizon. One of my sunset chores lately has been to feed two young feral cats living under a small barn a few hundred yards up the drive, a spot where I can also get a good view of the autumn sunset. I was thinking how fitting it was tonight that one of the cats is black, and the other orange.

Co-Creation

The collected notes and notebooks of decades were with me out on the slate floor of the porch in the sun – a couple of stacks of writings and drawings, ideas and outlines, in every sort of form, from the oft-mentioned Moleskine notebooks to CVS Chunky Pads to sleek Apica books to notes written on the backs of check carbons (I have a lot of those). (Folded into thirds they fit in my jeans pocket on walks.) Forming a third unit or stack of sorts, I had with me for diversion a volume of Proust I’ve almost finished and one of John Hart (unopened – I have no idea).

I was immediately joined by our two female cats. Pi, the young one, got hold of a red file folder filled with recently excavated ancient notes and started biting the edges of papers and pushing the folder all around the porch. Lily, blind, beautiful and recently turned 18, found a way to recline against one of the piles of notes and the books, while Pi ceased her labors and stretched belly-up behind the other pile. I sat at the edge of the porch with my back to one of the posts, facing the sun. Lily and Pi, who’ve recently suffered incursions by a local feral tomcat, seemed to relax with me positioned between them and the yard.

I had felt on the verge of something, which was why I had the notes out there in the first place, but couldn’t bring myself to move anything. I sat for as long as I could in the sun, petting the two, then left them the books and my notes. The great synthesis, if there is one, can wait.

Sunset, Sunday, 21 February 2010

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

I’m sitting in a chair by the woodstove with my notebooks and pens, Pi the cat is on the oriental rug in the other half of the living room (it is indeed divided into halves), lying halfway on her right side, head resting on her right front leg, paw outstretched toward me. Flint the foxhound has thrown himself down diagonally across the big pet bed (a dog bed that each of the three cats believes is actually the perfect size for a cat bed) right in front of the woodstove (the closer the better, in his opinion), his head right by my foot. Lily, the blind genius just two months shy of 18, is taking a break from perching on my lap and lies directly behind me in her spot under the little table by a window, her head toward me. They all seem, to my imagination, to be trying to help direct the flow of something or other to me – maybe the foregoing is in fact the whole thing.

The robins hopping (or bobbing) along on the dead oak leaves where the snow has melted, out the windows to my right, I’m not sure they care to be part of this energy grid we’ve got going.

A copy of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, parked in the triangle of struts of a wooden stool that serves as my morning desk (or deskette) – the book’s at an angle toward me complementary to Flint’s, but I can’t say if it’s there to inspire or maybe just intimidate the hell out of me.

Pi’s up on the bench to observe the robins. I think she’s too small to deal with them, but that’s not what she’s thinking.

In the disgracefully little time I spend reading – in the morning at breakfast and in a few minutes at the end of the night – I’ve been reading Proust and Poe, respectively. (Lily just decided to get back up here. Kneecaps, prepare for claws.) Picking up the Proust, I discover I’m at a point where the narrator’s grandmother is trying to encourage in him a steadier, more reasonable temperament, which she believes will bring

more happiness and dignity to life than were ever afforded by cultivation of the opposite tastes, which led the Baudelaires, the Edgar Allan Poes, the Verlaines, and the Rimbauds into sufferings and low esteem, the likes of which my grandmother wished to spare me.

I believe that at any given moment any of us may be justified in wondering whether something or someone is messing with us.