Perle The Girl

Here Perle settles in on my lap as we watch a movie. It's been ages since we had a date, but she still loves me. Usually I just pet her on the way in or out of the house.

About four years ago I was rebuilding a porch very late in the season and this charmer kept approaching me, asking for food. Her appetite was ravenous every time, and it was clear that she was a stray. First I started feeding her, and when it got really cold I adopted her. As time passed she morphed into the daily care of my housemate Now there are two seperate cat populations: My three in my room and three downstairs.

I name her after Margaret Perle McLeod (1861-1915), a noted anarchist of Philadelphia. Born in Scotland and raised in Baltimore MD, she settled at Philly as a young woman and was a key organizer for the cause from around 1890 until her death. Perle made her living working in ladies' hat factories. I've often wondered what she looked like but there's no surviving image. Once I visited her grave and found that the stone had fallen down. I knew that family members got more thorough service from cemetery staffs, so I said I was her g-grandson. Sure enough, they repaired the grave site within a few months.

In 1905 Perle wrote a letter in the anarchist-free love paper Lucifer, which in part reads: "For the past two years my life has been an awful struggle. many times even dry bread was a luxury. But this is the experience of many of us --it is an old, old story and why reapeat it? I have just acquired a position which promises to be permanent as long as I can stand it. The work is very hard and heavy, and the hours very long... and the pay is correspondingly short --$7 a week. [...] I can now as never before realize and understand the position taken by so many people who at heart sympathize with our fight for Freedom, but on account of their job will not dare come out openly. It is damnable, but it is so; the pity of it!

A few years earlier Parle was married to a restauranteur, but soon afterward they parted.

That's my "emergency blip" for the day --pull a story out of the hat and shoot the cat!