No Hill for a Climber

On a muggy and sweaty April afternoon, the trusty FedEx truck delivers the pet steps, leaving a bulky and almost unmanageable package that takes up a third of the front porch.  I haul the awkward, triangular shaped container inside and then spend a half hour fending off cats and cutting through a dozen layers of packing tape and industrial strength cardboard.  The folks who make these are serious about their products and leave no room for potential shipping damage - a well placed explosive device couldn't have made an impact - but it's no match for my stubbornness and carving knife.  Waving off cats with one hand, I hack, rip, tear, and slash until the steps are finally liberated.  The dogs, sitting a safe distance away, watch intently but do not approach.

It takes another ten minutes to repair the living room which now looks like the aftermath of a limited nuclear strike, and then I carry/drag/manhandle the three feet of carpeted steps to the bedroom and strategically place them next to the bed.  The dogs trail after me - curious but very cautious - like me, they're change resistant to a fault and aren't at all sure about this new addition.  It takes nearly an hour and more than a dozen treats before they will even get close.  Then another hour of repetition and encouragement, another dozen treats.  Over and over and over, I put their little feet on the first step then nudge and maneuver and coax to keep them there.   The black dog wants nothing to do with the entire process but I think there's hope for the little dachshund - he badly wants to be on the pillows with the kitten - and finally I sit on the bed and call him gently.  He begins to climb tentatively, anxiously, delicately, changing his mind in midstep several times, working up his courage gradually and then with one deep breath and a look of absolute steely eyed determination, he BOLDLY GOES WHERE NO NO DOG HAS GONE BEFORE.  He has conquered his fear and one cautious step at a time, he ascends.  He reaches the top step looking supremely self satisfied (and to be truthful, more than a little surprised), then steps lightly onto the bed.  The crowd goes wild!

Over the next few days, I work with the black dog but get nowhere.  She keeps a respectful distance between herself and the unfamiliar steps and contents herself, if a little resentfully, with being on the floor.  Wisely, the little dachshund shows no interest in bragging about his accomplishment and after a few more days, he no longer needs coaxing, climbing confidently and sure footedly on his own.

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer ~ Patton

Old Dogs, New Tricks

At fourteen, the black dog is still an emotional wreck and a holy terror but she doesn't have the spring in her step she used to when it comes to jumping.  She charges fiercely at the bed only to stop in mid-jump once she reaches it.  Then, like a sprinter, she backs up to get a running start and tries again.  She repeats this process a half dozen times, each attempt getting her closer but not to her goal.  It may be time to make a concession to her age.

Hold on there, tiger, I tell her and slip my hands under her belly to lift her onto the bed where she will, in a matter of minutes, immediately jump off and be back to square one.

The little dachshund doesn't bother with all the trying - he simply paws at me to get my attention and signal that he wants up - and I lift him easily.  His little short legs  and low slung little body aren't designed to jump and the breed is notorious for back and spine injuries.

Age and breeding against me, I finally give in and go on line in search of pet steps.  I'm not at all sure this will be wisely spent money but as my own back isn't getting any younger, I decide to try.

It's amazing what's out there - plastic steps, wooden steps, carpeted steps, fold-up steps, steps that convert to ramps and ramps that convert to steps, narrow steps, wide steps, non-skid steps, steps with side rails.

Good grief, I tell the black dog as I deposit her yet again on the bed and hear her jump down a few minutes later, What happened to simple?

I choose wooden for durability and workmanship, carpeted for stability, and a paw print design just because.

I have a suspicion that a couple of plain old 1X6 boards with a length of carpet glued on would do just as well but apparently fashion matters in the world of doggy steps - who am I to criticize a trend - and besides, I'd hate for word to get out that I was being chintzy with my little ones.  I'm absolutely sure they gossip through the fence with the Maltese next door.

The real question, of course, isn't about fashion or cost or ergonomics, but teaching old dogs new tricks.  Will they use a set of carpeted, wooden steps with a pawprint design?  No telling til we try.

It's said that when Dorothy Parker was asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, she gave the following now infamous reply - You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.

God preserve satire and elder dogs and the people who love them.







  

Skates, Bicycles & Music Lessons

Family, for me, is not a bedrock. It’s the hole I’ve crawled out of.
Laura Bogart

We lived on a quiet residential street in a town on the outskirts of Boston, in a two story white house with black shutters and a maple tree in the backyard.  The back yard was good sized and fenced all the way around so that property lines were clear and the dogs were protected.  The front yard, always mowed and green, was neatly divided by a flagstone walkway with a driveway on the side.  The neighborhood was not true upper class as there were a number of two family homes directly across the street and in the blocks on either side of us but it was comfortable.  No one struggled or collected food stamps, most mothers stayed at home, all the cars in the driveways were well cared for and reasonably new.  We had skates (both kinds, ice and rollers), bicycles, music lessons, a color television and went on regular vacations.  We were, from the outside looking in, a perfectly normal, intact family - two parents, three kids, a couple of dogs, public schooling and church every Sunday - unremarkable, ordinary, run of the mill, the very picture of middle America.  It wasn't a difficult illusion to maintain, at least not in the early years.

I was in elementary school when it started to go wrong.  Little things, mostly, my mother's pink Ford convertible parked a little crookedly in the driveway, finding her nodded off over her knitting when I got home from school.  She took to being sickly one or two mornings a week - migraines and some mysterious "woman trouble" my daddy assured us - now and again meals were under or overcooked.  She was more than usually bad tempered, sometimes flat out nasty.  She began to be forgetful, leaving half washed dishes on the kitchen counters or not noticing the overflowing laundry basket in the downstairs bathroom until the smell of mold was so strong that it made your eyes water.  Milk turned, ants would occasionally  be crawling in the sink, once she neglected to turn the iron off and the back door curtains caught fire.  My daddy spent more and more evenings and weekends at work and empty gold Miller beer cans started turning up in the trash, the cabinets, the linen closet, even the piano bench.  Late night fights were common - often punctuated by the sounds of breaking glass or the sharp impacts of solid objects connecting with solid walls - and then slamming doors, crying, the low hum of a stand off, silent but spiteful footsteps on the stairs, wailing and cursing.  It took several more years before things solidified and clarified themselves since no one ever acknowledged the problem in actual words - that would've been telling - but slowly we began to comprehend that the old lady drank like a damn fish and the old man wasn't going to do a damn thing about it.  We were on our own.

When I was older and had learned some of the cold facts about the realities and dynamics of addiction - it's a disease not a bad decision, for example - I might've found a little empathy and a little compassion but for the one inescapable truth about my family.  Truth to tell, I hadn't much cared for my mother for as long as I could remember, drunk or sober.  When not drinking, she was a cold, relentlessly critical, impossible to please and joyless woman who showed no love to anyone, least of all her family.  She cared desperately about appearances but made no secret of her contempt for her failure of a husband or her resentment of the burdens of her children.  When she drank, she was a disgusting, pathetic and dangerous lush, hiding behind the walls of that typical middle American home.  Either way, she used her indiscriminate venom and self pity like a second skin and by the time I was finishing grade school, the mild dislike I'd felt had turned to shame and hate.  I wanted out, with as much distance as possible between us. And I wanted it to be permanent.  My daddy might choose to stay and enable her, my brothers might choose to defend her and keep the liquor cabinet well stocked - as much for their own use as her's so it turned out - but I had had enough of violence and abuse and our own peculiar family values.  For me, the illusion had been exposed, the walls had turned transparent.   Family had always been a far and distant thing and losing it - as I fully expected I would if I were to take a stand - would be more a relief than a sacrifice.

Later on I was to wonder how many other secrets might be hidden behind all the neighboring middle class walls in our ordinary little part of town - how many other children were growing up cold, how many happy marriages were illusion - how many families were living in a hole and pretending it was bedrock.  Here so many years later, I still wonder.

To achieve true peace of mind, so many of my good friends like to tell me, you must forgive.  Anger and hate will eat holes in your soul, will turn you bitter and get in the way of your own inner happiness.

Maybe so.  But I suspect the combination of time, distance and scar tissue will do the same thing with less compromise.  My childhood rage is mostly past tense - I still write about it to remind myself that I survived,
to dodge the occasional flashback - but mostly it's like hauling ashes, a kind of maintenance to keep the old woodstove from clogging up.

Skates, bicycles and music lessons notwithstanding - for some wrongs - forgiveness is just not in my nature.

Neon & Noise

On the one side, there're debutante balls and cotillions for the well bred, young ladies and gentlemen from elite and wealthy backgrounds - very plantation-ish and genteel - and on the other there's the neon and noise of a downtown Saturday night on the riverfront.

The weather is agreeably warm and the stars, artificial and otherwise, are out.  Flying elephants soar in wild circles, carnies hawk their games of skill, the smell of popcorn and cotton candy is everywhere, and a red and blue and yellow neon ferris wheel twirls merrily.  The midway is clatteringly and chatteringly bright with enormous stuffed animals hanging from every booth.  Festival goers try their hand at everything - a pyramid of milk bottles, ducks in a shooting gallery, bingo.  You can buy beer or soda, foot longs or caramel apples. You can ride the screeching roller coaster, brave the tilt-a-whirl (CHILDREN UNDER 5 MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT!!! - now there's an optimistic sign) or creep through the haunted tower, menacingly aglow with alien-like green light.  The adults look tired, the carnies are hoarse, the children are wide eyed and the night is young.

I make my way through the crowd to the surprisingly well lit stage, find a secure corner, and unpack my camera gear.  The young man about to perform is something of a prodigy in our little town - still too young to play in bars, he's been on the music scene since before he was even a teenager - a sweet faced boy with good manners, the stage presence of an experienced and seasoned artist, and a love of music that absolutely shines through every chord and every lyric.  He waves at me, mouths Thank you for coming, and gives me a huge grin.  His mother gives me a hug and offers me a chair while his daddy efficiently goes about the business of setting up sound equipment.  I've always liked these people - they're a close knit and loving family - long on encouragement and support.   They understand family.  They appreciate music.  They respect dreams.

All along the makeshift midway, other families drift from ride to ride, booth to booth, some with children trailing after them like the tail on a kite.  There are lovestruck couples hand in hand, a wandering juggler and a fire eater.  And there are gangs of teenagers - mostly black, loud, scantily dressed, obnoxious - and speaking in a language that sounds only vaguely like English.  They travel in packs, shouting crude remarks and obscenities at each other, body slamming anyone who gets in their way.  Security guards watch them from a distance, now and again pulling one or two aside for a quiet chat.  Earlier in the day I was at the Makers Fair where the crowd was almost exclusively white and I'm struck by the difference in the atmosphere.  No one likes to talk about the underlying racism in this city but it's here and it's undeniable, I can see it on the faces in the crowd and I'm just as sure the same thing is on mine.  The arts and crafts street fairs with their wind chimes and home grown preserves and hair ribbons are one thing - here, at night on the midway, among the pulled pork sandwiches and corn dogs, it's quite another.  Trash is trash, I remind myself, and it comes equally in black and white, but the truth is that I wasn't uncomfortable at the Makers Fair and here I'm all too aware of my color and I feel just the slightest bit of unease.  I feel outnumbered, alone, a tiny bit apprehensive, and a little ashamed of what I'm feeling.  

Somewhere between the pageantry of the black tie traditions and the raucous neon and noise, there's a kind of middle ground where, I think, most of us live and for the most part, get along.  At least I hope so.

Jack & Cap'n Patch

He was called "Cap'n Patch" in honor of Gary Cooper's character in "The Wreck of the Mary Deare", a story of sabotage and a shipwreck and a man with a secret.  At one time, he'd had Cooper's height and easy good looks but life had been hard and by the time he settled back down on the island, he was gray and worn, his back curved like a horizontal comma and he relied heavily on a hand carved wooden cane, walking with slow, shuffling steps and never without a ruined, old, one eyed tomcat named Jack at his side.  Neither was known for affability - they walked the dirt roads in the late afternoons together but rarely returned a wave or a smile - and they spent their evenings alone on the unpainted front porch of Uncle Len's summer house which had been renovated for an artist couple from New York who discovered, after just one July, that island life wasn't for them.  Stoic, trusting to a self imposed isolation, suspicious and reticent - that summed up Jack and Cap'n Patch.

To keep himself in pipe tobacco and the cat in food - Jack, although an expert mouser and connoisseur of fresh mackerel had developed a liking for canned sardines - he made sculpture from driftwood.  Gulls and seascapes, sailing ships and lighthouses and the like, meticulously detailed and exquisitely painted, and Uncle Len would often take a half dozen pieces with him to sell to the tourists on the mainland.  A ship in a bottle once fetched an astonishing hundred and fifty dollars, a fortune at a time when you could buy cigarettes two for a nickel, but Cap never made a second.

Ain't enough life left in these old hands, he sighed and folded the paper money into his pocket, 'Sides, Jack and me, we got all we need.

He took, instead, to carving checkers and chess sets from the smooth, bleached pieces of driftwood we collected - a dime for every red wagon full, a quarter for the really pretty pieces - it was time consuming and demanding work but the finished sets brought high dollars on the mainland and even more at the one or two gift shops along the Digby Neck where tourists would pay ungodly sums for original art by locals.  Jack and Patch were in what the Arkansas travelers called "high cotton" in no time.

Damn foolishness if you ask me, the old seaman muttered, Ain't nothin' a monkey with a sharp knife couldn't do if'n he had the time.

Inevitably, Aunt Tessa - a dear friend of my grandmother's and a high flying specialty store buyer from California - was to discover Cap'n Patch, insisting against my grandmother's stubborn and solid advice, to meet the man and examine his work.

Stunning! she declared, holding up a black knight against the cloud crowded sky, Absolutely riveting work! 
She gave her feather boa a fling, twirled her bright skirts and settled down on the steps Indian style with her stylishly bare feet and painted toe nails tucked beneath her.  So, she demanded breathlessly, Cap'n Patch. Where have you been all my life?

Patch blinked, shifted in his rocking chair as if willing it to move away from the clearly mad woman who had descended upon him.  Tessa calmly reached one bejeweled and bangled hand toward the scarred up old tomcat and began to scratch his ears - we all drew a quick breath, sure there would be blood on the waters - but rather than withdraw, Jack stretched toward her and began to rumble low in his throat, a contented and surprisingly peaceful sound. 

Damnation, I heard my grandmother say, Didn't know the cat had it in him.

Cap'n Patch hesitated, looking from the cat to Aunt Tessa and back to the cat.  The sun moved from behind the clouds.  In one long, graceful motion - Like pouring syrup, Nana said - Jack stretched to his full length and casually rolled onto his back, all four paws extended.  Tessa stroked his exposed belly absently and Patch, so taken aback that he dropped his lit pipe and sparks flew like tiny firecrackers, hardly noticed.  He started to rock, looking somewhere between thoughtful and amused, and then his mouth curved discreetly at the corners and he began to smile. 


Ain't never been one to argue with the cat, he said amiably, Whatcha have in mind, ma'am.

Sooner or later, I wonder, don't we all find a reason to give up our solitude and let go of our secrets.

A Small Violation

To be honest, I was already in a temper.   

The latest software upgrade had - predictably - disabled our system for two days in a row and every other call was from tech support although none had proven useful.  I was tired from listening to their rapid-fire, third world chatter, tired of repeatedly asking them to please slow down and enunciate, tired of their excuses.  A mental health minute seemed called for - I snatched a plastic bottle of water and a single cigarette and went to sit at the back door - the office was at its usual meat market temperature and I thought a few minutes of warmth and quiet might help.

I didn't notice the old car until it had made its third pass - an ancient and uncared for rattletrap with a roaring muffler spewing exhaust - mismatched doors and duct tape holding the rear windshield together.  When it stopped in front of me, my heart sank.  An old woman climbed out, bent and limping and toothless, an old rag wound around her filthy hair and toe-less house slippers on her talon-ed and dirty feet.  The ragged edge of a torn slip hung beneath the hem of her grimy house dress and her ill fitting sweater was stained and faded with age.

Ma'am! she called out to me, Ma'am, you have 'nuther one?

I knew immediately that she meant my cigarette and shook my head.

No, I told her as she advanced steadily, Sorry.

She was so close I could smell the cooking grease and unwashed clothes and when she reached out one gnarly old hand toward me I almost flinched.

Den kin ah have your short?  she asked.

I've lived in the south for a good many years but it still took a second or two to make sense of the words.

Kin ah have your short, she repeated, 'fore you be finishin' it?

I looked at her, then at my cigarette, then back at her.  Was she really asking for my half-smoked cigarette, I wondered, and then realized that not only was she asking, she was expecting.  A twisted old hand with chewed up and dirt rimmed nails was inches away from me making grasping motions.  Somewhere deep in my belly, surprise, disgust and revulsion had a brief, acid-filled battle - an image of my mother surfaced and for an instant I thought I might gag - then the need to put as much distance between me and this sad, nasty, old woman kicked in.  I  shrugged, handed over what was left of my Virginia Slim Menthol Light and scrambled back inside, not exactly hurriedly but not taking my time either.  I didn't want to see her making her way back to the battered old wreck in the parking lot.  I didn't want to think about what would make a person so brazen that they would accost a total stranger for a cigarette.  Hey, look!  I imagined her saying to the driver of the car, There's someone smoking!  Let's get her!  Did they prowl around back doors and loading docks in search of victims?  Was her whole appearance a put on to gain sympathy?  Did I look like someone who wouldn't make protest?  I felt - ridiculous as it sounds - as if I'd been somehow violated. I've smoked for something over fifty years.  It's a vile and dirty habit, I'm not proud of it, and not a day goes by that I don't wish I'd never started (that's addiction for you) but nevertheless, there are rules.  You can, between good if not intimate friends, ask for a drag off someone else's cigarette.  You can bum off a friend and although more rarely, sometimes off someone you barely know.  You can panhandle for a cigarette but not the one someone else is in the process of smoking.

Not much of an infraction, I told myself as I scrubbed my hands in soap and hot water and added hand sanitizer for good measure, but I still wanted to wash it off.

  

Car Notes

It doesn't happen often but one or twice a year the finance company that holds the note on my little car neglects to send me a monthly payment demand notice.  It's annoying because this means I have to call them and go all through all the security nonsense and voice mail obstacles before someone will give me my account number and their payment address.

I explained this to Ryan, the polite and engaging young man at the finance company, and in record time he provided me with my loan number, gave me the mailing address, assured me it hadn't been the slightest inconvenience and wished me the very best day anyone could hope for.  I made myself a note to mail the check first thing in the morning but as sometimes happens, the next morning was mayhem and half over before I remembered.  I snatched an envelope and hurriedly scrawled the address on it, added a stamp, and walked it to the mailbox, not wanting to miss the morning pick up.  It was the next day before I realized I hadn't put the loan number on the check and cursing my forgetfulness, had to make a second call.

I explained this to Annie, the neither polite nor engaging young woman at the finance company, and asked if she would note my account with my telephone number and call when they received the check.

We don't do that, she said shortly, It's automated.

What is? I asked pleasantly although I could already see that this was going to end badly.

There are no people receiving checks, she said impatiently, You'll have to call back or stop payment and send another one.

If, I said carefully, still managing to be civil and not take the bait, there are no people, you must have an awesome automated system.  What exactly happens to checks you can't identify?

We hold 'em, she snapped and this time she made no effort at all to conceal her contempt, You can call back after it's had time to get here.

Well, I said calmly, determined to ignore the red flecks of rage that were beginning to drift across my field of vision, Since none of this would be happening if you'd sent me a monthly bill, perhaps there's some room to make an accommodation here.  At some point, an actual person must.....

We don't do that, she interrupted and it was very close to a snarl.

I counted to ten, took a breath, reminded myself that she wasn't worth it.

How extraordinarily unhelpful you've been, Annie, I said slowly and so sweetly that it made me a little queasy,

Thank you sooo very much.  And hung up.

That was when I looked up and saw our little nurse laughing so hard she was in tears.

In the words of Bette Midler, I told her and smiled in spite of myself, Fuck'em if they can't take a joke.

Pepper Wars

I don't like pepper on my food.  Never have, never will.

During the last days of my second marriage - when we were speaking at all - I repeatedly asked my husband not to put pepper on my steak.  He repeatedly ignored me.

It might've been because he thought I should like pepper on my steak.

It might've been because he thought I would come to like pepper on my steak.

The truth was, that he liked pepper on his steak in much the same way as he liked always knowing better than anyone else and having a better way of doing just about everything.   He didn't care in the slightest about my likes or dislikes but he did enjoy making decisions for me.  Until the night when I heaved an entire prime rib, plate and all - ruined and blackened with pepper - in his general direction and snarled that the dogs could have it.  I'd reached my limit of being dismissed and ignored and bullied and while it was a waste of a fine prime rib, at least it got his attention, albeit briefly. 

Until recently, I thought I was done with this kind of mindset but I hadn't reckoned on ol' Ace's arrival at the workplace.  Now it seems I have to fight the same battle all over again although of course this time it isn't about pepper or steak but rather about paperwork and forms, policies and the way things work.  It's about sign in sheets and clipboards and changing procedures out of arrogance.  And it's about manners, about calling someone 20 or 30 years older by their first name without being invited to.  It's about unsolicited change based on arrogance and despite the fact that it compromises the process.

I watched him take 40 patient encounter forms off their respective clipboards and lay them in a sloppy pile on his desk where he then re-attached each and every one when the patients actually arrived.  He felt no need to explain this curious and slightly roundabout method of getting from point A to point B.

I watched him dump all our sign in sheets into a trash barrel.  Presumably, he has a better design in mind but he didn't mention or produce it.

I listened to him call an eighty-one year old nun he'd never met before by her first name.

And I was the one who had to explain to a patient who'd been told to come right in (and did) why there was no one in the office and the door was locked because ol' Ace - so eager to be seen as a go-getter and better than the rest of us put together - hadn't bothered to ask which office he would be coming to and the patient arrived at the one some 70 miles away.  So sorry.

After this miserable day finally ends, I come home and try desperately to let go of my anger.  Condescending,
egotistical, controlling, I think.  Secretive to the point of paranoia, I think.  A bully with women and a coward with men, I think.  A blatant and shameless liar, I think.  He moves and talks as if in an LSD kind of daze and responds to questions with a vacant, slack jawed stare that makes me think of people who climb clock towers with rifles.  And yet I have to find a way to work with him or call it a day 'cause I can't shoot him.

But I might could hire someone.

Art on Fire

On a warm March afternoon, a handful of artists gathered on a hillside in a city park, built a fire and began burning their art.  The concept was a metaphor - clean house, make room for the new, purge and move on - but the flames were real enough.  There was a good deal of cheering and chanting encouragement as canvases were smashed and torn and laid in the fire.  The smoke, probably toxic as someone observed, swirled and floated on the light breeze, the ashes accumulated quickly, the heat spread like sadness.  I remembered I'd read that the event had been inspired by the passing of a California painter and the recent deaths of three local artists, all of whom had left behind a body of work but no instructions for its disposal. 

We are not what we used to be, a painter friend of mine pronounced solemnly, We let go of the past.  We do not leave our work to be a burden to our friends or family.

Each piece had a history and a story and each artist recalled it clearly, when it had been done, what the inspiration for it had been, where it had been exhibited and for how long and what the reactions to it had been.  They recited the details quietly.  As each piece went into the fire, I realized I was torn between admiration for their actions and a fuzzy sense of sorrow.  I am usually merciless with material possessions and feel no sentimentality at all about tossing them out with the dust they've gathered but no part of me goes with them.  This was somehow different, a little right and a little wrong.   I thought about the photographs I've taken over the years and knew I would never be brave enough to see them destroyed.  I've lost track of some and still sometimes grieve, wishing I'd been more careful, more discriminating about who they went to.  The negatives are long gone, lost in the shuffle of living, divorcing, moving from one state to another.  They may mean nothing to anyone but me but it makes me sad that they can't be re-created.

It takes a special kind of courage to create art.

It takes a special kind of of courage to let it go and watch it burn.