“If your words are less important than silence, keep quiet” — the Qur’an

These days I am pretty much alone during the week, but not quite alone. Ptolemy and Echo are here to watch over me. Ptolemy is a few years older than Echo. He is a product of “Vilt’s Valley” where I spent most of my early years.

Ptolemy was a very new male cat when Lydia and my niece, Jana, rescued what came to be called Ptolemy and another little kitten hiding in the garage from the high Turtle Creek water that ran over the bank and well into the yard. The property sat below the Sacred Heart Hospice.

It was originally Feely’s place when I was growing up and later the Hendricks family bought it, and they moved the home over to Maple Street. For those of you wondering where Maple Street is, I encourage you to ask an old timer. Back in those days all the streets had wonderful names. There were no avenues and streets. Then we lived on the River Road and up across the River Road from Feely’s was Bauman. The next street to the north was Gleason, then Paden, but now all those names are gone. I wonder if they are in storage. Maybe the city could action them off and make some money. I think it was in 1960, the city took them down.

There was another little kitten with Ptolemy but he or she didn’t make it. Lydia acquired Echo when she was dwelling in the cities and occasionally going to school or working on campaigns. Echo is now on a forced diet. An old neighbor now living far, far away e-mailed a cat weight loss technique that Lydia thinks is working. Echo likes to lay in the sun, inside the house when the sun is out. When it gets a little warmer, I will probably put some sun tan lotion on her.

This week Skyler is home for a spring break. It makes me wonder what they are calling a spring break. I guess it is nudging its way into southern Minnesota. Skyler will be heading up to the cities to visit friends there before going back to his school.

Then it will be the cats and me again. Now with Skyler here to watch the cats I will make a quick run to my niece’s place to see how well she edited my war story, “You Beau Coup.” At the same time I will drop off her kids’ Christmas presents or maybe call them spring presents and pick up our 2009 calendar from her.

On to a little more serious matter, I recently read online, an essay from the New York Times titled “This is the Way the Culture Wars End,” where the writer tells of President Obama’s recent call for “common ground” on abortion reduction and an end to the “stale and fruitless debate” over family planning.

The author calls on Obama to tell two truths that the left and the right don’t want to hear: “that morality has to be practical, and that practicality requires morals.” He says pro-lifers tend to show up after a woman is pregnant, “imagining that laws and preaching will make her bear a child she doesn’t want.” William Saletan goes on to say, “To prevent abortions, we have to prevent unintended pregnancies.”

“The conservative answer is abstinence. That’s a worthy aspiration. But as a stand-alone national policy for avoiding pregnancies, it’s foolish.

The liberal answer, he tells us “is birth-control.”

“Mr. Bush,” he says, “halted American aid to international family-planning organizations that provide abortion services; Mr. Obama recently restored it.”

According to Saletan, the principal cause of abortions isn’t that we can’t get birth control. It’s that they don’t use it.

“This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility,” according to the writer.

In talking to my niece as I was writing this and whom I am going to see and whom I talked to regarding the trip and this column, she told me of a friend who never forgot to take her birth control nor did she find a guy she wanted to settle down with.

I think that bell is ringing louder and perhaps for good reason.

William Saletan is the author of “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.”