Basically, a hermit

Every now and then somebody blogs about fun times meeting other bloggers. 

"We've known each other so long without meeting that 

it felt very natural to sit down and have lunch and catch up." 

or

"So nice to have a voice to go with the person I already knew!"

I like you all very much but I don't want to take a road trip and meet you in the middle or come to your town and meet you or have you come to mine and meet me. I don't even much enjoy getting together with people I've known forever, to whom I wouldn't be embarrassed to say, "You have a little speck of pepper on your front tooth."  If you and I could meet in a scenic pull-off on a road somewhere, or in a parking lot, get out of our cars, look at each other from ten feet away, and say, "Well! So that's how tall you are!" and get back in our vehicles and go on our way, that would be fine with me. 
I don't think I'm shy anymore the way I was in my younger years, but I am not a chatter. I can email with anybody all day long, but to have to speak, actually speak, with somebody while I'm still getting used to his or her voice . . . well, it just takes a while for me to absorb somebody's presence to the point that I could actually converse. Email allows me to, without a word of explanation, get up and refill my water glass, wander outside, visit the bathroom, move the laundry from washer to dryer, and not insult my companion. I think almost anybody would feel a little odd if I did any of that in the middle of a face-to-face conversation.
I used to be a switchboard operator. It was my first real job and I spoke with people all over the country. It was a lot of fun, and I became very friendly with some of those people. But I never wanted to get together and go shopping with them. It just isn't my style. Neither the getting together nor the shopping, alone or with anybody, either one. All the years that I waited tables . . . I developed real relationships with some of my customers, but the interaction stayed (with one disastrous exception) within the restaurant, hardly even extending to the parking lot,  should we see each other entering or exiting our vehicles. I couldn't indefinitely support the waitress persona outside the diningroom.
Besides all that, you all already know more about me than any six people with whom I might interact on a daily basis. Why meet?


So if you're planning a trip to this part of the country, let me know when you'll be here. 
I'll come out and stand by the side of the road and wear a red fleece shirt, so you'll know it's me. I'll wave as you go by, and we can say we met. Maybe the next time you're in the area we could actually exchange a few words.

An over-long cat tale

As I have aged, I have become more and more convinced that pets should be adopted as they come to us. Foundlings, shelter and rescue animals are The Best. I love my poodles, whom we sought out and paid for, and whom I have served faithfully ever since. But the Met-By-Chance-And-Meant-To-Be Animals are special. MiMau was one such animal. I believe that I have not related the story of how MiMau came to live with us. 


I have to start this story long before MiMau's arrival; please bear with me for a minute. When we were married five years and bought a house, we bought our first poodle. He was black, fiercely beloved BeauBear, ill with Addison's Disease from age 3 to his demise at nearly 11. Toward the end of his life, my sister acquired a new barn cat. A tiny kitten, she had been removed from a household where the toddling children had been manhandling her, dipping her in and out of mop buckets full of dirty water and the like. The poor little rescue was not successfully assimilating into the existing barncat population. She wasn't allowed to eat at the communal dish, not accepted into the group at all. Sister worried about her and begged me to take her. I had not had a cat for a long time, although I always loved them. The overwhelming amount of attention required by the sick dog made me a little leery of taking on another pet, but I met the little girl, a dark tortie, fell in love and brought her home. Named her KittyBear. BeauBear didn't like her, but she would cuddle up behind him on his bed at every opportunity, just to be near. She began to gain weight and to thrive, and by the time poor BeauBear reached the end of his road, she was well-established as The Beloved Cat.


We sold that house and moved to a rental home while this house was being built. KittyBear liked the big back yard, behind which was a new street full of new homes with big yards. Torties, I think, are nearly always great hunters because of their natural camouflage, and she often brought us offerings of mice, leaving them on the back step. For eight months, KittyBear was our only furchild. And then we brought home two tiny chrysanthemum-petal-headed baby poodles. KittyBear observed and hid and generally stayed out of the way while I overmothered the puppies and worked hard at housebreaking them. One night at 11:30, as I struggled back through the kitchen toward bed, after what I strongly hoped was Last Time Out, I caught KittyBear's eye as she lolled on the kitchen counter archly watching the two tiny dogs passing by below. 
"You could help, you know!" I said to her. She stared back.


A few nights later, Husband and I were in bed. We heard thumping, sounds of merriment and activity, coming from another room. I got up, crept down the hall . . . to find our three pets sitting in a triangle . . . in the center of which was a small living mouse. KittyBear had undertaken to teach the poodles how to deal with small rodents. Angus loved it, learned the lesson and loved KittyBear. Max watched and didn't much care about anything except cuddling and fetching. When the poodles were six months old, I got up one Sunday morning and found a tiny deceased mouse on the back step. We never saw KittyBear again.


Max went on happily, playing with his toys and being cute. Angus looked for his kitty sister. When he would hear, in our conversations, the word "kitty," he would pay close attention until nothing further happened to produce an actual kitty. Husband felt sorry for Angus. "Angus wants a cat. Should we get him a cat?"
I put out the word to people: If you hear of an adult female cat who needs a home, let me know. Months went by. Angus continued to exhibit signs of wanting a kitty sibling. I would not go to the shelter. With two same-sex puppies from the same litter, I already had a lot on my plate, petwise. If a cat fell from the sky, I'd happily take it in. If not, Angus would be fine.


My friend Juanita, something of a Cat Lady, called me one afternoon. 
"Are you still looking for a cat?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Why?"
"The prettiest cat I have ever seen just walked into my back yard. I've been up and down the street, and nobody knows who she belongs to. Why don't you come over after work and meet her?"
So I did. Juanita met me at her gate, wearing a dark sweatshirt thickly frosted with cat hair and holding a loudly-purring dilute tortie cat. "I think she likes me," she laughed.  The cat had come walking confidently along the fence into Juanita's back yard, sat down and waited for a proper acknowledgment. Juanita's neighborhood was home to a number of college students. It was the end of the semester. We concluded that someone, knowing Juanita was a Crazy Cat Lady, had offloaded their young pet near her house, confident that all would be well. I thought the cat was homely. I'd never had a dilute tortie, couldn't make sense of her markings, thought she looked kind of blah. But if ever a cat had dropped from the sky, here, certainly, was one. I had no carrier, so I picked up the cat, got in the car, and started home. 
My new little girl settled happily in my lap, curled up and was still: I took that to be a good omen. We were about two-thirds of the way home, twenty minutes' drive, when I looked down at my new pet. She was looking up at me with her green eyes and her tiny pointy chin. She lifted one paw, reached up and softly, softly, touched my cheek for a few seconds. 
Ka-ching!
Cats are born knowing how to seal deals.
Now, of course, thirteen years later, I can't believe I ever thought she was homely. It must be living with us that's done it: she is the most beautiful cat I have ever seen. 




10/18/2011 For English Rider, MiMau's photo added (from MiMau and the Importance of Keeping the Upper Paw). There's another fun picture of her at CamoCat.

I have no digital photos of KittyBear and no scanner available . . . but she was beautiful too.

I just don't know

I am often confused about politics in general, and my own in particular. 


I'm employed by the smallest possible governmental unit, and, of course, I see what I do as necessary to the general good. Somebody wants to build a fence between his yard and his neighbor's; the law says it can be no more than eight feet in height. He wants it to be as tall as possible and who are we to tell him a fence on his own property can only be eight feet tall? He has a deck and if he sits on his deck, he'll still be able to see his annoying neighbor. The annoying neighbor, on the other hand, will get No Sunshine on his property if the fence is as tall as our man wants to build it.


Small Pond, the village that employs me, had a little damage from the floods. Nothing in comparison  to the village that I call My Village. After the flooding, Small Pond's authorities had a dumpster put in place for use by the one street of people whose cellars and cellar contents had been damaged by the water. A couple of officials went door to door to let that street's residents know the dumpster was there for them. There wasn't wide publication of its presence because it wasn't meant for regular ol' garbage. A Man Who Is Never Happy phoned and complained that the dumpster was too high . . . people kept wanting to borrow his truck so they could reach the top to throw in their ruined armchairs and things. "And what about the old people?" he asked. "How are they supposed to use it? In BlahBlah and OverThere, they had trucks go around and pick up from in front of houses."
"Yes, those would have been National Guard troops going house to house where entire houses had been swallowed up by flood water and were being gutted," I did not say.
"I had to replace my furnace twice in three days!" he ranted. "Do you know how much that costs?"
"Yes. Yes I do," I said, calmly.
He went on for some time, complaining that the dumpster was there, that it was unsightly, complaining that it wasn't accessible enough, complaining that the sidewalk on his street has a dip in it that still held water. 
"I don't mean to be a pain in the ass," he said.
"Too late," I did not say.


People call every week on trash pickup days. 

• The truck [that went by at 7am] didn't pick up my trash and I put it out there as soon as I got up at 7:30! 
• The containers are too big for me to move from my garage to the curb! What am I gonna do? (To that person, I did say, conversationally, "I guess I'd ask my neighbor for help.")
• The containers are too small for our household: we have nine people in our family. 
• The containers are too big: I don't fill it up in a week. Why should I pay the same amount as the people next door who have nine people making trash?

All of us who take these calls wish that Small Pond would get out of the garbage business. The group of people who make these decisions keep renewing the contract. The alternative would be to have individual haulers coming through the village every day of the week, with trash containers sitting out on the curbs here and there every day of the week. And the cost to individual households would be higher than the existing arrangement. And maybe some people wouldn't have a hauler come, and would let their garbage accumulate. And then there would be . . . vermin. Another can of worms. So to speak.


So, I think about these small-scale problems, and I think about people's dissatisfaction with the services that Government provides, and I know that there is no winning. Sometimes I think that this country is too large and too varied in need and custom for one government to perform services that make people happy. Even perhaps this state, with its great variation in population densities and lifestyles . . . for Heaven's sake, we have New York County (aka Manhattan) and Onondaga County in one state! 


Everybody thinks the government should do some things for the public good. But it seems that nobody can agree on what those things should be. 
Take care of the roads? Yes, of course. But what roads? If all the roads are partially demolished, in what order should they be repaired?
Provide education to minor children? Sure. The argument goes, "We all benefit from communities filled with people who can read and write." Do the schools need to provide basketball programs? Swim programs? And, well, you know . . . Husband and I have no children, but we've been paying school taxes forever.
I get a tax break because I own land that's used partially for agriculture. Why should I get any favors because we could afford to buy that much land?
I pay taxes that pay for the state trucks and other pieces of equipment that are dredging out the streams that the floods filled up with gravel and rocks and rootballs. But I'm on top of a hill: my land won't flood. At least not until the gravel and rocks and rootballs accumulate to a depth of four hundred feet. I guess that would take quite a while.


So here are the questions that I keep coming back to: 
Should we just let it all go and let everybody get by as well as they can on their own? 
Should we have no permanent dwellings where there might be floods, or tornados, or wildfires that start by lightning? 
Maybe we should all migrate seasonally, garden with pointed sticks, live in houses partially heated by the bodies of large animals. 

At night in summer and all day in winter the peasants shared their huts with their animals. Parts of it were screened off for the livestock. Their body heat helped to keep the hut warm. ~A History of Homes

My boss read the other day that the house of the future will have no livingrooms. Dwelling units will have fewer rooms, and those rooms will be multi-purpose. That sounds to me like a return to a way of living that worked for humans for a good many years. We'll all have multi-generational households, filled with fleas and the aroma of manure, and we might be stuck all together for weeks on end if the roads are impassable, but at least it would take our minds off complaining about government.

It's just what you do

I've been feeling a little bit embarrassed about that last post. Some of you seemed to think I had gone above and beyond, and that makes me feel as if I was tooting my own horn. It took a long time for me to write about that day, although I knew I would. Melinda seemed to me so singular, such a character. She was the reason for the post. I have so much more memory of her than I wrote . . . sometimes I want to get the story told and I leave out details. Her direct brown eyes, her square jaw, her wide straight-line lips. The faint dramatic intonation: "Yes . . . mine is a lonely life." 
What I want to say here is that that's how it is in the country. I always thought so, and now that I live here, I do know it to be true. Maybe it's true in the city too; I don't know because I haven't lived in a real city. Maybe it's true wherever one human being asks another human being for help.


A long time ago, before we bought this land, but after we had begun looking around for a country place, I spent a few hours driving around being happily lost on country roads. It was late fall, might have been Thanksgiving weekend . . . and in the 'burbs the roads were clear. In the country, of course, they were snowy, slushy, muddy. I was on a long, long, unpopulated road when I slid into the ditch. I don't recall the details now. It was not a very cold day. Cell phones hadn't yet been invented. I didn't know where I was, but I remembered having passed a house less than a mile back. I trundled myself down the road, thinking to call Husband for help. There was one person at home, a young man. Early twenties, I'd say . . . big and burly and blond and country-messy . . . which is to say, clean but surface-dirty from physical labor.
But get this: his job was driving a tow truck.
That guy got on his overalls, got his truck and his big heavy chain, and he got underneath my car in the mud by the side of the road and he pulled me out most handily. I felt so bad that he was getting so wet and dirty but he said he was used to it. 
I had no cash to give him, and he didn't care. 
I never saw anybody work so hard and smile so much.
I still don't know what road I was on, or what his name was, or how I ever found, on a long, long, empty country road, the one person who would know exactly what to do and how to do it in fifteen minutes.


So, you know... What goes around comes around.

Melinda at my door

To the east, regions already suffering the aftereffects of flooding from Hurricane Irene almost two weeks earlier had those problems aggravated by 2–4 inches (51–100 mm) of new rain on saturated ground and rivers still swollen. TheWallkill River crested at five feet (1.5 m) above flood stage in Ulster County, and the village of Washingtonville in Orange County to the south was isolated as it had been after Irene by the rising waters of Moodna Creek. The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, just reopened a day earlier, was closed indefinitely. Roads were closed, including exits on the New York State Thruway in the Mohawk Valley and, south of the Interstate 84 exit at Newburgh, the entire road. Some businesses that had spent considerable time and money to reopen after Irene were once again flooded.^[52] Damage in Tioga County in the Southern Tier was estimated at around $100 million.^{[53] ~Tropical Storm Lee}

When the second inundation, courtesy of Tropical Storm Lee, was imminent, I left work early so as to get to this side of the creek before I could not. At home, I ensconced myself on the couch with my book. It was chilly. I thought about starting a fire in the stove, but it didn't feel as if it would be worth the effort. It was very quiet. The rain pattered against the windows, stopped, resumed.
I thought I heard a car's tires roll up the driveway, but from where I sat, saw neither Husband's truck, nor any other vehicle. After a few minutes, a tiny tap-tap-tap of a key on the glass of the door. I unwound my legs from among the poodles and got up, craning my neck around the end of the kitchen counter to see the door. A tall white-haired lady peered in, hoping for a human. I opened the door and she stood on the porch in the rain, telling me she'd been a mile from home and had gotten detoured . . . and lost. "I could see the church up on the hill there, you know the one, with the blue cross? And he wouldn't let me go on!"

She wore no coat, and her black sweater was soaked. I got her inside and settled on the couch, provided, with my apologies, a cup of coffee reheated from the morning, and put the afghan on her shoulders. We visited for a little bit, and I heard the short version of her life story. She's from Lubbock, Texas, had a husband who died, then a son who died. She went to school for architecture but then decided she didn't like it because she didn't want to have to work with men all her life, so she got a degree in interior design. She was in cohoots with builders and worked a deal in which she'd decorate the new houses that they built. Anyway, then her son died, and this man Bob somebody (who owned the place near here where she lives now) married her and brought her here and then "no sooner did we get here, but he died."

She was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, except a slight wonderment at all these people dropping dead around her, and I enjoyed listening to the Texas flavor of her speech. In the short time she was here we covered a vast amount of conversational ground. She said the women here have been unfriendly to her. I said, "Well, you know, there's that little bit of antipathy between Northern and Southern women." I mentioned Jeannie to her, who had said once, in one of her Scarlet O'Hara fits of pique, and probably quoting some romance novel heroine, "That's work that only niggers and Northern women would do!" My guest was aghast. "I was raised with ladies, you know. No one I knew would ever have used language like that!"


While we talked I checked the computer to see how to get her home. 
She said, "I'd better write this down." 
"You don't have to," I said. "I'm going to lead you there." 
She did that whole upper-body recoil that it seems to me only Southern ladies do so well, and said, "You're going to lead me there?"
All little back roads and the poor thing had no idea where she was, I couldn't send her off into the rain alone to follow directions that included no landmarks. Some of the roads look like hardly more than somebody's camp driveway. But all told, it looked like only about seven minutes from here to there. 


After a while I said, "Well, you finish your coffee and get your keys, and we'll go out and get you home. And you get into a hot bath and warm up."
"I will. I'll put on one of those things, you know, that you wear over your bra." I expect she meant a camisole. Another Southern lady thing. I would have put on my flannel jammies.
I wasn't real sure where I was going but I knew where we needed to end up, and I knew the general direction. Some of those roads were ones I'd never been on, but lo and behold, after a while, we came out on the other side of the big pond that was the state route and I delivered her to her door. We blew our horns, waved out our windows, she pulled into her driveway and I went on. I wanted to see the flooded road. I saw it . . . all covered in several feet of water, guarded by sheriff vehicles with red and blue flashing lights. Having seen it, I had to back into somebody's driveway and, anticlimactically, pass by my erstwhile guest as she stood at the end of her driveway, in the rain, talking to someone I took to be a neighbor. Getting more soaked as she did so. Excessively gregarious. Maybe that's her "Texas" coming out.
We waved again and I wended my way home.


I am not an Earth Mother type. I don't go around Doing Good Without A Second Thought. I would not be one of those women about whom people would say, "Oh, she's just an angel . . . help anybody." But it never occurred to me not to go out in the rain and take that poor soul home. I think it's just the way it gets to be when everybody's all together in a big uncontrollable mess and we find out we need each other to survive. When I look at it that way, it makes natural disasters look a little bit like blessings.

Drying out the village

Last weekend I made my third and fourth drives through the village since it drowned. The pizzeria's neon OPEN sign is lit, the drugstore has a brave white paper with a handwritten "OPEN" on it in the window, but neither had any noticeable traffic; almost nobody lives in the village anymore. The parking spaces on Main Street were empty except for torn-out sheetrock and fiberglass. People wearing gloves and masks over their noses and mouths carried debris out of wide-open buildings. An old blue barn that had floated off its foundation and nearly into the road had one of its walls removed on my morning trip by, two by the time I went by in the afternoon. The building that housed my hairdresser's shop has its walls half-removed to take advantage of whatever drying the sun and air could accomplish. 


The first time I went through the village, when it still looked like a war zone, it smelled like Death. The second time it smelled like heating oil from the storage tanks that had been knocked loose and had leaked their contents. The stench has dissipated. Now it smells less like Death and more like the old mildewy dust of country cellars. 


Along the road between village and home, and between the other side of village and dog groomer's shop, the cornstalks that still stand rise from a foot of standing water; elsewhere in the same fields they are wind-flattened. All of it is useless.


There are houses with "For Sale By Owner" and Realtor signs in the front lawns. The mortgages on the ruined structures and the cost of rebuilding . . . some people are simply walking away, to live in apartments with newly-bought or donated furniture. Those who are brave and strong enough to hire contractors to tear down and start over run the risk of some mean SOB reporting them to the state Department of Labor for not having an asbestos survey done before they demolish . . . as if any asbestos that might have been attached to those structures wouldn't have been miles downstream by now.


A couple of weeks after the floods I had heard rumors of forgetting about maintaining the dam, allowing the valley to flood, some level of government taking the land by eminent domain. I haven't heard any of that recently, and I am relieved. I prefer that my house be "hilltop" rather than "waterfront."

Holiday weekend

It is the early morning of the third day of a three-day weekend. It is Columbus Day, or rather the day of the observance of Columbus Day. I doubt that many people other than east coast Italians know anymore what Columbus Day is meant to celebrate. If you're going to the parade, it starts at Fifth Avenue at 44th Street at 11:30 this morning. (In a nice balance, today is also Indigenous Peoples Day. I didn't know that until just now when I looked for a link for Columbus Day.) I will not be at a parade today. I will be doing my civil-servant-on-a-holiday-Monday thing, which is to say, whatever I want. I've been counting the workdays (20) since Labor Day and I'll be checking to see the number of days between now and Veterans Day. 


By happy chance, and perhaps a measure of God-knows-we-deserve-it, the weather has been glorious for the last several days. On Saturday I was out bright and early to get the dogs to an overdue grooming appointment, came home to do the Dance of the Washer and Dryer, mowed the lawn, sweating, cooled by the breeze while I filled my head and my lungs with the sweet yellow scent of freshly cut hay and the rich green billow of freshly cut grass. There was a particular area where, when I wheeled and faced west, the bouquet was head-spinning. The sun and the shadows, the aromas, the sight of the grasshoppers and crickets leaping out of my path, the small yellow butterflies arcing and dipping . . . pure intoxication. 


After the mowing, after the clean and trimmed dog retrieval, on the final round of laundry, pleasantly sluggish as the windfall-apple-drunk wasps, I sat at the shaded picnic table and read. 


What a gift is an eighty-degree day in October.

How Chantix worked for me

A few of you who left comments on the "Moderation..." post wanted to know how the Chantix worked for me. 
It worked as it was meant to: I haven't smoked since August 12. Six weeks, give or take. 
I had just about every one of the side effects:

...suicidal thoughts or actions; new or worsening depression, anxiety, or panic attacks; agitation; restlessness; angry or violent behavior; acting dangerously; mania (frenzied, abnormally excited mood or talking); abnormal thoughts or sensations; hallucinations (seeing things or hearing voices that do not exist); feeling that people are against you; feeling confused; or any other sudden or unusual changes in behavior, thinking, or mood. 

One of my friends knew I'd stopped taking it when I [mostly] stopped being mean. 
Feelings of confusion are a common feature of my personality so I'm not sure I can blame Chantix for those. 
The auditory hallucinations were barely noticeable and only lasted for a few days: they were, as my doctor predicted, like hearing the conversation of many voices from an adjacent room. That was interesting. I kept trying to hear what the nonexistent people were talking about, but never could make it out.
I stopped taking it when the occasional nausea became more regular. By then I was forgetting to take it anyway.

The loss of interest in food did not last, and the inability to resist the famously unhealthy White Food has dropped into place. Now I scurry away from the sight of blue and white Entenmann's boxes the way, six years ago, I began to avoid the red and white of Budweiser.

Just as  Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, "It's always something--if it ain't one thing, it's another." 

I used to see this guy Bob in the rooms. Big guy, balding young. When he moved, he shambled, hunched over by the weight of the chip on his shoulder. He was a wrinkly, puffy mess, pouty about everything, always Poor Me coming out of his mouth. He hated his job, he hated his job, then he got fired and he was mad about that. When he shared, he'd pick one person to talk to, look down while he spoke and then up to check with his audience of one for . . . whatever he was checking for. Acknowledgment: let's call it that. 
Like so many of us in those rooms, he was a little kid in a grown-up's body.  
I haven't seen Bob in a long time. 
I haven't been going to meetings.


A few days ago the mailman left a notice for me that I had a piece of mail that I needed to sign for. It would be held at a post office not my own. "Odd," I thought. The floods, though, have caused the mail, as well as many other things, to be off kilter. The next day I asked the mail carrier who delivers to the office why my mail might be at a different post office. She said that if there had been a substitute delivering mail on my route, he might have used the wrong call slip . . . on of his "home" call slips instead of filling out a blank one for my village. 
"Call first," she said, "before you make an extra trip." 
Of course I did not call first, but started my Saturday morning rounds with my home post office. The lobby, where the mailboxes are, was open, but the clerk's area was locked up tight. Through the glass door I saw that the walls are half gone . . . the studs are drying out before the sheetrock can be replaced.
Ah. No mistake then. I really did have to go to the other post office to retrieve my mystery mail item. Only a pleasant ten minute drive, past barns and pastures of cows, and over the creek that has come to resemble the mighty Mississippi in its new breadth and milk chocolate color. 
I parked, went inside, signed the orange slip and handed it over to the clerk. While she flipped through a carton of packages, I picked up a small brass bell on the counter and looked inside it. The original clapper was gone, replaced by a paper clip. I waggled the bell and it tinkled faintly.
"How cute," I said. "Is it effective?"
"Oh yes," said the clerk. "I can hear it every time."
"Ears like a dog," I said. We smiled, I took my envelope and I turned to leave.


I pushed on the door; it gave way suddenly. A tall man was pulling the door open to come inside. We met in the doorway. "Oh! I'm sorry," he said, stepping back to let me pass while he held the door. 
"Perfectly all right," I said. We smiled. "Thank you." 
"Have a good day," he said. 
"You too!" I told him. I headed for my car.
The car next to me began to back up. Then, a crackle-whump sound, like a cardboard box being run over.
"Oooo, that doesn't sound good," I said to myself. The car pulled forward again. I looked over my right shoulder to see what was going on. The driver and passenger, all covered with consternation, hurried out of their vehicle and went to look at the rear of a small green car parked behind them. The man who had held the door for me appeared. All three of them looked long and intently at the bumper of the car, which seemed undamaged, unmarked. Each of them ran their hands over it. Nodding and shaking of heads all round, readiness to accept responsibility, to forgive injury.


I backed up slowly and minimally.  As I moved the gear shift from "reverse" to "drive," I heard the man say, in a comforting tone, "Noooooooo....." and then, "You have a nice day now." As I prepared to turn out onto the road, all three were getting into their cars. I looked closely at the man getting into the green car.
It was Bob. 
A Bob all grown up, wearing neat clothing, wearing a smile. 
Wearing his sobriety.

Now this: This was a nightmare.

I'm at work, temporarily answering phones while the regular receptionist is out for an afternoon.
A man calls and says he wants to talk to the Chancellor or he'll send in a bomb.
I can't transfer the call because I don't know the Chancellor's extension.
The Chancellor himself calls me on an internal line, tells me, "If the man calls again, send him to me at extension 247."
"247 . . . 247 . . . 247 . . ." I mutter to myself nervously while I wait for the man to phone again. When he does, I try to transfer the call to extension 237, which does not exist. Now I have to deal with embarrassment as well as a real threat of true violence.
The security doorbell buzzes. I get up from the desk, go down the stairs, and open the door. A man puts into my arms a full-grown German Shepherd, "Here's Bob. He's loaded." The man leaves quickly, and horrified, I carry the beautiful black and silver dog back up the six stairs to the lobby, noting that he feels as if he has valises under his skin. In fact, he has explosives sewn under his skin; he is armed as a living bomb. I'm in fear for all our lives, not least the beautiful dog's. I'm on the floor, trying not to weep, trying to comfort the nervous dog, who in turn is trying to comfort me, when the Chancellor comes into the lobby and sits down at the receptionist's desk to manage the situation. With kind urgency, he dismisses me, and as I push open the heavy steel door to leave, a young and handsome dark-haired man grasps the edge of the door. 
"Who are you!" I shriek.
He's frantic. "I'm Bob's dog!" he shouts. "I mean . . . Bob is my dog!" The Chancellor comes to the top of the stairs and tells me, "Let him in."
I leave the building and wander through the campus with tears rolling down my face, expecting at any moment to hear a loud explosion. 
Sirens in the distance...


And, thank God, then I woke up.
If this doesn't stop soon, I might have to stop sleeping.

General update

I just turned up the thermostat for the first time since I-don't-want-to-remember. The temperature outdoors (says the weather website) is forty degrees. I don't know what it was inside. It's uncomfortable, I'm up at 4am on a Saturday and I deserve to feel not scrunched up around the shoulders and neck trying to keep warm. 


I got up about 3, I think. Or, really, 2:30ish. I woke up from another long and vivid novelette of a dream, made a trip to the Small Room, and got back in bed. Max started to wiggle around, settle, wiggle. I got up, carried him downstairs and delivered him outdoors. He is such a small dog . . . his innards must be crowded by his bladder, which has about a gallon capacity. I waited at the door for his gauge to drop to "empty." It takes a long, long time. Then he refilled at the water dish: a long slurpslurpslurpslurpslurpslurp. At least five minutes. MiMau interrupted him, he stood back. She drinks for a long time too; I think she's part camel. Finally, she stepped back and he resumed. A second trip out to make sure his bladder was completely void. 
We went back upstairs to bed.


Angus hadn't moved: Ah, good.
Angus spent a day at the clinic last week, having teeth removed/cleaned, having his anal glands and his ear canals deep cleaned. His mouth has caused him no trouble in the aftermath, his ear canals are no longer itchy and painful . . . but the butt. Oh . . . my. My life for the last two days has been taken over by my black dog's butt and its discomfort and recovery. Twice a day I am to administer 1.5cc of liquid antibiotic. Mm-hm. We aren't doing very well with that, but I'm hoping that whatever remains on Angus' tongue, after he flings it hither, thither and yon, will do some good.
This is my life.
Last evening Angus was suffering quite some anxiety about issues back there. I put him in the bathtub with the handheld shower and washed him off with Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap. Immediate relief. We went to bed. He settled down, sighed, and we all went to sleep. So when I got back to bed with empty Max, and Angus still seemed comfortable, I thought, "Great, back to sleep until the light of the Saturday sun shines on my face!"


Two minutes later, Angus began to fidget. He moved under the covers with me. He moved out from under the covers. He wiggled and squirmed. He settled down at my command. Then the whole routine started up again. I sighed. I flipped the covers back, put on my robe, picked him up and tucked him under my arm and carried him downstairs, delivered him to the door. He went out.
I went to the dog medication corner of the kitchen counter and quartered one of Max's Tramadol tablets. While I was at it, I fixed some food, as Tramadol is supposed to be given with food.
Angus came back in, walked to a scatter rug and resumed his interest in his rear end. I picked him up and carried him to the couch, next to which I had, in his absence, surreptitiously placed the quarter tablet of Tramadol (he's a suspicious and observant little dog), and where I cornered him, pried his jaws open and shoved the medication down his throat. Honestly, you would think that I had given him poison. He spit and shook his head and thrust his tongue out and spit some more. And out came the Tramadol. I hadn't lost patience, exactly, but I was empty of my usual empathy and full of determination. I picked up the wet quarter tablet, pried open his jaws again, and while I leaned my body against his, pressing him into the corner of the couch, calmly pushed the pill halfway down his esophagus. I held his mouth closed with one hand, then the other when he wiggled his muzzle out of the first, and rubbed,  with some vigor, every part of his head and throat. He performed the whole Yuck!  Yuck! Yuck! dog and pony show again, but the medication did not reappear.
You know . . . I have swallowed Tramadol myself. It does not taste that bad.


While I was on a roll, I hid his thyroid medication in a half inch ball of raw hamburger and placed it before him on a small dish of microwaved-for-thirty-seconds-and-cooled kibble/water/hamburger. He ate the ball of hamburger, so the morning dose of thyroid med is inside him. I have a reprieve on that until this afternoon. 
But we still have the morning dose of the liquid antibiotic.


He's snoozing now (thank you, Tramadol!), over there between his little dish of uneaten food and the far arm of the couch. It might be time to load up the plastic syringe with antibiotic. I won't have a better opportunity for hours.

A note to interested entrepreneurs: There might be a real market out there for this design in straitjackets.

Hell hath no fury like the dreams of a woman taking Chantix

Carolynn's comment about violent dreams reminded me of a dream I had a few weeks ago. 

Or so. 

It doesn't matter when, really, although I do think it preceded the Tropical Storm Irene inundation...

...and the Labor Day inundation.

I think of the dream . . . and it felt like a dream, not a nightmare, despite the way it rolled out of my id . . . in relation to the storms only because I wonder . . . was I reacting somehow to the unsteadiness in the atmosphere? Or was it just one of the famous Vividly Violent Chantix Dreams? I can hardly believe that most dreams only last three to five seconds (something I read recently) because this one seemed to go on for weeks. 

Anyway...

There were two of us in the dream: a man, familiar to dreaming me and unknown to my waking self, and me. He and I were close. Not lovers, not friends, but somewhere on the edge between the two. Throughout the dream, over and over again, I would begin to trust him and his good will . . . and then he would do something or make a remark that would cut me, humiliate me, leave me not knowing what to say, how to react. 

At last, my hurt feelings turned to cold rage. He had one more chance. I knew he'd blow it and he did. He made yet another barbed joke at my expense.

I turned and drove a long two-tined barbecue fork into his throat even as he still smirked at me. I could feel the tines' sharp points passing through resisting tissues. He fell backward onto the floor and lay staring at me in shock, struggling only feebly. I was strong; I would not let him free. 

I woke up, leaving my dream self holding him pinned to the floor by his neck.

BBQ fork by ~princess-distracto 

Aren't you glad you don't live in my head?

Last night's dream

I dreamt that I was a cat, the youngest in a colony of cats who all looked very much like me.
We were all pretty cats: black and gray tabby with white bib and paws and lips. 
It seems as if the dream went on and on. There was lots of conversation among us, along the lines of: We are cats and may do as we please, whenever and wherever we please.
In the final scene of this dream, we were all gathered in a diner, all sitting like humans in booths.
It was a meeting of some type, and our patriarch said: "We are cats. We have no kings. Except humans, but that goes without saying, since humans rule everything...."
He went on with his speech, or announcement, but I was shocked.
It had never occurred to me that We the Cats had any superiors, least of all . . . humans.


In a scrap tacked onto this dream, there were a few Helpful Household Hints.
One of them was to use a curling iron to iron ribbons.


I don't know where my brain gets this stuff.

Moi, après le déluge

I drove through the village this afternoon......thought maybe, since the road was open again, some places might be open for business. I thought I'd go and see if the Community Apothecary was open. I left a prescription there Saturday morning to pick up on Monday.
Uh. 

No.

I had no conception, despite the pictures and the videos, of the immense reach of the flood. The little league fields at the outskirts of the village . . . the markings and fences are there. The creekside pavilion next to them is a hundred feet from where it was. The pavilion's picnic tables are upside down, way up next to the road....washed upward fifty feet, and hundreds of feet south of where they started. 
The 300-year-old stone house is there, and solid, its front yard rail fence plastered with dusty matted waterlogged brush and weeds. 
My drugstore with the windows and greeting card racks empty, my hairdresser's machinery and pedicure chairs piled up in the parking lot, the library with the filth matted against the caved-in latticework porch skirting . . . all dusted with dry mud . . . the antique camelback loveseat, from one of the little reading nooks, outdoors and all brown-murky-smeared, tipped on its back.
No way to turn around until I got to Bridge Street, now bridgeless and closed after the first block. The macadam that, in June, I waited in line for and detoured around, smelling then its fresh rich intoxicating oil and tar scent. I watched it being rolled and pressed beautifully smooth. It's all peeled up and washed far away. I turned and came up the back street with the big pretty houses. Muddy, filthy, soaked, formerly (five days ago) elegant furniture, and piles of lumber and torn-out hunks of ruined pink fiberglass insulation out in the yards. 

Porta-potties here and there.

People in rubber boots and rubber gloves and filthy legs standing looking at the mess, carrying buckets up and down the street.

A big sign: "CLAIM INFORMATION HERE" and "VOLUNTEERS, THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS YOU."  

The whole area stinks. 

I don't know what the stink is. It isn't sewage stink, although that's part of it. The closest I can come to a description is: rot and silty creekbottom mud.

Beyond heartbreaking; stomach-turning.

A fire policeman whose left arm must have been so tired, pointing me to the detour up over one of the hill roads. Oddly, interestingly, the old, old plank bridge is intact, although I could see where the creek had surged right over it.

I have seen this stuff on the news, in Arkansas or Louisiana or someplace and I have thought, "Oh those poor people..." but this! These are places I know by smell and sound, and it's all a wreck from one end to another. Must I see every disaster first hand to feel true sympathy for others who've had these experiences? 

If this is this horrible, what must it be like in places where it's been wearing down for tens, for hundreds of years?

I drove down the driveway and breathed deep breaths of spicy wet leaf scent. The house had had little bits of leaves stuck to it through Monday, but they've dropped off and blown away now. I drove into the barn and got out of the car, turned and stood a minute ignoring the dogs' hysterical hello barks from the front doors. 

I looked at my nice clean dry house with a nice clean dry mattress to go to sleep on tonight, and I thanked God most heartily.

Marie Louise Schroeder

About once a year, when Saratoga's in season, I get taken up by a fascination with Mary Lou Whitney (née Marie Louise Schroeder, Kansas City, MO). She's rich, her wardrobe and jewelry are gorgeous, and, you know, even now at eighty-something, she has an interesting face. Her decades-younger husband is, from all accounts, just crazy about her. Hers is a pretty classic Cinderella story, although I gather she was no blushing maid shyly offering her foot to a glass slipper held by a supplicating prince. Marie Louise' mama diddent raise no fool.

Marylou graduated from Southwest High School and went to the University of Iowa, but had to come home and get a job after her father died. She got the perfect one: flirtatious wartime disc jockey at station KCKN. "I created a show for servicemen called 'Private Smiles,' " she says. "We played Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra, and it was very popular and made me kind of a star."

 "Marylou wooed Sonny with her cookbook," claims one longtime friend. "She played the role of the simple girl from the Midwest who loved to cook. He wanted to be fussed over."~Driving Mrs. Whitney

The handsome prince in 1949, nine years before he married Marylou:
US Undersecretary of Congress Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sonny) Whitney

“When I first came here, I made a statement that made the town furious. I said to (late husband C.V. Whitney) Sonny, ‘Goodness, this is a dead town.’ You could roll a basketball down the center of town and not hit anyone. There was a bank and a drug store and there were a few places open … Skidmore was the only thing going. It was very hard to buy anything and most people went to Glens Falls or someplace else. I said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this town, get the shops open and get it busy.’ Sonny said, ‘You can do it.’ I said, ‘How?’ We knew it was the top place to go in the summer. I decided I would make it better. We started to have parties and brought people up here. In one of my first interviews here, I said ‘Saratoga is the summer place to be.’ Now, everyone uses it. No one gives me credit, and I don’t want it. I am glad they use that line. I just love it here.”   ~Marylou Whitney

"A coterie of fine artists and society leaders create an atmosphere of elegance ..." according to the caption below this Palm Beach Daily News photo at Wally Findlay Galleries, perhaps more than 35 years ago. L. to r., Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Simone Karoff, Wally Findlay, artist Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt "Marylou" Whitney, whose artwork was being showcased, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.~12/16/2009 New York Social Diary

~from The Saratogian newspaper, 7/11/2010, 

but that picture of Marylou looks a lot earlier than 2010.

From 1960 until 2006 she hosted annual summer galas . . . celebrities galore . . . 
her entrances were always the stuff of fantasy...

In 1992 Sonny passed away. 

Five years later 1997 Marylou, 72, married John Hendrickson, 32. 

It was quite the news story, but God bless her, I feel as if she's like our own homegrown queen.  

"Pink roses especially remind me of Marylou and this one is classic and beautiful, like my beautiful wife." ~John Hendrickson

11/18/2009 Albany Times Union

I was going to joke about how her voice and speech changed from what I imagine they were in her midwest girlhood to the old money drawl, but she's so brave in this video of her January 2011 Eclipse Award acceptance speech, despite the apparent remaining effects of her 2006 stroke, that
I simply cahn't do it.