An Offer of Grace

 

During the last conversation with my daddy, I was only dimly aware that I was being manipulated. He had fallen into his speaking with his bereaved voice, kind and understanding, a little reverent and a lot empathetic. It was so effective that I very nearly missed hearing the ultimatum.

“Your mother is dying,” he said with a comforting reasonableness, “Nothing else matters. You have to make peace with her. If you can’t bring yourself to see and talk with her, neither your brothers or I will be able to see or talk with you.”

The words were so calm, so measured, so deceptive. I heard them but it took several seconds for me to comprehend that I was being disinherited. He was offering me a way back in, a path to grace and forgiveness. All that was required was for me to accept the terms.

“Nothing else matters,” he repeated ever so gently, “Please say you’ll come and see her before it’s too late.”

I knew two things he didn’t, first, that it was already too late and second that he was wrong. I stumbled through some half assed version of I’m sorry you feel that way and then heard him sigh deeply, just before he hung up. I never spoke with him again.

I never regretted my mother’s death and I didn’t know either one of my brothers well enough to miss them but much as I tried to deny it, the realty of not having my daddy in my life haunted me for years. He had taught me to love satire, crossword puzzles and Dixieland jazz. He spent hours teaching me to ride a bike, helped me to sell my Girl Scout cookies, was almost always there to supplement my allowance and more often than not, stood up for me against my mother, at least in his way. He was handsome but never minded looking silly – I remember in the winter, he slept in a knit woolen cap and heavy socks and when he dressed up in full masonic regalia, somehow managed to retain not just his dignity, but his sense of humor as well. He played piano by ear and despaired of my ever learning to play bridge. He could make one scotch on the rocks last for an entire evening, smoked Lucky Strikes for most of his adult life, helped me with my homework and never missed a parent teacher conference.

He also protected and enabled my mother and grandfather from the consequences of their drinking for decades. He worked far more hours than were necessary so as to avoid coming home. He had a long term affair with the widow of a close friend. He was a peacemaker, a negotiator, an enabler and unless absolutely cornered, would always choose flight over fight, a habit, I’m sorry to say, he sadly passed to me so that even now, just the thought of a raised voice can send me running for the nearest exit. He was neither a perfect man nor a perfect parent and it took me most of my life to realize he had his own demons but at the time of my mother’s death, all I could see was that he abandoned me. He changed the rules of engagement and tried to blackmail me with the threat of permanent estrangement.

When time didn’t heal the wounds and distance didn’t bring any peace of mind, I was forced to look elsewhere for help. My Al Anon group was a source of support and serenity and it helped but the guilt continued to gnaw at me. I turned to books and read everything I could find about addiction, co-dependency, adult children of alcoholics. I learned the language of recovery and how to detach, build self-esteem, look inward for solutions, not people please. I recognized my near obsessive need to control my world and those in it and tried hard to accept the things and the people I couldn’t change. After 10 years of being married to an alcoholic, I even realized that I shouldn’t judge my daddy for being in the exact same situation. He had 3 children and 30 years of marriage on me and was, estrangement or not, doing the best he could. As improbable as it seemed, we shared the same guilt, weaknesses, fears, flaws, struggles and desperation. The knowledge didn’t resolve anything. The time for reconciliation had passed and my mother died in 1991. To my absolute astonishment, I learned that my daddy re-married just two years later. It eased my mind considerably and I was very glad for him. Although their time together was brief but I’m very sure it was right, peaceful, and long overdue. Through my one cousin still speaking to me, I learned that my brothers did not share my opinion and were not kind about it. Neither their resentment nor their cruelty surprised me. Ours was a family of strangers, not given to thinking outside of our own space and our worlds were very small.

It took just over a month of twice weekly sessions with a therapist to clear my mind and make me see that I hadn’t been wrong to choose self preservation over forced compliance.

“After denial,” the doctor would tell me repeatedly, “Guilt is the most powerful force in the world. Don’t feed it.”

Sometimes unlearning the lessons of childhood takes a whole lifetime. Forgiveness takes even longer, if it comes at all. Maybe it’s enough to get to a place of understanding, even if you find yourself alone there.

Bringing Tuesday Home

 

My across the street neighbors have dogs and some peculiar ideas about caring for them. They leave their inside front door open so that their ancient, crippled up, and badly overweight lab, Tuesday, can push his way outside and cruise the neighborhood. At least once or twice a week, I find him wandering down the block, confused, moving slower than molasses, and willing to follow any friendly voice. I keep a leash in my car and he gives me a grateful look as I slip it over his head and lead him home. We walk very slowly, keeping to the grass when possible to save his paws from the intense Louisiana heat, and giving him time to figure out where he is. He’s like a very chunky, very old man who’s lost his way but doesn’t know it. When we get to his house, he mounts the steps carefully and waits while I slip off the leash. I open the storm door and he wanders inside. There’s no sign of life beyond the slow, deliberate clack of his nails on the wood floor. I sometimes call out to see if anyone’s home but I’ve never gotten an answer so I don’t bother anymore.

I’ve talked with his owners who always seem surprised that I go to the trouble of bringing him home but they don’t seem to think it’s a problem. They thank me and shrug off the idea that he could become permanently lost or hit by a car. They appear proud that he’s learned to open the door on his own, don’t seem to be concerned about leaving their house wide open when no one’s at home, and often promise to scold their teenagers who, when they are home, don’t pay any attention to the old dog. I’m not sure they’re even aware of how often he gets out or that someone brings him home.

On this day, he had gotten to the end of the block and actually crossed over to the next. It was a long walk home.

Kitty Stark and The Ginger Cat

 

There were two schools of thought about Kitty Stark: One, that her madness had overtaken her so slowly and so discreetly that no one had noticed for several years and two, that it was a quiet kind of madness, not likely to put anyone in the community at risk.

“Long as she don’t bother us, ain’t no need to bother her none,” as Sparrow put it, “I heard tell it’s called peaceful coexistence.”

“It’s called everybody mindin’ they’s own bidness,” Long John said sourly, “I reckon we could use a little more of it.”

Ruthie and I had just turned 10 the summer Kitty began talking to the ginger cat about what the Moon People had to say. Kitty herself was just shy of her 42nd birthday. She and the ginger cat lived in the attic of the house she’d been born in, midway between Bill Albright’s still and the old cemetery, a stone’s throw from the water’s edge. The house was in a state of mild disrepair but the attic window offered an unobstructed and bright view of the ocean and the evening moonrises were clear and close as day. Kitty and the nameless ginger cat watched them nightly, hearing and seeing impossible things as easily as falling off a log and never once questioning that it might not be real.

One mild summer morning, Nana woke with an itch for blueberry fungy. She gave Ruthie and I each 3 shiny quarters and two plastic pails and sent us up island to pick blueberries at Miz Kitty’s.

“But Nana,” I halfheartedly protested, “Everybody knows Miz Kitty’s crazy. She talks to the moon!”

“No, she don’t,” Nana said and gave me an encouraging pat on the bottom, “Kitty Stark talks to the cat and the cat talks to the moon. They’re both harmless. Now git!”

We got to Miz Kitty’s about noon and found her in a rocking chair on her front porch, shelling peas and listening to a Red Sox game. She’d already set out a pitcher of milk and a plate of peanut butter cookies for us and the ginger cat was innocently napping on the window sill. Every now and again his tail would switch slightly but otherwise he was still as a statue.

“Don’t pay him no mind,” Miz Kitty said with a shrug, “I ‘spect he jist wants you to know he’s listenin’. He listens to most everything but don’t say much ‘cept to me.”

“Folks say he talks to the moon,” Ruthie blurted out with the boldness I so envied, “And that the moon talks back.”

“Do they now,” Miz Kitty said impassively, “What else do folks say?”

I started to speak, thought better of it and would’ve stayed quiet except that Ruthie gave me a sharp elbow jab in the ribs.

“That he kin tell the future,” I said reluctantly, “Like when a boat ain’t comin’ back or a still’s gon’ blow.”

“Or if’n you’re in the family way, whether it’ll be a boy or a girl,” Ruthie added.

At this, Miz Kitty laughed so hard she nearly spilled the bowl of peas. On the window still, the ginger cat opened one eye and gave us a quick, suspicious look then twitched his tail, stretched expansively, and jumped lightly down. He began the delicate process of grooming his paws and whiskers and, as cats do, keeping an eye on his audience while pretending we weren’t there.

“I declare,” Kitty Stark said with a definite smile in her voice, “I reckon if’n one old cat could do all that, he’d be some slick. Now I’m thinkin’, you might get to berry pickin’ or you’ll be late to supper.”

We each dutifully handed over our two quarters and Miz Kitty pocketed them, thanked us and nodded in the direction of the blueberry patch.

“Mind you, keep an eye on the sun,” she called after us, “It’s a ways back to The Point and if you don’t get there by dark, your grandma like to skin you alive.”

It might have been my imagination, but I thought she called once more. I could’ve sworn I heard her say “Leastways, that’s what the cat says.”

Chaos Theory

 

Sometimes you just know.

I don’t need quantum physics to know that the overturned kitchen trash can or the rolls of eviscerated paper towels are the work of the cur dog. He might as well have signed his name.

Similarly, credit for the chewed up house slippers and the desecrated cactus plant goes to the girl pit mix. Their tastes are different but the end result is always the same: destruction. Only the little pit mix, standing watch at the window in case of backyard intruders, is innocent. He’s loud and obnoxious and aggressive, often nippy and the first to get on my last nerve, but he’s never been destructive. Oh, sure, he can find a discarded plastic dog food container with the accuracy of a heat seeking missile, but he’s quite content to chew it and only it to pieces. The girl pit relies on Michael’s absent mindedness and usually finds only those targets of opportunity he leaves in plain sight – shoes and slippers are her favorites with weather stripping and linoleum close seconds – but I have seen evidence of search and destroy missions for pillows or couch stuffing. It’s the cur dog who is the most agile and determined. He is undeterred by gates or closed cabinet doors or high shelves – he has, as best we can tell, learned to climb, jump or otherwise propel himself onto counters and sinks etc to reach his goal. He’s also quite partial to used coffee grounds or filters, we’re not sure which. Michael absolutely swears he recently jumped from a second story window to the concrete front porch at the sight of a squirrel but I’m not convinced. Seems to me he’d have broken a leg or two, at the least, but I perhaps he just bounces better than I imagine. Michael thinks he could’ve cleared the concrete and the iron gate, landed in the shrubs and then jumped the gate to get back on the porch. The dog isn’t talking so we may never know.

I pick up a pair of underwear, the remains of a toothbrush, a roll of duct tape, a half eaten tape measure and what’s left of its packaging, a dry erase marker, several miniature candy wrappers, a sheet of stamps and a handful of what appears to have started life as a kitchen sponge. In the office I stumble across a bagful of plastic shot glasses, chewed and cracked and shattered almost beyond recognition, a cell phone charger cord with the charging end missing,

the pieces of a Bic lighter, and the forlorn remnants of a scented candle, glass holder and all.

The kitchen floor is littered with empty sugar packets, more ragged pieces of sponge, a tattered leash and dog collar, a couple of dishtowels, a small scrub brush and a half dozen or more torn up paper grocery bags.

The evidence strongly suggested a two pronged attack, concerted, focused and certainly highly organized. “My, my, my,” I could hear Tommy Lee Jones saying as he surveys the bus crash scene from The Fugitive, “What a mess.”

The dogs pranced and danced around me and each other as if I’d been gone for years, completely oblivious to the damage and destruction they’d created in just four hours, anxious for attention and food. I shooed them out the back door and down the steps and set about cleaning up. There are times when you just need to embrace the chaos.

Deliver Me

 

The salon is quiet as a tomb and I sit in the chair, trying not to fidget while Anna snips and cuts and hums softly to herself. One reason I like her is that she’s slow and meticulous, another is that after a minute or two of small talk (she asks after my dogs, I ask after her kids) when I first get there, she’s all work. She never feels the need to chatter at or entertain me. I dislike these visits, always feel that something more is required of me rather than just to shut my eyes and let her work but I’ve never known exactly what it is. A trust issue, perhaps. Putting my hair in the care of another after I neglect it for months. I often expect a gentle scolding for waiting so long between appointments but unlike other hairdressers I’ve had, Anna seems to understand and she never raises the issue.

I always make a “first thing in the morning” appointment and I’ve gotten accustomed to being the only client. On this day, however, a second stylist and a second client, both considerably pregnant, arrive. It’s eight in the morning and I’m remarkably unprepared for the conversation that follows. They are two chairs away and I can hear every word and grisly detail about dilation widths and how long it takes, the pros and cons of epidurals, contraction timing, an animated debate about the value of amniocentesis and the C-section vs natural childbirth debate.

Finally there is a graphic discussion of afterbirth and stitches.

“You want to be cut not torn,” Anna says casually, “They can stitch a cut in a straight line but if you’re torn, it’s ragged.”

Both pregnant women enthusiastically agree. As best I can tell, the number of stitches is a badge of honor. It takes me a moment or two to realize that somewhere between natural childbirth and stitches, I began to feel lightheaded and a little shivery. A voice in my head kept repeating Dear God, please, no more, but there’s no mercy and no escape. Anna doesn’t appear to notice my discomfort and the two pregnant women chatter on. Fortunately, their conversation turns to child raising rather than birthing and then to the husband’s role in the process, all the way from conception to the delivery room.

“Imagine,” one cackles, “If men got pregnant!”

“Tell me about it!” the other replies and laughs.

“All done!” Anna announces with a final fluff of my bangs.

You have no idea, I think to myself and run for the exit.

A High School Memory

 

It was, most everybody said, an unusual and highly unlikely friendship.

Dawn was a golden girl, a child of wealth and privilege, gifted with more beauty than brains but with a good heart and an unexpectedly strict sense of fair play. She was more at home on the tennis court than the classroom and she stood her ground fiercely when it came to choosing her high school, refusing the private venues her parents had selected and opting for a public one. What’s more, she wouldn’t even consider using the family’s driver. She would ride the transit bus, same as 99% of her classmates, spring and winter weather notwithstanding. When the school choir needed a soloist, it was always Dawn they turned to, the rest of us were just backup singers. She and I had known each other for years as both our families attended the First Baptist Church and we’d been friends since junior high. Despite her background and upbringing, despite her blonde hair and fair peach skin, despite how easily everything (except a high GPA) came to her, you got used to her genuine smile and easy manner and how she treated everyone as equals. It was impossible not to like her.

June was the daughter of immigrants who lived perilously close to the sleazy side of Cambridge in a triple decker on a poorly lit and neglected side street. She was tall and slim, dark haired and olive skinned with an athletic build and a competitive spirit that made her perfect for the high school basketball team. We’d known each other since elementary school, had done projects together and played on the same Philadelphia Kick Ball and softball teams. In fifth grade, we were the only two girls to pass on the ballroom dancing class in favor of field hockey. Her family, loud and rambunctious and generous, welcomed me with open arms, genuine affection and always full plates of pasta and hot buttered garlic bread. We’d been choir mates since junior high and shared a love of music and cheap romance magazines. In sixth grade, I helped her with English classes, she helped me with math and somehow or other, we both managed to pass Conversational French.

The three of us came together in our first year of high school. We didn’t know it then but June would be Dawn’s first serious competition for the role of primary soloist for the choir. We more or less expected some resentment or jealousy from Dawn but that sense of fairness got in her way and she opted for sharing the spotlight. The choir had one of it’s best seasons in years.

As so often happens, the closeness we had in high school didn’t last after graduation and we lost touch. Rumor had it that Dawn had gone on to finishing school and then to two or three failed marriages and then to a quiet and well funded retirement condo in Daytona Beach. June got a scholarship to Northeastern, played four years of basketball as a star forward, graduated with honors and married a ROTC candidate. Several years later, I heard that she and her husband had renovated the old triple decker and become active in the gentrification movement of her old neighborhood but I never knew about either of them for sure. Sometimes, people, even good friends, come and go in our lives like the weather. You have to appreciate the fair, get through the foul, and be grateful for both. Everybody we come across is a lesson.

Fire & Flood

 

It isn’t going to be the fires and floods and earthquakes but the little things that do me in. Like not being able to remember if I let all of Michael’s dogs back in, changed the kitty litter or the name of an actor from an old (or new) movie. Like how I routinely forget to enter a transaction in my checkbook or can’t come up with a particular word when I’m writing. All I really have to do is leave things (glasses, keys, purse, etc) in the same place each and every time and I would never lose things. I weary of wondering if I locked the door behind me or put that last cigarette out or turned off my headlights. I tell myself it’s absentmindedness (and that I’m entitled) but I don’t always seem to convince myself anymore. I sometimes feel a sense of dread that senility isn’t as far off or traveling as slowly as I’d like.

Just today, I left class to make a quick trip home to let Michael’s and my own dogs out. I hadn’t been back more than 10 minutes when I realized I couldn’t remember letting any of the dogs, mine or his, back in. Michael and I both knew the chances that I actually hadn’t were somewhere between slim and astronomical but it’s not something you can risk so as sure as I was that all the dogs were exactly where they were supposed to be, I made a second trip, just so I was absolutely, unshakably positive. It really should be a little easier to trust your instincts – Michael’s three were calmly sleeping in the front room and my two were in the sun room, napping peacefully on the love seat. Just as I had left them. Just as I knew they would be. It was a silly waste of time, energy, worry and gasoline.

These golden years are tinged with rust and these senior moments are (pun absolutely intended) getting old.

Pioneer Days

 

The Storm of 2021 was no surprise. It was the after effects that did us in.

You’d have had to be six feet underground to have missed the warnings and the forecasts and the dire predictions so on the last day of our suspiciously mild winter, I trudged to the grocery store and stocked up on dog and cat food, kitty litter, diet cokes in glass bottles, Ghiradelli caramel squares and cigarettes. I felt quite secure about the coming storm, naively optimistic that the doomsayers were wrong when the said we could expect 5 -8 inches of snow followed by a full week of well below freezing temperatures. This was, after all, Louisiana and such things were unheard of even in our northwest section of the state. I went to sleep feeling confident at being prepared and slightly foolish for letting worry get the best of me.

Sleet against the windows woke me around 5 am and when I looked out, I was shocked to see the world had turned a pristine and deep white. Everything from the lawns to the street and the trees and the vehicles, including my own, was blanketed in snow and it was still falling. It was amazingly beautiful and serenely still, like a painting. It was also, I dimly realized, deadly.

I dug out a layer of thermal underwear and pulled on sweats and a second pair of socks then woke the dogs.

“Brace yourselves, guys,” I warned them, “This is something you haven’t seen before and you’re going to have to be very brave.”

There was easily over a half foot of snow on the deck and while they each started out willingly enough, all it took was a couple of paws into the icy cold before they retreated and gave me an unbelieving stare, a patented “Are you on drugs?” kind of stare. This, I saw, was not going to be a cakewalk. I put on my leather Nikes, hunted up my knit cap and gloves, and resistance aside, tucked one dog under each arm, carried them outside and set them down in the snow and sleet. Being small dogs, they were both immediately half buried but they managed to do their business and then tunnel their way back inside, coats glistening with ice and shivering from muzzle to tail.

“What good, good dogs I have!” I told them and gave them double biscuits before setting about to feed them and the cats.

I checked the thermostat and was relieved to see it holding at 72, a result no doubt of having replaced all the plastic duct work with metal a few months before. At the time, I thought the cost had been obscene but now I found myself grateful even if I didn’t live long enough to pay it off. I still had water at that point, the prior day’s grocery run had been a true blessing, the cable was still on. Things looked rough but not bleak. I had no idea of how wrong I was.

Day Two dawned cold, bright, icy and well below freezing. The forecast was for “A wintry mix of precipitation” which translated to more snow, sleet, freezing rain and the possibility of an ice storm. I decided to give the weather folks the benefit of the doubt and scrounged old towels and plastic trash bags and duct tape to wrap the outside faucets and set all the inside ones to dripping. I was anxious about the pipes freezing or losing power but not panicked. I did my best to concentrate on what was happening and tried to keep what might happen at bay.

Things escalated on Days Three and Four. A second storm brought several more inches of snow plus more sleet and freezing rain. Ice formed underneath and on top of what was already there and it took everything the poor dogs had to stay upright when they went outside. Reports of power outages became common and widespread, the shelters filled to overflowing, water mains froze and cracked all over the city, and every other story on social media seemed to be about animals left outside to die. A Days Inn across the river caught fire and burned to the ground and a homeless man froze to death on a downtown street. Water pressure evaporated in one neighborhood after another and by the third day, thousands were without any water at all and thousands more were without power. And still the arctic cold and snow continued, downing tree limbs onto roof tops, collapsing carports, freezing roads and trees and anything in its path.

The interstate closed with mile after mile after mile of 18 wheelers jackknifed or frozen in place.

Travel was out of the question, not that there was anywhere to go.

By Day Five, the hospitals were without water and in crisis. Medical personnel couldn’t get to work and those who were there already couldn’t get home. Tow trucks couldn’t get to stranded motorists and the National Guard was called in to deliver water and medical supplies and staff newly opened shelters. There was not a hotel or motel room to be had for 20 miles. Private citizens were on the streets, clearing wrecks and accidents and checking on neighbors.

By Day Six, a Thursday, there was speculation about a potential warm up for the weekend and people began shoveling out as best they could. One chain grocery store managed to open with reduced hours and rationing and was immediately cleaned out of everything from drain opener to canned vegetables and anything in between. Though fragile and painfully uncertain, there was at least the hope of a thaw. Looking like a refugee Eskimo, my neighbor, Kevin, appeared to break up the ice on my steps and make sure my car would start. Still without water, we began collecting snow to melt – we boiled it for drinking and then collected more so toilets could be flushed and dishes could be washed. We filled buckets and bath tubs and sinks and ice chests and said prayers of thanks for gas stoves and heaters.

“Snow coffee is really awful!” my friend Michael texted me, on Day 7, “When is this nightmare going to end?”

The thaw began on Day 8. It slowly warmed up to almost 45 and being out of dog food, I had to chance driving. I stayed on the main streets, avoiding any road that hadn’t gotten sunshine and inching my way through intersections of slush and black ice, driving only in the ruts and never more than 20 mph.

“S’posed to be almost 60 tomorrow,” Kevin told me when I got home, “You got everything you need?”

Everything ends, of course, and a week or so later, the storm was mostly a memory. Spring, complete with flowers and 80 degree temperatures arrived, making us all feel as if we were waking from a bad dream. Sadly, not everything survived and in many places what should have been green and growing was dirty brown, bare, and leafless. AT&T’s underground cable system was severely damaged and entire neighborhoods were without telephone and internet for the next month. Repairs to the battered water infrastructure took less time but busted pipes sprung up like a measles epidemic and the city’s water department was kept on overtime for weeks. All in all, we took to telling each other, it could’ve been far worse. We really would have made pitiful pioneers.

Soap & Shoe Leather

 

Convinced the cur dog has stolen his jerky treat, the little pit mix turns on him in a fury of snarling and snapping jaws and frantic barking. He fights back with equal ferocity, sinking his teeth into the little one’s neck and trying to shake him off. Before I can get them separated, the female pit joins the fray, not caring who she can try to tear apart as long as she’s part of the confrontation. I amaze myself with my own coordination – several swift kicks to the cur dog, one hand grabbing at the little pit, and the other hauling off the female with a nearly malicious twist of her collar. I get resentful looks from all three but I’ve intervened in time and there’s no bloodletting so I beat them all within an inch of their lives, sort of, and then lock each into a solitary time out.

“Miserable goddam dogs!” I holler at them and slam the door behind me, “Got the manners of savages!”

I spend a relatively quiet forty-five minutes at my desk and then reluctantly release them. They are wide eyed with innocence and the unfairness of it all.

“For two cents and a bus token,” I tell them sternly, “I’d have ya’ll turned into soap and shoe leather and get a cat.”

It’s an empty threat and they know it. They trail after me, barely chastized, nipping at each others heels, pushing and shoving to be first out the door. One alpha dog is a challenge, Two are a nightmare. Three are bedlam. They descend the steps like a 3 car pile up, regain their footing, and make a mad dash for the back fence where one of the neighborhood ferals is watching calmly and being singularly unimpressed by this display of ferocity. The barking is frenzied and hysterical but the cat is unmoved, unequivocally staring them down with the kind of defiance seen only in stray cats and right wing republicans. When she’s ready, she walks away, tail held high, stepping lightly and in no hurry. The exhausted dogs watch in desperate despair as their prey casually wanders off.

If cats could join social media, I suspect they’d scroll right past offensive posts. Dogs would engage at every opportunity. Cats know you don’t have to dance just because some damn fool asks you.

The Burden of Children

 

The first time the boys came racing through the dining room, nobody paid much attention. My mother halfheartedly told them to slow down.

The second time, she hollered at them but they ignored her.

The third time, Miz Hilda calmly stretched out her walking stick just as they barrel assed around her chair and sent them both flying. Although unhurt, both immediately burst into tears and began to wail like a pair of banshees.

“Hilda!” my mother protested but at the other end of the table, I could see my grandmother fiercely trying to smother a laugh.

“Children,” Miz Hilda said grimly, “particularly boys, are assuredly overrated. Get up, you young hooligans, and stop that hideous noise!”

“Hilda!” my mother repeated weakly but it was no good and she knew it. The former British nanny glared her into submission and she folded and staged a tearful retreat. Abandoned, the boys got to their feet and stood sullenly.

“You did that on purpose,” one of them muttered.

“I most certainly did and I can’t imagine any children more deserving,” Miz Hilda snapped impatiently, “This is a dining room not some barn on the prairie for mannerless, ill brought up street urchins! Take your rude, vulgar games outside this instant or mark my words, I’ll beat you both within an inch of your lives!”

They fled.

“I do apologize if I’ve overstepped, Alice,” Miz Hilda told my grandmother with a sigh, “But not being able to hear oneself think is simply not something to which I intend to become accustomed, however briefly. More tea, dear?”

Nana, now making no attempt to hide a smile, shook her head.

“If I’d had my cane, I might’ve tripped the little bastards myself,” she said mildly, “No harm done.”

Looking back, I have no doubt she meant every word. The boys were her grandsons and while she may have loved them, I knew she didn’t much like them. I think she saw too much of my grandfather in them – crude, coarse and common, as she’d once said when she thought no one was listening. When I was a little older, I began to realize that for my mother and possibly my grandmother as well, children were a by product of marriage, a requirement to be filled, almost a necessary evil. You married and you had children because that was the traditional thing to do. Wanting them was for other families.  

One Less Good Dog

 

He was old, overweight, clumsy, perpetually underfoot and a little dim.

He was also sweet-natured, patient, affectionate and (unless you were a cat) very mellow.

We are going to miss him terribly.

I found him on a chilly Sunday morning, lying on the rug in Michael's office, just exactly the way I'd found him asleep too many times to count. Only this time he didn't rouse, didn't sigh and stretch and slowly get to his feet.

He was, I realized in that fraction of a second before I reached down to shake him awake, dead. It appeared to have been peaceful and just before I began to cry, I had a moment of gratitude. I've lost count of the number of times I've prayed to God to take a sick little one in his or her sleep. This time, although the death was sudden and completely unexpected, God had apparently been watching, maybe even waiting.

I covered him with a blanket and sat down to think of what to do next. I couldn't quite bear the thought of calling Michael to let him know and besides it was barely 7 in the morning – there was no chance of getting Michael so early – but I also couldn't keep a dead dog laid out on the floor. Moving 70 pounds of pit bull was clearly not something I could do alone and even if I managed to get him outside, then what?

When Sweetie died, we called Nathaniel, the young man who tends the yard, and he came and dug the grave. I made the call and then called Michael.

I’m not one who favors big dogs but this one - so gentle and with such huge, soulful eyes - had always had special place in my heart. He was hard of hearing and his vision was bad, he often stumbled going up and down the steps, he had no sense of personal space and no idea of his size and weight. One swing of his head was enough to knock me off my feet and he terrorized passersby and mail carriers by his appearance alone but he loved people and was really not much more than a massive lapdog. Watching Nathaniel dig the grave was profoundly sad.

Rest in peace, old man. You were a fine dog and our lives won’t be the same without you.

The Old Lady Cat

 

The old tabby cat jumps lightly onto the love seat and settles herself next to me. It seems she has several things to say and with her face just an inch of two from mine, she stares intently, as if trying to read my mind. It was a little disconcerting when she began doing this several months ago but I’ve gotten accustomed to it and I stare right back. It’s all terribly serious and her eyes never waver. When she speaks, it’s short and to the point. I scratch her ears and after a series of retaliatory head butts, she curls up, tucks her paws beneath her body and drifts off to a cautious sleep.

She’s an old lady these days, well into her teens and having the expected old lady ailments. She doesn’t much like the Purina UR prescription catfood and she doesn’t always make it to one of the litter boxes in time. I clean up after her a few times every week - sometimes once or twice a day, sometimes not at all – and I don’t scold. I keep a careful eye on her but so long as she’s eating and drinking and not in pain, I’m not ready to let her go. She’s still active and agile and alert. Mild and intermittent incontinence isn’t much of a price to pay.

Perhaps one day someone will feel the same toward me.

My Mother's Child

 

He was every inch my mother’s child.

By the summer my brother turned 10, he was a vandal, a petty thief and a consummate liar. I hated him with every fiber of my being and avoided him whenever possible. Like my mother, he was short, stocky, and slovenly. He had a lazy eye and wore a perpetual smirk, was mean to the dogs, and liked throwing rocks, plugging up toilets and setting small fires. He was grimy and dirty and usually smelled of rotting food and stale sweat. Like all bullies, he terrorized everyone he could but at heart was a coward and a low fighter and never took on anyone who might break him. He was what my grandmother dismally called “a nasty piece of business” with no conscience, no empathy, no thought for others and no remorse for whatever harm he did. When I was young, he terrified me. When I was older, he repulsed me.

That particular summer, he’d been grounded for stealing cigarettes and selling them to the younger Albright kids and then re-grounded for trying to kill Aunt Lizzie’s chickens with a stolen pellet gun. In retaliation, he and the Sullivan boys poured bleach into her well and then set her barn afire. Uncle Shad and Uncle Willie saw the smoke and the volunteer fire brigade arrived within minutes but it was too late to save the barn – it and several chickens perished and why the fire hadn’t spread to our house next door or to Ms. Mary’s on the other side was entirely due to favorable winds and happenstance. It was all too much for my grandmother and the day after the fire, she had my mother pack a suitcase and ordered her and my brother home for the rest of the summer. There was a terrific quarrel but Nana refused to relent.

“I won’t have it, Jan,” she told my mother, “Boy’s dangerous and got no more sense than God give a fence post. He goes and you go with him!”

The scandal rocked the tiny village and cost my grandmother a pretty penny to have the barn rebuilt and the chickens replaced. Most everyone believed it had been intentional but nobody could prove it so there never were any consequences although Nana stayed very angry for a very long time.

Not all that long ago, I happened to find out that my brother died a few years ago. I don’t think he had much of a life but I couldn’t find it in me to either mourn or celebrate. I cared as much as I might care about a stranger who I didn’t know even existed and who died a half a world away.

He may have been my mother’s child but he was never anyone I knew.

Family Fraud

 

“Quelle surprise!” my Aunt Helen exclaimed, reverting as she often did to French when she was feeling particularly condescending.

Nana and her sister, my Aunt Zelma, had worked most of the day on the birthday cake and produced a masterpiece of a 3 tiered lemon cake, complete with perfectly lathered on pink icing and a discreetly inaccurate number of candles.

“How lovely of everyone to remember,” Helen added with one of her patented superficial smiles, just as if she hadn’t been dropping unsubtle reminders for the past two weeks and insidiously putting the fear of God into us all lest we forget.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Helen,” my Aunt Zelma said impatiently, “Just cut the damn cake.”

Aunt Zel was a tiny woman but all 4’10 and 90 pounds of her was feisty. She had been born with a club foot and had to wear a specially built up orthopedic shoe but even so she tended to a serious limp and often had to drag her bad foot behind her. It caused her considerable pain and did nothing for her disposition – she wouldn’t tolerate an ounce of pity from anyone – but she could also be demanding about getting her own way and more than a little sarcastic with her tone. She’d never cared much for her brother’s choice of a wife and it was no secret that she and Helen were frequently at odds.

The house slept ten comfortably, twelve if pushed, but we were busting at the seams that particular birthday with nine adults, five kids and to my grandmother’s great distress, an extra dog – my cousins had brought Twinkle, a high strung, nervous, spindly legged chihuahua with the disposition of pirhanna, perpetually underfoot and on all our last nerves.

“His vet says he has separation anxiety,” Aunt Elaine said apologetically, “We didn’t have the heart to board him.”

“I declare, Elaine,” Aunt Zel said sharply, “If I trip over that nasty tempered, little overgrown rat once more, I’ll fall and break my damn hip and then I’ll show you both some real separation anxiety!”

“Mother!” Aunt Elaine protested and promptly burst into tears.

“Here, what’s all this,” Uncle Les said, glancing up from his checkers game with Uncle Herb,

“Damn, I wish you women could get along.”

“Oh, shut up, Lester,” Aunt Zel snapped.

“Zelma!” Uncle Herb said loudly.

Uncle Eddie, normally the most mild mannered of men, rattled his newspaper and peered over it with a frown. “Gettin’ so’s a man can’t read a paper in peace,” he muttered. The remark drew Aunt Zelma’s wrath and she turned on him immediately with a scowl. “Mind your business, Edgecombe,” she said harshly, “Nobody asked for your opinion!”

“Really, Zelma!” Aunt Helen chimed in, “There’s hardly a need to be rude.”

Aunt Zel turned slowly, limped to the doorway of the living room and glared fiercely at the entire room, most especially her pristine sister-in-law. Aunt Helen paled under her perfect makeup and actually took a half step backward, one hand nervously fingering her pearls. I saw surprise, a hint of dread, and for a fraction of a second, she nearly withered. We never did learn what my diminutive aunt planned to say because at that moment, my grandmother laid a hand on her shoulder and pulled gently.

“Bread needs to go in the oven, Zel,” she said firmly. Simple words but enough to bring about a de-escalation of a potentially explosive moment. Aunt Zelma returned to the kitchen and Aunt Helen fled upstairs. The checkers game continued, Elaine dried her eyes, and Uncle Eddie returned to his newspaper. Nana sent me and my cousins out to pick blackberries and Twinkle dutifully trailed after us. Just another day in the life of a family who sometimes got tired of pretending.