Help, My Compass Broke!

OUR BOB

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 21 Jul 2018 19:12:00 +0000

So what's the point in having a big brother? Is it to lie on either end of the sofa in shared misery when one of you is getting over chicken pox just as the other is coming down with it? Is it to ramble through the woods together looking for arrow heads and interesting rocks while listening to a hidden waterfall and a thousand bird calls? Maybe it's to argue over who's going to sit in front as your family drives home from a vacation in Maine, a week where you hung around together because everyone else was a grown-up, and you slept in a room where the walls didn't go all the way to the ceiling, and you will still remember many decades later how when you dug for clams they'd shoot water up out of the sand. You can still smell the salt and hear the tide going out.

Maybe you get to know all the early Yankee players and their stats from the baseball cards he collects and the pennants hung in his bedroom. Then there was that one Christmas when you really wanted your own typewriter and your parents bought you a brand new electric Smith-Corona but you watched your big brother struggle downstairs from his bedroom, where he'd hidden a huge and ancient manual that he found in a junk shop and bought with his paper route money. And the way you'd follow him and his friends as they explored the town, even though you couldn't keep up with them, determined to shimmy over drainpipes and climb trees after him, knowing that he was always secretly looking back to make sure you were alright, knowing you had nothing to be afraid of.

One rainy day you're huddled in your brother's bed with him listening to Disney record albums...a day later, it seems, his friends are huddled under car hoods with him, smoking cigarettes and playing 60's rock music on a scratchy transistor, all with their own teenage agendas and here you are reluctant to give up your Barbies while your mother's trying to teach you to cook. He is the bane of your existence; he turns the light off when you're in the shower, chants rhymes threatening to throw you down the cellar stairs, tells your parents where you are and when he thinks you're up to no good; he even accidentally breaks your finger once when he shuts the bathroom door as you're reaching in asking him to pass you the rubbing alcohol for your earrings, while he's standing there hot-combing his hair.

But you give as good as you get: you sneak up and put blue eye shadow on him when he falls asleep on the couch, stick “KICK ME” signs to the back of his jacket and hope he'll make it to the school bus stop without noticing, read the letters in his top drawer from his girlfriends, tell him his legs are so skinny they look like horses' legs bent backward; you even steal one of his two-dollar bills. Embers become flames, flames become fire and you scream at each other. As far as you're concerned he doesn't exist. You act polite to each other when you're at a relative's house, but otherwise you'd rather not be seen with him in public. You'd rather not know him. Deep down inside you admire the fact that his hair is blond and he can do algebra, but you're not about to let HIM know.

And then without realizing it you DO realize it: you are not just big brother and kid sister. Maybe it happens when you see a chink in his armor or the first time he asks you for advice. You have been playmates and partners in crime, growing in the same place and coming into the world the same way, and no one in the world except you two will ever know what it means when you refer to itching powder, the World's Fair, Dad's mad suit, Ronnie Repap, "Hello Walt," Quatz Booda, Telefunken, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Raccoon,"Green Door," Triscuit crumbs, the upside down 8-track player, Dr. Zito's woodchuck, Powder Ridge, "You might know," and popaholics. (At least not in the context you're referring to.) He knows your secrets. He tells you his. Some.

He rescues you when you get your mother's car stuck in a marsh down by the shore, and pays the taxi fare when you fly in from overseas and are too tired and jet-lagged to wait for a ride from JFK. He gives you nephews, two of the greatest gifts you will ever receive. He drives you everywhere at a moment's notice when your battery dies or your eye somehow gets scratched and is out of focus. He drops off popsicles and Nyquil on the doorstep when you're sick. In fact when you have an odd flu and finally decide to go to the emergency room, he not only takes you immediately, he stays with you for 9 hours in a little out-of-the-way room and while the nurses help sicker people, he helps you to the bathroom and on and off the toilet a number of times -- modesty flies out the window, not surprising at all.

You begin to understand that together you can get through ANYTHING – that he is a link to your earliest breaths, your primal, pre-verbal memories. He is laughter and security and the right voice on the other end of the phone. He has stood next to you at your dying mother's bedside. As long as he was there, within reaching distance, you did it everything you had to do. He gave you courage.

He will sternly tell it to you like it is and then surprise you with unsolicited admiration and praise, sometimes even to other people, behind your back. You don't just defend each others' quirks and idiosyncrasies, you champion them.

And that's the answer. It's simple when you get right down to it. The use of having a big brother can be measured in how two hearts become one when you are in the world together, and when you're not, you will look down on a sunny day and forever see not just your shadow, but his right next to it.

My brother -- my hero, my rock, my best friend and partner in crime left this world without warning shortly after midnight on June 30, 2018. He is missed beyond words; we are left stunned and broken. He was robbed. We were robbed.

At his memorial service, there was so little room left in the church they had to bring in folding chairs and usher people up to the balcony. While folks were leaving we played a tune from 1968 that Bob used to play over and over again on his record player up in his room -- so much so that our father finally knocked on the ceiling with a broom and said "Can't you play a different song Bob?" These lyrics perfectly embody my brother and this will always be his song.

SHE IS EVERYWHERE TODAY

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 19:40:00 +0000

Y'all know I write because I can't NOT write, but rarely does anything I write come to me in the form of poetry. Last night, though, on the edge of sleep, these words did. Maybe because I was feeling a little under-the-weather over the weekend, though not NEARLY as much as lots of you guys fighting all kinds of coughs and flu and fevers. I just wanted to complain and be taken care of a little I guess, and it brought back memories and when I woke up this morning, the words were still there.

SHE IS EVERYWHERE TODAY

I come back quietly from a child's fever dream
And she is there at the end of the sickbed
Eyes closed, but flickering, not sleeping --
She might have dozed off but she knows
Immediately I'm awake now.

All night and all day
She has been catching my sickness
In her thin brown hands
With thin brown arms.
Ready with her mother's armor of
Tea and toast, noodle soup, ginger ale.
She keeps the room dark.

In my sleep I hear a television
Turned low,
A door opening gently, a quiet murmur,
A tip-toeing aunt: “How is she?”

My head hurts. She sets off
To get the children's aspirin,
Crushing it between two teaspoons and water,
Spoons it in. Rubs me with alcohol,
Cold washcloths. I smell only clean.
I feel the sheet, cool underneath me.
I don't know what time it is.
I wait only for her face, her hands,
Her arms, her voice,
The voice I know from inside her womb.

“Will you read to me?” I ask.
Poetry, when I'm sick; I'm sure she
Wonders why. The rhythm, the rhyme,
The soothing predictability comforting.
I don't have to follow. Her voice lulls.

I am so important right now,
I will be better because she will make it so.
She knows what to do,
She does it.
I fall in and out of sleep,
Once to wake seeing her walking away;
“Don't go,” I say, “Stay...don't go.”
She will be right here, she says.
I'm not going far, she says;
If you need me, I'll be right nearby.

A half-century now gone in the blink of an eye,
A time when I knew nothing
And she knew everything
And I knew everything
And she knew nothing.

And “I'm going here,” I would say,
“Or there, and I'll be home late, so
Don't wait up,” but later
She would tell me, she couldn't sleep
Until she heard the door close
And the lock turn.
(And she had two of us.)
“Not like your father,” she said,
“He let me do the worrying.”

On Christmas, on my birthday,
On Valentine's Day
She sleeps now, peacefully
And deeply
I hope,
Beneath the snow.

She lay bravely in her bed,
Let them do what they had to do,
I waited;
The hum of machinery
Next to us, rhythmic,

Like a heart beat, like breath.

I wet her lips,
I smooth her hair. They tell me she just
Won't give up.
She loves too much.
She is too strong and brave.

Her feet moving slightly
Her eyes flicker.
My head swims and sings
I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

Out in the hall it is the same as ever.
People move. People shout. Nurses sit at the
Station, making notes. They check on her.
They have seen this before.
They are kind.
She should hear life.

Her breathing is uncomfortably loud,
Too shallow.
Her face changes colors. “I am here,” I say,
I kiss her forehead.
I take her thin brown hand.
I tell her, “Go.”
Her lips are still, but I hear her,
I know her voice from inside her womb:
I'm not going far, she says;
If you need me, I'll be right nearby.

CATCHING SOME ZZZZZZZZS

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:59:00 +0000

Some years ago one of my doctors suggested I have a sleep study done. I forget which doctor because I have quite a few, since I have several things wrong with me, most of which involve curious maladies which are quite uncomfortable albeit hard to get a handle on. I have a lot of “ologists.” A rheumatologist, an immunologist, a neurologist, a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, a gynecologist (of course) and if my insurance covered it I'd damn sure have a psychologist, too. I think a big mistake a lot of us made in high school was that we didn't make plans to be an “ologist.” We should have all striven for this. We'd make good money and meet interesting people with interesting illnesses (like me). I am not sure I'd want to be a proctologist, but maybe they make more than everybody, who knows. No reason to scoff at proctologists.

Anyway I think it was my cardiologist who suggested the sleep study to see if I stop breathing in my sleep. I guess this can affect blood pressure and mine was starting to creep upward. I know for a fact I snore; when I was a young kid living at home and my mother was messing around in the kitchen right below my bedroom, she could hear me through the ceiling. And I've spent months at a time out in my sister-in-law's brother's one room adobe and straw bale house in the California canyons driving him insane with insomnia. I slept in a fold-out love seat on the ground floor and he slept in a little loft. Therefore he could not poke or kick me. He tried ear plugs but they didn't really help, though he noticed that if he yelled “Quiet!” I would stop sometimes, except he got bored yelling “Quiet!” after awhile so he just started yelling out random things like “Karen Carpenter!” and “Phuket, Thailand!” and whatever else came to his mind. I never heard it, not consciously. But it did help the poor bastard get some rest, I guess.

Anyway I had no quarrel with getting a sleep study so they set it up and around 8 PM I made my way to the hospital. They suggested I immediately put nightclothes on and get comfortable. I had brought an old pair of jogging pants and a thin sweatshirt. The night started out on an inauspicious note when I went into the bathroom, saw no shelves to rest my things on while I got undressed, and draped the pants across the top of the sink, not realizing that would trigger the handle-less faucet. By the time I finished using the toilet and taking my outer clothes off the jogging pants were soaked. I put my jeans back on and wondered if there was a clothes dryer anywhere nearby and if I could use it. A nurse came into the room (it was a nondescript bedroom) and took them and said she'd put them on top of the sterilizing machine, that was always warm. Shortly thereafter a sullen young woman came in to hook wires to my head. This took forever. She had to use some sort of sticky stuff and I could feel my hair getting stickier and my head getting heavier with every minute. I figured there must be a load of wires (there were).

I tried making a little conversation with the girl because it vaguely reminded me of being at the hairdresser's – well, it was nothing like that, but it was the only association I had – and when you're at the hairdresser, chatting with the stylist is what you do. This woman was having none of that. None. She answered my questions in monosyllables and initiated no talk at all. Maybe she was just concentrating. Who knows. The nurse who had taken my pants came back in with them after an hour or so and said they were still too damp, so would I mind just wearing my jeans? Nope, I didn't mind.

This is NOT ME, of course, but this is pretty much what you look like
after they finish hooking you up.

So they want you in bed by 10 PM and you can watch TV until 11. I don't know why I did, but I watched it until they finally came in and told me to shut it off at around 12:30. I was watching one of the late night talk shows, Jimmy Kimmel or somebody. I don't watch any of these shows at home so I thought it would be a little treat. After that I fell asleep very quickly (I'm pretty good at that) and they said push the call button if I found I had to use the bathroom as they'd have to unhook me. They would have me on closed circuit TV all night and there would be a film taken of me sleeping as they watched from another room. Maybe that's why the girl was sullen, because I'm not sure I'd want a job sitting in a room watching some doofus like myself just sleep, roll around and snore.

Seemed like no time at all I hear the girl's voice on an intercom saying “Okay, you're all through and you can get up now.” I was really conked off and found this very unfair. What harm would it be to them to just let you go on sleeping till a halfway decent hour? Not like they need the room because they don't do daytime sleep studies, I don't think. I was so groggy I don't even remember them pulling those wires off my scalp. Anyway, here it was the crack of dawn and the hospital cafeteria wasn't even open yet so without coffee I drove to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for some grub. I felt really odd. Later I realized I looked pretty odd too, with my hair sticking out in all directions full of dried goo of some sort. But they probably see all kinds in Dunkin Donuts.

The sleep study revealed that I did have mild sleep apnea but did not experience a reduction of oxygen during the periods of apnea, so there'd be no need to pursue any treatment other than plain old blood pressure meds. I found all this out later. That morning I drove home (18 miles, all highway thank Heavens since I was dopey) and got in bed for awhile. The cats, who had no doubt slept all night just fine without me, got in too. Then we all slept some more. Piece of cake, a sleep study. I feel my eyes getting heavy now just thinking about it. Probably won't stay up for the late show tonight.

GOBBLE GOBBLE

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 04:42:00 +0000

Tomorrow is December 1^st. We have had worse years in this family but by gosh, I have to say we've damned sure had better ones. To begin with, my mother (“our mother,” as my father refers to her) lost her balance during a stupid power failure in August, fell backward, banged her head and back on the kitchen radiator, and couldn't move. My father crawled on the floor to get the flashlight, dialed my brother and his wife on the rotary phone, and they hurried over. By then the lights were back on but everybody was really scared for Ma, so they called 911. The ambulance took her to the local satellite emergency clinic where she spent SEVEN HOURS on a stretcher, very uncomfortable, but I have to say they did some pretty thorough testing.

There were no breaks or fractures, but Ma couldn't stand up by herself or breathe without supplemental oxygen. Why, we don't know. They shipped her off to the hospital where she spent three days in observation having even more tests. They still couldn't get her to use her legs or, for that matter, get her off the oxygen, then it appeared she had pneumonia, so they transferred her to the rehab wing of a nursing home here in town. They tried like hell getting her to get in and out of bed by herself, up from and back into her recliner by herself, and back and forth from the bathroom by herself (with a walker). They tried to wean her off oxygen. Neither effort succeeded. Why, we don't know. No one really knows, except that (long story VERY short here) the hospital was only giving her ONE THIRD of her prescribed dosage of Lasix (a diuretic, for congestive heart failure) causing her legs to become so waterlogged and heavy they looked more like logs.

Anyway, she's still there, still needs 24-hour-help and it's more than any one of us can do, but we have been there so much I think they are ready for us to become volunteers of some sort (my father can play the guitar...maybe I can do arts and crafts?) and we decided too that nothing was going to stop us taking Ma home for Thanksgiving. For the past several years Dad has been ordering Thanksgiving dinner at one of the local supermarkets. Then everything just has to be heated up, and people can bring side dishes if they want different ones, and desserts. That is not how we used to have Thanksgiving dinner in days of yore, but it works well for us now. My brother and sister-in-law host it. They decided we would eat at 2 PM. Here is where it all starts going downhill fast.

Two o'clock seems like a reasonable time to eat Thanksgiving dinner. Gives everyone enough time to travel, do the last minute meal preparation and settle in for cheese and crackers. By 4, 4:30 you're done, having dessert, getting ready to watch football if you're into it, and you can get home at a reasonable hour. My father does NOT think 2 PM is a good mealtime. In his opinion, this is eating much too late. I personally don't care what time I eat if someone is willing to feed me, but that's just his preference.

So my brother says he will actually pick me UP at 2 PM to go get Ma at “the home.” I have my creamed onions with sherry and nutmeg all ready and a nice French green bean casserole with mushroom soup and dried onions. I'm watching out the door for him and a car pulls into my driveway, next to my car but so far back toward the road no one could pull in behind it. The person is out of the car and into the other part of the house (it is a two-family home) before I can see who it is. Obviously someone connected with the tenants. The tenants have their own driveway but if they are having lots of people over I always let them use mine as well, I just sorta like to be asked...just sayin'? So maybe this person's gonna run in there for something and run right back out. Um, no. My brother comes down the road and with his big Chevy Traverse is unable to negotiate room behind my car and next to that mysterious Other Person. So he has to wait in the road while I haul stuff out and get in. Oh well. No trouble. (Ha ha.)

In five minutes we're at the Home, and Ma is dressed and ready but does not have her shoes on and the portable oxygen tanks are not filled. This takes time. Eventually we get everything squared away and wheel Ma out to the parking lot. We have a homemade wooden mounting block to help Ma get up high enough to get in the car. By now my brother and I have worked out a system: we wheel the chair right up to the open car door, put the brakes on, I stand behind the chair steadying it and holding the portable oxygen paraphernalia, my brother stands in front and 1-2-3 lifts Ma out of the chair and they “dance” to the left until she gets her rear end close enough to the seat to sit down. Then the O2 tank goes between her legs on the floor to steady it, we load the wheelchair and block, and we're good to go. Sometimes it is easier than other times. This time a well meaning nurse thought Ma would do better using a walker to get into the car. With the nurse helping it did work fine. The really tough part is at my brother's house, which, though a ranch, has three narrow concrete steps going up to the front door. With four adults helping (my nephew was there) we managed to get Ma inside and sitting. Dad was already there. The house smelled good. I was starving. It was now 3 PM.

My sister-in-law returned to heat things in the kitchen. My nephew, who had run a road race that morning, started telling me about it. My father started to grumble. “I think I may have left the stove on,” he said. “I better go home and check.” We didn't pay any attention. “Maybe I ought to go see if that timer works that I set to turn the outside light on,” he said. “Getting dark now.” My nephew says “Papa, NO.” My sister-in-law says “Let him go. He wants to go, he can go.” My father sighed deeply and said “I can eat leftovers tomorrow.” I knew what he was really saying. Everybody knew. Eventually everything made its way onto the table and the turkey was carved. Dad was asleep on the couch. We woke him up to go eat.

As with any Thanksgiving feast, everything was delicious but I just KNEW it would be better when this day was over with. I just felt it in my bones. All of a sudden Ma started coughing. She tends to swallow the wrong way very easily (in fact they think the pneumonia she had was aspiration pneumonia). Ma's face turned red. We all watched with varying degrees of nervousness. Ma got kind of a panicky look on her face. My sister-in-law went over with some tissues and water (Ma's on fluid restriction because of the edema in her legs) but though she wasn't choking, Ma could not stop coughing. I knew she was afraid she was going to throw up. She is deathly afraid of throwing up (I don't care for it much myself). It took a long time, but finally things calmed down somewhat.

By now it was in fact pitch black out. Dad does not drive well in the dark. It wasn't a long way home, but I was a little concerned. I worked it out so that I'd ride back to Dad's with him and my brother could follow because I had something for my nephew in Dad's old closet (which was 100% true; a long time back my late aunt had sent for two Hallmark Christmas ornament collections, one for each of her great-nephews, and charged me with seeing that they got them when they got their own home or apartment). We saw my brother's headlights behind us as he followed us out the driveway. However, when we got to Dad's and I fetched the big box of ornaments and was ready to go back to my brother's, we didn't know where my brother was. We looked outside and didn't see the car. “But he was RIGHT BEHIND US,” I said. Dad thought he'd better take me back. “NO,” I said. “Then they've taken your mother back to the home,” he said. “WHO?” I asked. “They haven't had time to get her in that car.” “Don't worry, he'll be back for you,” Dad said. I wonder what my blood pressure was at that point. Meanwhile Dad decided to show me all of the old Christmas stuff he had found and asked when could I come over and go through it?

Finally I decided I'd better call the house. My sister-in-law answered. “I have no idea where he is,” she said of my brother. “If he doesn't show up in five minutes call me back.” Then I realized my brother probably had his cell phone with him so I called HIM. He answered pleasantly. “Where are you?” I asked. “Out in the back yard listening to the car radio,” he said. “I'm waiting for you.” Dad has two driveways. We'd come up different ones. We didn't see my brother's car. Out I went with some sense of relief, matched with even greater relief by my sister-in-law. “Mom thought you had an accident,” my nephew said. “She was getting ready to come looking for you.” I gave him the box of ornaments. He opened one and thought they were nice. (They are all miniature snow globes.) He was glumly bemoaning the fact that his brother, with wife and baby, had not stopped at the house. He said even if the baby was fussy and needed a nap his mother could take him home and maybe his brother could still stop over. He didn't want to bother his brother at the in-laws' house so he didn't call, but you could tell he was glum.

I was hoping we'd have good luck getting Ma back to the Home. I thought it should probably be sooner rather than later. My brother went down to the cellar for something and yelled “What are all these tapes here?” “What do you mean?” my sister-in-law yelled down. “What tapes? I'm trying to clean that cellar out, who's putting tapes down there?” “What kind of tapes?” I asked. “8-track, I think,” my brother said as he came back up the stairs. No one has seen an 8-track tape in my family for decades. “Did your FATHER put them there?” asked my sister-in-law with some vehemence. She sent my nephew down to bring them up. They were not 8-tracks, they were videocassettes and I recognized them as having been in a box in a cupboard in our old house, all right. They were an eclectic collection, to be sure: “Daffy Duck,” “Rogaine-Taking Control of Your Hair Loss,” “Barbados, A Travelogue,” “Bruce Almighty,” and something to do with putting a stop to the fur industry.

I had one nerve left by now and started scurrying around dumping leftovers willy-nilly onto a plate so I could have some later and said we ought to get Ma back. Getting her DOWN the cement steps proved measurably more difficult than getting her UP, even with four of us. At the last minute by the car door Ma, my brother, and my sister-in-law got tangled up in the walker and Ma started sliding precariously out of my brother's arms. I yelled for my nephew to jump into the driver's side and grab her and pull her into the car. She was completely out of breath and wheezing loudly. I was frightened. “You want my inhaler?” I said. She shook her head no. “Let's go,” she managed to say. It sounded like she was trying to breathe underwater. Halfway to the Home the spare O2 tank in the trunk fell over, emitting an ear-splitting alarm which we did not stop to correct. We just got her to the Home and dragged her out of the car and into the wheelchair. I pushed her back to her room and told the nurse she needed her nebulizer. They got it, quickly.

We waited a few minutes. When things settled down a little, we uneasily left. Per usual I had forgotten to leave my front light on and it wasn't easy getting out and unloading the car. At least I would have some leftover creamed onions and that green bean casserole later, right? Half right. I grabbed the glass bowl of beans in the back seat with my left hand, transferred it to my right and it smoothly slid over the sleeve of my jacket to smash into smithereens in the driveway. At least the tenants' guest had vacated the spot. And though I have swept all the glass to the border of the driveway so no one will get a flat tire, I am waiting for it to rain to wash all that freaking cream of mushroom soup away before I clean it.

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE OR MINERAL?

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 21:25:00 +0000

The whole thing started with onions. Steve's mother was going to make corned beef hash from scratch and told him to come for lunch the next day. Usually Steve's brother and nephew, who install overhead doors, get through early in the afternoon and show up to eat too. However, Jane (Steve's mother) changed her mind and decided to make beef stew instead. She told him that morning she needed onions. Steve realized he would have to leave for Big Y immediately if he was to buy onions and bring them over to Jane in time for her to cook stew for lunch. (Jane uses a lot of onions.)

Last time he had been at Big Y Steve had noticed these small whole onions packaged in a bag that read "Vidalia Onions." He honestly did not think they were Vidalia onions but he wondered if they would have a sweetish taste and he thought his mother might like to try them. But, he knew she wouldn't put them in her stew so he needed to get regular onions. Unless, he said, "don't you already have some you can use until I get more?" "I probably do," Jane said. "Count your onions," he said. I am still a little confused as to whether Steve's mother ended up using her existing onions or new ones for the batch of stew, but in any case everybody ate it and enjoyed it.

There are often vegetable issues here. Jane sent Steve for carrots. There's a smaller independent grocery store near Steve's house. They have lovely produce (I've been there). Steve had a dentist's appointment but he was early and thought he would go get the carrots there to kill some time. If you live almost anywhere in the United States you know that this is the worst winter on record and that parking lots are very icy. VERY icy. Steve slowly shuffled, carefully picking his way in from the truck and trying not to fall and maim himself. All they had were those baby carrots already peeled and packaged. He knew his mother would not use those so he would have to look elsewhere.

After his dentist's appointment, where he learned he would be having the rough surface of the back of one of his front teeth filled in (because it was getting thin from him worrying it with his tongue) he headed for a local produce store and, finding the carrots he needed, walked out feeling like a puppy wanting to wag his tail. His mother was happy too.

Steve doesn't mind going grocery shopping and he does usually go to his local Big Y, a HUGE store I was bowled over by when I first saw it. It also has sales beyond the pale. The thing is, he told me, there is very little confusion about shopping in general until he gets to the produce. There he usually gets jittery. Once he could stand things no longer and finally asked a worker what the difference was between sweet potatoes and yams. "HAH!" the worker said, "There is absolutely no difference. But some people want sweet potatoes and some want yams, and so we put them in separate displays and mark them differently." They were, in fact, the same price so this made sense to Steve.

BUT Steve is not one to take things that lightly and the next time he was at his parents' house he dragged out their encyclopedias (this was pre-computer) so he could look up sweet potatoes and yams. Well, one or two yams, he discovered, would take a pickup truck to transport. They are grown in Africa and are about six feet long. Steve says he sometimes sees people looking back and forth between the two displays at Big Y and he usually looks over and says "HAH!" like the worker did. Sometimes for kicks he will go right up to the display, shake his head sadly and go "pssht" like Ed Bassmaster in these famous skits :
.

"I just feel like I have to do it sometimes," he said.

There is an issue with green peppers, too. Some are shorter
and rounder and some are longer. Often when he brings her peppers his mother will say "Stephen, those peppers are too big." "What do you mean those peppers are too big?" he asked her. "I got them in my car!" Too big for stuffed peppers, she explained. Steve thought she cut the tops off and stuffed them but in fact she cuts them in half and makes two. Therefore the logic is that she can use a smaller pepper.

There are a few other vegetable considerations in the family. Jane puts "eating celery" on her shopping list when she wants celery hearts because she doesn't like to eat or serve "cooking celery," though she will just ask for celery if she's planning on cooking it. How often do you cook celery, anyway? What do you put it in? Beef stew, I know. Hey, I'm not making fun of anybody. When I run out of cat food I always say "Well, if worst comes to worst I always have a few cans of human tuna." (Human tuna with eating celery makes a good salad, of course, if you put it with mayo and elbow noodles.)

"You know, I think most people get confused when it comes to cuts of meat," Steve said, "but really it's the VEGETABLES. If you don't understand the different vegetables you can really drive yourself crazy. It's all well and good to know the butcher, but the guy who can help you with the vegetables? That guy? He's like this all-knowing presence. He can tell you everything. He's like a sage."

Sage, I think, is in the next aisle over.

WHAT GOES AROUND (Some Of The Names Have Been Changed To Protect The Innocent, haha)

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:03:00 +0000

The other night I was sitting on the floor finishing trimming my parents' Christmas tree, when my father, who had been relaxing quietly in his recliner looking around, asked, “Doesn't anybody ever get appendicitis any more?” We are quite used to my father suddenly coming out with things that he has apparently been musing about. (Once while he was getting dressed in the hallway he quietly pondered "I wonder how many people in the world have just one leg in their pants right now?") I turned to look at him. “I mean I had it,” he said (he did, before I was born, shingling the roof on a hot summer's day...he seemed to do an awful lot of shingling, I think he likes heights). “Bob got it,” he said with some emphasis (Bob is my brother and he had one nasty case of appendicitis). “Well, I don't know,” I said. “I suppose they do.” “But you never hear of it, do you?” he said.

That night I was discussing this with Steve, my Significant Other. He thought it over. “I think it's because we have so much other stuff now, a lot stranger stuff than appendicitis,” he said. “More interesting to the doctors.” I sighed. “I wish we could go back to those days when the only things you had to worry about were appendicitis and tonsillitis and stuff like hay fever; my uncle had hay fever and he had ulcers for awhile – I remember the doctors telling him to drink milk.” In fact my uncle got in the habit of drinking milk with every meal. “But now they've found that bacteria is the cause of ulcers,” said Steve, “and it doesn't matter what you eat.” True, I said. In fact I'd heard that eating hot peppers when you have ulcers is not necessarily a bad thing at all. The stomach is full of hydrochloric acid, caustic, and if you can trick it into thinking it's already peppered with hot stuff it manufactures less of that acid. I haven't looked it up but it sounds right.

“And by the way when you have the puke virus, yogurt is good,” I noted, “plain yogurt.” Steve, agreeing that yogurt's good for pretty much anything, wanted to know where I'd heard that. “Well, from this guy Jimmy,” I answered. “Jimmy Westcott.” "Oh, tell me this story," Steve said.

Jimmy, I told him, was a guy from New York City who came up to town on weekends. In New York he worked for the telephone company and liked to call the young girls in our town toll-free. He, his mother, and his brother Alan lived in this big, half-finished house out by the lake. Jimmy and the mother would only come up on weekends; Alan stayed there all the time and didn't go back to New York with the other two. He was a painter. His works were incredible. I have never seen the like. Alan probably could have been very rich; he really didn't show his stuff in galleries, though, and was just an unassuming goofball like us (though of course we thought we were hot shit), and our gang would often go out to the house to party with Alan during the week, when Jimmy and the mother were gone.

The place was primitive – a big wood stove for heat and cooking – a crude bathroom – no TV or phone. It was barely lit at night and seemed a little ghostly but at the same time a little other-worldly cozy, one of our favorite places to hang out, and Jimmy, who fancied himself as somewhat of a pioneer cook, made homemade elderberry wine. Yes, of course we drank it, what do you think? There were jars and jars of it stacked on floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves in the kitchen. We'd rearrange the jars afterward and hope he wouldn't notice.

Jimmy was definitely Not Right. He was a Viet Nam vet and whether or not he'd seen combat was debatable, but without question he suffered from something - shell shock, they used to call it. I'm grateful to all our armed forces members who stand ready to defend us against all enemies. That's no lie. But Jimmy...who knows, maybe he had shell shock from childhood. We thought we might embarrass Alan if we asked him though. And we weren't too interested, to be honest.

Across the street from the Westcotts a family originally from the outskirts of Boston lived in a big brick house which had recently been occupied by a Mr. Thompson – a good guy who once broke up a fight between my older brother and Jimmy who accused my brother of taking Alan out and getting him drunk (like Alan needed help) when in fact my brother had only given Alan, who never had a driver's license, a ride home from somewhere. (Mr. Thompson had then brought my brother home all bloodied up, which scared the hell out of me as I was alone watching “Creature Features” at the time.) Anyway, this new family – mom, dad, and four young kids – were all hellions and a whole bunch of us started hanging out over there, too, including an old pal of mine, Pete Prentiss.

Pete and I were strictly vertical friends – I was the sister he never had. Though he's gotten somewhat surly of late, back in the day Pete was a hoot. Sometimes relatives from Massachusetts would come to visit and we'd all stay up playing setback until 4 in the morning. I have fond memories of that house; I was sitting in the living room the very first time I saw “Saturday Night Live.” (I was smoking pot at the time and thought Chevy Chase was doing a real newscast.)

Pete Prentiss worked with his father, Mr. Prentiss, doing pest control. Mr. Prentiss had his own business and a good name, and was grooming Pete to take over when good old Jimmy from across the street came to make the acquaintance of his neighbors. In chatting with Pete, Jimmy thought it might not be a bad idea for him to get his exterminating license too. He wanted to sever ties with New York and bring his mother to the country to live full time but he needed a job. He proposed that he would work for Mr. Prentiss for next-to-nothing after he'd learned the trade from him. Instead, after he got his pest control license, Jimmy set up his own exterminating business and began competing with Pete and Mr. Prentiss who had been so good to him. (He also began keeping a large pig in his yard.) There was not much welcome for Jimmy at the brick house any more. Needless to say.

Jimmy had also become somewhat of a political gadfly and once took it into his head t0 run for office against my father, who served our town as First Selectman for 22 years. (Jimmy lost.) Nonetheless he liked my dad and every so often he would bring us a huge braided Swedish coffee cake which he had baked in that wood stove. These tasted great. We didn't have much else to do with Jimmy except he did ask my father, who had grown up in town, to help prove that the Westcotts were actually part Indian and if so, apparently Jimmy would possibly have a stake in the proceeds from the local casino. (He insisted on wearing a bear claw necklace with his exterminating jumpsuit. This wasn't as absurd as it may sound since we do believe that he was indeed part Indian. Native American, for the politically correct.)

The Westcotts had lived in town for several generations; in fact Jimmy's father, Jimmy Sr. (no one ever knew what happened to him later) went to school with my dad. They chummed around now and again but not often, because Jimmy Sr. was kind of a “bad actor,” as Dad put it. Once Jimmy Sr. had stolen a pack of Listerine cigarettes from some local store and urged Dad to go with him to some hiding place and smoke them. Dad got very sick. But he did know the Westcott family pretty well and had been to Jimmy Sr.'s house, and knew his mother. “I recall she always seemed to be sitting in a rocking chair,” Dad said. He didn't know how he could help Jimmy prove that he was part Indian, except he did write a letter stating “Grandma Westcott had a very dark complexion.”

I was a little surprised one day when Jimmy asked me if I'd like to go with him to see a play at the local summer stock theater, where big names had often played in the 1940s. Jimmy got comp tickets because he'd gotten the exterminating contract there. I had been to a couple of plays in the past and loved it, so I said sure, why not?

Jimmy and I went to several shows that summer, the most memorable being Sondheim's “Into the Woods” which we gave a standing ovation. There was no debating, however: these were not dates. I never had the slightest inclination to go out with Jimmy on a date. In fact I quite disliked him, though I never acted like a bitch, or anything; but by the same token, not once did I flirt with Jimmy or lead him on. “Maybe we'll go see a few movies when the theater season ends,” he told me. I honestly was not very enthusiastic about seeing more of him, but what the hell else was I going to do, sit home and twiddle my thumbs? Besides, a lot of good movies were out right about that time, not the least of which were “Philadelphia,” “In The Name Of The Father,” “The Pelican Brief,” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.” And again I never thought of these as dates. I believed Jimmy wasn't thinking in that light either. Truly.

One night when we were headed to a movie I asked if we could stop for a few things at the local grocery store and drop them at the doorstep of my pal Gary, who was awfully sick with a bad stomach virus and to make matters worse was taking care of his 2-year-old daughter that weekend, who was also sick. I picked up the usual suspects: ginger ale, saltines, chicken noodle soup, tea, and Jell-o. Jimmy then brought up the matter of yogurt. Plain yogurt is exceptionally good for digestive problems, he maintained, and would do Gary and his daughter a great deal of good. Though I didn't know it then (which is beside the point) he was absolutely right – yogurt does replace the good bacteria in your gut that are taken down by infections, viruses and various medications, especially antibiotics. I indeed bought the yogurt. (I also bought some Spam as kind of a joke.)

The night was cold and the winter air was still as we left the store. I pictured poor Gary as I hustled through the parking lot headed for Jimmy's truck. I was glad it wasn't me for a change. I thought how much I missed summer weather and wondered vaguely what the movie would be like; and then Jimmy, of all things, suddenly broke the silence and let one rip. Loud and two syllables. It reverberated in the still night air and I'm grateful we were outside because in fact it sounded like it would be foul. I had no doubt, in fact.

Well, I was greatly taken aback and quite offended even though Jimmy did say “Oh, excuse me,” in his corncob-pipe-smoker's voice. Excuse him hell. You have to earn the right to fart in front of people, I believed, and Jimmy wasn't familiar enough with me to have been so uncouth. Though I like a good fart as well as the next person (especially if it's my own) I just felt that Jimmy had taken too much license. I was not pleased.

So when Jimmy pulled into the parking lot at the theater, though I was grateful he hadn't done another one in the heated truck, I was not feeling very friendly to him. Unfortunately he was feeling overly friendly toward me. He declared that he had romantic feelings and knew that I had been going through some stressful times of late but he figured that by now I would be more amenable to going further than just a box of popcorn on the seat between us. I was not.

He tried to kiss me and I leaned away, saying what you always say in cases such as this: “Gee, I'm flattered, Jimmy, but I'm sorry, I just don't feel that way about you.” Smile. Jimmy wasn't happy. He kept leaning over and I kept leaning away. As far away as I could without getting out of the truck. Finally he stopped and we went in to the movie. I forget now which one it was. It seemed to be a regular sort of evening after that but guess what? Jimmy never called me again. I was okay with that. I was tired of always attracting nuts, as a matter of fact.

A couple of years went by. I saw Jimmy occasionally in the store, sometimes with his mother, who was a beautiful woman with long grey hair. We – Jimmy and I – avoided each other. At least I avoided him. Then, I got a call from my friend Heather, whom I've known for so long it's almost embarrassing. Heather was getting married! Everyone was so pleased for her and her intended, Dan. I bought a lovely wall plaque for them as a wedding gift; it had a pink background (one of Heather's favorite colors, and mine too) and said “Bless This House.” A couple of weeks before the wedding I called to ask if I could drop it off at their house. “Sure, you can come out,” she said.

Heather and her two grown daughters were sitting at the dining room table. Dan was in watching TV and Heather was on the phone, rather frantic, it seemed to me. When she hung up from whoever it was she said “Listen to this. Dan and I are having a hell of a time getting somebody to marry us. I called Jimmy Westcott because he's a Justice of the Peace, and he won't do it.” I was surprised; Jimmy was a cousin of sorts to Debbie Hammond, who had been a longtime foster sister to Heather and her family after her own parents died. It was only natural for Heather to think of calling Jimmy. “Why won't he?” I innocently asked. “He asked me, is Laurie Blair going to be at your wedding? I said of course she is, she's one of my best friends. And he said I'm not doing it then, because Laurie broke my heart, you know. She ran away with that goddam Pete Prentiss.”

That's right; Pete Prentiss the exterminator, whose father had taken Jimmy under his wing only to have Jimmy break away and become, in fact, his arch rival in the bug business. (Weasel.) Apparently Jimmy thought there was more here than met the eye.

Heather did succeed in finding someone to officiate at her wedding, thank goodness. I went. It was at the house, and the reception was outside. My skirt was too short, the food was great and Heather, her sister Lisa and I linked arms after a few drinks and sang "My Guy" together. All went very well. Of course I never ran away with Pete Prentiss but let Jimmy think that if he wants. Karma, Jimmy! I am just glad Heather didn't hold it against me that I broke Jimmy Westcott's heart and consequently he'd refused to do her wedding (though I think he drove by during the reception). I have no interest in whether or not he still has his appendix.

NOW THIS IS ODD...

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 04:32:00 +0000

The other day my father and I went grocery shopping in his pickup truck. He likes to have company because he hasn't been back in the driver's seat very long due to a shoulder injury which is, in fact, still somewhat painful. As is typical when you go into the grocery store because you "need a few things" we came out with 7 bags. Most were his own cloth or vinyl bags, but a few were plastic store bags. Dad bought two jars of gravy, chicken and beef. These went into a plastic bag. Together.

So, we go outside and we're loading the bags from the cart into the back of the truck. We have no trouble until Dad hands me the gravy bag and lets go of it just before I can grasp it. (I think. Could be I lost my grip, just to be fair.) Of course the two jars hit the ground and broke, glass and goo flying everywhere, to our great dismay. Dad said "I knew it! I knew it!" Then he jumped into the truck because he gets too nervous in these situations and isn't sure what to do next.

I bent to pick up the glass when a woman in scrubs, who had just parked her car, ran over and yelled "Don't touch that, you'll cut yourself! Let me do it! Carol to the rescue!" Well, startled, I let her do it. "Have you got another bag?" she asked. Another woman came up to the truck and said "Here's a bag." She and Carol picked up the glass (and several cans of Fancy Feast and a package of hot dogs covered in gravy) and put it in the bag, and Carol said "I'm going in to get you two new jars of gravy. They should never pack them so heavy."

So I got in the truck and yelled (Dad can't hear for crap) that she was going into the store to get two new jars. I felt a little guilty. "Who is she?" Dad asked. "I don't know," I said. "Oh! I think I know," he said, "She's that lady who does acupuncture." I thought a second. "Where did you have acupuncture?" I asked. "No, no - needles! You know, she takes your blood!" he answered. (In a bit of a tone of disgust with me, I think.)

A few minutes later Carol came out of the store, came over, and told us they were bringing out the new gravy and some cat food too. "Do I know you?" Dad asked; "I'm Bob Blair." "Carol Smith," she said. "You work at the Shoreline Clinic?" he asked her. "Used to, now I work at Quest," she said. "Come and see me sometime!" (Requiring a lab slip no doubt.) I hugged her, thanked her for her random act of kindness (I actually used that expression) and she said "Just pay it forward." I said "We sure will." We always do try to be kind ourselves, but goodness, she went the extra mile I guess. She even had a paper towel with her and sopped up some of the mess. I'd have said Hell, let the next rain get it.

Anyway a young girl did come out a minute later with a new bag and two jars of gravy and new cans of cat food too. (I'm not sure why there was a fuss about the cat food, they didn't split open or anything. But they were awfully nice to replace them.) "I wasn't sure what kind of cat food you bought but I tried to match the colors on the labels," she said. See, even young girls can't read small print, hah.

We got back to Dad's and brought the bags inside to unpack. "Where's that gravy?" I asked. I was sure I had taken the new bag (very, very carefully) and put it down by my feet in the cab. "Must still be in the truck," I said. I went out to look. Nope, wasn't in there. Just for the hell of it I pulled the lever for the seat, bent it forward and slid it up. There was, in fact, a plastic grocery bag back there. I checked; it had two cans of soup, a small bottle of Sprite, and a hard roll that wasn't in its own bag and I figured must have escaped (Dad had bought hard rolls that day).

So in I went and unloaded the bag. Right around that time I decided to dig further into one of Dad's big green bags and there, packed carefully underneath everything, was the bag with the gravy. "Here it is," I said. Dad was looking at the stuff I'd found in the truck. "You bought soup?" he said. "I thought you bought soup," I said. "This was in the back of the seats." "Well, I didn't buy it," Dad said. "Do you think Bob [my brother] bought it when he was with you the other day and forgot it?" I wondered. "I doubt that," he said.

We checked the hard roll and it was fresh. Dad threw it out to the birds. I put the soup on a shelf. I noticed one was chicken and dumplings. Years ago I ate my mother's chicken and dumplings, which was really good, then threw up because I was coming down with a stomach bug and haven't been able to bring myself to eat chicken and dumplings again. So if I were to buy soup, it wouldn't be chicken and dumplings.

Dad just stuck the Sprite in the refrigerator. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been spoken of since.

ANGEL CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN YESTERDAY...(Thanks Jimi Hendrix)

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 03:29:00 +0000

I used to dislike the term "random acts of kindness." I thought it was trite and overused. Besides [she said cynically!] who really does you a favor without expecting anything in return? Then a while back on Facebook I shared a post about being kind to strangers (and animals) as they may be angels in disguise. Shall I tell you a story about an angel I met when I wasn't, by any means, expecting it? Shall I tell you two? And were they angels, or were they simply doing a random act of kindness? I believe they certainly were, in fact, angels. But I'll let you decide.

Several years ago a friend called me from a town about 30 miles from here (there were phone booths then) and said his car had broken down on the highway. He'd managed to limp it into a closed garage, but was stuck, and asked if I could come and get him. Of course, I said. He tried to tell me where he was, but the town was totally unfamiliar to me (it isn't now!) I got off an exit I recognized was wrong, and, frustrated, went into a convenience store hoping to get some help.

There was a line at the cash register and one customer was a young African-American kid who -- I am going to be very politically incorrect here, please forgive me -- you might get quite nervous meeting in an alleyway or "bad" section of town. Then suddenly he turned to me - specifically to ME, just standing in the line - and said "You're lost, aren't you? Where do you want to go? I'll help you out." It did occur to me to wonder how he could possibly know that...but I was lost, and more than ready to take him up on his offer. I tried explaining where the garage and my friend were. "Gotcha," he said, "Follow me. I'm going right onto the highway - when you see my signal you go straight about a mile and it's on your right. Don't follow me onto the highway, just keep straight. When I signal you."

I had my misgivings and I didn't feel totally comfortable. But the kid finished his purchase (whatever it was) and went out and jumped into a low-slung car, and I got in mine. He led me through curving city streets (kinda fast) and I did my best to keep up with him. It wasn't long until we hit "civilization" though, and sure enough we were on a main drag with freeways branching off. A little way down the road his car slowed, and he put his right signal on and stuck his left arm out the window, pointing for me to go straight. I felt great calmness finally, and sure enough, about a mile down the road, there was my friend standing in the parking lot of the of the garage waiting for me. "Thought you'd never make it!" he said jokingly. I smiled and said "Someone showed me the way."

Angel story two: I was in Walmart the other day buying some new windshield wipers (mine were just flapping rubber) and I didn't see my year of car listed in the directory, so I was confused. I could have asked an employee, but there was a young man in that aisle (along with a VERY pierced young lady with the sweetest smile) and though I know it's sexist, I figured he was just the right age to know something about cars AND he was a GUY. So I said "Excuse me, can I ask you a question?" He said "Sure!" And I asked him whether wipers for a 2001 Explorer would fit a 2000. "Oh yeah, no problem," he said. He showed me the different lengths and explained them. "You'll be fine with these but you ought to get two," he said, "So you'll know you replaced them the same time." I agreed (these weren't the expensive ones); he asked if my back wiper (almost said "rear wiper!) was okay, and I told him I thought it was.

Then imagine my surprise when he smiled and said "If you're going to be here awhile I'll go out and put them on for you." For some reason I was speechless and could just raise my hand up, and I finally said to the girl "He's earned his place in Heaven." She smiled again. "We have a little shopping to do," he said, "And then I'll look for you." "I'll make sure I'm here!" I said. I sat on a bench by the toilet seats and waited about 40 minutes, wishing I could call my mom who was out in the car to tell her I hadn't been killed by a falling display of Ricola lozenges or something.

Finally I decided he'd forgotten or had given me some B.S. so I went to the checkout. The kid was coming in through the front door of the store. He grinned, pointed to me and came over and said "I found your car - I thought you'd be waiting there and I think I scared your friend half to death!" (Mom IS my friend, lol.) We walked out together and I said "You know, you're a very good guy and your parents must have raised you right and you can tell 'em I said so." But "I'm pretty much alone," he said, "I've been on my own since I was fourteen." Why did that not surprise me? Some kids really do come from toxic parents who consider them "disposable" - and some of these are the greatest kids ever. "I've had some misfortune in my life," he went on to say, "And if I can make sure somebody else doesn't, then I'm happy." Sure, this could all be him playing me, for some reason. I don't think so though. His good energy was off the charts.

He undid the packages and snapped the new wipers in while I told Ma yes, we DID make that arrangement! I gathered the old wipers and trash from his arms (he was going to take them, too, I think, and looked surprised) and thanked him profusely, of course, and asked him his name - "Brett," he said. I stuck the old stuff in the back seat and noticed my mother rummaging in her purse, looking for a little something to give Brett for being so kind. Which only makes sense. She was still rummaging while I still stood outside -- but that's my mother.

Of course I could have figured out how to put the wipers in myself, or asked my brother to do it. But Brett did it. I couldn't help but hug him. Then he walked off quickly -- very quickly -- as I got in the car, before we could even hand him any money. (And who knows whether or not he would've taken it? My significant other said that the purity and crispness of this whole story was perfect and money would have tinkered with it and troubled it somehow.) Anyway I said again, shaking my head. "He's earned his place in Heaven, that kid!" And then I smiled and thought; I believe, in fact, young as he was, he'd no doubt earned that place a long time ago.

FOR WANT OF A NAIL

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 02:22:00 +0000

We've all heard the fable, you probably chanted it in nursery school -- the poem "For Want Of A Nail." Remember? "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost," etc.

Well, it really doesn't take much for some things to snowball. Some years ago when I went out to get into my car in the morning there was a political lawn sign in the hatch-back. Now I do lean toward the left and this was a Liberal candidate but it was not one of whom I was particularly fond. Nevertheless, my first thought was not "who the hell put that in there?" (it was my brother, but that's so beside the point) but rather "what can I do with this to ~~cause trouble for somebody~~ continue this little joke?" I thought immediately of a friend, Jon, who stayed weekends with his girlfriend and whose house was empty then. Shame on me, I drove down there and stuck the sign in his lawn. I don't know how I was even able to breathe for laughing so hard imagining him driving up Monday morning and seeing it.

Turns out it never occurred to him that I was the culprit -- he thought it was a pal/crony of his, Chris K. He told me later he drove down to Chris K.'s that night and furiously tossed the sign onto the lawn. And he figured he'd made his point. The next day, though, when Chris got up and saw the sign he figured it had been a neighbor two or three houses down who always seemed to rub him the wrong way. Chris apparently marched down there with this sign, flung it at the neighbor and warned him that if there was any more trouble he was going to call the police. In fact the police may have been called; I don't quite remember. It was a good one though. Even Jon thought it was.

The thing of it is, things do take off at times. The other day my father was looking through some books I'd found for him at the dump and out of one fell a photo of a lovely baby girl; on the back, inscribed in shaky handwriting, was:

TO MILLIE

w/love

Dad was DELIGHTED to have found such a thing because now he could play a joke on my mother, whose name is Millie. He immediately took it to her and with a straight face told her it had fallen out of another book which my Significant Other, Steve, had recently lent him, and it must be a baby picture of him. (The "S" was there and everything.)

First of all, said Mom, it's obviously a girl. It's a PRETTY baby, not boyish, and she has pink and lavender on. Second, it's a color shot. Back in the 50s, when Steve and I were babies, most pics were in black and white. I'm sure he just walked away hiding a smirk. My mother thought she'd put him in his place but she gets a little confused at the best of times, and he knows it.

Meanwhile I had asked Steve if he knew who it could be and he racked his brain. The books had been his late dad's and maybe his dad had stuck the snapshot in as a bookmark. However, Steve could recall no Millie on either side of his family. "I think it was my Uncle Frank who gave Dad those books," he said. "Maybe somebody from one of his in-laws. This is a very mysterious thing." He questioned me a little more and then said he'd ask his 93-year-old mother.

The next day I found out about my father's shenanigans and wasn't surprised, but I was praying Steve hadn't asked his mother about Millie and the baby girl yet. Even though his mother is sharp as a tack and looks it, I pictured her fretting about this at her age and eventually getting on the phone to call as many relatives as she could think of to ask for help in tracing the mysterious Millie. Well, I didn't get to Steve in time and he in fact had already asked his mom, but fortunately she was just very matter-of-fact about it and said she had no idea what he or I were talking about and thank heavens, presumably did not care.

Dad, who is 91 himself, is a terrible trickster. I have heard many a tale from those who knew him way back in the day, and he admits it all, including setting his boss's hat on fire once just to see what would happen. He gets away with this stuff because he is charming. The most jokes he ever played were on my Uncle Bill Breslin. He got me involved early on in this. It was almost automatic that when he changed a toilet seat he would leave the old one in Uncle Bill's yard. Once, he had me stand on the hood of his car and hammer a sign into a tree on my uncle's property that said said "For Sale By Owner" and then gave the number of the local coffee shop downtown, thereby killing two birds with one stone. If we found something funny in the dump, there it would go, to the Breslin house where he and my Auntie Mig took it good-naturedly.

The killer dump find was an old accordion. This was probably a good 12 or 15 years ago. We could barely get the thing in the truck. We got lucky that day and found my cousin Peggy's car parked at the foot of their long, steep driveway and like thieves in the night - or reverse thieves in the night - we pulled up, jumped out, deposited the squeezebox and squealed away. HA! This time the joke was on us. We found out later that Peggy had put the accordion down cellar, bringing it up one night when someone who was visiting mentioned that he knew how to play the instrument and damned if they didn't have a concert.

I got my brother REALLY good once; it was an incredible stroke of fortune. I'd gotten a parking ticket for $150 for parking in a handicapped space without a permit, though I do HAVE a permit (Lyme disease), I had just forgotten to use it. It was all straightened out with a minimum of trouble, but meanwhile, coming back from taking Mom to a doctor's appointment in the city, it was still in my car. We stopped for lunch at Ruby Tuesday's and who should walk in a few minutes later but my brother and his youngest son, who had been doing something at the DMV and had also decided to stop at Ruby Tuesday's.

We all had a pleasant time, and on the way out with Mom I looked for my brother's car and very surreptitiously slipped the ticket under his windshield wiper. Again, the anticipation of his unpleasant surprise in finding it made for a very pleasant ride home. Later I spoke to my nephew. "Oh my God," he said, "Dad freaked out because he thought he was parked in the To-Go section." Once he saw what the ticket really said, though, it was "Well played, sis...well played."

Of course. Back several years ago I was visiting the aforementioned Jon and another woman, older than us and very pretty, had also stopped by. I didn't know where he knew this woman from but she was pleasant and we were making conversation when she suddenly stopped and said "Hey - how old were you in 1971?" "Um, 15," I said. "Were you tall and skinny with long brown hair?" I had been. "Oh my god, I was your neighbor across the street - Elaine!" I hadn't seen Elaine or any of her family in DECADES and was delighted to have crossed paths with her again. But before I could say anything else she asked me "Didn't you make a sign once that said 'I AM WOMAN' and stick it to the back of your brother's jacket without him knowing, and he wore it on the school bus that morning?" My jaw dropped, and then I smiled...it's good to be remembered.

LUCKY PENNY

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 02:17:00 +0000

Penny was a Golden Retriever. She belonged to my friend and employer Gregg Fisk and his partner Wendy Manes. I worked for Gregg in his flower shop/boutique, Chester Herbworks, in downtown Chester. Gregg and Wendy brought Penny to work with them most days. She was a lovely dog and had her "route," strolling up and down Main Street and stopping here and there to visit other shopkeepers and their patrons. It was the early 1980s, a fun and friendly time in Chester center.

We often worked into the night with custom jobs and closed up when we could. One night when we went to close, Penny was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't at all like her. We started to canvas the streets, figuring she was surely nearby having a long talk with someone -- or maybe she was getting "treats" at one of the restaurants and didn't want to leave. However, we couldn't find her, though everyone we spoke to had indeed seen her that day. Now we were very worried and jumped in our cars, driving slowly through nearby neighborhoods, calling her name and asking everyone we saw if they'd keep an eye out for her. Sadly, no luck.

The next day we made posters and offered a reward, putting my phone number on them because Wendy and Gregg lived in New Britain, at least a half hour away, and as I lived in town it would be easier for me to quickly follow any leads. We plastered the town with these flyers. A day went by, then two. There were a few apparent sightings of Penny, but she was not to be found. Then I had an idea.

I had just graduated from Middlesex College and had read their brochure about adult summer education. One of the offerings was "Learning About The Paranormal," which was going to be taught by a man who lived in town. His name was Roger Pyle. I had never heard the term "paranormal," and when I looked it up I was intrigued. I was debating taking the course myself. I started to wonder, is it possible that Roger would have an idea that would help us? Could he "read" Penny and give us a lead as to where she might be?

We called Roger, told him the situation and he said by all means, come on over -- and bring something that belongs to Penny. We drove to his house; Roger and his wife Nancy greeted us. We all sat down and talked. Everyone has potential to be psychic, they told us, and everyone had a sixth sense; the trick was learning how to use it. Roger took Penny's rubber ball and sat quietly. Nancy draped Penny's blanket over her lap and shut her eyes. Suddenly she said "I'm getting something."

Penny was in a black pickup truck, she said. And she was seeing a man with a cowboy hat. She couldn't tell if Penny was still close by, but she had another vision of Penny lying on a red tiled floor where it was cool. We had no reason to doubt Nancy, but the information didn't help; I mean, this is a little New England village, there are hundreds of black pickup trucks around...except we didn't know anyone who wore a cowboy hat. But the visit was not entirely in vain. We had met two nice people who gave us support and encouragement.

The next morning, another phone call came in -- another possible sighting of Penny by some folks on Goose Hill Road -- not too far from the center of town. It was a very hot day. I drove up with my mom to talk to the woman. It seems she had seen a Golden Retriever a few nights ago and had just seen the poster. We drove up and down Goose Hill Road, but we knew most everyone on the road and couldn't imagine they'd have found Penny and not called the Dog Warden. "Let's drive through the center once more, maybe she's back at the store," I said. I was keeping my eye out for a black pickup truck and there it was. THERE IT WAS. A black and silver pickup truck. With Texas markers. And there was a Golden Retriever in the back of the truck.
Wordlessly, I pulled up into the adjacent parking space. I just sat there. My mother and I looked at each other. "That looks like..." she said. "That IS," I answered. I felt my heart beating faster as I got out of my car. The dog recognized me and stood up. "Hey there," I heard a voice with a southern accent behind me. I turned around to see a man with a cowboy hat crossing the street, a young boy trailing behind him.

It was all so unreal -- and that's an understatement -- that I was at a loss for words, though I was filled with joy to see Penny again. "Are you the one who's name's on that poster?" Mr. Cowboy Hat asked. I nodded. "She followed my kids up the road the other night," he said. "Up Goose Hill. We didn't know who she belonged to, we thought she might be a stray so we kept her. We just saw the poster today." Turns out the guy was renting a house you couldn't see from the road, down a long winding driveway. "And what about the reward?" the boy asked. "You never mind that," his father said.

I ran over to Herbworks and left a note on the door that Penny had been found. Then I brought her to my mom's, a place she was very familiar with, and we gave her water and a biscuit from the stash my dad kept on hand for the neighbor's dog. I called Gregg, but there was no answer so I figured they were on their way from New Britain. We just waited. We were absolutely flabbergasted. Flummoxed. And every other related adjective. And Penny, after she got her water and treat, just sprawled out on the kitchen floor where it was cool, and there she lay when Gregg and Wendy burst through the door -- on a floor with the design of red tiles.

HEAVE-HO?

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 03:54:00 +0000

There are certain subjects which, when talked about, naturally invoke strong and often discordant feelings and thus can invite trouble, especially amongst the inebriated. Politics and religion, for example. Trust me, I've seen it happen. Gauge your situation as it is and decide: you wanna spill it or play your cards close to your chest? All right. I'll go ahead and admit it. For all eyes to see right now: when I was a kid, when I was in a moving car, I was a carsick kid.

My father drove, and my mother sat in the front next to him, or my uncle drove, with my aunt in the front. In either case my brother Bob and I were relegated to the back seat -- in my father's station wagon, on the way to visit my grandfather Blair and his second wife ("Pa and Nora") it was the WAY back for me, since this trip involved many miles of road and I ain't talking highway. Most other little kids would have just watched other cars, dozed, and dreamed for the duration. I, on the other hand, groaned and moaned and clenched my teeth, curled in abject suffering, while my brother happily chattered away with Ma and Dad per usual. To make matters worse, my father ALWAYS had one of those green "pine tree" air fresheners hung from the rear view mirror. I loved pine trees, but these horrid things were so chemically tinkered with that my head would be pounding on top of the stomach flips.

It was the 1960s -- you'd have thought people would have been more hip by then to motion sickness; put a carsick kid in the front seat, and you can avoid the problem pretty much altogether. However, my lot in life then was a healthy dose of Pepto-Bismol and Dramamine, neither of which did anything to improve the situation. In fact my mother said that upon our departure we often had to pull over while still on our street so I could get out and throw up. Needless to say I despise Pepto-Bismol to this day and feel compelled to look away when a Pepto-Bismol commercial comes on the TV. I'm surprised that the color pink has always been a favorite of mine, but it is.

Wikipedia defines carsickness this way: "A specific form of motion sickness, car sickness is quite common and often evidenced by the inability to read a map or book during travel. Car sickness results from the sensory conflict arising in the brain from differing sensory inputs. The eyes mostly see the interior of the car which is motionless while the vestibular system of the inner ear senses motion as the vehicle goes around corners or over hills and even small bumps. Therefore the effect is worst when looking down but may be lessened by looking outside of the vehicle." Guess nobody knew any of this when I was, like, 6. Test pilots, maybe.

Carnival rides made my cousin Cynthia sick, but not me. I had traveled by train on short trips and that had never bothered me either. As far as a school bus, well, I walked to school and only took one on an occasional field trip. But another question loomed; if I got so sick riding in a car (imagine our summer vacations), would I get seasick and/or airsick, too? In other words, would I ever get out of Dodge?? Well, when I was 10 years old, on one of our (typically, for me, drowsy and hellish) "Sunday drives," my father stopped at the little airport nearby so we could watch the planes take off and land. His pal Everett happened to be there that day taking his little 4-seater up and invited us along (my brother was not with us, ha ha ha). Never one to be left out of any sort of adventure, I all but pushed everybody else aside to get in. It was thrilling and unforgettable, seeing my little town from this soaring perspective, lost in a geometry of green fields and grey roofs.

So no airsickness that day, nor have I ever been airsick since, and I have flown in everything from a helicopter to an 18-seat prop plane over the Everglades to a 747 over the Atlantic ocean, and encountered some mighty turbulence along the way. Nor have I ever been sick in a boat -- a row boat, a sailboat, a motorboat, a cruise ship. And I've pleasantly outgrown the carsickness almost 100%. However. There is a however to this part. In the early 90s I persuaded my friend Gregg to accompany me to Prince Edward Island in Canada, a place I became enamored with after reading all of the books in the "Anne of Green Gables" series. Part of this jaunt included driving from Connecticut to Maine, staying overnight, and then taking the famous "Bluenose" car ferry in the morning, a six-hour crossing to Nova Scotia. When we boarded, part of the fare went for a generous breakfast buffet. I had no reason not to indulge in it. I figured.

The "Bluenose"

Up on deck we went, settling in for the duration. The sun was bright, the water dark blue, the air clear and the wind fresh. Occasionally we would see a spot of color in the distance, a trawler maybe. Suddenly to my horror I realized I was feeling very, very ill and could very easily have ~~puked~~ thrown up over the railing in front of all the other people who were hanging out having a fine time. Except I sat immobilized, afraid to move a muscle. "Gregg," I said without preamble, "Will you please go below and get me a big glass of ginger ale?" He must have read the danger signs. He simply turned and ran. He was back almost immediately. I drank the soda and thank heavens it settled my stomach. "Another?" I asked. Wordlessly he accommodated me. But I never thought "seasick." I thought, too much to eat this morning; it had to be. Seasick? Why all of a sudden?

After driving to the northernmost point of Nova Scotia, we took another short ferry ride to Prince Edward Island and I was fine. But I felt considerable trepidation knowing that our return, from Yarmouth to Portland, Maine, this time, would be on the "Scotia Prince" and was an 11-hour crossing. Despite the fact that my jacket was no match for the wind and chill off the water, I stayed up top in a deck chair THE WHOLE TIME. But I never felt a fleeting moment of nausea. So I figured that Bluenose thing was a fluke.

The "Scotia Prince"

Several years after that I was visiting my good friend Elaine who lived not 20 minutes from Bar Harbor. We decided to go to Nova Scotia for the day, this time on the "Cat," a high-speed ferry that bumped along the water at 55 mph and would get us there in a fraction of the time the Bluenose took. Just in case, I made sure I had some ginger ale handy when we departed. The trip was miserable. It could not end soon enough. Other people were drinking highballs and playing the slot machines while skillfully keeping their feet; I was so sick I found a corner of the upper deck where I'd hopefully get least waterlogged, and when we docked, I knew what the Pilgrims felt like. On the way back, I thought, I'm medicating myself. Sadly we had miscalculated our time and taken the wrong departure time -- we didn't have hours on land as we'd thought, we only had 40 minutes!! My HEAD wasn't back on my NECK yet and here we were on that damned catamaran again. Oh, death, I thought, come get me now. What have I done to deserve such wretchedness?

The "Cat"

And then came the "AHA!" moment. I realized the common denominator here. It was the goddam BAY OF FUNDY that was making me sick. My own personal Bermuda Triangle. If not, wouldn't I have gotten sick on other bodies of water? The Scotia Prince crossed the Gulf of Maine. That's why I survived. And just coincidentally? If you haven't already heard this? The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. Don't know if this has anything to do with anything or not...just sayin'.

Since then I have taken ferries to Port Jefferson, Long Island from Bridgeport, and to Orient Point from New London. Roughish water on the second one, too. And as I said I rarely get carsick any more. Sometimes if I'm crunched in back and we're going hill-and-dale, up-and-down winding country roads (which is about all we have around here) it will revisit briefly and I'll just yell "Somebody let some fresh air in here, okay?" and somebody does, then I feel better. I can even read in a car from time to time. Even in the back seat. I guess my brain's sort of caught up with my ears, or vice versa. But I take no chances. If there is a pine tree air freshener hanging in the car somewhere I ask to put it in the glove compartment. And even if they start ferry service again (the Bluenose and the Cat are scrap metal now) I think that should I take it in my head to go again to Canada I plan on staying the hell away from the Bay of Fundy.

A SNOWBALL IN SCOTLAND

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 02:48:00 +0000

An excerpt from a recent e-mail from my cousin Wallace in Scotland...who said "no good deed goes unpunished?"

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WALLACE SAYS:

2012 was not one in which we did much gallivanting. I had my week in southern Ireland, and we spent some time in Arbroath trying to get tradesmen to quote for electrical work, and bathroom replacement in the flat. Electrics were all done, but we only got one response from 4 people about the bathroom replacement, so that had to be shelved - we think we might just try and co-ordinate it ourselves, calling on individual tradesmen as required for the stuff we can't do ourselves.

We did manage to get some work done in Edinburgh, but it ended up being a bit of a saga. We needed to replace the toilet/cistern, so arranged with our friendly plumber to do that. Since that was to be removed we thought we'd redecorate the wall behind it (remove old tiles, get it replastered and painted/papered to match the rest of the bathroom) before the plumber put in the new toilet.

Since we'd get a plasterer we thought it an idea to have him skim the ceiling, which was a rough texture, that was a pain to get any mould growth from. It was then suggested that the reason we got mould was that there was no air flow, so an extractor fan was proposed - electrician required.

If we're having an electrician we might as well get him to replace the light fitting and move the switch outside the bathroom (instead of a dangly pull string) and put in a fancy lit mirror unit.

When the electrician arrived it was decided that the fancy mirror needed a separate electrical circuit, which meant a new fuse/trip switch/consumer unit (it needed [to be] replaced anyway), and because it sat next to an old security alarm (which we never used), we might as well get the latter replaced with something modern and slightly smaller (so the new, larger, consumer unit would fit in the space).

Then once we'd removed the old wallpaper we thought the plasterer should skim all the walls, so we needed the plumber back to remove the central heating radiator ...

The 60s comedy song, "The Gas Man Cometh" by Flanders and Swan, springs to mind ...

So it's now all in place and working fine ... and would have all had to be done at some point. But it was a bit of a shock at the time how it snowballed ...

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I'll say. I think it's a family thing, Wallace. Sigh...

GOING TO EXTREMES

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 04:53:00 +0000

Emma (not her real name) is a Friend I've not yet met. Friend with a capitol "F" as in yes, you guessed it, Facebook; we came together as two residents of the same state who were (and still are) highly incensed by a precedent-setting case of animal cruelty a couple of years back. Since then we've hit it off on other issues, and today, Emma posted this on her page:

"I have been told many times in my life that I need to stand up for myself, and if I am upset about something someone is doing or saying to me, I should say something about it. Every time I have done this, though, even if I've said something in a pretty subdued way, the other people involved have had an extreme response, such as not speaking to me any more, screaming at me hysterically, deciding they don't want to be friends with me any more, or in one case, even pulling out a gun and threatening suicide. Wow. What can I take away from all this? (I am really asking myself that here.)"

I figuratively staggered away from this post with my jaw dropping. Aside from the horrendous gun incident she describes, it may as well be me talking.

I've never had a problem speaking my mind, once I learned how to do it diplomatically and without morphing into Attack Mode. (I am one-fourth Italian, after all, with a good dose of the Scottish Highlands thrown in. Don't tread on me.) For the most part, however, I usually sidestep it (read: let other people leave some heavy footprints on my person). Why?

A couple of reasons. One, the older I get, the harder it is for me to stand up for myself/correct someone in a NICE way. As*hole overload, I really think. Too damned many of them out there. Gets exhausting. And I don't trust my own temper. So I take a LOT of crap. Two, read Emma's post again. Yep.

I do not get it.

A few years ago I became friendly with a woman who walks her dog past my parents' house. I'll call her Diane. My father had mentioned to her that I was a dog-sitter, and one night she gave me a call. An eccentric person, she was a gifted artist, estranged from her husband and fighting an addiction to alcohol which had resulted in her losing her license. She loved books, astrology, and vintage. I had dinner with her several times or hung out at the house to watch a movie. She wanted someone to look after her spaniel while she spent an occasional few days in NYC networking. I'd drop her off and pick her up at the station, taking the pooch with me for the time she'd be gone. It worked out fine.

Then she got a dog-sitting job of her own -- on Martha's Vineyard. Could I take her to the ferry at Woods Hole on Cape Cod? If she paid for gas? We'd do something fun when she got back. Sure, I said, why not. I wrangled my mother into coming along for the ride. We set out for the gas station where I asked Diane to put $30.00 in the tank to top it off. I'd only ever been to the Cape once before in my life, and this was an impulsive side trip with a friend on our way to the Eastern States Exposition (the "Big E") in Springfield, Mass. Naturally I headed that way on the highway but Diane, sharply, asked me where I thought I was going. "Oh...," I answered sheepishly. "Wrong way I guess." I got off the next exit and reversed direction.

So up through the eastern tip of Connecticut I drove, through Rhode Island and finally to the ferry. The trip was completely uneventful and actually not at all unpleasant. I was to come back in a few days. The SUV I drive ate some gas, though, so on the way home I pulled into a station in Falls River, Mass. and plunked another $50.00 in the tank.

Dutifully I went to pick Diane up a little later that week. On the way back I told her about having to get more gas in the tank and that it turned out to be around a $75.00 round trip. "Oh," she said icily. "Well, you told me $30." I didn't catch on. "Yeah," I said, "but we had to fill up in New Bedford. I have the receipt here for you -- you want it?" "Of course not," she snapped. "But you knew you were going so why..." Wait, are you kidding me? "I didn't even know which WAY to go," I replied in disbelief.

It was entirely beyond my comprehension, but Diane was apparently offended by my asking for the rest of the money to cover the trip. ENTIRELY beyond my comprehension. She was going to shake me down. Lord knows what she'd just gotten paid by the folks on the Vineyard, but she was "broke right now," she said. "If that's okay." What a discernably icy atmosphere blew through the car. I tried to keep it pleasant. "Your pup's waiting for ya!" I said. "Can't wait to see him!" she said, smiling tightly through her teeth.

That was a few years ago and that's the last conversation I ever had with Diane. I don't know if she eventually recovered her driver's license or even if she still lives in that same house. I have seen her walking once or twice as have my parents, but with an entirely different dog. I felt really sad about getting stiffed and I really missed the times I'd had fun with Diane in her odd, retro little house in the woods. So after a few weeks I wrote her a card. "It's okay," I wrote, "if you don't pay me the money -- I don't want money to come between our friendship. It isn't worth it." I never heard a word. So I can only speculate...maybe she found someone to do her favors for free. Not a trait I'D want to be known for.

Truth is I felt tremendously deflated. Not only had I believed Diane had liked me for the person I am, I thought I had been valuable to her. Coming from as eccentric a family as I do, I'd simply accepted and overlooked stuff I suspect the average Joe -- or Jane -- would find trying in a friendship. I thought Diane and I were new pals and I'd been enjoying her company. It is, of course, way better I found out what a weasel she is early on in the friendship. I mean, she IS, right? A weasel? Because I didn't do anything wrong. I don't think. I'm pretty goddam sure.

So that's what happened with Diane. With Lori it was so much worse. Lori and her sister Helene and I have been friends since grade school. Their kids are around the same age. Lori's daughter Ellen is a CNA -- Certified Nurse's Aide. Tough, tough work. Lord bless the people who do this. Helene's daughter Cassie is married with a 5-year-old and living at her husband's great-grandmother's house. Gram is in her late 90s and has dementia along with a host of other maladies, but Cassie takes great care with her, despite the accompanying difficulties -- and it's her frustration at these difficulties that Cassie vents on Facebook. Cassie is often beside herself with Gram's lying, bull-headedness and insults, much of which is apparently NOT related to her advanced age and confusion. Well, Ellen got mad at her cousin.

"There is such a thing as elder abuse," Ellen posted. We all took a step back...whoa. "If she saw what you were saying about her she'd be embarassed." True, no doubt, but unlikely to happen. Well, Cassie didn't take this statement kindly. That's understandable; elder abuse? And then, through Ellen, Lori became involved. "My mother says we might need to contact the authorities," Ellen wrote. I was bowled over. I have no reason nor desire to become embroiled in another family's arguments, but I simply couldn't take that sitting down! "You guys should have no fear," I wrote, "Cassie may be frustrated by Gram at times, but the care she is providing is top-notch. Every time I've been there Gram is clean and well-fed, and Cassie does her best to engage her in activities. Her health and well-being are not in any jeopardy, believe me -- the old girl is very happy!"

That's all it took. "You are no better than HER," Ellen wrote. Then she launched into a rather cruel public diatribe involving Helene, whom she ripped into even though Helene had no involvement in the situation at all. And then she "un-Friended" all of us, as did her mother.

It isn't at all wise to air family grievances on Facebook and we should all have known better. Nonetheless I thought I was being diplomatic when defending Cassie. I didn't insult anyone, but I did stand up for what I knew was right. I wasn't going to let Ellen say such things about Cassie when I personally knew better and felt terrible. I'd known both girls since they were babies and you just can't say that kind of stuff in a public forum, so I countered it in a public forum. I'd certainly have done the same if the situation had been reversed. Lori and Ellen had never been to Gram's house; Helene and I had been there several times, and we knew the meticulous care Gram was getting, often involving assistance in bodily functions we are all better off not knowing about.

As close friends -- damned near SISTERS -- will do now and again, I was dumped. But I had no reason to think it was anything but temporary, so I wasn't too invested in the situation. And then time went by and nothing happened. So I wrote a private message to Lori on her Facebook page. "Somebody somewhere has to be the grownup!" I wrote. "You know that by defending your niece I meant nothing against your daughter. So let's call all this nonsense a day!"

Nothing. Weeks. Months. Nothing. Then I ran into Lori at the supermarket. I walked up to her to say hi as I'd done a thousand times. She would not look at me. I asked her how her summer was going so far. She turned her cart abruptly and went in the opposite direction.

This fall, more than a year after the whole thing started, I was going through some drawers in my old bedroom. I found a lovely card from Lori with a heartfelt message, something she'd sent me way back when and I'd kept. I made a photocopy of it, wrote a long, loving letter, and sent them off. When two weeks went by without a word I realized, to my hurt and horror, that this was bad. Possibly permanent. Downright awful. And totally, unequivocably unfair to me.

Since then Cassie, Helene, and I have been completely ostracized by Lori and Ellen (who has since moved out of state). Poor Helene took the high road and her other daughter Riley was completely out of the loop. Nonetheless the three of them have been excluded from family functions that involve Lori. She's convinced other family members that we done her wrong, I guess. And she won't go to any parties or events if WE are invited. Or even if she THINKS we may have been invited. Wisely, I think, we haven't bought into it and are treating the family as we always have, with no elaborating on the situation. It wouldn't pay.

I think time is on our side. Recently we were all invited to a holiday party at another sister's. It was a nice night out, and we were enjoying it -- then, Lori walked in. She didn't look at me though I yelled hello along with everybody; she wouldn't go near Cassie either, but she DID go hug her sister. I figured it was best to stay my distance from Lori. She'd pretty much made it apparent that this was her preferred state of affairs. Helene told me later she figured the hug was nothing but show. She said she couldn't trust Lori. I just felt grave concern for Lori myself. Was she going through a mental breakdown of some sort? Cassie maintains that Lori is a "horrible, miserable person" and has ALWAYS treated her thus. She is? She did? This girl I grew up with? How foolish she was acting. If you have something to say to me -- some beef with me -- tell me to my face. Get IN my face. This was so ludicrous!

These two examples just scratch the surface of the propensity people seem to have to TURN on me if I stand up to them. So Emma, it ain't just you.

I don't feel any better, of course, if I just shut my trap (in fact I don't doubt my blood pressure goes up exponentially). And I don't feel very well when people go -- well -- batshit on me, either, just because I stand up for my rights, or speak my mind, or defend an innocent. So I'm stuck. I'm just stuck.

Diane is a weasel, I know that now. Lori, well, I was hurt to the core at first; life is short, lifetime friends are rare. Now I'm just plain puzzled. But there is nothing more I can do on that front. I miss our friendship terribly. She couldn't come to me and say "Hey -- maybe Ellen was out of line, but you can see why I got mad when you contradicted her, she's my daughter. I know Cassie takes good care of Gram. I'm sorry." Nope. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. And that makes me feel very helpless.

So. What is it, what is it, what to do. I may resent it from time to time when someone calls a spade a spade and it involves me, but too bad for ME. I have to say I've never overreacted in this manner, not that I can ever remember. Guess I'll have to take it on a case-by-case manner. If it matters very much to me that a certain person stays appeased and doesn't take up arms against me, then I'll bite my tongue. If I don't care, I'll speak up. It is tiresome, unfair, and downright strange. But Emma, I just found out it's not quite as rare as I'd thought. And I guess you did too.

SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:52:00 +0000

I was an angel. Just so you know. I was never Mary in the Sunday school pageant, but that was okay because the angels, I think, got better costumes. Ceremoniously retrieved as a group from the church attic each December and laid out lovingly on the furniture in the Ladies Parlor, they were shimmering creations of sky blue, lemon yellow, pale green, peach, and white; they slipped in silken quickness over our heads and hung in stately, eddying folds, transforming us. Mary had to stay in one place, too, kneeling, while we got to march with our halos down the aisles while the choir and congregation sang comforting hymns: "The First Noel," "We Three Kings," "Joy to the World," "Silent Night..."

But being taller than the other girls (and most of the boys) it was harder and harder each year to find a robe long enough to cover up my knee socks. I stood out. It didn't bother me, but one year, as our mothers milled around us tying cords, straightening wings and readying us for dress rehearsal, someone's mother cast a nasty glance our way and said "Hmmmm....isn't she a little tall to be an angel?" I stood wide-eyed and mortified, and in instantaneous fury my mother turned from what she was doing and snapped "What's the matter? Didn't you know that angels come in all sizes??!"

The 20 children killed a couple of weeks ago by a mad man in a bucolic New England town (about an hour from where I live) are being portrayed now as beautiful little angels. Photos have surfaced quickly, and it is painful but also in some way so right to lay eyes upon them. To a one, they are happy, smiling, beginning. I did not give birth to these children nor have I ever met them or their families, but nonetheless, I bear the awful pain of their loss. Yes -- I know that children are sick and starving in refugee camps. I know that children are felled every day by bullets intended for other targets in fire fights and drug deals. I know that children lie in cancer wards, hairless and bloated, fading from life as we speak, a miserable and unfair circumstance. I know. But these 20 kids in Newtown, Connecticut -- okay, go ahead and say it, white upper middle-class -- were my children.

Naturally there are no neutral posts on Facebook about Adam Lanza and what he did. Every one, everywhere, is to one degree or another affected. Cute cartoons, always good for an "LOL" or even a "LMFAO" were for several days nonexistent. We were not in the mood to laugh (I think we were incapable of it). The animal welfare, shabby chic decorating and holiday baking pages I subscribe to were dark with grief. Nevertheless there has been a great deal of activity. There are discussions about the influence of violent video games and the effects on young minds nowadays. There are painful posts about mental illness in young people -- how to recognize it, what to do about it (sadly, not many resources are available). And there is, of course, dramatic polarization about gun control.

On one friend's page she posts how vehemently she is against owning a gun and how she feels that laws are too lax. Under that is a comment from someone: "This is not the time to talk about gun control." And my friend replies "If this is not a good time to talk about gun control, I don't know what is." As more information surfaces we find that the shooter's mother (who was also killed by her son) owned the guns he used for this massacre -- and for whatever purpose, she owned them legally. We also know that the shooter had oddities since childhood that set people to puzzling just what was wrong with him. He was exceedingly intelligent, but also unable to look you in the eye; he didn't react to physical pain; he was finally pulled out of public school by that same mother who bought gun after gun after gun, taking him with her to target practice. Maybe, suggests another friend, it was the only way she felt she could connect with him -- that he was spending more and more time isolated in his room and she couldn't "reach" him any more. Guns, though...perhaps that wasn't wise?

I don't expect to ever own a gun. Therefore I have never seen an application for a gun permit, so maybe this is already done, for all I know, but would it not be a good idea to do a family interview when a weapon is applied for, and ask if there is anyone unstable who also might have access to that gun and bullets -- and may potentially be apt to use them in an impulsive or violent way? I am not talking background-checking the applicant; I am talking of an investigation into who might be apt to use this gun other than the applicant.

A teacher leads terrified students from the school.

The Governor of my state wept at a news conference the other day; the normally stoic spokesman for the Connecticut State Police finally broke down in tears. I am sad, shocked, and angry myself, but I am also surprised at how visceral my reaction has been: the first day I felt as though I had been laid out by a series of blows, weak, aching, the second day I shook uncontrollably. The children I myself have been privileged to help raise are 29, 22 and 22 now, nonetheless I turned inside out with wanting to hold them in my arms as if they were little again, because I love them more than life itself and yesterday, they were in kindergarten too.

The day after the tragedy my friend and I needed to do some errands at the local Walmart and our odd job lot store. So close to Christmas, these stores would normally be clogged with people, furiously bustling through in high form. There were shoppers, yes, but no ebullient kids running up and down the aisles or people quick-stepping through the last of their shopping lists, furious to finish, and the lines at check-out were manageable. There was, in fact, a kind of somber quietness in the stores. It was subdued and polite. I had not seen this kind of public reaction even after September 11th. There were not a lot of smiles. And if I am not mistaken, a sense of fear -- small but tangible -- beat in our hearts. We were, after all, out in a public place, in a crowd, never knowing if a madman with an assault rifle might be lurking in the shoe department, a person who might have been able to be stopped if not for a Perfect Storm of circumstance and ammunition.

I won't pretend to know the answer to this one, not even a little part of the answer. I do know that when I was in kindergarten in 1961 the only worry I had was if I could snag the purple crayon out of the Crayola box before somebody else got it, and why my shoe wouldn't stay tied and could I get a chance in the swings at recess. Couldn't tell you if there were less guns out in circulation then. Couldn't tell you if there were less crazy people or better places to deal with them than there are today. Couldn't tell you any of that. But I can tell you that something is very badly wrong in this world right now.

And yes, there are too frigging many guns in the wrong hands. And yes, it is way too hard to get help for the mentally ill and way too easy to get a gun. But in the last few days I've talked to a couple of friends who have another theory and I think they're right. I think they're goddamn right: we have lost the function of engaging with each other. We don't know what's real any more. And the children especially. Where are the children??

In the sixties we were outside swinging from tree branches, hitting wiffle balls or playing tag. Or maybe inside playing with Matchbox cars or Barbie or Chinese checkers or a chemistry set. Now you could live 4 or 5 years across the street from a family and never know they had kids. Where are the kids? Usually playing video games. And I'm not talking Pac Man or Atari; I'm talking Grand Theft Auto or worse, where the simulation rivals that in training films for soldiers and police, and the object is to see how many people you can kill. KILLING PEOPLE. That's where the kids are. Or maybe watching cable where the blood and guts and violence are spilling out into bedrooms and living rooms everywhere...by the time they're 8 or 9 these kids are desensitized to death. We had cops-and-robbers and shoot 'em up cowboys-and-Indians and cartoons where animals are pummeled and people shoved off cliffs and dynamite is everywhere for the taking -- but then we had respite: dinner at the family table, Sunday rides in the country, finger paints. I'm not saying that no Baby Boomers grew up to be murderers, thieves or rapists. I'm just saying, we seemed to know reality better (in spite of the fact that many of us tried various substances to temporarily visit an unreal world)...and we looked each other in the eye.

"All those Hollywood liberals," said my friend Lester; "Gun control and all that crap they're always yakking about -- well, ask them not to do any more violent movies. See what they say. It's their bread and butter. Talk about hypocrites." He's quite right that movie stars aren't exactly putting their money where their mouths are, isn't he? I never thought of it that way before.

So yes. There is a problem with guns in this world, and I kind of think our founding fathers weren't envisioning semi-automatic rifles when they wrote the Second Amendment. And yes, lord knows there is a terrible, terrifying lack of mental health care -- in my state alone, three institutions have closed in the last few decades; whether they were good or bad I (thankfully) don't know, they may have been the most Draconian halls to grace the Northeast, but nonetheless they're gone. Just as the all-too-frequent horror stories of foster care painfully point out that perhaps orphanages weren't all that bad, incidents upon incidents demonstrate that mainstreaming the mentally ill might not be in society's best interests.

But quite possibly the bigger issue is knowing what's real in this life...knowing that you're not just knocking down 20 little clown faces in a game, that you are, in fact, annihilating the future of 20 families, real living families. Make that 26; you killed six dedicated faculty too. Look me in the eye. Be human. We need to know one another. We need to engage. If Adam Lanza couldn't do this he might have been better committed to an institution; at the very least he should certainly not have had access to guns.

I was an angel, but that was pretend; really I'm just made of flesh and blood. Two days ago, on Christmas, those parents in Sandy Hook faced an impossible task -- having Christmas without their murdered children, making Christmas for their living ones. No matter how cool the costume is I don't think, given a choice, the kids of Sandy Hook wanted to be real Christmas angels this year. I think they wanted to make gingerbread houses and do puzzles. I think they wanted that purple crayon and to get on a swing at recess.

LAZY POST

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:46:00 +0000

20 Things I Like
(Except I thought of more than 21 things to include, and that's a good thing, right? Maybe I'll just keep this as a happy ongoing list.)

1) Animals
2) That first balmy night in spring when you can leave your bedroom window open and hear the peepers
3) Chocolate, especially white chocolate
4) Stars
5) Anticipating a new adventure, especially when it involves an airport
6) Nail polish
7) Baseball
8) Easter
9) The cellar of the local public library
10) Eggnog with rum
11) The dump
12) Quotations
13) Mountains
14) Shopping for a new handbag
15) Catching up on my electric bill
16) Online Scrabble
17) Jean jackets
18) The desert
19) Spooky stories
20) Perfume
21) Getting into bed with clean sheets (especially if they were dried on a line)
22) Betty White
23) Cinnamon buns with icing
24) The Rolling Stones
25) A good hair day
26) Faeries
27) Shabby Chic
28) Vacuuming
29) Painting radiators

21 Things I Dislike (okay, so I went over the limit here too, sue me)

1) Asparagus
2) Cold feet
3) Flat tires
4) Sinus infections
5) Mosquitoes
6) Winter
7) Wall-to-wall carpeting
8) Biting the inside of my cheek by accident
9) Too much bass
10) Twitter
11) "The Real Housewives" of anywhere
12) Humidity
13) The Muppets
14) Dirty bathrooms
15) Allergies
16) A bad hair day
17) Musicals, with a few exceptions ("Camelot," for example.)
18) Insomnia
19) Fanaticism
20) "New" country music
21) The deep end of the pool
22) Sectional couches
23) Beets

WE'RE JUST NOT SURE ABOUT DEAN

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:48:00 +0000

Really, we're not. In fact for a long time I thought Dean's name was Nick, and it's only just now that I'm getting comfortable calling him Dean and not feeling as though it's in error. He seems like a Nick. Or maybe that was his cat's name. I know that Dean is a cat-lover, and that he goes to the library (I've run into him coming or going) and to the local fair, and I adore the simplicity of his house -- what I see from the outside, of course. I seriously expected my mother or father or both to encourage me to make a play for him. They haven't. I've made mention of the fact that he's a single man with similar interests to mine but they said they're pretty sure he's not interested in having a girlfriend. How the hell they know this is beyond me. They did say they thought there was a woman living there when he first moved in. I couldn't tell you. I didn't pay enough attention.

Dean lives in a cape just across the right-of-way from my parents' house. We think he still rents it from the guy who built it, and it can't be a cheap rent, not by a long shot. It has a garage too. Of all the people who have lived there Dean has stayed the longest. When he's there, that is. There are long periods of time when Dean's work takes him out of town, state and/or country. Japan, I think, for two weeks at a time, though that job ended and now it seems he goes to Maine a lot (Maine, of all places). He is a good man. You can tell. He's brought homemade cheesecake to my mother when she's been laid up. He wanders through their yard sometimes calling for his new cat, a white longhair named Wolfgang, and when Wolf hears him Wolf comes running. One night Wolf didn't, and Dean told my father he couldn't rest, when Wolf did eventually appear at 9 PM with soot all over him; obviously he'd been caught somewhere. Dean said it made him sick with worry. I know that sickness. Been there.

Several years ago the neighbor on the other side of Dean, a raucous truck driver named Mike, hosted a pig roast for Dean's 50th birthday. So I'd guess Dean and Mike are good friends for Mike to have gone all out like that. Mike invited all the neighbors and a motley crew of other townsfolk, their connection to Dean completely escaping me, though really it's none of my business. My father and I went over. It was a miserable, rainy spring day but we were in a tent. The food was great and people were having a good time. I went over to Dean and said "Happy birthday -- I'm a couple of years ahead of you; I escaped out to Disneyland for my 50th." Dean said "Uh-huh." Needless to say I felt that conversation was going nowhere and neither was any possibility of an affair of the heart with Dean.

On his front porch he has a white rocking chair and a pot of flowers. That's all. He sits out there smoking cigarettes sometimes. When I drive out the back driveway we always wave to each other.

Dean's no Brad Pitt (if you like Brad Pitt that is); he wears thick glasses and has a bit of a gut, and his face looks like maybe he had acne as a teenager. But around these parts we don't see too many Brad Pitts, and I think Dean is perfectly pleasant looking (hey, I ain't no Angelina). The thing is, we're just not SURE about Dean. "I think,"my father said to me the other day, "that Dean may be a spy."

Funnily enough Dean DOES look spy-ish, in a way; he's got the basic look of a normal, fit-in-anywhere type of guy but he also has this air about him that's a little puzzling. It's like you can't quite remember his features when he isn't standing there right in front of you. When I do see him in public, as I did this summer while manning the library book sale booth at the local country fair, I am not 100% sure it IS him. After all this time. And as I said I don't even really want to call him Dean. It just doesn't seem to FIT right.

So the mystery continues. Is Dean really who he says he is? Well, he hasn't really said anything. He's quiet. I'd even call him mysteriously standoffish sometimes. But a good guy. Good guys CAN be spies. There's really only one thing to worry about, said my friend Steve last night: what SIDE is he on??!?

ABOUT MR. FRENCH

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:56:00 +0000

It's Father's Day, just about. And I could get going on that easily enough. My father's packed with 90 years of quite-a-guy and he is the best. He is bigger than life. But, I think I'll tell you about Mr. French instead. He was Dad to my friend Holly, and to her brothers Stanley and Jimmy, and to her sisters Cathy and Leslee and Lynn and Beth and Penny, AND to a slew of foster kids who simply became extra siblings who seemed to have been there all along.

His parents came to the United States from England when he was a small child. In World War II he served in the Seabees. He was smitten with the smiling Irish eyes of Cathleen Resides, and they got married, and they bought a small house by a babbling brook in a country town, and they had kids and dogs and cats, and he was a carpenter. He was pretty much retired by the time I became friends with his daughters Holly and Lynn and was thus kind of absorbed into the family. The house was always full of family. As you can imagine.

If ever there was a male equivalent to the Mona Lisa, his face could do it proud. His eyes held that same enigmatic twinkle and his mouth that not-quite-smile-but-almost. He wasn't tall, but he stood straight. He was the tree around which the flowers grew. His love was quiet and tough as nails.

Mr. French loved to stay up till all hours and then sleep very late - sitting as if a sentinel while his family slept. Rather than a Lazy Boy or Barca-Lounger, he sat in a plain New England rocker and read the paper or watched TV. He had no intention of missing anything, and he did not: one time when I was sleeping over Holly and I decided to sneak out of the house and walk up to the lake. We were probably 15 and 16 at the time. We never did destructive or cruel stuff as teenagers, but we were unwise at times. This time, in fact. Halfway there and we see Mr. French in his station wagon coming up the road. "Jump!" we yelled to each other and pitched over the guardrails, tumbling down an unseen embankment and lying there out of breath and giddy. We weren't hurt but we were caught. A lesson: look before you leap.

He was a quiet feature at the dining room table and one day, as I sat fiddling with the cloth band of my watch and not getting it to stay on, he startled me and said "Hand it over." I did, and he fixed it. I felt smugly privileged. He had noticed me and thought enough of the whole situation to help. Other friends had fathers, good men all, but none -- even my own father -- would have seen my small dilemma without me verbally complaining, and done something about it. I may not have the watch any more, but I have the clearest memory of the time.

He died at home, peacefully, holding his wife’s hand, just on the other side of the wall from the yard where just yesterday, it seemed, he chopped wood and planted a garden. I see him now in his daughters, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, steadfast and dreaming. I hope he was who he started out wanting to be. "Take care of things," he would say, "And they will last."

Harry Belafonte - Jamaica Farewell

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:53:00 +0000

HOW I GOT TO JAMAICA

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 21:47:00 +0000

My cats are bad. I love them, but they are incapable of good behavior. Good behavior consists, among other things, of letting me sleep. Yeah, I know, that's laughable -- like ANY cat will let you sleep when they want something (or nothing, for that matter). But in my case, with these particular two, I am not allowed to sleep AT ALL no matter WHAT TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT. Buddy (he of the golden coat) will leap onto my chest, abdomen or legs and then spring off again, quickly, as if I were a human trampoline. He weighs 16 pounds and something like that landing on you when you're catching some zzzz's is unpleasant and startling, at best. Molly, my black-and-white daughter, is way worse. She catches me nodding off and she will sneak up onto my bedside table and start knocking stuff off, including, at times, a full but opened bottle of spring water, pills, hand lotion, Kleenex boxes, and my telephone. (She is just now sitting insolently on the kitchen table across from me. Not supposed to be up there. Right.)

I wracked my brains thinking how I was going to work this one out. I have had cats all my life, and I have never before had one who wasn't completely content to snuggle up in bed (even if occasionally it was on my head or face) for most of the night. In fact back in the days when it was safe to let your cats out day and night without worrying about predators, I kept my bedroom window slightly cracked (as it opened onto a low portion of the roof and they could just come in and out whenever), and TWICE I woke up in the morning with a totally unfamiliar cat nestled in my bed. One was a Siamese that I knew lived somewhere nearby as I'd seen him before, and one was a small black cat with half a tail. (This scared me since I HAD a small black cat and without my glasses I thought it was her.) Now, these cats were conked out WITH A STRANGER and apparently very content. What I'm trying to say is, what the hell kind of furry little demons possessed me here that I had to live my life as sleep-deprived as the mother of a newborn? Do they not know when they've got it good??

Well, I finally figured it out. See, I have a cellar. It is not a heated cellar, but it is chock-full of little alcoves and shelves and cubbyholes, all perfectly primed to make cozy sleeping places for a cat. My whole life long (so far) I have watched my father construct little outdoor houses for stray and/or feral cats who might be roaming through the neighborhood. He would insulate and waterproof them and locate them out of the wind, so I knew, pretty much, what to do and how to do it. Really, the place was luxurious when I got through, and -- I hang a thermometer there -- has never dipped below 40 degrees in the coldest of winters. (In fact a couple of years ago, during a record-breaking snowy winter, an opossum lived down there with them for about three months. Really. Read about that interesting saga right here: "The Cellar Dweller" or, "Where is Granny Clampett When You Need Her?"

Cozy Place #1 is a pile of old porch cushions on an old table. (Like "The Princess and the Pea.") The possum lived in a loosely-folded tarpaulin behind this table.

Cozy Place #2 is a wooden box underneath the workbench next to my power sander.


Cozy Place #3 is a wicker basket, one for each, lined with old towels.


Cozy Place #4 is a chair I found in the dump with old bathmats on it. There are more Cozy Places.

I admit I am not entirely appreciative of this plan when it's 11 o'clock at night, I'm in my pajamas and ready to turn over and conk off but there is still the issue of Putting The Cats In The Cellar. Directly under my bedroom and kitchen is the "warm" (+/-) cellar where my washer and dryer and furnace etcetera are. A door from there opens to the outer cellar. That's the cats' room. (I cannot keep them in the inner cellar as they would simply come up to the top of the stairs where there is a real door and raise holy hell with me. It would be of no use.)

Molly goes down by herself, but Buddy (16 pounds, remember?) makes me carry him and makes himself a dead weight. Once in awhile he will jump out of my arms at the foot of the stairs and run and hide somewhere in the "warm" cellar. The only way to get Buddy through that door into the other cellar, believe it or not, is to chase him with an old crutch. I don't know why he is afraid of it (or of anything, for that matter, since he's never had a hand raised to him) but he is deathly terrified of that crutch. Thank goodness. Sometimes I just rush at him (or where I guess his general whereabouts to be) and I holler "MAMA'S GONNA GET THE CRUTCH!! GETTING THE CRUTCH RIGHT NOW!!!" and he will behave. Sometimes. Again, however, all I really want to do is sleep at this point.

So they're in their room, but there's still the issue of that door between the cellars. Keeping it shut is not enough, because one of them, I suspect Buddy because he has the weight, apparently throws its body against the closed door repeatedly. Then there's additional scratching alternating with the door-smashing. Whichever one is doing it, the point is I can't sleep through it and THEY KNOW. They're not sleeping either but what do they care, they've caught cat-naps all day and are raring to go.

After trying various remedies, I finally came up with something that seems to work. There was already a screw-and-eye closure at the top; I screwed one into the bottom too. Originally I had fastened a bungee cord through one of the connections, and I pulled on that cord to make the door as tightly shut as possible after I hooked it, hooking the other end of the bungee cord onto the leg of an old metal chair. They pounded on this, so I realized I had to PUSH the door tightly closed, not PULL it. I push a cement block up against it from my side so that really stabilizes it. (Because if it's possible to make excessive noise with a door that's opened one-tenth of an inch, they know how.)

Cement block; note old crutch leaning against wall to the right.

Since they still managed to scratch, I stretched an old rag rug around the bottom half of the door on their side and I securely fastened it there with a staple gun. This way I don't hear the scratching - it's muffled. Because believe me, they work at this door all night long even more skillfully than those guys who actually did escape from Alcatraz.

Rag rug. Not shredded yet. Thanks, Christmas Tree Shops.

Success! I felt the wondrous joy of an uninterrupted night's sleep. Almost. Because, don't you know, I worried about those damned cats. Who was sleeping where? Were there enough blankets in their baskets and boxes? What if some chemical thing, paint thinner or something, got knocked off the shelf and tipped over and spilled...would they perish from the fumes? Did they feel that I was abandoning them? Were there animals outside, deer or foxes (both seen in this yard) peering in on them through the little ground level windows, taunting them perhaps? And worst of all, especially on a very windy night, was the old door to the outside holding shut?? It's not a bulkhead or overhead door, see, it's just a regular garden variety one with a doorknob and, of course, a lock that I double-check every night. After I turn the lock I lean on the door to make sure it's fastened all the way and won't blow open. It's peace of mind for me; little enough, but some.

Then one night a couple of weeks ago when I leaned on the door it unexpectedly flung open and I, in turn, was almost flung out into the backyard in my nightgown (beside the point but I'm including it). This cannot be, I thought. I pulled it shut and locked it again, and leaned on it -- and vrooom, again it flings open, and "Shit," I said. For the lock to just give up the ghost with no warning. But it had; now what? I had to get the door to stay shut. It's not like I could drag a bureau (if there happened to be a bureau in the cellar, which there did not, though there is almost everything else down there) and push it up against the door, because the door doesn't open inward, it opens OUT. So out I go, looking around for heavy stuff out in the back yard.

Believe it or not there were slim pickins'. I ended up pulling an Adirondack chair out of the screen porch, hauling (with no small effort) another one of those cement blocks over and dumping it on the seat of the chair, and leaning the weed whacker against it. I figured I'd go back down through the inside and finagle something else with another bungee cord just to be on the safe side.

It had started raining, not a heavy rain, but enough to feel like cold spit on my head and make the yard slithery under my bare feet. So I ran around the side of the house and went to let myself in the front door. And could not believe it -- I had already locked that door from the inside. "Isn't this a fine frigging how-do-you-do," I ~~snarled~~ murmured. It's important to note here that there's a hook-and-eye lock here, too.

I felt sure that something thin would fit in between the storm door and the screw hook so I could lift it open. Nope. NOTHING. Thin twig, no. Old envelope from the stack of recycling on my front porch, no. Miserably, I tried yanking the thing open. I could not have cared less that this meant a new screw hook lock. But nope. I have strong arms, too, if I do say so. But I could not get in my own front door (and was too pissed to acknowledge that this should have made me feel secure). Back around to the back yard it was, where I morosely dismantled my clever and very heavy improvisation and let myself back into the cellar. The two of them were sitting there staring at me. I think they were snickering. Or they would have been if possible. I dragged myself upstairs, undid the screw hook on my front door and clumped back down to the cellar. I caught them both watching the door to see what was going on but as soon as I came in they both started getting washed up (it is a dirty job sleeping for hours on the back of the couch and/or bed). Like the Pink Panther I slithered back outside and started dragging things to the door; fortunately it was just that spitty little rain still, nothing heavy, but the motion detector light had snapped on and moths were flitting a little too close to my ears, nose and mouth. I have kind of a phobia about moths.

Finally, when I was again fairly satisfied that the door was blocked with enough heavy stuff to withstand tornadic winds and not blow open, I walked back up the hill on the side of the house and let myself in the front door. And locked it behind me. And with my heart pounding, went to bed. It seems that all the reckless and unnecessary activity had given me restless leg syndrome or something of the sort because I flailed around all night and caught myself turning from front to back to front like somebody flipping a pancake on a hot griddle. They don't care, I thought. They do not care what I go through, they have NO empathy. They only want to eat and play and squabble with each other, and wake me up incessantly and preen. I should throw them out to the coyotes once and for all. Little bastards!

I did finally doze off and when I went down the next morning to let them up, I felt a little better about the whole affair. Or more resigned (I could be confusing that with better). Anyway there they were, the two of them, big as life. Molly took her designated reconnaissance walk behind the washing machine, under the window and through an aisle of boxes to get to the stairs (I don't know what she looks for on the way). Buddy ran halfway up, then did his customary about face so the two of us could head-butt each other twice and then I could loudly kiss his forehead. I'm too fuzzy headed to recall when all that disgusting behavior began but it's mandatory now.

My father was kind enough to buy a brand new lock later that day and stand out in the heat and install it. Oh, and about Jamaica. I have been to the islands, but not to Jamaica, not yet. Having grown up in a house full of music and a father who would play guitar and sing "Jamaica Farewell" to me as a lullabye, not to mention the whole ganja-Rasta thing (irie, mon), it's an island I've always wanted to visit. It's looming there as a dream: Montego Bay, Dunn River Falls, the coffee plantations, the Reggae...please, let it happen. In winter. I DESERVE IT. I don't care how long the plane ride is or how many connections and layovers because I can spend the time writing long essays about my AWFUL CATS AND THE THINGS THEY MAKE ME DO. Late at night. With screw hooks, cement blocks and yard furniture. (In spitty rain.)

HOW TO SAVE A LIFE

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 02:41:00 +0000

For ten and a half years, from 1983 to 1994, I worked as a municipal social worker. I fell into this job; I had not the slightest inclination toward this sort of career and, in fact, could probably have used a little social work myself. (I was 28 years old, had a 2-year college degree in Liberal Arts and lived with my parents.) This was not a big city but rather a small town, the one I'd grown up in. If you think this meant there wouldn't be much real action going on, think again: I saw it, heard it, and very probably smelled it, all of it. (And on the top floor, alone, without a panic button.)

The job description, basically, was to administer the General Assistance program "in accordance with state mandates." It's all done by the state now, in fact, but back then if you needed money you came to see me. If you met the eligibility guidelines I slipped a voucher to the Town Treasurer who would cut a weekly check, either temporarily -- if you had minor children and were pending State Aid, or were disabled and pending Social Security -- or ongoing, if you had no other source of income and agreed to participate in the town Workfare Program. This was the dry stuff, I'll admit, and required reams of paperwork and keeping a yearly ledger by hand -- I'm lucky I had an adding machine that took tape, never mind a computer.

This wasn't all, though. There was another aspect of the job, and that was to be a referral service for -- and often a liaison between -- the client who needed help and the agency or person who'd be able to supply it. There was some guidance for this, of course...conferences, information dissemination, and Info-Line. (Thank you, whoever invented Info-Line.) Over the years I'd built up my "Anonymous Angels" too -- townspeople who wanted to help in some way but remain unnamed; I could call them when soon-to-be new parents had need of a crib, or when there wasn't going to be a Christmas this year for a big family, or when someone deserving needed their oil tank filled. There was no telling who would walk through my door next, or what they'd need; one day it might be a wig for a woman with cancer, the next a grieving father who did not know where to turn for help with his murdered daughter's funeral expenses, the next day finding a lawyer for a 15-year-old boy who wanted to be legally emancipated from his parents. This was not Happy Valley.

It was a job that made me feel important, gratified and at times at my wit's end. And usually, people moved on...I might never know what happened, or how they made out, or what became of them, but it was a learning experience for both (or all) of us. That much is a given. And as time went by I realized: with the exception of a few repetitious ne'er-do-wells who felt they were entitled to damn near everything, these people were on the other side of the desk could easily have been me -- and my mantra became: there but for the grace of God go I.

One day a couple a bit older than me came into my office, shaky, wide-eyed and with an air of desperation. "It's our son," they said. "He has nowhere to go and we can't take him because we can't help him. He's 20-[something] and he needs treatment for substance abuse. No one wants him. He has no insurance. We are afraid he is going to die." Not on my watch, I said. And I got on the phone.

They were quite right; none of the inpatient treatment programs in the surrounding areas wanted him. "We have no beds available," they said, or "Sorry, but without a guarantee of payment..." I looked into the eyes of these parents. I got back on the phone. I begged. I pleaded. I stopped just short of offering to pay for the treatment myself, which of course I could not do. I took it as my challenge and my mission -- to find help for this kid, a kid who, sadly, would probably slip right back into the self-destructive behavior anyway, but he was going to have at least a chance. I tapped hospitals and treatment centers in a gradually widening circle. We were so discouraged. I knew the State Hospital would take him for a detox but after that he'd be pretty much on his own again...and he needed more. He needed an ongoing program, and by Jesus, I was going to find him one, and then -- a facility said okay.

I wrote down the information for the parents and they literally ran out the door with it.

Weeks went by; maybe a few months, I don't quite remember. Every day something new came down the pike, another challenge, some new law to learn or case to be researched, more goddamn paperwork, and worst of all, the politics. This was a municipal position, and non-union; we were subject to new and often unpleasant treatment by new employers every two years, and if they didn't like us or didn't like the job we were doing, it was one, two, three you're out. Election time was nearing. The atmosphere at Town Hall began to shift and change. We could no longer operate as a well-greased cog; we had to watch our backs.

One day, a striking young man in a leather jacket strode into my office, holding a single red rose. He was smiling broadly. I could only begin to imagine what this was all about.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Tyler Smith." (Not his real name, of course.) It was the substance-abuse case, of all people, and the kid standing in front of me looked a little the worse for wear, but happy nonetheless. "I know what you did for me," he said, "And I just want to say thank you." Thank you!? In the midst of all the slings and arrows came a beating heart, a big smile, and a sign of hope. I hugged him, and wished him all the luck in the world.

Out with one administration and in with another and the workplace became needlessly miserable for not just me, but a number of others. We were told to keep hand-written logs of everything we did each day, from opening the mail in the morning to locking our desks at night. We had Staff Meetings every week which accomplished nothing and took up precious time, since each of us had our own separate tasks which until now had simply fallen into place as they should have without interference. This new atmosphere did not bode well. There were rumors. There were whispers and closed doors. There were ongoing "Executive Session" (strictly private) meetings by the powers-that-be. Our hours were slashed, especially mine, and after I turned in my daily log I was told not to get involved with helping people any more -- just do the assistance applications and distribute the checks. Helping people wasn't in my Job Description.

I was completely bewildered. How do you do this, I thought...when they come to you and look you in the eye and ask you, how do you say you can't when you know you probably can? Do you just turn your back? What do you say, that your hours have been slashed so you just don't have the time to help them? I realized my days were numbered now and the way I felt about the job's evolution and the suddenly shifty eyes and shadowy offices, that was okay by me.

Years went by as years do, and I found happiness as a library technician until chronic Lyme Disease kicked my ass so hard it effectively disabled me. I worked as long as I could, with double vision, weak arms and numb legs, but finally, I had to stop and apply for help, first from the state and then from Social Security. This wasn't easy, and was made more difficult by the sometimes harsh and haughty demeanor of the person I had to apply to -- at times it was an old colleague, for one reason or another, and there was a collective sigh and rolling of the eyes at that. But I had no choice.

Yesterday I was shuffling around the grocery store, tired, sweaty, and in a hurry. A guy with a carriage passed me by the ice cream section and from the corner of my eye I saw him stop, turn around and look in my direction. It didn't register that he had stopped to look back at me. "Um," he said quietly, "Excuse me, but are you...Linda?" I didn't recognize him, but because people do confuse my first name (it's the Linda Blair/Exorcist thing I guess) I corrected him, figuring maybe he knows me from somewhere, maybe he's someone's brother or husband or son or... "I'm Laurie," I said. "You worked at the Town Hall?" he said. "I did," I answered, and I felt a flicker of familiarity -- I have seen this guy somewhere before. "You helped me a lot when you worked there," he said. I was still puzzled and then he smiled and said "I'm TYLER?!!"

Oh my God, I thought, and "Oh my God," I said, "Tyler." Of course he politely asked "How are you? How have you been?" I haven't been all that great, but what do you say, really -- "I'm good," I said, and then I realized I was good, seeing his handsome, healthy grown-up face. "And you?" Funny, even as I asked, his smile broadened until it outshone the fluorescent lights overhead and I suddenly knew what he was going to say. "I'm doing really well," he said. I hoped he was telling the truth. "That was a long time ago, Tyler," I said, "That was in the late 1990s." His smile widened. "Yes," he said. "I'm 42 years old now, and I've been clean and sober for 19 years."

That stopped me in my tracks. I shook my head; I didn't know what to say, and I had to just hug him again. "I'm an operating engineer now," he said with obvious pride. I wanted to ask more questions, to know if he was living in the area, if he'd ever gotten married and/or had kids, but he began to push the cart down the aisle again. So I wouldn't get to know everything, but that was okay. He had told me the most important thing. You remember the old "Mary Tyler Moore" show? Remember how she's walking in the city and she suddenly takes off her hat and throws it up in the air? I would have done that, I think, if I'd been wearing one. I smiled all the way home.

For the last four years that I'd worked there, I'd have to say that the job at Town Hall had been the worst job I'd ever had.

Yesterday I think it became the best.

THE NIGHT THAT RUSSELL WAS BORN

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Spoiler alert: Russell, my nephew, was not in fact born on this particular night. However, in the spirit of an essay by James Thurber entitled “The Night The Bed Fell,” which is how his family always referred to it even though the bed falling was about the only thing that didn’t happen that night, I take the same literary license.

Our joy knew no bounds in October, 1989. My brother Bob and his wife Rosemary were about to give their six-year-old son Robert a new brother or sister. (We all knew while in utero that Robert was a boy, but this time around everybody opted to be surprised.) We had collectively decided that should Rosemary feel the need to leave for the hospital at some ungodly hour of the night, my father would go up and stay with Robert because he (my father) was used to getting up at all hours, anyway. (So was Rosemary’s mother, who often worked third shift as a nurse, but she was somehow spared.)

Sure enough, around a week or 10 days before her official “Due Date” Rosemary called around dinnertime to warn everyone that she thought she was in labor. The doctor had said to lie down to see if the contractions went away, in which case they would not be labor pains (yet). Nevertheless at about 9:00 P.M. she and Bob decided to leave for the hospital, just to be on the safe side.

We duly alerted my father who came groggily down the stairs, put on his hat and overcoat over his pajamas and headed up to my brother’s. After a fairly short period of time my mother, in terrible suspense, decided she could wait no longer, and followed him to the scene of action. Once there, she called to fill me in. We were very excited. However, in the background I could hear my father grumbling that he couldn’t be expected to get any sleep when all around him people were talking on the phone. “There,” my mother said, “He’s going to go sleep in their room.”

We talked some more. I was washing, drying and re-hanging my mother’s living room curtains for no reason other than nervous energy, though it never hurts to have clean curtains on the windows, be it spring or fall. Finally, my mother noted she saw headlights coming down the long driveway. I hung on. Yes, it was my brother returning home but without his wife; they had decided to keep Rosemary overnight in the hospital, just in case.

As our mother picked up her coat and purse to head back home, my brother had gone into the master bedroom, turned on the light and found my father sleeping deeply. My brother didn’t particularly wish to sleep with our father (Dad snores and sleeps on the diagonal) and politely requested that he move. Grumbling again, louder this time, my father got up and headed for the small single bed in the room that was to be the nursery. “I don’t know how anybody can be expected to get any sleep around here,” he was saying.

My mother headed home again. It was pretty much the middle of the night by now. I hadn’t slept, nor had my mother or brother or, presumably, Rosemary. However, by this time my father had slept in four different beds (well, one was a couch, but that’s neither here nor there). At around 8 A.M. my father returned, clad in hat, overcoat, pajamas and slippers. He was not in good humor. Apparently when he had finally had a quiet bed all to himself, he found the room too cold and couldn’t see the numbers on the thermostat. He had piled as many things as possible on top of himself including baby blankets and old coats from the closet. He said he had hardly slept a wink all night, what with constantly being disturbed and then cold. And to top things off my brother had gotten a phone call at 7 A.M. from the hospital requesting that he come pick up his wife, as no baby was imminent.

Of course, Russell was born a week or so later. I wish I could say there was no drama connected to his birth but alas, there was some. Suffice it to say that a few unexpected – and harrowing – details occurred. In the end, though, it all turned out just fine. It’s just a good thing that by then everybody was rested up from The Night That Russell Was Born.

DIRECTIONS: FREE WITH EVERY PURCHASE

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 18:38:00 +0000

Some time ago I blogged about a troubling phenomenon known to my nearest and dearest as The Forty Degree Thing. I was heartened to read the comments and discover that lots of other people also get the 40-Degree Thing (well, I guess “lots” would be overstating it but that’s only because not that many people subscribe to my blog. Enough, let’s just say. There was one comment.) We also, in our family, have “Bob Zuppe Things” affectionately named after my uncle who, among other misadventures, once had to move with his wife into a hotel because he had temporarily ruined the bathroom in their condo by trying to fix his own plumbing. He also showed up on the wrong day for his colonoscopy. Anything we do with the best of intentions seems more often than not to turn into a "Bob Zuppe Thing." Well, now we have a new Thing: the “Mingle The Change Thing." The "Mingle The Change Thing" was born last week.

Every so often, it becomes necessary for someone to retrieve something from one of the lower built-in cupboards in my mother’s sitting room. A game of Yatzee, a hammered aluminum tureen that was one of my parents’ wedding presents in 1946, old political newspaper clippings, and a set of permanent rollers that belonged to my grandmother are among the many treasures that live there, but usually we’re looking for a photo. These are in the cupboard with the boxes of old schoolwork and report cards my mother never threw out. We are talking from kindergarten (1957 for my brother, 1961 for me) on up to 12^th grade. This stuff is pretty good for some amusement and great for nostalgia, but there was one bothersome year – 5^th grade I think – when it seemed like every assignment I did was marked with a big bold underlined “F.D.” in red ink. With exclamation points. Like this:

F.D.!!!

Translation: FOLLOW DIRECTIONS!!! I, of course, always thought I HAD followed directions and could never figure out where I’d gone wrong. Really, I knew I wasn’t STUPID so what did the other kids know that I didn’t? How come they knew how to F.D.???

Well, if it’s spelled out really well for me I can follow directions just fine. Especially geographical directions (I am also good at mazes). There is no ambiguity with these kind of directions (except it is occasionally a guessing game when someone tells you "it's the third right after the fourth stoplight -- or no, the fourth light after the third right...I think). It's the ones that require mind-reading I trip up on. One specific thing comes to mind. It took place in 1991.

“What did you THINK I was telling you? What did you THINK?” my friend Gregg was bemoaning; we had been on a week-long jaunt to Canada after I’d read all the Anne of Green Gables books and took it in my head that I wanted to see L.M. Montgomery’s (the author’s) house in Prince Edward Island. I had weaseled Gregg into going with me. To earn travel money we held a month’s worth of weekend tag sales set up on my parents’ screen porch, which no longer had screens, though it did have a roof, so we didn’t have to pack all the stuff up every time and set it up again. Though we should have, since it rained every week, and just drying stuff off and cleaning up the water took more time than that would have. We had the oddest stuff (well, I guess most tag sales do). Gregg, who had worked the window displays at G. Fox, would swoop in at the last minute and do “merchandising;” while my contribution (which I thought very clever) was a big bag of hotel shower caps one of my aunt’s friends had given her and a sign “Free Shower Cap With Every Purchase.” (People made sure they got theirs too.)

The most successful sales were made by my brother, who horned in and sold my uncle’s old car for $75 (and then refused to give the money back when the buyer couldn’t get it through inspection and my brother KNEW this) and Gregg’s old set of encyclopedias with one volume missing. The girl who bought it seemed like she had a head on her shoulders, too…anyway, I think we made $110 total. Since our plan was to camp rather than stay in a hotel, we figured we were probably safe; also, we were taking my Dodge Omni, a sub-compact so good on gas I’d give my right big toe to have one nowadays.

It was not a trip without turmoil here and there. I got terribly seasick on the six-hour ferry trip from Bar Harbor, Maine to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Seasick and sunburned. After driving the entire length of Nova Scotia (pretty fast since it took us awhile to realize we were now in the land of metric mph) to catch a second ferry across the Northumberland Strait to P.E.I. we were queued in the line for the last ferry of the night, when it looked like they weren’t going to let us on. I mouthed “Pleeeeease?” and made praying motions til two beefy guys in orange jumpsuits took pity on us and motioned us forward, literally picking up the car and moving it with me in it when they didn’t quite like Gregg’s parking job. And Gregg had carped so much about having to “drive, drive, drive on my vacation,” despite the fact that it was my car and I assured him I would gladly take over, that I had to lie and say “I’m sorry” when I was no such thing and I really wanted to shove the keys up his ass.

P.E.I. was beautiful, though, with its red cliffs and dazzling views of the water, sweet looking black and white cows and freshness in the air. The camp site was cheap -- $12 a night, I think -- but buggy. The tent, which I'd just bought but hadn't used yet, was a cinch to set up but unfortunately not long enough for either of us, so we had a choice of sleeping like pretzels or sticking our feet out the front flap. We chose the latter, and yes, of course it rained. But I did get to L.M. Montgomery's, clotted with other tourists as it was.

The ride home was calm and warm, listening to Chris De Burgh on Canadian stations and chasing glimpses of the Northern Lights. We stopped again in Yarmouth and found a funky motel for the night, then hit the road running the next day.

The last toll booth before Connecticut was looming ahead and if we had two dollars between us it would have been a miracle. Very frequently, when I travel, I arrive home broke as hell. Flying by the seat of my pants, as it were. (See "Houston, We Have A Problem" for a very good example.) This was no exception. "I'll tell you what we're going to do," Gregg said; "Separate all the Canadian money from the American money. The coins." In the dark of a car traveling 70 mph down the turnpike, I picked out "Loonies" -- Canadian quarters, so named because of their imprint of loons -- from the familiar George Washington quarters, John F. Kennedy dimes and who is it, Jefferson? nickels.

"And now mingle it," said Gregg. Ohhhhh-kay. I tossed the coins all back together into one pile on my lap. "Wait wait wait wait ---" Gregg was saying. "Don't throw it all back together!!" "But you said MINGLE it," I protested. "Yes," he said, "mingle the Canadian and American money together, enough for the toll. I wanna get rid of the Canadian coins." I thought for a minute. "Why?" I asked, "they take Canadian money in America." Gregg made a noise that sounded like he was in pain. "NOT THE POINT," he said. "I don't know why you can't just follow directions! What did you THINK I was telling you??!!"

Fortunately we did get through the toll booth okay and sped toward home, stopping once in Worcester, Massachusetts at a deserted phone booth so I could call my father. He had been taking care of Gregg's cats and I wanted to tell him to leave Gregg's key in the mail box because it was sure to be the middle of the night when we rolled into Connecticut. Gregg kept the car running and yelled "Hurry up, this is the kind of place where people get murdered!!" Anyway, we made it.

So the other day my neighbor Bonnie -- my very close neighbor, it's a two-family house -- called me in mid-afternoon and asked me to do her a favor. Her husband Bill was working late and she wasn't sure what time she would get home, so could I go put her chicken in the oven at 325 degrees, or else they wouldn't eat until 9:00 P.M. The chicken was in a big red casserole dish in her fridge, all ready to cook. Naturally, a chicken dinner for me was in the deal. I said "Of course, Bonnie," and let myself into her kitchen. Sure enough, there was the chicken. The casserole dish was very heavy, but I managed to carry it through the two doors and stuck it in my oven as directed. Then I lay down on my bed to watch "Judge Judy" and wait for the crew next door to arrive. The house smelled wonderful of whatever buttery herb concoction the chicken was sitting in, and I couldn't wait to eat it.

An hour or two later there was a knock on my door; there stood Bonnie wearing two large oven mitts. "You put it in YOUR oven?" she asked in an incredulous voice. And before she even got the words out I understood. She had not spelled it out precisely; "put it in THE oven," she had said. It had simply seemed logical to put it in mine. Bonnie carried the dish back to put in her own oven to finish cooking, bringing me a plate of delicious chicken and fixin's a little while later as promised. Was I embarrassed? Was I defensive? No, not really. I hadn't done the right thing BUT I hadn't exactly done the wrong thing either.

So I called Gregg and informed him that I had done a "Mingle The Change" thing. I knew he would appreciate it, and he did. He was not in the least surprised by it though. In my mind's eye as I was relaying the incident all I could envision were huge letters:

"F.D.!!!"

The thing is, directions are often more trouble than they're worth. Take the ones that come with your new gas grill or crib, for instance. You know that no one fluent in the English language proofreads these. You know you will have more "Screw A"s than you apparently need while you'll be sadly lacking in "Bolt C"s and you're going to have to improvise and hope the thing stays together. At least that's what happens to ME. Really, need I say more???

P.S. Yes I do. Need to say more. Awhile back I had a morning doctor's appointment in a town about 20 miles away. Coincidentally my friend Holly had an afternoon appointment in the same town. I said "Why don't you come with me, we'll go for a bite of lunch in-between appointments?" Sounded good to her, so off we went. She patiently sat through my appointment. After lunch I asked her where her appointment was. She took out the card and gave me the address.

It sounded very unfamiliar, so I started cruising the streets near the hospital. Nothing. I kept turning around in bank parking lots and going over the territory again. Holly started getting nervous and watching the clock on the dashboard. "I know it's right NEAR here," she said. FINALLY out of the corner of my eye I saw a small blue sign with the right number on it. We pulled up. "There's no parking lot here," I said, "I'm just gonna park next door [it was a lawyer or accountant or something's office] because we haven't got time to spare." And then as we approached the building something about it looked familiar.

You guessed it. Same building I'd had MY appointment in a couple of hours previously. Only thing was we were in the front this time, and I had previously parked in the back. where I'm used to parking.

"You fools," said my friend Edi when I told her the story. I couldn't very well argue.

A NEW BLOG IN TOWN

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:02:00 +0000

Look for more posts at this link: "A Wrinkle In Time" (Thanks.)

TIMOTHY LEARY WOULD BE PROUD

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 03:34:00 +0000

Recently my mom, who's 86 years old but a real pip, required surgery to fix a hernia that had already been fixed once last summer but had been messed up when she fell and broke her pelvis this fall. Got that? Anyway, she got through the operation fine and settled into my brother's house to recuperate. We figured that would be easiest; if she went home she'd only have my dad, who can't hear a thing and is gone four hours a day (yes, he still works part-time) and if she came here with me we'd watch off-color movies and eat chocolate, for sure, but I live alone, and might need to call my brother for help anyway. (As I did at 10 P.M. last June when poor Mom, still very weak, was teetering half on, half off the sofa and I couldn't lift her by myself even though she's a skinny little bee-atch). So with a spare bedroom and three people on duty (my brother, Bob, his wife, Rosemary, and their 20-something son, my nephew Russell) you knew somebody was always there to cover.

When you're 86 nothing is minor, even a minor surgery. This one was outpatient, even though the one last summer was inpatient, and I'll tell you why: the original date for the fix-the-fix was late January. Mom stopped her long-acting bloodthinners several days ahead of time, as instructed, and began once-a-day short acting (24 hours) bloodthinning medicine injected into the stomach (yes, ow, and guess who had the job of shooting her up every morning? Take THAT, Ma!! This is for not letting me go out with Bruce Cassidy when I was 16 years old!! Yeah!!) So anyway we reported to the hospital as scheduled, but after routine pre-op bloodwork the surgery was cancelled since her blood was still a bit too thin for the surgeon's liking (and she already had her gorgeous flowered gown, sexy elastic stockings and fetching bonnet on, too! Damn.) The new surgery was scheduled for February 15th. So there'd be a couple more weeks of belly shots...not that either of us was too thrilled to hear that, but what the hell, you do what you gotta do.

And then all of the procedures which the surgeon had scheduled for that day were moved in one fell swoop to the Outpatient Center. I didn't like this, Mom didn't like this, my bro didn't like this, Dad didn't like this, NOBODY liked this. Mom is still recuperating from her broken bones and has a number of other fairly serious conditions. I'm no great fan of hospitals, but if anything went wrong, we know hospitals have a bit more in their arsenal than outpatient surgery centers. You'd better believe I called and questioned them. The surgeon's coordinator sighed and said "they just looked at the procedure...not the patient. They figured it was a safe one to do as an outpatient. Let me call and see if I can have her moved back to the hospital." Well, the outpatient people called; not only did they tell us there were no hospital beds available until April, they also reassured us that the surgeon goes over every scheduled procedure and if he didn't think it was safe to do as outpatient he wouldn't have okayed it. They just swept us off our feet; really, the thing is that Mom didn't want to have shots every day until April, nor did she want to contemplate surgery any longer. It had been an awful few months for her and she just wanted everything over with. I get that.

Anyway this is all background stuff, just to set the stage. So off to the surgical center we went, Mom, Bob, and me. The surgery was done accordingly. It took a while for Mom to wake up from whatever it was they used to knock her out, but even so we figured it probably wasn't as strong as what they used for the original hernia repair, so hopefully we wouldn't hear talk about loud Italian people holding a wake at the end of the hall or, worse, nurses and doctors walking through walls and a barking dog just outside the door. (If you think these are good ones, you should've heard Dad after he had his knee replaced. Chinese people made out of papier mache'??) Indeed, after we got Mom back home to Bob's and tucked into bed she was quiet, comfy and not the least bit out of her mind -- except for what's normal for our family.

When you're a bit doped up on pain meds and still have anesthetic in your system, it's understandable that you might think you're somewhere you're not...in your own bed, for example, when you're really bunked in at your son's up the road a ways. It's also not atypical to think you hear someone talking in another room when they're not there. These little drug-induced quirks and confusions aren't really too scary or unpredictable. Frankly the way Mom was lurching sideways onto my brother's shoulder as he spooned scrambled eggs into her I could swear she was, in fact, still under. I mean, she was perfectly capable of feeding herself, except she couldn't find her mouth. But this, too, we figured, would pass.

"Rosemary," said Mom the next day, "There was a bird in this room last night." Bird?? Rosemary assured her she would open a window and shoo the bird out. And no, there were no fish anywhere around. Even though Mom could smell fish. Or clams. And they were sticking to the bed clothes. "Were you, like, dreaming about this?" I asked. "I don't know," Mom said, "I think there really was a bird in here. I felt its feathers." Oh....kay. "Not just that," my brother told me, "She said she was at the Shoreline Clinic and Jerry Stevenson was there." The Shoreline Clinic is a satellite emergency room of our nearest hospital, and Jerry Stevenson is one of our cousins. "All night long," Bob said, "We heard her. 'Oh Jerry...you know I always loved you so much, you're such a good boy.'" Mom, it seemed, was having a little difficulty distinguishing between dreams and reality...and was rambling aloud in her sleep. "Gotta be the painkillers," I said. We were nonplussed by this, and we hoped it would stop soon...it's disconcerting to be a Baby Boomer and come from the generation of mind-bending drugs only to have your MOTHER be the one taking a trip.

Next morning my phone rang. "Laurie," said my brother, "We're gonna have to get the ambulance for Gramma." I asked him what was going on, and things had taken a bad turn. Apparently Mom had believed there to be a 6-car accident during the night, and no one was helping the people, so she felt compelled to take them some blankets. She'd grabbed the comforter from the foot of her bed, gathered it up in her arms and started to walk out of the bedroom unassisted -- and she'd fallen again.

The words were chilling. In September Mom had fallen at her own house, in the middle of the night, onto a hard wooden floor. My father had not heard her. For 45 minutes she lay there, unable to move, until she finally made a noise loud enough to wake him. From that point on it had been a steady diet of ambulances, hospitals, and convalescent homes, an abrupt departure from the normal, everyday world so reassuring in its constancy. (A walker became Mom's new best friend.) Mom had done incredibly well despite all this, and had finally been judged well and strong enough to go through this second abdominal surgery. And to recover at home (well, not her home, you know what I mean). We knew it was going to be a setback, and we all wished it didn't have to be done but, if wishes were fishes, etc. etc. etc.

Mom was very, very lucky this time. She had fallen on wall-to-wall carpet that had cushioned the blow somewhat. She only hurt her shoulder and it was only a bruise, not a break. We didn't know that or much of anything else that morning -- when I got to my brother's house (in record time) Mom was sitting on the bed, unsure of where she was (though she knew all of us) and talking about big bubbles hanging from the ceiling with crawly things in them. Things were crawling on the rug, too -- bugs, and cats under blankets that had been thrown on the floor. "You don't see this??" she asked calmly. Apparently she'd had a bad night, again jabbering, as well as asking why I didn't come in to help her since I was right outside -- she could hear me talking -- and I had broken the window to get in, not to make mention of the fact that I had gold front teeth.

We knew it had to be medication, since to the best of our layperson knowledge a person does not develop dementia that suddenly, unless there is an injury to the brain, maybe. So along comes the ambulance and a group of firefighters and Emergency Medical Technicians -- heroes all of them, believe me -- and they gently carry Mom out to a stretcher, and off we go. At the E.R. they did an EKG and some blood work, took vital sign readings, x-rayed the shoulder, gave Mom an I.V. treatment since she was a bit dehydrated (she isn't one to drink water), and took a CT scan of her head to make sure she wasn't having a stroke. All came out great. Mom was still goofy, insisting in an annoyed fashion she had two pennies and had dropped them in the sheets. She had not. After four hours she was discharged with instructions to call her own doctor in the morning. Mom did manage to yell down the hall "Look at that doctor, he's so good looking -- hey Dr. McDreamy!!" I told you she was a pip.

As it turns out the diagnosis did indeed appear to be a combination of the anesthetic -- which had not entirely left her system -- combined with some heavy duty painkillers. We were to force fluids to dilute the stuff as much as possible and switch from the hard stuff to Tylenol whenever we could, or break one pill in half. When I left my brother's house she was extending both arms out straight and fidgeting with her hands because bugs were still crawling up her arms, plus she had some stuff she wanted to fold -- towels and blankets I think. When I asked her about it she was pissed and said "Stop getting mad at me!" My sister-in-law simply brushed the "bugs" off, gently, and Mom lay down to rest. When I asked her if she knew where she was now she said "Chester Elementary School." I don't know why, but she had a smirk on her face and when I asked her what day it was she said "Fart day." Leads me to think she really had no idea but by kidding around she figured she'd be off the hook.

The next morning she was fine and back to having her wits about her, though when you are 86 you expect the occasional memory lapse, repetition or word retrieval problem. We're used to that and so is she. Here's the deal, though: no one told us how to handle a woman with delusions and visual plus auditory hallucinations. We simply had no clue. Before, when she and my father both had taken their post-surgical "trips," we'd just been quiet and waited for stuff to wear off. But really, what do you do? Do you agree with them? Ask questions? Argue? Reassure? Shut up??

Having a parent with Alzheimer's or another kind of dementia has to be close to unbearable, I'm guessing. Two of my aunts -- my father's sisters -- developed dementia late in life and had to go to convalescent homes. One of them was happy as a clam to be there and be waited on hand and foot, zoom up and down the hall in a wheelchair, have all her meals brought to her and just generally soak up the surroundings...and I miss her dreadfully, as do we all. But she's the exception. What if your mother or father or husband or wife is seeing things, hearing things and doesn't know who you are any more?? Mom's dementia was temporary and curable. In fact we were teasing her about it at first. Nonetheless, it was dangerous: she didn't know what she was doing, and she fell. She was very, very lucky when she did.

DON'T CALL ME, I'LL CALL YOU

noreply@blogger.com (Laurie Blair) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:38:00 +0000

So the other day I bought a 60-Minute card to add to my cell phone. I don’t have a cell phone “plan,” I have a pay-as-you-go TracFone. This means that I have to buy minutes every so often because my dates of service (and consequently my phone number) expire. You used to be able to buy 30 minute cards for ten bucks, but now the cheapest one is $20 for an hour of airtime. That’s the one I typically buy. They’re sold all over: Walmart, Walgreens, Cumberland Farms, et al. TracFone makes sure you know this by sending you reminder e-mails and leaving automated messages.

So that night I go to the function on my phone to add the card. You just type in the PIN number from your card and your hours and service days are updated. But, this time the phone wouldn’t take the PIN number. It kept saying “PIN number invalid.” Well. Don’t we just love it when our PIN number is invalid. Now I get to call Tech Support (India) for help. So I get a girl who’s very polite, who in fact hints that her whole reason for living is to help me, and she says she’s going to give me code numbers to enter on the phone and that should fix the problem. It does not. The code numbers generate an error message. All of them. About six. Repeated three times.

I am getting a sneaking suspicion that the guy I bought the phone card from forgot to activate it at the cash register. I ask Tech Support if this could be the case; “No ma’am,” the gal says, “It must be your phone. Your phone is no longer working properly, ma’am. You will need to buy another phone. I can sell you one if you like.” My phone is shot? I look at it and see that now the message “Prepaid Service Disabled” is displayed -- even though I still have 75 minutes left on it, as well as 8 voice mails I haven’t yet retrieved (and never would, now). I get a sinking feeling that this whole deal is not going to be easy or go well. Things that involve Tech Support, especially when you are talking to someone in a different country and they are trying very hard to speak legibly but not particularly succeeding, and you have to ask them to repeat things and feel you’re being impolite and bothersome but you have no choice, rarely bode well. (And as an aside, did you know that almost everybody in India is named Kimberly, Judith or Steven?)

Anyway I tell her thanks but no thanks about buying the new phone. Truth to tell, I already have another TracFone – a “Safelink” phone. I get 250 minutes a month on this phone at no cost; I’m eligible for this because I’m receiving disability. Safelink advertises that it’s very easy to transfer the number from your regular (old) TracFone into this one. I figure I’ll try this tomorrow morning when I’m fresh and not wrung out from an hour and a half on the phone to Tech Support (India).

So I call again the next day and I’m advised I need a new “SIM Card” to change the default number on the Safelink phone. The guy says they’re going to mail one of these to me and that I should call back after I get it. Sometime in the next 3 to 5 business days. Time to sigh really loud at this point, wouldn’t you say? HA. Keep some sighs in abeyance, you're gonna need 'em.

I am getting kind of nervous because I am about to embark upon a dog-sitting job and I want my parents, senior citizens with some health problems, to be able to reach me. But a few days later the SIM Card does indeed arrive. It’s a tiny little thing; I have to open the phone, remove the battery, take out one SIM Card and put the new one in. Not rocket science, nevertheless I rather triumphantly call India and inform them with some pride that I’ve done this and I’m ready to add my old phone number into this trusty Safelink. They fool around with whatever they have to do for a few minutes, apologizing for silence on the line, and then ask me for the number.

I have no idea what my number is, to be honest, so I keep it written down in my address book. I give them it to them. I hear “Hmmm……..” but I do not pay this the slightest attention. You have to allow for a certain amount of “Hmmm…”-ing to be done when someone’s half a world away on a computer entering data trying to make some sense of what you’re saying and also trying to impart helpful suggestions. By now I would say I have spent a good three to four hours on the phone to India if you add them all up. And spoken to six or seven people. (A lot of supervisors.)

Then I get a sinking feeling that something about this number isn’t right, and I double-check; sure enough, while not sure where I’d gotten it from, I’ve given the guy the wrong number by accident. “Shit!” I mouth, and “Sir!” I say. “That’s wrong! Don’t enter it!” Too late. If I’m going to change again I will need another new SIM Card, they say, which will be sent to me, sometime in the next 3 to 5 business days.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why I gave them this number or who the hell I got it from. The phone has actually rung a few times but I can’t understand what the person on the other end is saying. I thoroughly comb through the pages of my address book and finally find my error. Unfortunately the number I gave them was my cousin Peggy’s. I do not look forward to it, but I know I have to call her and spill the beans.

“Um, Peggy?” I stammer, “Lately I’ve been having trouble with my TracFone and…” “Me too!” she says – “I’ve been on the phone with India for about six hours!” Aha, I think, initially buoyed by this information, that someone else was having all this TracFone trouble too until I remembered who it was. The woman whose number I had inadvertently highjacked. Sabotaged. STOLEN.

Peggy took it in stride, to her credit. I told her I was waiting for a SIM Card to arrive so I could change back to my original number and give her hers back. As her phone wasn’t working at all, we agreed that I would take messages for her, “Especially the Lewises,” she said, “They’re in the islands while their house is being painted and I’m taking care of the cat.” We also narrowed down the calls which had been unintelligible: there’s a gal from the Phillipines who’s on Peggy’s bowling league and she doesn’t speak English very well, so we figured it was probably her. Peggy has a land line so she doesn’t get tons of calls on her cell phone, but still. Anyway, Peggy was waiting for her own SIM Card, since her phone went completely kaput. (Coincidence? Ha. We won't look too closely at that possibility.)

Next thing you know, MY cell phone went kaput. It read “Emergency Use Only” and had a zero airtime display. I didn’t like this. I hated being out of reach. A couple of days later I was checking my e-mail and I see one from TracFone confirming that a SIM card is on its way – to my cousin Peggy. So I called and told her it had been shipped. We wondered if it was my SIM Card or hers. We hoped they were sending two.

They did. I called the special “Manager’s Number” they’d given me. The phone rang a few times and then I got this automated voice stating that my call could “not be completed as dialed.” I figured I’d called the wrong number, called it again to make sure, and got the same recording. So I called India one last time (I hope). Strangely enough I got a girl who seemed to know what she was doing. I tried not to tell her all the stuff that led up to this, figuring it would simplify things to kind of pare them down, but was thwarted, since there were "notes" attached to my number and she was reading them. Anyway, it appeared, when I finally gave her the number from my other phone, it was “no longer available.” Regarding the original default number on the Safelink, she said nope, that wasn’t available either. I asked her what happens when numbers aren’t available – are they assigned to somebody else? “Probably, yes,” she said. Didn’t waste any time, did they. On the other hand, couldn’t they have told me PEGGY’S number was unavailable and thus prevented this entire situation? I guess not. So they just rolled the dice and gave me a new one.

Meanwhile, we still hadn’t solved Peggy’s problem. This became obvious when she called and told me she’d been on the phone with India again, and they’d told her that I had to “release” her number from my phone company so that TracFone could use it.

Peggy was getting just the slightest bit fed up. You could tell. I told her to come over and bring her phone and the ever-so-popular SIM Card. "Release the number," my ass. And furthermore Safelink and TracFone are both from the same company. Are you following this? Is anybody??

Peggy put her new SIM Card in and I called India again. I gave them Peggy's number. The guy said he couldn't assign that number because -- c'mon, let's all say it together -- IT WASN'T AVAILABLE. I asked him if it would be available if I released it. There was some silence on the line and then the guy, sounding more human than anyone so far, said "WHAAAAT??? NO!!!" Meanwhile Peggy's phone was loading with a brand new number unbeknownst to her or anyone else. We were able to find out the number, though, by pushing the "My Phone Number" function. And then I wrote it down with a huge "Peggy" next to it and an arrow pointing from the name. And then Peg said she had to get busy calling people with her new number. A few days later my land line rang. It was Peggy. "I'm parked right outside in your driveway," she said, "I have a couple of coupons for a free lunch at the new restaurant downtown. Come out and get 'em." I did. And I thought it was a very nice thing to do. Her way of saying "No harm done." Frankly, if I were her, I'd be more tempted to cut my phone lines instead. Until next time, India. It was nice knowing you. You have humbled and exhausted me. So long.