I’m not really a pet person. Growing up in a penthouse in New York, in Little Italy, it’s not like a family dog would have been practical. And what’s more, my parents despised anyone who kept a dog in New York City – it struck them as impractical, cruel to the dog and, of course, an extremely rude thing to which to subject one’s fellow New Yorkers. After years of studying proper Italian, my Dad was at last able to develop the context necessary to pick up some of the saltier expressions floating around on the street twenty-five floors below, and boy howdy, when he stepped in some doggie dookie, he would let out a string of expletives that ran the gamut from Sicily to the Tyrol – swears so strong, my mother, who was a native Italian, would cover her ears. She used to say that if my father tended bar in Naples and talked like that, the dockworkers would blush like school girls and run out.
Not that Mom, Dad, and indeed our whole family, weren’t mad about animals – on the contrary, we were all intensely interested in them, and we all went to the zoo together several times a year, right up until my older sister Rose left town for college. Even after that, Rob Roy and I kept on going. My parents believed that animals had four proper places in this world – in the forest, in the barnyard, in the pasture and in the zoo. So, with that attitude instilled in me, it’s certainly not astounding that I never even considered having any kind of house pet, not even fish. Nevertheless, those trips to the zoo were, I am pretty sure, instrumental in provoking my interest in biological sciences, which later culminated in a baccalaureate diploma that sits, along with my others, neatly rolled up in a cardboard tube on the top shelf of the closet in my study.
Despite all that, I have a cat. Yes, a cat I have, despite all that. That I have a cat, despite all that, I cannot deny. A cat I have. A nice kitty, a pretty kitty, a furry, purry puss-cat is she, and Twinkle is her name. She’s a “Himalayan,” which means only that she’s half Persian and half Siamese – just as there are no Belgian waffles in Belgium, there are no Himalayan cats in the Himalayas – it’s all marketing, and Dora hooked up with Twinkle at a pet shop on Fifth Avenue; no cheap cat, that, take it from the guy who bought the little rug runner for Dora’s birthday.
So Twinkle has the big Persian fur coat and the long Siamese bones, and looks back at you through lustrous Persian eyes. Brindle and tortoise is her long, silky and pet-able fur – black, auburn, red, tawny and white, mixed closely in cascades of subtle hue, her coat looks rather like a Jackson Pollock on an autumn theme. Pretty kitty, indeed.
And I am very, very fond of that cat, even though it would never, in a million years, have occurred to me to run out and get a cat. No way. I needed a girlfriend for that. Without digressing excessively on the many good and interesting things besides hot, steamy all-night sex that a girlfriend can bring into a guy’s life, let me note that, besides being a considerably civilizing influence, girlfriends also want things, and consequently introduce guys to things, that guys would never, on their own, think of in a million years – unless they were gay, of course – things, for example, like having a cat.
Now, this was some twelve years ago, when Dora and I decided, more or less at her insistence, that moving in together would be a good idea. And not more than a week after the dust settled, she said she wanted a cat. Since my place in Great Falls has plenty of room, and since cats are well known for their low-maintenance profile, I agreed. And so, for five more wonderful years, Dora, Twinkle and I lived in a state which, if not complete happiness, was a very good facsimile.
Then things changed, as they will, and Dora was off to France to pursue her career as an aircraft designer. Now, the thing about France, at least then, was this – no way you are getting your pets into France, you stupid foreigner! We all know that every year of a cat’s life, or a dog’s, for that matter, is seven years of our own, and Twinkle’s quarantine in France would have amounted, in cat years, to more time than a most murders do here in the US. So Dora went to France, and Twinkle stayed here.
Dora has a French cat now. His name is Descarte. A big, impressive white Manx with pale, limpid blue eyes the size of Third Republic franc coins, he’s quite le chat francais. I have a picture of him, astride a Louis XIV chair on a balcony overlooking Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. It’s sunset, and the spring breeze is billowing the lilac damask lace curtains of the balcony windows just slightly out of focus into the left foreground. And that balcony’s balustrade, by the way – it’s polished, jaundice porphyry, catching the late afternoon sunlight and reflecting it, in softly glowing, rich and honeyed beams, onto his magnificiently poised and regal form, balanced, on the other side of the frame, against an exquisite crystal vase of purple narcissus in perfect bloom. Looking at that photograph, it is very easy to understand why the Pharaohs worshipped cats, and furthermore, it makes me suspect that Descarte the cat lives a better life than I do. Without working. Pets – go figure.
I have one single, solitary cartoon taped to my refrigerator. It’s by Hilary Price and came out a couple of years ago. It has two panels. In the left panel, a cartoon version of a typical cat, what is pretentiously called “the American shorthair,” sits on a bale of hay next to a wall, upon which a pitchfork leans. The caption is “Barn Cat,” and the cat is thinking (as cartoon animals do) “I kill mice.” In the right panel, a cartoon version of Twinkle poses serenely atop a couch. The caption is “Pottery Barn Cat,” and the cat is thinking “I accessorize furniture.” Exactly. That’s Twinkle’s job, one she does exceedingly well. Put Twinkle on a ten thousand dollar couch and it immediately appears to have cost thirty thousand.
They say cats spend about half of their time looking at the world upside down, and I think that’s how Twinkle must have gained her uncanny ability for visual composition – as seen by someone looking at her. Given a room full of tasteful and expensive furniture, Twinkle will invariably choose to hang out in the exact spot where a professional interior design photographer would put a stuffed cat for the center fold shot in the annual competition review issue. Then she will adopt the perfect cat pose to set off the decor mood – compact and comfy, half dozing in “full meatloaf with tucked tail,” exotic and mysterious in the classic “sphinx,” or lounging like a voluptuous odalisque, stretching languidly in await of her pasha on an Ottoman, choosing, each time, from her comprehensive and informed repertoire the exact body expression to heighten and intensify the viewer’s sense of place and moment. Twinkle is, I think, more of a Design Week or Architectural Digest cat than a Pottery Barn cat, but the cartoon says what it says, so that’s as close as it’s going to get, I guess.
Not that Twinkle isn’t 100 percent cat – when, by some incredibly unlikely stroke of bad luck, a short tailed vole scampered past me into the house as I opened the back door to retrieve an arm load of seasoned hickory and oak faggots a few years ago during a blizzard, she killed the unfortunate little beast and delivered the carcass proudly at my slipper clad feet by the fire, as any good cat would do; and did so, I will proudly point out, less than an hour later. The occasional cricket in the basement has fared no better, rest assured of that. Each one, like that poor vole, tortured mercilessly before being fiercely slain and delivered to me, no doubt sincerely rued its very existence for an agonizing and protracted period as my pretty puss cat scratched, bit and beat it to quivering, lingering, painful and certain death.
Cats bring their humans little gifts like that for a very good reason. The cats are trying to teach us how to hunt. They feel sorry for us, you see, because we obviously don’t know how to identify, capture and subdue prey. So, each time Twinkle brings me a cricket and lays it at my feet, she’s thinking “Come on, you idiot. This prey. I caught some, and you can do it too, if you get up off your lazy butt and try.” It’s really touching to know that she cares.
Not that Twinkle would, as many cats do, gnaw the choice pieces off that vole before laying at my feet. No, Twinkle was raised on dry cat food and doesn’t eat anything else.
My system for cat maintenance was structured based on a set of requirements, and one of the most important was that neither I nor Dora should have to be home at any certain hour to feed it. So, since she was a kitten, Twinkle has always had a human-sized breakfast cereal bowl of dry cat food next to three water bowls, located in the kitchen beside the exit to the deck. We started out with one water bowl, but quickly learned that Twinkle prefers three – one to wash her paws, one to wash her face and one to drink from. That was the cat’s idea, but mine was to keep things interesting so she didn’t get bored and neurotic. So, ever since she was a kitten, Twinkle’s food bowl has been filled with a buffet of various dry cat foods – premium salmon, chicken, and lamb brands, to be sure, but also stuff like Deli-Cat, which is definitely cat junk food, maximized for cheap thrills; gourmet selections that sell for up to twenty bucks a pound; and specialized function dry cat foods that minimize magnesium, control hair balls, or clean teeth. Every year, I go out and buy a load of various types of dry cat food like that, mix it all together thoroughly, and then pour it into a bunch of airtight two gallon containers, which I store in the basement. When Twinkle empties her food bowl, she gets another. The food is always there, and she just eats what she wants when she wants it. And guess what – her favorite type of cat food, out of that entire feline smorgasbord, is Friskies Dental, which is available in nearly every supermarket and isn’t even particularly expensive. So here’s Twinkle, going on thirteen, and the vet says there’s no point in bothering to clean her teeth. Or do anything else, for that matter, other than keep up with her shots; and Twinkle’s not fat, either. I mean, seriously, how many people who are 91 still even have all their teeth? Maybe everybody should just eat a nice mixture of dry cat food and live to be 140.
Other than the four bowls in the kitchen and a cat box in the basement, Twinkle has a scratching post in the den and an 18 X 26 inch hand woven Afghani silk rug that lies at the foot of my bed. That’s where Twinkle sleeps, when she doesn’t feel like climbing onto my chest and purring the night away while I snore.
Using that little silk rug as her personal sleeping space – instead of laying around anywhere on my bed – is the closest thing to a trick that I have ever taught Twinkle. The requirement that she sleep on the little rug was a solution cooked up by me and my current girlfriend, Cerise, who is a neat freak and did not want cat fur all over the bedspread. Teaching Twinkle this trick was a simple matter of petting Twinkle, patting the little rug and repeating “Cat… cat… mat… mat… cat-mat, cat-mat, good kitty, Twinkle” approximately ten thousand times. Ignorant people use anecdotes such as this to illustrate their fallacious belief that cats are stupid. True, a dog would have gotten the idea, concerning, for example, its doggy bed, with considerably less insistence from its owner. A dog, which is naturally eager to please its master, would start behaving in the requested manner after only a hundred or so repetitions – perhaps many fewer. Cats have no masters and cat owners do not have personalities that require fawning, sycophantic animal slaves, either. After about five repetitions of the concept, Twinkle knew damn well what I was talking about. But Twinkle is a cat, and therefore 9,995 additional repetitions on my part were necessary in order to convince her that the requested behavior was something actually important and, moreover, that my request was sincere. That’s the true and fundamental difference between cats and dogs – their attitude. You want an animal that’s genuinely stupid? Buy a horse – they’re dumber than a sack of oats. Seriously, an Oscar fish is smarter than a horse. You want an animal that’s smarter than a cat or a dog? Buy a potbelly pig, an African grey parrot or an octopus – any kind of octopus will do.
But just how smart can a cat be? Pretty smart, in my opinion. Twinkle can say my name, her name, and the names for some parts of her body – “ear,” “tail,” “paw,” “tummy,” and “face.” She can say “yes,” “no,” “like,” “good,” “bad,” “food,” “water,” “cat,” “dog,” “he,” “her,” “out,” “in,” “me-out,” “me-in,” “pillow,” “table,” “chair,” “mommy,” “toy,” “Booda,” “litter” and “cat-mat.” “Like” means she approves of or wants it, whatever it is – her opposite of “like” is “bad,” which she also uses, as we do, to mean the opposite of “good.” “Me-out” means “let me outside,” “me-in” means “let me back inside,” and whoever my current girlfriend is, Twinkle calls her “mommy.” Twinkle calls strangers “he” or “her,” and gets the gender right almost every time – I figure it’s probably the scent. “Booda” is what she calls her cat box, which is made by Booda and which I have always referred to as “Booda box.” True, she refers to couches as “chair.” Twinkle also refers to my computers, my stereo, my car, my television, my firearms, my tools, my table settings and my kitchen utensils, as well as all the objects she plays with, whether designed by a human for that purpose or designated as such by Twinkle, as “toy,” which, I believe, she uses as a general term for “object interacted with via hands, feet or paws.” So, while she may have more common sense than the president of the local PETA chapter, Twinkle is probably not as smart. But for a creature with a brain the size of two walnuts, I’d say she does pretty well.
Followers of Dr. Skinner will, of course, say that Twinkle’s apparent ability to speak is only the result of my unconscious operant conditioning and that Twinkle is merely reacting to subtle cues I give her, to which she responds with feline vocalizations that I, over her entire lifetime, have consistently reinforced in a positive manner when they approximated the sounds of various English words. Okay, then, cats are dumb and it’s impossible for Twinkle to talk, and even if other animals, like parrots and chimpanzees, can, they don’t know what they’re saying. There is simply no way to demonstrate that your pet is more intelligent than any arbitrarily selected believer in operant conditioning will allow them to be – arguing with such people is like trying to prove that fairies do not exist, and I have no time for such pursuits. Who cares if my cat can actually talk or not, anyway, as long as she has an effective method to let me know that she wants her litter box changed?
Given my twelve month time frame for pet food purchases, the whole recent hullaballoo about unexplained kidney failures among cats and dogs seemed to be happening on another planet. I bought everything I have in storage now back in August of 2006 and Twinkle won’t run out of safe food until early September. The uproar has been going on for months though – just long enough for the National Pet Food Association to hire me for some much-needed advice. Friday, I turned in a deliverable addressing the situation. Just another quick-turnaround technical policy study, I thought.
Sunday, the east coast was beset by huge storms, drenched with rain and whipped by winds you have to break the speed limit to feel on your motorbike. Twinkle, whom all the noise had quite unnerved, was rather uncharacteristically curled up in my lap, soaking up the glow from the fireplace, half dozing as I thumbed through the April issue of Scientific American by the light of a newly-acquired lapis lazuli floor lamp. On any other night, she’d be roosting on the furniture, looking cool, aloof and ignoring me – but not last Sunday.
Twinkle stirred slightly, then became suddenly alert. It was obvious that, despite the howling wind and drumming rain, she heard something. “Toy,” she said, then jumped out of my lap and ran to the front door and sat down. As I approached, she said “he.” There was a knock at the door. I opened it.
On my porch, the interior lights of his car just winking off in my driveway, struggling to control his umbrella in a soaking downpour, framed against a background of treetops writhing in merciless winds, stood Finnigan, the NPFA lobbyist.
“Hi, Tom,” he said as he walked in, way too fast for me to invite him to do so. Can’t blame a person for that, I guess – the weather was brutal, after all. Finnigan exuded quarts and pecks of false congeniality as I helped him take off his Gucci overcoat and stow his Burberry umbrella.
“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he ventured, smiling as he intently watched for my reaction.
I deftly turned away from his gaze as I hung his overcoat and umbrella in the hall closet. “What brought you out to Great Falls at nine twenty on a Sunday night when it’s storming like Noah’s Flood?”
“I, ah, had an urgent appointment this morning with an NPFA board member who has an estate on the Virginia side of White’s Ferry,” Finnigan offered, “and I thought I’d drive back on the Virginia side, since the ferry would probably close after a storm like this blew up.”
I gestured toward the crackling fire in the living room. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” I lied, “Have a seat. Care for something to take the chill off?”
“Thanks,” Finnigan replied, seating himself in a chair by the fire, “I’ll have some coffee or tea if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Oh, no trouble at all,” I said, heading for the kitchen, “I’ve got some Indonesian coffee I think you’ll like.”
Returning to the living room after the coffee got started, I took a seat at the end of the couch closest to the fire. Twinkle went into furniture enhancement mode, artfully positioning herself on the back of the couch midway between me and the other end.
Finnigan opened his Versace briefcase portfolio, withdrawing a copy of my deliverable. We got right down to business, reviewing the Introduction and Background sections. By the time we were done with that, the coffee was ready – under the circumstances, I figured Finnigan deserved a large mug of it.
“Extraordinary flavor,” Finnigan observed, “I taste berries, banana and overtones of tropical fruits.”
“Ah yes,” I agreed, “quite unique. Care to move on to the Analysis section?”
He did, and spent the next ninety minutes or so going over that with a fine tooth comb. I got my jollies though – Finnigan requested, and received, another steaming cup of coffee made from Indonesian palm civet scat. That stuff may be expensive, but for certain situations, I think it’s more than worth the price.
At about eleven thirty, we wound up our review of the Analysis section, and by that time, I could readily sense that Finnigan had something up his sleeve. There was nothing in what we had discussed so far that could possibly justify dropping by the author’s home at night on a Sunday, much less during the worst Northeaster in decades. So I decided it was time to hold his feet to the fire.
“Finnigan,” I said, returning from the kitchen with a third brimming mug of palm civet poop coffee for him to swill, “there has been nothing in what we have discussed so far that could possibly justify dropping by somebody’s home at night on a Sunday, much less during the worst Northeaster in decades. What the hell are you up to?”
Finnigan struggled not to spit out his coffee as he reacted to my question. “Uh, ah, I… NPFA, we…” he waved my report in my face – “It’s a great product, Tom.”
“I hear that a lot,” I observed, “usually right before somebody leans on me to change my recommendations. All I’ve seen so far is minor editorial quibbles, policy nitpicking and scientific hair-splitting. We haven’t discussed one substantial, material change to that deliverable’s content since you got here. The only part left is the Recommendations section, and before you get started, let me make one important observation – there’s nothing, anywhere, under any person’s or organization’s authority, that requires you to accept my recommendations about anything. If the NPFA members don’t want to implement my recommendations to address the pet food problem, nobody can stop them.”
“I know that, Tom,” Finnigan whined, “but here’s this rock-solid piece of veterinary public health policy research and analysis followed by recommendations for a bunch of… very expensive new protocols.”
“Says who?” I demanded, slightly indignant. “I can’t believe that the NPFA member companies are against additional contaminant testing. We’ve already been over the market impact analysis, and, with a ninety percent level of confidence, we know that the new testing protocols would raise the price of an average pound of pet food by two cents. The NPFA doesn’t really believe that people would rather save two cents a pound on their pet food and run the risk of other contaminants like melamine turning up in their pet’s dinner dish, do they?”
“Tom, it’s not the NPFA members we’re worried about. It’s… the Chinese.”
“What about them,” I demanded, now considerably more than a bit indignant, “The one point four cents a pound the manufacturers would bear is twenty eight dollars per ton of finished product. The remaining quality control costs of zero point six cents per pound of product, would, for a Chinese gluten plant, which, after all, functions only as a supplier of a raw material that constitutes a fraction of the finished product, a run about three dollars per ton of gluten!”
Finnigan cleared his throat theatrically. “Three dollars is a lot of money in China, Tom.”
I looked into the fire, away from Finnigan. “What figure do the Chinese have in mind?”
“Twenty-five cents per ton of gluten,” Finnigan replied.
“Well, then, screw them,” I suggested dryly. “The Australians won’t have any problem with three dollars a ton. Neither will the Argentinians, the Canadians, or, dare I say it, the American gluten manufacturers. Who says the Chinese get to sell pet food product ingredients that kill people’s pets just because they don’t want to spend the same amount testing those ingredients for contaminants as everybody else would agree to pay?”
“Oh, come on, Tom,” Finnigan chided, “let’s not be so absolutist about this. This thing that’s going on now, it’s killed, what, sixteen, twenty animals? All we need to do to please the Chinese is, add a technical appendix that projects the trade off between contaminant levels and deaths…”
“Oh, right,” I interjected, “and fudge the assumptions so that it looks like less than one animal per year will die from contaminants in Chinese gluten. Tell me something, will you? Why is the National Pet Food Association so suddenly ardent to please the Chinese?”
“There’s been some pressure from… ah, the White House,” Finnigan stuttered.
“In other words, if we don’t kiss up to the Chinese on trade issues like this, then they won’t permit us to sell more American-made products in China,” I surmised.
“Yeah,” Finnigan nodded, “stuff like that.”
“And, more importantly,” I continued, “the Chinese won’t do anything about the rampant intellectual property violations involving crappy Microsoft products, crappy Hollywood movies and recordings of crappy RIAA-backed music acts, which are currently committed every day on a massive scale in China.”
Finnigan hung his head and shook it slowly. “Tom, I’m sure you’re right about that, too – you know a lot more about the big picture than I do; all I do is represent the pet food industry. The Administration’s talking tit for tat and quid pro quo on this issue. Go along with the Chinese trade conditions and FDA will look the other way; fight them and the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine puts forty fingers up the NPFA members’ keisters – increased inspections, more and bigger fines, even plant shutdowns.”
“And what else?” I demanded. “What’s in it for you?”
Finnigan blushed – he knew I had him dead to rights, so, after heaving a deep sigh, he spilled. “EOP made it clear to me that if I deliver on this, there will be a place for me at the RNC during the upcoming election and then something juicy in the Executive Branch when the Republicans win.”
“You mean, ‘if the Republicans win,’ don’t you?” I said, my eyes boring straight through his head.
“The Republicans will win the White House, Tom. It’s too important for them to lose. No matter what it takes, they’ll win the White House in 2008, just like they did the last two times. So come on, Tom! One hand washes the other, you know? NPFA is prepared to offer you more for that Appendix than it did for you to develop the entire study. You scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours – business as usual. We play footsie with the Chinese on this…”
“And pets will die,” I interrupted.
“Okay,” Finnigan conceded, holding up his hands and shrugging his shoulders, “a few animals die. So what? They’re only animals; it’s not like they really matter one way or the…”
“No!”
Together, our heads snapped around – Twinkle was standing up, her back arched, her fur puffed out so she looked twice her normal size. In an eye blink, Twinkle jumped from the back of the couch, landed the coffee table and leapt onto Finnigan’s back, a snarling, raging ball of teeth and claws.
The two of them began capering around my living room, Finnigan yelling bloody murder, Twinkle riding him like a cowboy on a Brahma bull, scratching, hissing, growling and yelling “No! Bad!”
At this point, what I saw and heard made me stop, just for an instant – the howling wind moaning through the eaves, the rain pounding at the pitch black windows, Twinkle and Finnigan, illuminated like spectres by the ghostly firelight, bounding around, she caterwauling like a lynx fighting a wolverine and him jabbering like a damned soul on Judgement Day, their shadows performing a lunatic danse macabre on the walls – no, it was not a surfeit of horseradish mustard, an overdose of jalapenos or my fondness for fried calamari. I was indeed awake, and Finnigan was actually breaking things – expensive things.
I ran to the front door and flung it open, heedless of the rain pouring in on the floor. I ran through the kitchen and opened the door to the deck, then opened the door to the back yard, the door to the side yard and on and on, until I had opened every door on ground level to the seething black maelstrom of wind and water, all the while Finnigan’s piteous howls and Twinkle’s hideous battle cries echoing through the house like the siren songs of demented banshees, punctuated with a sickening syncopation of breaking lead crystal, snapping luxury hardwoods, thudding overturned furniture and shattering porcelain, as if Beelzebub were taking a drum break during Miles Davis’ command performance for the Devil.
Then I heard Finnigan’s gibbering and Twinkle’s feral wailing fade into the distance – it appeared my strategy had worked – they had taken their disagreement outside. I ran around like a maniac closing doors, terrified that they would stumble back inside again. I was right, too – not ten seconds after I slammed and locked the garden door, Finnigan thumped up against it, howling – “Let me IN! Get this THING off me!”
Like the pilot of a lifeboat from the Titanic, I did nothing of the sort. Instead, I ran like crazy to close the remaining three open doors before Twinkle and Finnigan could reach them.
The battle royal raged outside in the merciless tempest for another ten minutes or so, then gave way to only a steady howling wind and relentless, pounding rain.
“Me-in! Me-in! Me-in!”
I opened the front door and there sat Twinkle, drenched to the bone, proudly standing over Finnigan’s Hermes tie, laid out like a dead vole. See? This is what you do with corrupt lobbyists, stupid.
How right you are, my little walnut brain, my living-room goldfish, my mobile interior decoration intensifier, my purry, furry, hair-ball horking pussy cat. You are a very, very good kitty indeed, and thanks for keeping me honest.
For her trouble, Twinkle got a warm bubble bath and spent thirty minutes under Cerise’s blow-dryer. She tolerated that indignity without protest, probably realizing that otherwise she would contract pneumonia from soaking in the icy spring downpour. And she returned to duty the next day, perching fetchingly on the undamaged furniture. But she’s been giving me dirty looks and avoiding me since Sunday, shunning her cat-mat and sleeping somewhere else – God knows where. Someday soon, I hope she will forgive me.
Finnigan called my office Monday morning. He left a message, stopping to sneeze occasionally, asking me to return his tie, overcoat, umbrella and briefcase, and also claiming that Twinkle had shredded his five thousand dollar Armani suit. I summoned a bicycle messenger to my office and sent the stuff he left at my house, which I had brought with me to the office that morning, back to him. Then I called and recorded a message on his voice mail, detailing the damage he did to my house, including the complete destruction of a lapis lazuli floor lamp, a gaping hole kicked in an antique sideboard, total destruction of a walnut armoire with cherry, cocobolo and mahogany inlays, huge, deep scratches across my solid teak dining room table, decimation of my matched set of custom-made Schott Zwiesel crystal wine glasses, and, ironically, quite a bit of smashed china. By coincidence, the deductible on my homeowners insurance policy is five grand. I’d say we’re even.