I have a cat whose name is Tennison. She is 12 years old, a tortoise-shell domestic shorthair. Tennison has none of the docility that a few Angora or Persian genes will add to your average house cat. She is nice to me and my husband most of the time, but she has no good will toward anyone else. When we have visitors, she will approach them looking friendly. When a guest, charmed by her beauty and elegant bearing holds a hand out for her to sniff, she does, then looks deeply offended, hisses dramatically and stalks out of the room. You should see her at the vet.

Tennison has had trouble keeping her teeth clean since she was a kitten. She never eats anything except Science Diet kibble, but according to the vet, her teeth looks like she's lived on a diet of beeswax and caramel between her annual visits. Having the vet clean her teeth is expensive - not to mention the lousy attitude she brings home when we have to leave her there all day. So I look for ways to keep them clean. I found these little fish shaped cat treats that are supposed to help, so I bought a package.

When it comes to food adulteration, Tennison has the nose of a 1950s vintage KGB agent. I can put half of a tiny, crushed tranquilizer pill in two tablespoons of her favorite canned cat food in preparation for getting her into the carrier to go to the vet. She will inhale an unadulterated serving of canned food, living as she usually does on dry kibble. But when the pill is in the bowl, she just knows. She walks toward it with a suspicious air, sniffs once, takes a tiny taste and walks away after giving me a really dirty look.

Knowing that, I put a couple of the teeth cleaner treats on her place mat. She ignored them, so I put them in the bowl with her food. She looked at me like I had filled the bowl with dill pickles. When I looked a few minutes after she had eaten, she had managed to eat a swath around the two teeth cleaner fish. The next day, I buried the little swimmers in a large bowl of kibble. When I checked, she had made it down the hatch. The next day, I put them on top of her food and she ate them first. I guess they taste good if you can get past the desire to appear to be a picky eater. As I listened to her crunching away, I harbored hopes of a brilliant feline smile at the next vet visit (not that they would see her smiling - but I can dream).

The following day, I put the food in the bowl and the fish treats on top. She ate the treats, then stepped back from her bowl with an expectant look and a polite meow. I told her we would have more treats tomorrow, and to eat the rest of her food. She stalked into a corner and began to yowl like the cat from hell - really loud and insistent. I ignored her, so she jumped on the dining room table - off limits to anything with more than two legs. I told her to get down - and she ignored me and kept on yowling. I picked her up - which one does not do to Tennison if one expects to live on with ten fingers. She started sqirming, hissing and yowling. I put her on the floor and she walked back to the food bowl and stood there with an expectant look.

During the last few years, a lot of us got in the habit of confusing treats with everyday life. We bought bigger houses than we could afford, bigger cars than the environment could afford and went shopping for entertainment. Now we're living with the rude awakening. It was interesting to see those same unrealistic expectations expressed by my favorite feline with equivalent emotional maturity to your average two-year-old human.

The great thing about Tennison is that she can be hissing and whapping at you one minute, then five minutes later she returns to the scene of the argument purring like crazy and head butting you to scratch her ears. I wish people were like that.

Yesterday I drove to Warrensburg, Missouri to record some on-air breaks with my friend, Jon Hart, who is the Program Director of radio station KTBG-FM - 90.9 The Bridge. It's the NPR affiliate at the University of Central Missouri. You can listen to it online at ktbg.fm. Jon and I worked together at the legendary KY-102, Kansas City's great album rock station, about 30 years ago. I've been on the air a handful of times in the last 20 years and it remains fairly instinctive. I see that mic and start talking, usually fairly coherently.

Jon and his crew at The Bridge are working hard to create a radio station where the music really means something. It reminds me of the "underground" FM stations of the late 1960's. When you turn on the radio you hear something interesting and frequently new every time. The Bridge features the major NPR news shows and some of the public radio syndicated entertainment shows like World Cafe, Blues Quest and Car Talk, but most of the time they play Alternative music, frequently introducing new artists into the playlist well before commercial radio.

Jon and I both are fortunate to be doing work that allows us to feel like we're creating something new every day. Both of our organizations are struggling to survive from one minute to the next, but their survival is worth the effort it takes to move mountains.

Jon is an intelligent and insightful guy. We finished our work in the studio and went to lunch. During the course of the day we had a chance to talk about what it was like 30 years ago to work at the coolest radio station in town. I can still remember the energy and sense of accomplishment we felt. We were all getting paid, and certainly the management had financial targets to meet, but it was about more than the money - for all of us.

At the end of lunch Jon told me he had a surprise. It turned out that two of our other KY-102 colleagues were meeting with him that afternoon and would be at the station when the two of us returned there - and so they were. I have to admit, it was weird the four of us there together all aware of that shared experience and all aware of being 30 years older. What was great about it is that we had all taken interesting and worthwhile journeys since that time. Remembering the old days was a thrill, but we're all happy with where we are now.

We took a picture of the four of us which I'm posting with it. From left to right: Stan Andrews, Bob Garrett, me, Jon Hart.

I had interesting conversations with two friends yesterday. During the course of the first one, my friend noted that people are more drawn to negative energy than positive energy. The way she put it was "we'd rather watch a train wreck than a sunset." Even though I dislike the fact that this is true, I believe it is. Moreover, nine times out of ten, if you gave me the choice of hanging out with someone who goes to the effort of trying to convince you and (him/herself) that he/she prefers sunsets to train wrecks (and there are a few out there), I'll take the train wreck afficionado every time.

So, people create drama - sometimes out of thin air, sometimes out of whatever is lying around. Remember the story of Henny Penny - the chick who ran around telling all the other animals "the sky is falling."

My conversation with the other friend started with the observation that everyone seems really exhausted lately. Nobody has much energy to do anything. The worry about money, security, the future - all of that stuff during the last six months or so has drained everyone of motivation to step outside the regular daily orbit of essential activities.

You could describe someone in my profession as being charged with the task of helping people get beyond that daily grind and consider what it means and where it is going over the long haul. Some people call this spiritual life and that's as good a name for it as any. For many of the aforementioned sunset fanciers it's about a place to feel safe and comfortable, where they can imagine that nothing bad is every going to happen to them or anyone else. For the train wreck fans, it's more complicated. Some of them want to dig deep and aren't sure how. Others are more inclined to blow off the notion that there's anything more to existence than putting one foot in front of the other. Others are spiritual, but not religious - and that is, imho largely the fault of religious institutions that have consistently squandered opportunities. They have done that by presuming to make sense of all the slings and arrows life offers rather than offering people a framework for doing tha themselves. They have given people a fish rather than teaching them to fish.

verbalize it . . .

I've been thinking about this business of turning nouns into verbs. Have you noticed it? Do you do it? Do you think it's a good idea.

I don't care for it, but it interests me that one word at a time seems to be the one chosen for this grammatical metamorphosis. The word of the moment is transition which has evolved (and I use that word loosely) into transitioning.

As a verb it can refer to something or someone that is undergoing change. I recall a parent discussing her 3-year-old child who invariably became cranky when it was time to leave pre-school. She said "Lauren loves pre-school and she's happy to be home but she has trouble transitioning." Maybe she said it that way because she didn't want her kid to hear her say "Lauren is an infernal little demon in the car on the way home."

Yesterday on an NPR news item, an earnest woman used the word transitioning in the same sentence three times: twice as a verb, once as a noun. Frequently now when someone leaves a job (or loses a job more likely) he or she is described as transitioning rather than being out of work.

I first noticed this phenomenon in the 1970's. That decade's memorable noun to verb transformation was parent to parenting. When I was a kid mothers and fathers raised their children - or if they were really stodgy, they reared them. About the time I was graduating from high school and slithering out of the parental clutches, they were all set to begin parenting. That may have been a bullet I dodged.

In the 1980's it was impact which frequently looks the same whether it be noun or verb. (Now do you see why learning English makes people crazy?) Once in a while someone will say impacting.

I don't remember a specific noun to verb metamorphosis for the 1990s. What I remember from those years is the gratuitous repetition of is before that in a sentence. "The trouble is is that I don't like brussels sprouts." My theory is that people heard Bill Clinton utter that immortal question (maybe a slight paraphrase) "It depends on what the meaning of is is," and we were off and running.

Thirty-five years ago, a group of linguists set out to measure the speed at which a new element of language was adopted generally within a population. It was a "rough and ready" field experiment. A group of grad students set out to introduce the expression "in a pushcart" into colloquial English. The phrase didn't mean anything until they decided to use it as a slang term meaning the same thing as the expression "having one's ass in a sling." Three or four of these students began introducing it subtly in casual conversation without any explanation. Four days, later, one of them was standing in line at the supermarket and heard the checker use it in conversation with a customer as she was punching prices into the cash register. That's how quickly a weird and meaningless variation can creep into the language.

I've been thinking a lot lately about envy. I've likely been motivated by a couple of personal life incidents that were motivated by it, but were ascribed to other motivations.

People confuse the words envy and jealousy. For me, jealousy involves a relationship with another person that one fears is being threatened or encroached upon by someone else. It can be a romantic relationship, a professional partnership or a familial bond among other things.

Envy is something different - it's wanting something someone else has: a possession, an advantage, a personal characteristic or a talent or ability. I work hard at redirecting the feeling of envy when I experience it because it's a self-destructive waste of time.

Recently, I've experienced it myself and been in the path of the fallout when someone close to me experienced it. In both instances, the characteristic that was envied involved an innate gift or talent that was turned into an advantage by diligence and hard work.

In both cases, the enviers (both of them well into adulthood) threw screaming fits when they found themselves feeling envious. They blamed their negative feelings on the people they envy and, in one case, dragged a bunch of other people into the fray.

Envy can lead us all to an appreciation of our own abilities and advantages and the goodness of our lives. In some cases, it can also be a motivator that gets us off our behinds and sets us to work making the most of what we have. What it shouldn't be is a pit of misery to wallow in.

Last refuge of . . .

I recall being in a discussion group about ancient faith communities who had committed, among other good works, to taking in persons who had suffered emotional damage of one sort or another. The idea was that these communities would welcome the sufferer and provide a quiet, safe and nurturing environment in which he/she could heal from emotional pain.

The expectation was that the time of healing would be finite. The sufferer would be restored to emotional health and either join the committee as one who was capable and willing to nurture others - with a sense of empathy. Or, he/she would leave the community and return to the world, restored to emotional health and capable of functioning productively. The community didn't particular care which outcome was realized - only that the person was healed, thus making space available for others.

It occurs to me that our contemporary faith communities understand the part about creating healing space for those who have been harmed in one way or another, but lack the expectation that they will eventually be healed. The problem lies in both sides of the relationship. The communities are only to happy to nurture ad infinitum the lost lamb. And, the lamb is only too happy to remain lost, demanding endless spiritual care, always too fragile to take the role of healer.

Someone I'm close to has characterized the church as the last refuge of screw-ups. I don't consider myself at liberty to be quite so harsh, but I understand what he's talking about and I don't necessarily disagree.

In the healing stories in the gospels, the ones who are healed always get well. Jesus and his followers expect it to happen and it does. In the baptismal covenant we promise to respect the dignity of all persons - but doesn't that mean holding them accountable for realizing the level of emotional health of which they're truly capable?