The cold cold ground
We took Zoe to the vet yesterday and sat with her while the drugs did their work. Then we brought her home and buried her in the backyard. Later, we will get a marker, maybe plant a tree. When I woke up this morning, I thought: now we can never leave this place. Because she is here.
When Kevin announced that he wanted to be buried, it seemed bizarre. In the ground? Smothered under dirt and grass and rock? In the end, we did it. Half of Kevin's ashes were buried in an urn in a cemetery in Chestertown, the same cemetery that my friends and I used to cut through freshman year in college to go to 25-cent draft night at Newt’s. My mother spent the first two years after Kevin's death driving every weekend from the Washington, DC suburbs to his grave, bringing Woody the dog along until Woody got lymphoma and died. Gradually she visited less and less until her trips tapered to one or two a year.
The tapering was bound to happen. Time changes grief, makes it less of a physical ache than an emotional one. Talking to the air can be as satisfying as a graveside monologue. Kevin wanted his little plot of land and he got it, with a stone that my mother dragged out of the woods and a beat-up concrete angel propped next to it. When we want to visit, he’s there. Except, of course, he’s not.
My husband dug the hole yesterday morning. He dug it deep, struggled to cut through cloying clay. We looked at Zoe one last time, touched her soft fur, and told her we loved her before rewrapping her body and lowering it into the grave. I tossed in the first shovelful of earth. It's a strange sensation to cover a body with dirt. It feels wrong or maybe stark, a jarring acknowledgement of death. The towel still contained her warmth. She was alive an hour before we buried her. Surely this was a mistake.
Eventually what is left of Zoe return to the earth. She will live on in our memories and in our stories. The cats we have now will grow old with us. Their time will come. I'll be dust myself some day, my ashes tossed to the wind or scattered into the water, or perhaps sitting in an urn on a mantel or a closet shelf, waiting to be forgotten.
A tribue to Zoe-cat
My first husband and I were newly married and had just bought a house. The realtor’s partner’s daughter had found this malnourished, Giardia-ridden kitten in a German Village alleyway. Once the kitten was done with her medications, would we like to take her in? We already had a cat, Sidney, and a sheltie dog, Loudon. But our new house was big and Mr. X and I had both grown up with animals and we were reveling in domesticity. So a month after we moved in, Zoe moved in too.
Her first night with us was not auspicious. She hid in the litterbox, growling and crying while Sidney lurked silently outside. Eventually she came out and showed her true assertive nature, but those first days of intimidation marked their relationship. She preferred the laps of humans to feline company.
Zoe has remained kitten-sized. In her early and middle years, she was actually somewhat zaftig. Rubenesque. In the past year and half or so, she has gotten heartbreakingly skinny. Her fur goes unwashed and she spends much of her time asleep. Her kidneys are failing. Her mind wanders. She is not the cat she used to be.
So here’s to Zoe, the cat who used to trill every time she leapt, the kitty who convinced us that she couldn’t jump up to her food bowl but who later scaled our 8-foot fence, not once, but twice, the tiny powerhouse who had to be subdued at the vet’s office for any procedure. Zoe who confidently crawled around the cab of the pick-up truck while Mr. X drove from Ohio to Washington, DC and Sidney mewled in terror from his carrier. Zoe who braved the long flight from DC to San Francisco. Zoe, the cat who used to perch herself up to bat at my dental floss every night.
It is time to let her go.
Tomorrow morning she will join the others,
among them cats Regis, Sheba,
Frank,
Liz, Ming, Nicky and Sidney, and dogs Greta,
Buttons, Barney, Samantha,
Louise,
Augie, Woody, and Loudon. I’ll ask myself
again why we do this, why we take in animals
who will be with us for such a short time.
It’s about love. Love comes with the threat,
the almost-guarantee, of loss and we take it
on anyway, hoping that the sadness won't
outweigh the joy.
Image: Top, Zoe in her
rounder days. Bottom, Zoe in her kitten
days.
Shadowy figure
I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.
That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?
There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.
I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.
Hope you are well,
J
Image by zen.
godless wonder
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
Road trip
Elephant seals near San Simeon.
The boy on the beach in Santa Monica.
Towards the tail end of a graduation
ceremony.
More later.
Thresholds of glass
It’s impossible to hide anything in this house. Even the attic space, something that we can only reach with a ladder that my husband drags into the living room from outside, has two windows, one on the front of the house and one open rectangle directly over the living room. But we still pack stuff into these spaces, boxes of old photographs (so useful for blogging) and books we mean to sell, clothes from my office days. I've sewn single-panel curtains for some of the doors, but in the closets it has been easier to staple burlap roughly to the inside, a way to hide the disorder within, if I do anything at all.
Over the last week we’ve sold some of this stuff on craigslist, carseats and breastfeeding supplies, the artifacts of our son’s infanthood, perhaps showing both an acceptance that he will most likely be an only child and a desire to jettison the things we carried with us across thousands of miles.
What will happen when the earth shakes beneath us, when the house jiggles and pops? I just discovered that we are in a liquefaction zone, which means the ground under the house isn't as solid as it appears, that in an earthquake the earth will take on the qualities of water. Before we moved here, I worried about living in a house where every threshold was marked with glass -- even the stairs and kitchen have glass-paned doors -- where there were 11 skylights and 31 windows. But then I got complacent, because that's what happens when nothing happens: who knows when the next big quake will hit? At least our son’s bed is no longer under skylights. He sleeps safely beneath a solid ceiling, though when he slips into our room he's stuck under glass with the rest of us.
Maybe it’s better to live in a dark space where the secrets can hide behind thick wood, locked against the discovery, where they won’t come spilling out when the world shows its instability. But we’re stuck with the openness for now, with the light, with all the riskiness that openness implies. Here are my secrets, boxed and contained in glass. We live with the danger, with the fact that it could shatter in seconds, that we will be crunching across shards after the tremors.
We have 19 glass-paned doors in this house.
The slideshow above shows most of them -- if
you can actually see the slideshow. Whether
or not looking at slides of glass-paned doors
is a worthwhile activity, I'll leave to you.
But I do like the soundtrack.
Top image: the closets in our bedroom.
From a prompt, "Inside the
closet."
Friends
Good things are going on.
Hopefully I'll be able to write about them
soon, or at least escape my distracted mind
for some other kind of writing here. In the
meantime, a picture for you, albeit a
slightly blurry one: Big Skully with his
friend Dress-Me Monkey. I think Big Skully
won the sword fight, though Dress-Me Monkey
doesn't seem to mind.
Thank you for all your helpful and warm
comments on my last post. I'm doing better at
the moment and have a plan in place to deal
with the sadness when it feels
overwhelming.
While my mind is on hold
Hopefully my brain will be fully functional tomorrow.
Bullets over Berkeley
We live in a tightly packed neighborhood in West Berkeley, with a house directly behind the back fence and other people’s yards and houses on either side. When was someone firing off a gun? Target practice seems unlikely, unless the shooter liked the idea of randomly hitting a house or killing a neighbor making breakfast or having a late-night snack. Maybe these were celebratory bullets, fired at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, or maybe something more sinister happened in our backyard long ago.
I wonder about what houses hold, memories and smells and the intensity of events long gone. Sometimes I walk into our son’s room, which was just an attic at some point – it’s right against the roof line and the ceiling angles, perfect for a kid’s room – and I smell old cigarette smoke. That stuff soaks into the walls, into the floorboards and rafters. You can never truly get rid of it. I picture an old guy up there, smoking and sweltering, listening to baseball on the radio or plopped in front of an ancient TV. Maybe a part of him is still there and he’s mystified by our setup, the Legos and stuffed animals, the piles of children’s books.
When my ex-husband was in his early twenties, he had an encounter with a ghost. He was visiting a friend’s house and was exploring the attic when the air was suddenly infused with the smell of pipe smoke. "I couldn't get down those steps fast enough," he told me years later. It was an overnight visit and as he slept he was visited by the house's previous owner, though X. described it as less of a visitation than being pestered by a lonely presence, like getting stuck next to a talkative guy on the train. When X. woke up, he knew the man's name, that he was a widower and a painter and that the man had spent many hours up in the attic smoking a pipe and mourning his dead wife. His friend's mother confirmed the man's name and widower status and said that she, too, had felt his presence.
I find a bullet and I want a story. I almost want a crime scene for the excitement of it, for the unexpected narrative, but I don’t want someone else’s real life pain to come out for my entertainment. I want to believe that everyone who has lived in our house has been happy. I want their happiness to fill me with joy or at the very least contentment. I don’t want to think of the pain of others who have come here before me soaking into the walls, into the dirt in the backyard where I will grow vegetables, cucumbers on the vine, juicy tomatoes, pumpkins that will be as heavy as toddlers by summer’s end.
I want us all to have the happy ending.
Image: Bullet in hand.
Dream police
You know the type of dream:
the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It
crumbles into dust before you even get a
chance to try it. Or the door has a series of
complicated bolts and attachments and there
you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a
hillock of desert sand, holding this
old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key,
which at first you don’t even recognize –
does anyone use those things anymore?
But I’ve never had a key dream. There is
nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible
thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and
overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling.
The kind of dreams I have are telephone
dreams: me in a phone booth, the phone
an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t
quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the
comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m
a dark room heavy with curtains and carved
furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the
throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy
plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key
word here, no pun intended), but never quite
make it.
In these dreams I’m always trying to call my
mother, which is funny, because in my waking
life I talk to her on the phone every day (on
the cell phone, where I have her various
numbers linked to single digits: the
only possible mistake my fingers will make is
hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband
or my father instead). As I write about it, I
remember that these dreams are more of a
thing of the past, a symbolism my
subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being
too trite and obvious. I like to think that
the connection between my mother and me, the
path of communication, has opened, is free of
static and complication.
Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll
start having keyboard dreams: me
sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this
chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a
circle of light against the early morning
darkness, my fingers unable to find the right
letters. I turn the letter “a” into a
semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers.
It could be the keyboard is against me or my
own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing
class in ninth grade, are starting to
stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading
away. So I’ll return to the pencil,
scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of
paper, my grip loosening, until all I can
write is a series of scrawls.
Image from
Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap
Trick song, here's a
link. After watching it once,
all I can think about is how unhealthy they
look.
Ready to rumble?
What I've been up to:
writing, thinking, staring off into space,
and fighting some epic sword battles with the
boy. Yes, I am Dress-Me
Monkey. It's all in the mask,
but a weapon and some armor don't hurt.
More words here by the end of the week. Maybe
even by tomorrow. And if Dress-Me Monkey is
too much for you, consider the
below:
Image, top: Dress-Me Monkey
in full battle regalia, suited up and
photographed by my husband.
Image, bottom: What Nora dog and I found on
our dog walk yesterday
morning.
Cat from the past
What's new, pussycat?
My husband and I have
always thought this was a funny picture of
him, very 70s, very huh?
When I posted
it on Facebook, where the photo on the screen
was larger than the original Polaroid, I
finally really looked
at the lion.
Here was this a wild animal lying on his side
like an overgrown house cat, napping while a
seven-year-old boy straddled him. This was
not a full leonine life. Even lions in zoos
get to pretend they are wild occasionally,
get to roar and faux-stalk the
sunscreen-scented tourists.
Then the comments for the picture started
coming in. They were variations on worry,
about putting one's child on an actual living
lion, no matter how moribund and perhaps
drugged (and most likely toothless) the big
cat was, with a chilling mention of Dave
Egger's novel What is
the What: An Autobiography of Valentino
Achek Deng. Deng was one of the
"Lost Boys" of Sudan, one of countless
children separated from their families or
even orphaned, "beset by starvation,
thirst, and man-eating lions on their
march to squalid refugee camps in
Ethiopia" (Publisher's
Weekly review as quoted on
amazon.com).
In a few hours, the picture had totally
changed for me.
But I still feel bad for the lion.
For the k.d. lang version of What's New,
Pussycat?, click here.
Image: Mr. T at Magic Mountain, 25 February
1973.
Golden
I finally stopped running.
The routine felt oppressive and there was all
that huffing and puffing. Everything went by
so fast, the bungalows of Berkeley a blur,
the friendly cats passed in a leap, the
crazies of University Avenue or MLK deftly
avoided (or ignored). I couldn't think beyond
my heartbeat. When I first started running
again, there was pleasure in
the rush, in the pounding of my feet.
There was purpose. But now I was getting
bored with my routes and not feeling
motivated enough to pick new ones.
So now I walk. Three mornings a week, I
wander the sidewalks, sometimes stop to pet a
cat or watch one hummingbird dive-bomb
another. I still move quickly, a hair over
four miles per hour, fast enough to get a
workout, but slow enough to really see
things. My weekday walks are relatively
short, about three miles, but on Sundays I
have the luxury (thanks to my husband) of
going longer, often past six miles.
View of the hills from my street.
From our neighborhood in
the flats, with its stubby trees and cozy
two-bedroom bungalows, I head for the hills,
where the trees and the houses stretch out in
all directions. It's not that the hills are
less populous: even more than in our West
Berkeley neighborhood, houses here are packed
in tight. And like the flats, there are
places where large backyards have been taken
over by second, income-generating houses. But
there are all those trees,
and the streets twist and get vertical before
suddenly dipping and rising again. The houses
are generally bigger and more various, fun to
look at, to imagine myself in. The views are
also incredible. My Sunday walk is a hike on
sturdy sidewalks, much of the beauty with
none of the mud of a woodland trail.
For the first half of the walk, I usually
talk to my mother on the phone -- though I
have to ask her to do most of the talking
during some of the steeper climbs (and
forgive me my heaving breathing). We've had
some of our most interesting conversations
during these walks, about books and what it
means to be a writer, about art and spirit.
View of Marin County and the San Francisco
Bay from Euclid Avenue, just before the
Berkeley
Rose Garden.
During the second half, I
look at the houses and the view. I think. On
a clear day, you can see the hills of Marin
County across the Bay or catch a glimpse of
the Golden Gate bridge. I imagine a life in a
house perched high, where I would inch my way
up from the sidewalk on a set of narrow steps
edged into rock. The chill of pine-scented
fog would accompany my morning coffee and I
would watch every sunset from my teetering
deck, stand wrapped in a wool blanket,
sipping a glass of plummy Zinfandel as the
sky fills with color. Near the base of one
hill, I pass a small wooden house constructed
around a tree. The house is rustic, with
unfinished planks as siding. On colder
mornings, a line of smoke trails from the
chimney. What would it be like to live in
such a house, where nature has been invited
in? Here I would bake my own bread in a
wood-fired oven, have a huge untidy garden,
maybe a couple of egg-laying chickens out
back.
The view down
from Keith Avenue.
Around mile four, I'm going downhill and the
endorphins start to kick in. I think about
how lucky I am to have my husband, so funny
and creative, smart and loving, how lucky we
are to have our boy, how maybe I can do this
writing thing after all. I don't worry about
income or what is coming next, just feel
appreciative for all that I have. Which is a
lot. I realize that in many of my
alternate-life fantasies, I am alone, and I
wonder about my imagined bereftness when I
have a loving family at home. I'm
self-protective even in my imagination, and I
make a vow to change that, to bring my family
into these scenes, there with me as I sip the
Zinfandel or collect eggs from the chicken
coop. The recognition of my stubborn fear of
loss makes my heart ache and I pick up the
pace in anticipation of seeing my husband and
son.
The trees start to get smaller, the houses
less lavish. The sidewalk loses its slope.
The hills are behind me now, a dramatic
backdrop against cottony blue. My legs are
starting to ache and my stomach growls in
anticipation of food. By the time I reach our
block, I have acclimated back to the flats,
to the place where my family waits. I walk in
the front door, tired and happy. Mr. Trinkle,
the kid, and our various animals greet me
with hugs, kisses, and licks, and the humans
in the house sit down for our traditional
Sunday breakfast of bagels and cream cheese
with a side of the Sunday New York
Times.
This is where I belong.
Top image: A peek at the
San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge,
taken from just above the Berkeley Rose
Garden. All photos from November
2009.
I can walk under ladders
My husband defended his dissertation.
I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.
The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.
My marriage is better than it ever was.
There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.
Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.
Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.
Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.
We live in a lovely house.
Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.
I am a writer.
I can transcend.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.
Thank you for being a part of it.
New blood
Nick’s existential angst or blood lust, take
your pick, has taken the form of 2:00 a.m.
howling. He’s the loudest cat I’ve ever
known, full of throaty confidence and the
ability to project, the kind of cat depicted
in old-time cartoons, sitting on the fence
yowling as neighbors hurl shoes. He’s an
opera singer belting out a sad little tune,
“Let me out!” or “I must kill!”
It must seem like a cruel joke when we get
out the cat fishing line, the feathers
attached to a stick. As I whip them around
the bedroom, the feathers turn and beat
through the air as though they were birds'
wings. Like all cats, Nick has an active
imagination and allows himself to be taken in
for a few minutes. He hustles and jumps,
takes a very strong cat arm and pins the
fluorescent feathers to the carpet in one
swipe. The feathers crunch and crumble as
Nick snaps his jaws against them, tries to
carry his prize downstairs.
I am actually tempted to let him out – it
feels cruel to keep him from something he
loves and clearly knows well. My other cats
have all been indoor-only from the beginning
so they didn’t know what they were missing.
But I know that it isn’t a safe world out
there and we signed a contract saying that
his paws would never touch dirt or concrete
sidewalks again.
Perhaps it’s time to take in a budgie or two,
a little something to make life more
interesting for our 2:00 a.m.
howler.
Goodbye, Sidney
Sidney enjoying the yard, late June 2009.
He showed up at a
coworker's back door on New Year's Day 1995,
a half-grown kitten who needed to get out of
the Columbus, Ohio chill. The kitty was
charming, climbed up on her husband's back
while he worked in the garage, greeted the
couple with a high-pitched mew whenever they
entered the room. But they couldn't keep him,
so my boyfriend and I took the cat in, named
him Sidney. We had a six-month-old sheltie
named Loudon and he and Sidney quickly became
buddies.
By January 1996, my boyfriend and I had
gotten married and purchased a Queen
Anne-style house in a downtown Columbus
neighborhood. We'd taken in another foundling
kitten, Zoe. By mid-1998, we were living in
separate states, scheduled for divorce. I got
the cats, he kept the dog.
Yesterday afternoon, after a long illness and
slow decline, Sidney collapsed by the water
bowl in the kitchen. My husband, son and I
rushed him to the vet to be gently nudged
into death. It was sad and it still is sad
and I don't think I can write much about it.
We will miss our sweet kitten.
Sidney and Loudon, January 1995
Sidney looking at snow ... or at a ghostly
cat? January 1995.
Sidney stretch, 2001?
Will blog for squirrels
Nora,
researching a blog post.
The writing to survive
household is traveling this week and next,
from DC to MD to DE to NJ and back. In the
meantime, Nora, our Russian Squirrel Hound,
will be filling in. Or something like that.
Expect a photo post or two.
P.S. -- People googling my name: You are
freaking me out.
Would you like bloodworms with that?
He sold the whirligig mallards and Canada geese at a produce stand on Route 213. They were solid moneymakers, big sellers with the weekenders who clogged the roads every Friday and Sunday night. Lined up outside the stand, a bank of lures staked to the ground against a backdrop of cantaloupe and corn, the birds would be set off by the breeze, wings turning frantically in a frustrated pantomime of flight.
Wing tracing was not enough to keep sixteen-year-old me occupied for two months, however. That’s how I ended up, after a lot of maternal arm-twisting, as the sole employee at Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things (not its real name), a small marine supply store in Chesapeake City.
Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was a muddle of motors and Docksiders, winches and water-skis. It didn’t know exactly what kind of store it wanted to be: hardcore marine supplies (motor oil, pumps, pulleys) or day on the water store (skis, shoes, inner tubes). For the fishermen, we had a refrigerator full of packaged live bloodworms. If you wanted to toss some cash at an Evinrude motor, we could get you one. And towards the end, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things became the local dealer for Motorola car phones, exotic objects with a limited range, toys for the gadget aficionado.
Every day at the shop offered me a new opportunity to feel stupid. I knew nothing about boating. People would question me about sailing pulleys, or what weight motor oil they would need, would quiz me on outboard motor horsepower and I would stammer through a non-answer, look dumbly at the shelves, hope for an epiphany.
The store’s owner wasn’t much help. When he was there, it was mainly to down beers in the back with his buddies, an off-duty Maryland state cop and the rug cleaning guy from the shop next door. From the clenched jaw, one-sided phone conversations I overheard, I could tell that his marriage was disintegrating along with his business. Maybe the responsibility for both was too much for him, too many things to juggle.
Over the two summers I worked for him, the owner became more and more erratic. Though he hardly ever showed up during my shifts, my boyfriend D. and I would sometimes run into him at Bennett's Liquors or at the Canal House, the local boater's watering hole. He'd greet us with a high-pitched hello and a tight grin, insist upon giving us ice or a drink. "Want some iiice?!" became our catchphrase for him, a reference to the night he filled D.'s cooler with an intensity beyond the task.
My boss was a no show for my last week of work, the week before I left for my freshman year in college. Even his wife was calling, trying to track him down. Then another call would come in on the line, his distant voice over car phone static. He'd be at the store by noon. It never worked out that way.
Alone, I’d pace the aisles, line my white MIA shoes heel to pointy toe in a circuitous route around boating supplies. The occasional customer would show, hopefully with a simple request. I waited for business, drank diet Dr. Pepper, ran my finger along the bottles of teak oil. The sailing equipment fascinated me and I would finger the pulleys, try to figure out the knot chart.
When Dan, one of our suppliers, dropped by with beer for a farewell visit on my last day, I didn’t see a problem with cracking one open. We sat in the office and talked over a couple of Coors, had a meandering goodbye conversation about John, my college plans. At the end of my shift, I emptied the cash register, doled out my weekly salary. I locked up and delivered the keys to the rug cleaner, then hopped into my grandfather's waiting car.
Within six months, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was closed. I never saw the owner again.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her
in. There were stories of other dogs that had
cracked after hearing the tests at
Aberdeen Proving
Ground, dogs that pushed their
way through second story window screens,
desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb
and munitions tests across the river. The
aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s
general nervousness, but now when a
thunderstorm blew through town, she was
absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed
her. By the time you got the pill down,
the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to
the local grocery store. Mom rolled the
windows down a safe distance, locked the
doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green
beans when she heard a little girl’s voice.
“Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the
Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the
beans and continued to the toiletry aisle.
The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the
dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced
past the row of shampoos to the plate glass
windows – were those thunderclaps she heard?
– when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on
the run from one of our favorite check-out
guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger
and always made friendly conversation. Louise
darted for the automatic doors, heading along
the sidewalk in the direction of the
Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the
door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering
force. She watched Louise scatter a school of
carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked
work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant
and made a left into the hardware store. Mom
followed, pushing past customers, until she
found Louise in the back of the store,
trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the
storm passed, then walked her back to the car
and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently,
the dog panicked when she heard the
approaching thunder, pushed through an open
car window and went looking for Mom. We were
grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I
came home from grad school for a visit.
Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s
long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with
a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was
close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was
getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to
thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from
Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She
was terrified. If no one was home, she would
attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would
force her way through a closed window,
pictured a return home to bloodied shards of
glass and no dog. If someone was home, she
would scratch and pace, pant and whine.
Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We
sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet
depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.
Dashboard confessional
That's right: I don't drive. Yes, even though I possess a driver's license, I have not been behind the wheel of a car since 1996. That was back in Columbus, Ohio, where I took driving lessons and passed the test -- in a stick shift, no less -- only to continue with my non-driving, pro-walking lifestyle.
The Ohio license was my ticket to a Washington, DC license, which in its turn practically guaranteed me a California license, both sans driving test. California required that I take a written exam, which I passed by the skin of my teeth, with a score just good enough to get my golden pass to the highways. But, don't worry. If you are driving the roads of our fine state this summer, or any time in the near future, you will be relieved to know that I will either be safely ensconced in the passenger's seat or hoofing it.
Though I am a big supporter of public transportation (how could I not be?) and I am happy not to have to plunk down an extra car payment, my decision not to drive has nothing to do with a political stance or with economics.
I am afraid.
Five people from my high school were killed in car accidents in the space of a year and a half. When I was fifteen, I was in an accident on the very same winding Delaware back road where two upperclassman had been killed a month before, though I got off lucky, with a few stitches near my right eye.
I concluded early on that cars are big, heavy, and fast and can cause a lot of damage. The possibility of killing someone with a two-ton, gasoline-powered weapon is terrifying. I can't suspend disbelief, act as if there is no danger involved. Everyone shuttles around in these shuddering heaps of metal and plastic as though it is the most normal thing in the world. And I guess I do, too, as a passenger, though I'm not exactly a relaxed passenger.
It's a phobia, one that was relatively easy to live with when we were in the middle of convenience, in a fantastic DC neighborhood where everything was within walking distance and if it wasn't, I could hop on the Metro to get there. No one even needed to know that I didn't drive, which was wonderful, because I'm embarrassed by it, this dependency on my husband, this weird fear of mine.
Now that we're in a less convenient place, I am feeling the effects of life without driving. I know what I need to do, but I don't know if I can do it. Hey, if Sarah Vowell can survive without driving, why can't I? (But then again, if Katha Pollitt finally did learn to drive, what's my excuse?)
Gritty fingers
Last fall, when home life was strained, I stopped regularly watering our outdoor plants. The dirt beneath the scrub grass cracked like a drought-choked riverbed. Herbs turned brown in their terra cotta pots and the stressed lemon tree in the backyard dropped withered leaves. Every time the lawn crew (another thing I haven't quite gotten used to here) finished its work I would come out and find a shallow hole where yet another plant had perished, removed by the efficient men with their thick gloves and weed whackers.
We spent the late fall and winter rebuilding, nurturing our family life in California. The rains came. The greenery was rejuvenated. Herbs mysteriously re-sprouted and the grass came back a patchy grey-green, though the lemon tree did not undergo a spontaneous rebirth.
Yesterday we celebrated spring by planting flowers and vegetables: three tomato plants, a tomatillo, a pumpkin vine, a melon plant, and six tiny swiss chards (too much, I'm sure, but spring calls for optimism). Sunburned, shining with sweat, arms smeared with compost, we linked our gritty fingers after the last plant was watered. One tough year down and a lifetime of growth ahead.