Push Pins

You'd have thought I was looking for hens teeth.

Push pins, I told the first cashier patiently despite her blank look, They're kind of like thumb tacks.

Push pins, I told the second cashier who looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language, They're kind of like thumb tacks.

Push pins, I told the third cashier tiredly, They're kind of like.....

Thumb tacks?  she asked and I felt a small thrill.

Yes! I very nearly shouted.

We don't carry them, she said cheerfully, Sorry.

I controlled an urge to reach across the counter and shake her senseless.

Leaving the parking lot, I pass the hardware store and decide to try one last time.  It's a locally-owned store, very upscale and fancy and selling way more than hardware and it tends to be pricey so I rarely make it my first stop.

Push pins?  I ask hopefully.

Right this way, a young man in a carpenter's apron smiles at me.  Seconds later I'm at the checkout with a pack of a dozen metal push pins.

I don't know why I just don't come here first..... I tell the cashier as she rings up the sale and slips the push pins into a small paper bag.

$13.82, she tells me brightly but almost immediately the smile turns to a frown as she realizes the unlikelyhood of the charge.

......but that might be the reason, I say equally brightly, Are you sure?  Thirteen dollars for a dozen push pins?

Mercy! she exclaims with a suspicious look at the cash register, That can't be right!

She fiddles impatiently with the keyboard, wipes out the sale and starts again.

$1.77, she tells with an apologetic smile as I hand over two dollar bills.  I drop the change into the little plastic St. Jude's container and slip the push pins into my pocket.  She wishes me a Happy New Year and I return the favor but as I leave, I notice that she gives the cash register a sharp head slap and mutters something about technology. 

This makes me smile.

Down and Out

The pre-dawn stillness is shattered by the sounds of a catfight on the front lawn and for several minutes it sounds like the end of the world.  It's an ungodly sound, cutting through the darkness like a knife, worse than fingernails on a blackboard.  It unnerves the dogs and sets my teeth on edge til I'm fully awake and trudging to the front door.  The door opening is enough to send them scampering off - I catch a quick glimpse of the Siamese from next door and the tail end of a tabby - a few final spiteful words are exchanged and then the quiet takes over.

It's too late and I'm too awake to go back to bed but more unfortunately, the shingles are also awake and screaming.  Four weeks after the onset, with people regularly asking me how I feel - my instincts are telling me to lie - no one wants to hear that the pain is just as bad as it was three weeks ago, no one wants to hear that I'm not over it, that I'm worried about nerve damage because while I can feel my skin with my fingers, I can't feel my fingers with my skin, no one wants to hear that I wake up each morning feeling that my whole right side is on fire.  No one wants to hear how exhausted I am from the pain, how depressing it is not to be able to see an end to it.  Easier to smile and lie, say Better every day, thanks!  One of these mornings, I tell myself, it's bound to be true.  One of these mornings, it has to be.

An hour or so after taking the morning meds and a supplement of ibuprofen, the pain backs off to where it's bearable.  I shower and dress and get ready to take on the day.  

It strikes me that a fair amount of the time, it's easier to lie.  People may ask how you are but a lot of them don't stick around to hear, especially if you're not getting better.  I have a suspicion that part of it is simple courtesy but that another part is knowing they can't fix it.  I'm convinced that we're all fixers at heart and we don't like being reminded that we're really helpless.

I paint my side with the betadine andI ease into sweats and a loose, light sweatshirt - wince as the fabric touches my skin and sends a quick dagger of pain into my side - I've been in the same clothes for the last week and only got to wash them this past weekend.  Dressing well has not been my first concern lately although to tell the truth, fashion has never been very high on my priority list.  When it doesn't hurt, it itches and I can't scratch because that sets the rash on fire.  Nerve pain, I've discovered, is very different from a headache or a broken ankle or a pulled muscle - it's inaccessible, unpredictable, too deep to reach and too shallow to be relieved.  It's as if a colony of gremlins with hot pokers have taken up residence beneath my skin - they're sleeping more these days but when they wake up, they wake up hungry and bad tempered and mean, chewing on my nerves with nasty little teeth, pulling at them with sharp claws.   The pain only travels so far before it reaches a dead zone, that space between my insides and my outsides, where the nerves are (we hope not permanently ) damaged.  It's that space that makes me want to take a hatchet to my right side and live the rest of my life crooked.

But again, these are not things anyone wants to hear so I put on a happy face, take a deep breath, smile.

Better each day, thanks!  I say brightly.

'Cause nobody loves ya when you're down and out ~ John Lennon

Mean Old World

It's rainy and dark and I almost don't see the old man pushing the overloaded shopping cart when he steps into the street directly in front of me.  I slam on my brakes and he glares at me, shaking one gloved fist in the air and shouting something unintelligible into the wind.  It wasn't close enough to be a near miss but still my heart hammers a little faster until he reaches the other side, navigates the curb and gets swallowed up by the darkness.  

I thank my lucky stars that I wasn't going faster, that the brakes didn't take a sudden notion to  hydroplane, that he didn't step out a second or two later.  It's the what might've beens that give me the most trouble. There are times they seem to be everywhere, chattering like a flock of seagulls, deafening me with their cries.
Their cousins, the what if's are never far behind.  As Marl Young and T Bone Walker wrote, This is a mean, old world to live in all by yourself.

My eyes aren't what they used to be - but then again, what is - so I check both sides of the streets before I drive on.  The State House building is empty but lit up like a Christmas tree, the now defunct hospital is closed and dark, the single three quarters enclosed bus stop is vacant and littered with debris.  There's not much here beyond the local bar, an abandoned corner lot with a shabby For Sale sign, a recording studio that has seen better days and a solitary block of small buildings with vandalized walls and smashed windows facing the ever present and somehow lonely convenience store with its blaring neon lights and self service gas pumps.  The interstate is just a block or two ahead and then you're on the outskirts of downtown, block after block of sad, decaying structures, pot holed streets, dark alleys and fenced off sections of forgotten landscapes.  It feels forlorn and miserable, like a terminal illness.  The homeless and those who prey on and condemn them prowl the filthy streets along with the feral cat colonies, the hookers, the drug dealers and the rats.  At times it feels like the whole city is dying and dying badly, without dignity, without putting up a fight.

Determined to derail this particular train of thought, I pull up to the stop light and crank the Hugh Laurie cd a little louder.  Police Dog Blues by Blind Blake, The King of Ragtime Guitar, fills the car and makes me smile.

It may be that nothing brings on the might've beens and the what if's like sitting at an empty intersection in the rain and the dark, waiting for the light to change and thinking about a homeless old man with a shopping cart, worrying that one day I might become him.

It may be that nothing chases them away so fast as an elegant, well educated Englishman singing an old blues tune by a ragtime guitarist dead since 1934.

It may be that all the might've beens and what if's the world conjures up don't make a damn bit of difference in the what is.

Move along, I tell myself, nothing to see here.

Late at night, when I can't sleep and end up replaying old tapes and old choices and listening to the old voices in my head, I backslide.  I think of opportunities I gave away with both hands, of choices I made on impulse, of roads I took out of restlessness or boredom or mild misery.  I think about the uncertain future.  When you're thirty something, you don't think about being sixty something.  You think you have time, that something better will come along.  You can't imagine being old, sick, miserable, or poor.  And then one day - just like that - you are.

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls ~ Edgar Allen Poe

A Disturbance in the Force

She is sitting on the external half of the window unit, demurely grooming her white-tipped paws and unaware of - or unconcerned with - the chaos unleashing itself within.  All five inside cats have gathered around the window in a tight little circle of hostility.  Backs are arched, tails are switching, and the language is shocking.
Drawn by the low hissing and growling, the dogs pace back and forth anxiously - they can't see this newest intruder - but they sense a serious disturbance in the force.  The kitten, a pretty little thing, I have to admit with a heart shaped face and tufted ears - startlingly lynx-like - exhibits no interest whatsoever in the domestic drama unfolding on the opposite side of the window.  She finishes her grooming, yawns delicately,
stretches out and prepares to take a nap.

This arrogant complacency is too much for my own little ones.  They can't reach the trespassing kitten so they turn on each other and the result is anarchy - undiluted and nerve-wrackingly loud - a ceramic bowl skids off the table, the blinds come down in a crumpled heap, a chair is overturned.  Scattering and scrambling, the cats fly off in all directions and the dogs, alarmed at the sudden escalation of the situation, turn tail and race for the safety of the bedroom.  It's finally enough of a racket to attract the outside kitten's attention - she rouses slowly, glares at me as if it's my fault - then gracefully and sure-footedly jumps to the wooden fence and strolls away and out of sight.  Of course I can't know for sure, but I have the distinct impression that the whole thing was as carefully planned and executed as a military coup.

I pick up the pieces, separate and scold the cats, find and reassure the dogs, deliver my usual lecture about peaceful coexistence and tolerance.  Because it's November and due to turn bitterly cold, I'm compelled to bring up gratitude and the fact that but for the grace of God, it might be them on the outside looking in.  The cats - entitled creatures and casually immune to my empty threats - listen politely then wander off.  The dogs crawl into my lap and take notes.

With the possible exception of the little dachshund - I know he was rescued from an animal hoarder but don't know details - none of my little ones have ever known real hardship.  They've never gone hungry, never suffered from the shelter-less November wind, never been endangered.  They take their home and its comforts for granted.  They're realists and don't waste their worry on the less fortunate until the less fortunate wind up on the window unit.

Funny, how they remind me of humans. 

Poof!

It's not under the bed or behind the door or stuffed between the cushions of the loveseat.  It's not discreetly hidden beneath the computer desk or the nightstand.  It's not behind the shower curtain or under the bookcase
or tucked away in a crowded corner.  It's not underneath the pillows or secured behind a plant stand.

It must be somewhere, I tell myself reasonably.  Shoes don't simply get up and walk away on their own.

And yet, it hasn't been dragged behind the litter boxes or beneath the furniture.  It's not under the refrigerator or behind the curtains.  It's not waiting behind the tv or buried in the dirty clothes.  It's not in the chiffarobe and it's not behind any of the doors.

 Poof!  A single mesh tennis shoe vanishes without a trace.

 It's like life, I decide, sometimes the search isn't worth the reward.

Shingles

The pain comes from everywhere - jabbing into my hip, my belly, spiraling up my side and between my shoulder blades and under one breast.  My entire right side seems to be in melt down.

Booked up, the ill named patient care coordinator tells me indifferently, Next opening is a week from today.

I protest and plead but I might as well be talking to a wall.

Booked up, she says, unmoved and unmovable.

I go back to the massive doses of ibuprofen, not caring in the least whether they produce stress ulcers or internal bleeding - by the third day, they're all that's keeping me sane.  Just to be safe, I look up the symptoms of appendicitis.  That leads nowhere and as unlikely as it seems, I'm back to gas pains.  I hunt around and find a cache of laxatives, contraindicated if you're in pain but I'm willing to take the risk.  The laxative works as predicted but the pain doesn't ease.  At my wits end, I take more ibuprofen and crawl miserably into bed, managing to sleep an hour or two at a time, getting up only to take more.  By Sunday, things have leveled out and as long as I take the ibuprofen every couple of hours, the pain is close to manageable.

Monday morning, having woken to a rash on my side and back and on my way to work or the ER - I haven't quite decided - I pass a family clinic.

Accepting New Patients, a billboard sign proclaims, Sick Today, Seen Today.

Feeling like I have nothing to lose, I pull in.

Amazingly, I've seen within a half hour.  The nurse practitioner takes one look at the rash and reaches for his prescription pad.

Shingles, he says sympathetically.

That's what I thought, I say with a wince, But the rest of the pain?  My back, my hip, my shoulder, my belly?

All shingles, he assures me, It's a bitch.

I explain how I can't quite comprehend that a rash on my side - a rash I didn't even know was there until a few hours before and that isn't particularly bothersome - could be causing such pain in so many unrelated areas.  He explains that shingles is about nerves going a little wild, warns me that it's likely to be worse before it's better, prescribes pain meds and antivirals, tells me to take it one day at a time.  Two days later, I'm still miserable but feeling lucky - the rash, prickly, uncomfortable and painful if I move wrong, doesn't progress to the weeping stage and while the pain is relentless and exhausting, it never gets to excruciating - all in all, it could've been much, much worse.

After the first week, the internal pain recedes but the rash flares and at times seems to set itself on fire.  I dutifully take the regimen of medications, adding ibuprofen when it becomes unbearable.  It takes everything I have just to lie still on the loveseat and try to sleep, anything requiring any more effort is out of the question.
Shingles or not, however, there are cats to be fed, litter boxes to be changed, and dogs to be tended.  I spend a lot of time wishing I had the energy to die.

On the eighth morning, I wake up and make my way to the kitchen to tend the animals and swallow the morning meds.  For the first time in over a week, the pain is manageable.  I can stand straight, think clearly and walk as if I'm not going to break.  For the first time in a week, I don't think about giving up because it's too hard.  I can see the possibility of tomorrow.

Adversity, Albert Einstein wrote, introduces a man to himself.

Maybe so, but having met myself, I don't think I care to know me just now.

Whine & Twine & Eggnog

I wake just before 4am, stumble to the back door to let the dogs out - it's dark and moonless, freezing cold - and they trot bravely out while the cats begin the breakfast dance, twining around my ankles, always hungry, always in a hurry.  They don't care that it's 4am, surely an uncivilized time if ever there was one, or that it's winter.  The dogs are pawing at the back door and whining to come in before I've gotten the first package of Friskies poured.  I think about going back to bed but once morning has broken, even if it's in the the dead of night, there's no retreat.  I turn up the heat, light a cigarette, and pour a glass of eggnog from the glass bottle I bought on a whim last week.  Coffee would make more sense but I don't drink coffee and there's no hot chocolate and even if there was, I'm not functioning well enough to make it.  Eggnog will have to do.

Nana kept a carton of Hood's Eggnog in the fridge every week from Thanksgiving to New Year's.  Uncle Eddie liked to make his own, adding liberal doses of whiskey and paprika and serving it warm in small silver cups, but I liked store bought, ice cold and thick like syrup, so sweet it made my teeth ache.  There were dozens of brands to choose from but for Nana and I, only Hood's would do.  They were (and still are) a Massachusetts company that had doing business since the mid 1800's.  I doubt my grandmother much cared about the shop local trend - Hood's simply made the best dairy products and she was a fan - we drank Hood milk, used Hood cream and butter, and in the summer the freezer was packed with Hood ice cream and Hoodsie cups.  Nana would probably be distressed to know that I'm drinking non-Hood eggnog but probably pleased that it isn't up to her standards or mine.  She liked being right.

Being partial to Elsie the Cow, my mother was a Borden loyalist.  On more than one occasion, she would surreptitiously remove the Hood milk  (or cream or butter or eggnog or ice cream) and replace it with Borden's. Nana would fairly light up with rage at this dairy travesty - it was a sacrilege to move anything in the neatly organized refrigerator and not replace it exactly as you'd found it - and the ensuing feud could last for days.

You're fighting over dairy products?  my daddy had once asked incredulously,  The world is going to hell and you're fighting over milk?  Have you both lost your minds?

My house, Nana had snapped defiantly, My refrigerator!

Borden's is better! my mother had snarled back sullenly, and I paid for it!

THAT'S ENOUGH! my daddy had roared and both women had taken a startled step backwards, IT'S CHRISTMAS, GODDAM IT AND THAT'S ENOUGH!

 I don't care who bought it, he said tightly, and I don't care whose refrigerator it is!  It's Christmas and we're going to have some peace on earth around here if I have to drag it out of each of you so I recommend you get over it and get over it right now!

The women, sulking and glaring with indignation, got gone.

Milk, my daddy - a man who prized peace and quiet and diplomacy above everything - sighed and sank tiredly into a kitchen chair, I lost my temper over milk.

Sitting at my own kitchen table a lifetime later, the memory still makes me smile.  It doesn't warm me but it does make me smile.

The cats twine, the dogs whine and the eggnog is just another dairy product.

Needful & Needed

The reason we get so little done, my friend Michael tells me as he snatches at his disaster of a desk, sending papers and discarded boxes and unpaid bills and cologne bottles awry, is that we spend half the time looking for things I've lost!

Clutter borders on chaos in his small office and I can't find it in my heart to contradict him.

What is it now? I ask with a sigh.

My wallet! he snaps impatiently, I've looked everywhere!

I doubt this - he has what I can only describe as a violent flair for the dramatic - but I also know that until the missing wallet is found, he will rant and rave himself into hysterics.  I step over the dogs, clear one of the leather chairs of magazines and unread mail, a cashmere sweater, an empty cigarette carton, several plastic covered binders, a retractable leash and several yards of credit card tape.

When, I ask him, dodging a flurry of flying bank statements and nearly tripping over the smallest dog as she runs for cover, is the last time you remember having it?

Out in the yard, he says and throws up his hands in frustration, It was trying to come out of my pocket.

There's no sense in telling him to calm down or take a breath.  It's best to let him storm it out.

Tell me, I persist firmly, exactly what you did when you came in from the yard.

He sinks into a chair and jams his hands into his sweatshirt pouch.  Sulking, I've learned, is the first step on the road from flying objects rage to simple exasperation.

I don't remember, he mutters.  Sharp. Stubborn. Petulant. Defiant.

Yes, you do, I tell him patiently, just tell me what you did after you came in.

He's sullen, angry at himself, disgusted with his own carelessness and it's like pulling teeth but he lets me lead him through it.  He remembers coming in, going upstairs to change and watch tv.

Where did you change?  I ask, What did you do with your yard clothes?  What were you watching?

It takes another twenty minutes and he snaps and snarls like a wounded cur dog, curses colorfully, hating every minute of it and being ashamed that he brought it on himself.  He's irritable with the dogs, flailing at me and trying to change the subject with every other breath.  Luckily, I can be as equally obstinate.

When you empty your pockets, where do you normally leave things?  Did you do laundry?  Did you go back out? Did anyone come by?  

The answers aren't all that helpful - his habit is to leave clothes wherever he happens to shed them, the contents of his pockets on whatever's handy - the wallet could be sunk in the mud of the flower beds or buried under a half ton of leaves, in the trash or under the bed and half eaten by dogs.  He is the most thoroughly disorganized, most easily distracted person I've ever known.  There's not an iota of neatness in him, not the first hint of a predictable routine or pattern or need for order.  Scatterbrained, my grandmother would've said, but I know better - he's overwhelmed by his own flaws, his tendency to hoard, his lack of focus.

Drink your coffee, I suggest, and take your meds.  I'm going to look upstairs.

On the second floor, the first thing I see is the faded red hooded sweatshirt.  It's out of place somehow, tossed thoughtlessly onto the stair railing and hanging there, mud stained and disreputable.  Not a single other item of clothing is within ten feet of it and I have an immediate sense that the crisis is about to be over.  When I pick it up, it jingles and when I slip my hand into the front pocket, I discover a wad of crumpled bills, a front door key, a handful of coins, and of course, the missing wallet.  Everything is thrown together but intact.

Looked everywhere, I mutter to myself, Yeah, sure you did.

But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, I didn't come to talk to you about a lost wallet.  I came to talk about the dynamics of relationships.

We could hardly be more different, Michael and I, or more alike.  We have many of the same flaws, many of the same virtues, a few of the same vices.  We clash as often as we agree but in the end, he needs someone to look after him just as I need someone to look after.  It seems to work more often than it doesn't and maybe that's how life is designed, like a grand, ambitious jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces.  With a little skill, a little more luck, and the patience of a couple of dozen saints, everything eventually fits.







  

  

Mittens & Mufflers

Snow is such a rare event - praise Jesus! - in my part of the country, that just the threat of it is enough to unravel us.  The probability of it sends us scurrying for mittens, mufflers and cover.  An actual dusting is downright paralyzing and a flurry might as well be a blizzard.  For someone who lived in New England for as long as I did, all this fuss seems overdone and useless - a tiny molehill made into an entire mountain range - but when the flakes begin to fall, I still stare like an open mouthed tourist.  I suppose it calls up childhood memories of snowmen, snow angels, snow days, snow shoveling.  These are not treasured memories but more the stuff of nightmares - frostbitten-feeling toes, slush in my boots, fingers frozen and numb - oh, the first snowfall is pretty enough, I'll give you that, especially on a blue-ish moonlit night when you're watching from a snug second story bedroom window with a cup of hot chocolate at your side and Christmas carols playing in the background.  You don't think about what it will be like in the morning and for many mornings after.

If there's a constant in my life - aside from the anger on which so much of me is built - I suppose it's being cold.  They go together somehow.

The house I grew up in was cold but my tiny room had a good sized heating vent - at night in winter I would open it up as far as it would go and the heat would roar in - by morning, it was so hot and stuffy that I had to open a window.

My grandmother's house was cold - sterile, obsessively neat - and my room at the top of the stairs was monstrous large and sparsely furnished.  I piled on blankets and quilts and slept in thermals.

There was the nasty little two room apartment on Gainsborough Street in downtown Boston where the heat was controlled by the landlord's whim - rarely on before November or past March.  Then a series of other apartments, each a little nicer with a little more space but never warm.  And there were workplaces where my fingers would stiffen with cold.

A small house in Maine with snowdrifts that reached the windows.  A cabin in New Hampshire with a wood stove that was blindingly hot and stole your breath but still icy if you wandered too far from it.

And finally there is Louisiana - the best of a bad lot, I sometimes think - in the summer the heat is paralyzing but come winter when the temperature drops into the 30's and 40's, it feels like the rest of my life.  

Classrooms and restaurants and hospitals and department stores.  Subways and commuter trains and college bookstores.  Doctors offices and banks and grocery stores.  Not always intolerably cold but cold enough to be uncomfortably aware of being cold.

I feel it everywhere.  I always have.  Underneath the long underwear and the flannel shirts and the sweats I pile on until it's awkward to move, there's a draft, a chill, a shiver. 

Not all of it comes from the outside.