If you want to read this correctly, do your best Robin Leach. I’m not really calling you unskilled and lazy, unless the bootie fits. It is I who am unskilled and lazy. And these are the things I cook to save my life.
Last night, I found a poem I wrote in my 20s for someone’s 50th birthday. I had so much time on my hands. I wrote it to the style and meter of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. It’s funny to me for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I am almost 50 myself. What I used as old age benchmarks are a bit antiquated now that I’m almost there. It’s also quirky because of my references to pop culture at the time.
And because we’ve established that I didn’t have much to say, I’ll post it. If you know anyone turning 50, feel free to cheer them up with this in a greeting card.
Youthful Nevermore
Once upon a midnight dreay Muscles cramped and vision bleary Lawrence Welk upon the tube I used to think he was a bore. Dentures soaking in the restroom sending forth a sterile crest fume, Having reached the end of Welk, I took the “flipper” from the drawer. Flipping with a steady hand, 60 shows at my command. To sleep is all that I have planned, Because I’m youthful, nevermore.
Is this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion? MTV and VH1? This trash was never here before. Carefully I weighed my choices, Thinking I might hear some voices. Could it be just “old age” noises, Beating down my bedroom door?
I tried to think what I could do To bring my youth back into view. But as of yet I have no clue. I’ve never been this old before. I racked my brain in desperation, thinking up wild combinations Extinction and annihilation – words that haunt me to the core.
There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own insight accosted I raised myself up off the bed And paced across my bedroom’s floor. Memories of my prime are nifty. Days when birthdays never miffed me. Now, alas, I’m turning FIFTY! Oh, what with this year have in store? I leaned against the bed to rest, a hanky to my forehead pressed, Still feeling overwhelmed and stressed… I’ll see my childhood nevermore.
“Oh well, I’ll soon be fifty five. The discounts will keep me alive. I think seniors aren’t so bad And I still think I know the score. And when this milestone day is done, I’ll push ahead to Fifty-One, With every rise and set of sun, My youth is with me evermore.
This is my version of Cheers and Jeers. I don’t have much to say, but there were a few notable things, especially in the Coos category.
Boos
April 1. Boo. Every year my kids try to pull things on me. They stink at it but I’m still on edge all day. They love April 1. I am not a fan. BOO.
Stuffing 800 flyers into PTA teacher boxes. I don’t like counting. I especially don’t like dividing 800 into little groups of 22. BOO.
Spreadsheets. Enough said. BOO.
Trying to write a blog on a Monday and having nothing to say. If I am bored by it, I stop writing. If I don’t like the paragraph, why would anyone else? I started the year with the goal of writing Monday-Friday, taking the weekends off. That’s a good goal and I like that goal. The problem is, my typical style of post is essay or story-esque. I don’t know that I can keep up a standard pace of 5 of those a week. Well, clearly I can’t, because I haven’t. Little things like 104-page elementary school yearbooks and 5th grade banquets get in the way. So, boo to slacking. But coos to trying.
Pretending that it’s normal to say boos and coos. Boo to that.
Coos
Really cool doorways that I stumble upon while biking and then risk arrest or death as I creep close enough to get a decent picture. I suppose if I’d been shot while taking the picture, this might go in the Boo category. But as it stands, it was just a really cool doorway.
Heres a big one. I’m 48 and just learned to use a bike pump effectively. I’ve never had any luck pumping up bike tires before right now. I even had to purchase a small compressor that I plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car that would pump the tires automatically. I did have to look up a YouTube video to pump the tires of my road bike because it had a Presta valve, which is smaller and trickier. After that, nothing could stop me. I carry the sucker like a 38 magnum now. Is that a real gun?
Yesterday something amazing happened. More amazing that learning to use a bike pump and actually using it. Yesterday I witnessed harmony at the Temple Terrace roundabout by the country club. I’ve never seen anything like it. Prior to this, all I ever saw was people stopping like a 4-way stop. People hedging. Hesitating. People with a look of abject terror in their eyes. But not yesterday. Yesterday, on TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS, I saw people jumping in when they saw an opening, waiting their turn and merging into traffic, and then exiting like an Olympic dismount. It was beautiful. It created this whirly swirl of car colors and body styles, spinning around an island of flowers and grass. It was like people from all nations and cultures were holding hands and singing a remix mashup of Kumbaya and We are the World. It’s possible this was just an April Fool’s joke played by the universe. But it’s also possible people in this community are finally learning the ways of the mysterious, mythical roundabout.
Have a great April 2. Here’s hoping you have excellent experiences on the roundabout of life and that you don’t suffer trauma from anything that occurred on April 1.
Today is March 24. It is not a birthday. It is not an official anniversary of a marriage or a death. But it is a special day to me. And to you, too, I hope. Two years ago today, the allergic husband said yes to adding you to our family. He said yes to bringing you indoors and we embarked on an adventure for which we were grotesquely under prepared. I said I would never share my home with a beast. I said those words just that way. And I meant them 100%. When we brought you home, I tried to block off the stairs with a twin mattress we were getting rid of. I figured you’d be a downstairs dog only. I tried to get you sleeping in a kennel in the guest room. When that didn’t work, I tried to attach you to Andrew, who has a bedroom downstairs. But things evolved, as things often do. And now, not only do I share my home with a beast, I have on occasion shared my bed with the beast and don’t view you as beastly at all. You attached yourself to me. You are my bdff. Best dog friend forever.
I’m that person now.
When I showed up at the front door of your former owner and
you bolted out the door and down the sidewalk going 55 miles an hour, I wore an
expression of shock. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Were you a
naughty dog? Were you a runner? What I know now is that you love to be outside.
You love your walks. When you get your outside time, you don’t bolt. You weren’t
getting any time outside before you came to live with us.
I’ve wondered 1000 times why 2 different owners gave you
away. What did they know that I didn’t? What about you was hard that would
cause someone to willingly place you somewhere else? I still don’t know the
answer to this one. The only answer I have is that you were born to be with us
and we just weren’t ready to embrace that fact until that day 2 years ago.
You are the perfect dog. Perfectly housebroken. Perfect
happy. Perfectly snuggly. You do become a demon when a golf cart goes by. And
golf carts do go by a lot. But I have to give you a pass on a few things.
They call dogs like you rescues. And in a sense, I do think we rescued you from a situation that wasn’t ideal. But the real truth of the situation is that you rescued us. The whole family came together to adore you in a unity we were really craving. We took walks together with you on the golf course. Together we bathed you about 15 times the first month because we thought we had to for allergies. We came to find out that we were cleaning you to death, so we stopped that business.
There have been a few accidents along the way. A few times we gave you a little too much freedom and almost condemned you to the mouth of a Belgian sheep dog. A few times we didn’t interrupt your need to roll around in another dog’s fresh waste. A few times we backed into you in the kitchen and almost killed the both of us. That one time we tried to teach you to swim. But mostly, we’ve gotten it right. We adore you. You are a hairy 5th child that doesn’t require a lot and rarely talks back. You are the best of all of us.
I don’t know what was wrong with your two previous owners, but I can tell you one thing for certain. We are your family.. We will always be your family. You are home now.
So let me hoist you up onto your dad’s side of the bed and tell you all about what happens when a guy travels to New York City without his wife. This is a good story. You’ll like it. It starts with New York City and it ends like this:
It is the 15th anniversary of the day I first laid eyes on you. I had seen some sonograms. I had spent some time trying to roll with you when you woke up jamming at 4 a.m. But this day was my first meeting in real time, full color. Turns out, as hard as we tried to check you out in advance, test your lungs, and plan every last detail ahead, you still weren’t ready to make your entrance. You’ve never liked getting up or out early. You like your sleep.
You were born on a Tuesday afternoon and placed immediately up against me for a first hold in this world. After about a minute of a strained cry, the doctor determined you weren’t quite all right, so they plucked you from my cradled grip and ushered you away from me for the next 8 hours. That was an exhausting 8 hours, swollen with anxiety about what was actually happening in the NICU. As it turned out, it was fairly standard stuff. But it isn’t standard to not have your arms around the baby you’ve loved for 9 months and who has only been in the world for a few hours. There is nothing that feels standard about that. When they finally let me see you again, it was about 8 p.m. I was shot all to c-section pieces, but still so happy to be headed down that corridor in a wheelchair. You were hungry. And screaming. Really. Really. Screaming. You still make shocking amounts of noise 15 years later. I scrubbed my hands, rolled around by your bassinet, and the nurse handed your pink, wrinkly disgruntled self. I hugged you to me and said quietly,
“Hey, boy. It’s mama.”
And in that exact instant, you stopped crying. Not a peep. And then I started up. Because I couldn’t believe that you were here and you were mine. And that the sound of my words could be a salve to your caterwauling soul. It was a moment I will remember until I don’t remember how to string two words together anymore.
That was the day you became my mama’s boy.
Even today, it is my privilege to be the one to cart you to a trampoline arena with 3 of your buddies and then on to eat our favorite, MEXICAN FOOD. You don’t need me for as much now. You don’t hug me quite as often. You outgrew your rather extreme lisp and don’t look over your shoulder anymore to see where I am in relation to where you are. But you’re still you and I love you exponentially more than I did that day when I suddenly got woozy and handed you back to a nurse right before throwing up in a cup someone handed me.
Hey, it can’t all be swaddles and lullabies.
You are rap music (clean version only), and marching quads, and jokes pushed too far, and extreme sports, and expensive shoes, and so many pairs of shoes, and fluffy hair, and oversleeping, and sidestepping the siblings who take swipes at you when you have poked the bear one time too many. You are kind when you need to be, funny to a fault, and really bad at drawing trees. Your words, not mine.
You will always be my mama’s boy. But we can just keep that between us.
Twice a week, from 2:45 to 3:25, I sit in my car and wait. I
wait for my daughter and her two friends to come out of a looming brick building
that houses their middle school. The bell rings and kids spill out from the
gates like they are being poured from a bottle.
Sometimes during the waiting, I write. Sometimes I can’t
think of anything to write so I listen to Ariana Grande or anyone else who
happens to be singing on New York’s pop station, Z100. Today, I listened to
Ariana Grande and then turned off the radio. It was annoying.
The skies are deceptively gray today, constantly tricking me
into believing it is cold. Flint-colored, threatening clouds sit atop a white
Tampa sky and if I didn’t know better, I would tell you it was going to snow.
I do know better. It is not going to snow. It is 74 degrees.
My eye wanders across the road to the fence that lines the sidewalk kids use when they are walking home. Mostly it is a solid fence and it stretches beyond my line of vision. There is one broken section that I could hit with a rock from my car. It is missing its top bar and sags forward without it. In another spot nearby, the fence is torn. Broken and torn fences remind me of a night.
When Brady was in 6th grade and Andrew in 8th, they went to a small Christian school. Andrew was there because it was exactly what he needed at the time. Brady was there because the other options would have killed him on the spot. It was the right fit at the right time for both of them. Some friends were there, too. One of them in particular has captured my heart since she was a baby. And I can’t stand for anything to go bad for the people who have my heart.
I was texting back and forth with this girl’s mom and discovered that she had left her binder on the sidelines of the football field after a practice. The binders were like a ticket to heaven. You didn’t lose, deface, damage, destroy, speak badly about, or misplace even for an hour, the binder. You just didn’t. Everything was in it and it was everything. So my young friend not knowing where hers was became a problem of gargantuan proportions. We had to get that binder.
I had to get that binder.
No one asked me to get it. No one sent me to the school after dark. In fact, when questioned by my family about where I was headed, I was rather cryptic in my replies. Noneya, people. I got business.
I drove the mile and a half to the football field and pulled up to the driveway where I wanted to turn in. But I couldn’t turn in. Because there was a fence. With a gate. And it was locked.
Crum.
This is the very natural point at which every other 45 year old mother would have gotten back in their car, reversed it, and gone home. I couldn’t quit that easily. That binder was at stake and so was everything tied to it.
I stood there, propped up against my open car door, with cars whizzing past on the highway behind me, and assessed my situation. It wasn’t good. There were fences. Solid, gated fences everywhere. What has the world come to that I can’t retrieve a binder on a football field without threat of arrest or personal injury?
Ah well. There had to be a way. I pulled my car over in the
driveway a little bit and walked over to a section of fence near the baseball
field. After scouting it thoroughly, I determined that this location wasn’t
going to work. I had to move on to Plan B.
Plan B was almost as bad as Plan A. More fences, more gates. But I had improved my situation dramatically in the fact that I was now parked down a long driveway out of the way of traffic. I turned off the car and started to slide my cell phone into my back pocket. I didn’t have pockets. I was wearing my yoga pants and a hoodie. It was dark. Don’t judge. What was I going to do with my cell phone? Was I going to embark on a covert mission in the dark without my phone, or was I going to handicap my mission by tying up the hand that had to carry it? It was a conundrum. In the end, I decided to take the phone and handicap myself for 3 reasons: (1) Where there’s no handicap, there’s no story. (2) I needed the cell phone flashlight. (3) I was pretty sure I was going to have to call 911 at some point.
I looked around as the headlights flickered off. There seemed
no way to enter any side of the school without climbing a fence. I am not a
good climber of anything. Trees scare me. We don’t have hills in Florida. I
once broke my ankle getting out of bed the wrong way. I can’t even do
furniture. I had no business doing fences. These were the voices in my head as
I turned to the right and grabbed a shock of wild hair.
Well, would ya look at that. Another gate. And not a solid
one. This gate was connected by a chain and there was a good 18 inches of gap
to work with. I could make that work for me. With the cell flashlight blazing,
I took off through the gapped gate.
It seemed like such a good idea when I took off running down a trail through the backwoods of the school property. There were no fences. I had been back here before and knew the way. It was a grand path to a binder that waited at the other end of that path.
Only the path was darker than a jaguar’s armpit and equally as frightening. My cell flashlight only managed to twist the shadows of regular plants and trees into the shapes of serial killers. But still I ran on.
That path was longer than I could have imagined when I was
standing at my car. And the darker and narrower it got, the faster I ran. I was
heaving puffs of night air and sucking wind by the time I reached the opening
to the football field.
Must.
Start.
Exercising.
I jogged to the edge of the field where the bleachers sat
lifeless, glinting silver under a half moon, and shifted my eyes to find a
lonely old binder. There was nothing there. To be certain, I walked the length
of the bleachers and shined my light wherever a binder could possibly be.
Nothing.
Well, shoot. The only other place her mother had said it
might be was on the stone picnic tables outside the portables. Theoretically,
that was a 2 minute walk. That walk was interrupted by yet another gate.
So many fences.
I had another decision to make. I couldn’t go back the way I
came if I wanted to search at the picnic tables. It had come down to this: I
had to climb a fence.
I walked across a short practice field to reach the gate. At
this point, I had to locate a section of fence that I thought I could successfully
climb. I shoved my phone through the links and watched it plunk softly on the
night grass and grabbed the top of the fence with both hands.
Heave!
I was in trouble from the beginning, because I was wearing my Keens. My Keens have a very wide toe-box and the fence holes were less that half the width of the shoe. Somehow I scrambled up and managed to swing one leg over. And then I sat there, atop a 5 foot fence, straddling it with one leg dangling over each side, swaying like a drunk monkey because I exceeded the maximum weight of the area I was sitting on.
“I’m too old for this mess,” I said to myself, finally pushing off to jump to the other side. I heard a rip as soon as I committed to the jump. When I landed, I reached down for my phone and around to see what I had ripped. My yoga pants. At the butt. Big time. And the rip was accompanied by a little scrape that comes from women in their 40s that try to climb fences in the dark. Shoot, I liked these pants. I knew I should have changed into my renegade pants before coming out tonight. But that would have drawn too much attention.
I limped over to the stone picnic tables, feeling triumphant to still be alive, and began my secondary search for the binder. There were a few things strewn about, left behind by other students. There was no binder. I hung my head, knowing I was not going to deliver any joy to a child tonight. With one last ditch effort, I slinked over to the glass double doors leading into the school’s main hallway and pressed my face to the glass. I could see the outline of the lockers, but nothing else.
Then I looked up.
At the security cameras that had been newly installed this
year.
My eyes dilated in the night like an animal about to be plowed
under by a semi. What if these are
monitored? What if I already set something off? What if they review video after
each night and my boys get booted from the school because their mom is a rebel
wearing torn pants?
And I took off running. I ran like I wasn’t 45 and hadn’t ripped my pants at the butt. I ran like I’d been running for decades. I ran straight down the paved car line path to my car.
Which was blocked by another fence. Are you kidding me with these fences? Right then I knew that my kids were at a REALLY SAFE SCHOOL.
I whipped all the way around, looking for the fastest way to jump another fence. This was going to finish off the pants. I don’t remember much about this last athletic feat. I’m sure it was ugly. I fully expected the way to be lit by primary colored lights but nobody came. There were no late night phone calls or visits from cops. I got back in my van and drove home, trying to normalize the last half hour as I drove. Turns out, you can’t fix in a mile and a half what you broke in 30 minutes.
I walked back through my family room and slipped back into my routine, as if nothing had happened.
“No luck,” I announced nonchalantly. Fortunately, no one wondered why I needed luck and no one made eye contact with the gaping pants hole.
The next morning, around the time of morning drop off, I casually
texted the mother of the binder-less girl.
“Hey, I went to the school last night and tried to find her
binder. Let me know what happens today.”
I was picturing her in the principal’s office, or spending the entire day trying to rebuild a binder from the notes of her friends.
Her mother texted back rather quickly.
“All good,” she replied. “Her binder was in her locker all along.”
My girls are both struggling with styes as of this weekend. They were worsening last night. Maybe there are parents out there who have no experience with styes and no knowledge of what to do when one crops up. I am not that parent.
I know everything there is to know about styes. I know what they look and feel like when they begin. I know what to do to stop them as they are just beginning. And I know when a stye has crossed the threshold into Frankenstein land. Lucy, bless her, had the restraint to not rub her eye. She followed my instructions to a T. Jenna, however, was rubbing her eyes rather generously as I barked orders for her to stop. She didn’t understand why I was barking orders. She doesn’t know that she is likely to wake up in Frankenstein land. She doesn’t know how bad a land it is to live in. She doesn’t know.
But I do.
The first stye I ever got was in 3rd grade. I didn’t need one more strike against me. I had big hair that looked like I had been riding in a truck bed for the last 7 years. My teeth were prominent. Not rich tycoon prominent. More like open wound on your face prominent. My freckles looked like angry fire ants. And my clothing was an ensemble that went perfectly with baggy tube socks.
I didn’t need a stye.
My mother told me not to rub it. She told me what would happen if I did. But it was JUST SO ITCHY.
I can’t describe the itching.
As predicted by my very smart mother, my eye got worse. And lucky for me, all that scratching sent the infection to my other eye, too. By Day 3, I was Grade A Miserable. I went to sleep that night holding a heating pad over my face. Sleep was the only thing that helped.
When I awakened on Day 4, I sat up in bed and swung my legs over the side to look in the mirror that faced me. I couldn’t see myself in that mirror because I couldn’t open my eyes. They were swollen shut and glued in that position by the extra-fun goo my eye had produced overnight.
“MOM!” I screamed. “MOM, MY EYES!” I was screaming like a child going blind. Like Mary Ingalls when she finally lost the last of her sight. I needed Michael Landon to wrap his arms me and apply some salve he made from cow spit out on the prairie. My mother came in and told me to take it down and notch as she assessed my situation.
She spent a few minutes helping me apply hot compresses to my gooped shut eyes. I was directed to massage the tear ducts. I felt like I’d been crying all night but instead of crying tears, I was crying rubber cement. When I got the eyes open enough to take a good look at myself, I was terrified of what I saw. It was the stuff of a professional makeup artist.
Surely she was going to let me stay home from school. She would not send me to school like this.
She sent me to school like that. Actually, she didn’t send me exactly like that. She proudly placed a plastic pair of yellow sunglasses with dark lenses over my swollen eyelids and patted me on both shoulders.
“There,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Just keep those on and no one will know.”
They might not know I have a highly contagious infection in both my eyes, Mom. But they will notice I’m wearing yellow sunglasses.
Every half hour I survived at school that day was a valiant effort and a triumph of my human spirit. I was paranoid on the inside. On the outside, my head was throbbing from the pressure of the extra stuff I was generating. It was beyond gross. At the halfway point in the day, we were lined up in the hallway of Kate Sullivan Elementary. We were lined up for lunch and we were neatly leaning with our backs up against the wall next to our classroom door. It was all very civilized until a cute little un-styed girl stared at me a little too long and decided to get to the bottom of my situation.
“Hey,” she called out, leaning over two people to make eye contact with my shades. “Who do you think you are? A movie star?”
SIgh.
If the movie is Godzilla, little miss.
I had comebacks running through my mind faster than I could kill a plant or burn a kitchen down. But I decided not to say any of them. Because none of them were as effective as letting her see for herself.
I raised my hand slowly to the temples of my shades and lowered them onto the end of my nose so my fat, oozing eyes were clearly visible to her or anyone else in my 3rd grade class that cared to look. Feast your eyes…on my eyes.
This little girl’s eyes grew double in size as she gazed in horror at what I’d revealed. She gasped.
“Never mind,” she said.
Yeah. That’s what I thought she’d say.
One more word and you’ll look just like me in a couple of days, sistah.
It all worked out. The stye went away 3 days later and I didn’t have any more trouble with that little girl.
I don’t want to get all 90210 emotional on people. And the truth is, I didn’t watch a whole lot of 90210 as it was actually happening. I was in my second year of college when the series first aired. TVs were sparse in college dorms back then. The only thing my dorm could agree on was Days of Our Lives, and that practically ruined my life. I’m thankful to say I kicked that habit. If there were girls watching 90210 in the evenings, I wasn’t aware of it. I was a nerd. I was studying.
But even if you didn’t watch 90210, you knew about it. You knew the actors. They were all over the teen magazines. Guys in high school and college were desperately growing their sideburns and trying so very, very hard to be Luke Perry and Jason Priestley. This show was all the talk. In office spaces. Classrooms. On ball fields. I remember sitting in a Creative Writing class as a junior at Florida State and hearing about Dylan and Brenda. More than I even wanted to.
Since then, I’ve watched some reruns. I’ve seen Luke Perry in 8 Seconds and on a corny romance on my beloved Hallmark. I’ve always been thankful that I was not in high school alongside the 90210 characters. It brought teen sex to the forefront of everyone’s minds and suddenly girls who didn’t really want to yet felt like they had to now. Because Dylan and Brenda had. It changed things.
Luke Perry died yesterday morning from the effects of a massive stroke he had last Wednesday. He was 52. I turned 48 fairly recently. 52 does not seem like stroke age to me. 52 is like I’m-getting-myself-together-pretty-good-now age. Part of the reason America is mourning him relates to what he represented and who he was. The other part of that mourning relates to who we are, how old we are, and our fears that if he wasn’t spared, how might we be? When Michael Jackson died at 50, it was because he had a full-time Dr. Jeckyl administering ridiculous amounts of life threatening drugs just to get him to sleep at night. That didn’t hit close to home for me.
But a stroke. Coming out of nowhere. That could happen to anyone.
And anyone is me.
Jill Filipovic of CNN said that “his death is a reminder of a youth that is receding in the rearview mirror, even as mortality is approaching way too fast.”
What do I see when I look in my rearview mirror? My own youth, yes. That one doesn’t bother me at all, actually. I am strangely unconcerned with the passing of my own youth. I have so many good, rich, fun memories of that youth. And we’ve all seen what my youth LOOKED like. It’s not hard to leave that behind. What I see most powerfully in that rearview mirror is the receding youth of my children. That’s the one that puts a lump in my throat. So little time left with the boys. So many things I’d do differently, more gently, or with more structure and discipline if I could just back that car up again.
But I can’t back that car up again. There’s no reverse.
The CNN editor, Jill Filipovic ended her Luke Perry article with this: We may not end up walking as far as we would like. Are we happy with the trail we have left behind us?
The good news is that, as of now, there’s still forward motion. There’s still a road ahead. Where I drive today is what I’ll see in that rearview mirror tomorrow.
I’m sorry Luke Perry’s road ended. He was a positive force. But I think I’ll take it as the gift of a glance into my own rearview mirror and a focused determination to drive on. #onlyforward
This story was written in the voice and style of Keith Morrison/Dateline. Read as such.
Temple Terrace, Florida–home of discarded couches and hookah lounges–and to a rather unusual cat, Steve Bennett. Steve was not a pure bred cat. Somewhere in his blood line, there was some dog in him. He seldom arched his back in arrogance, angry that his house rules had not been followed. Instead, he greeted his family–even strangers–at the door with a meow and a rub against any calf that would let him in range. Steve was needy. Steve was looking for friends. On the outside, he seemed perfectly friendly. But a friendly cat is an oxymoron. Things are not always what they seem. Steve was harboring a loneliness that seemed innocent enough. Until it wasn’t. Steve’s search for love led him to the brink of desperation.
In simpler times, August 2014 to be exact, Steve was in the prime of his life. He was at the top of his game. His owners, the Bennetts, had come to accept that he, in fact, owned them. They played along and everything went exactly as it should. Steve had a good life there on Main Street. But one thing had been withheld from him. One friend. A beta fish, set high on a table top and protected by a $12 plastic topped container, swam in circles that Steve was not allowed to enter. The fish was named Swift. Ironic, because in the end, speed could not save him.
Steve knew that cats and fish were not friends. He knew, because he knew things. It was against house rules set by the humans. But all Steve wanted was companionship. So when the family left the house, for non-cat activities, Steve would hop up to the table and commune with Swift. Swift did not know as many things as Steve knew. That’s how it is for fish and cats. But Swift, for all he didn’t know, knew that Steve was not his friend. Steve was to be feared. For awhile, Swift managed to circle his bowl at just the perfect speed and trajectory to make Steve a tad sleepy. During this honeymoon period, they appeared to be friends. Steve would sit bowlside, peacefully thinking about ways to further cement this relationship. He tried everything. Long gazes under the glow of the moonbeams spilling through the blinds. Reading the news to Swift. Pucker faces.
It was, at best, an unrequited friendship. Swift was cold to Steve. He didn’t like the news. He was creeped out by the moonlight. He blew his bubbles the other direction. He turned his fins on Steve. For a few weeks, Steve focused his affections on the children in the house. On his litter box. On his warm spot between the window and the blinds where he watched discarded couches go by.
In December 2014, everything changed.
Steve’s family went out of town. They had plans to frolic in the snows of Indiana. No one invited Steve. He was given enough food to get by, a clean litter box, and a neighbor to watch him on occasion. He searched his soul and found his circumstances to be unacceptable.
It was time.
Steve was taking control.
What happened in the next few days is anybody’s guess. There were only two witnesses and one of them was no longer witnessing. Steve’s family came home to a blood bath. Swift had been murdered and left to die in several pieces on the wood floors, far from the comfort of his tap water–the only home he’d ever known. Steve was off behind the laundry basket doing his thing. He wasn’t talking.
The family wanted to believe that this was somehow a grisly accident. That Steve had nothing to do with it. But a few days following Swift’s funeral, Steve’s human mama, Pippy, came around the corner to find Steve with his paw actually in the bowl that was once home to the family fish. It was as red-handed a moment as they were going to get.
Steve could see the devastation in their eyes. He knew he’d been found out, because Steve knows things. The family pulled together and together took the baby steps forward through the stages of grief, each stage lasting less than a minute. Steve slunk around with his tail down for a day or two, waiting to see if the humane society would be called in. He hung onto a strand of hope that they would get him another fish. Neither happened and life continued after Swift’s violent demise the same as it had before.
Steve wondered about that a little. Humans are funny folks. But in the end, he realized again that it was his house, his rules. And according to his rules, fish was always on the menu.
It’s 8:35 p.m. and it feels like midnight. That is neither here nor there. Unless here is my mouth and there is a Diet Mountain Dew.
Sigh.
The Snapps have a rather checkered past with pets, but more specifically pet-store-quality goldfish. Unfortunately for Andrew, Brady came out of the womb sneezing. He is allergic to everything not found in a womb. So having a fluffy pet was always out of the question. And because we are super great parents and wanted our children to grow up well-rounded and compassionate, we bought them fish. If you can’t have a dog, get a fish. Obviously. But what’s better than 1 fish in a bowl? TWO FISH IN A BOWL. Nothing was too good for our firstborn, so we brought home 2 Walmart goldfish that cost us a total of $12 if you add in the bowl and the food.
Within 7 hours, the first fish was dead and the other one was circling him with a life insurance policy. We hadn’t even named them yet. The next day, the other fish was dead. I know there’s a tenuous life expectancy with Walmart goldfish, but losing 2 fish within 24 hours seemed extreme even to me. Andrew was distraught, so that next day after naptime, we went back to Walmart to talk fish with the guy. He suggested that perhaps two cheap fish sharing one unfiltered bowl of tap water was not the best idea. He thought we should try our hands at keeping one alive first. We agreed. By then, Andrew had named the first two fish Dennis. Both of them.
We bought another. Andrew named him Dennis.
Dennis died, but not quite so quickly.
I wasn’t sure Andrew could continue tolerating this pattern of fish death, so I snuck back to Walmart while he was at preschool and bought one that looked just like it. He’s didn’t notice. I named him Dennis. Because.
Dennis died. Again.
This time, time #4, Andrew was home. There was no opportunity to skulk around, privately flush, memorialize, and secretly replace the dead fish. So I sat him down and we discussed our options. Maybe this time he wouldn’t want to replace Dennis the 4th. Maybe he would be ready to move on.
“So, Buddy,” I said, patting his knee, “What do you want to do?”
“Get another fish,” he said resolutely.
“Oh, really?” This was not what I wanted to hear. “When?” I asked.
“Today.” He smiled. That big goofy smile with a dimple for dessert. I dropped my head in defeat.
“Ok, but we’re not naming this one Dennis.”
We went back to the store and got a new fish. With this one, we went with a different look. We went splashy white with a flare of orange on the tail. The others had all been orange.
I threw out so many creative names. Andrew shot them all down and dubbed him Flipper.
At least it wasn’t Dennis.
Flipper was from heartier stock. Flipper lived. And lived. And lived. For 5 years. I wish I had a birth certificate for Flipper, so I could prove that he was the oldest goldfish ever in the history of the world. But I can’t prove anything so I’ve let go of that being my path to being independently wealthy.
At the five year mark, Flipper began to swim a little slower. He spent more and more time inside his castle and less and less time darting around it. And then one afternoon, 5 months later, he turned over and gave it up. I was reaching for the net to fish him out when he flipped back over and swam away. He was alive. For now.
A week later, he died again. And lived again. Four times he false alarmed us.
But no fish lasts forever. And here is my journal entry from that final, FINAL day:
—————–
No joke. 5 1/2 years later, our fish is finally done. He fought a great fight. We discovered his demise while I was trying to order pizza tonight. Imagine that little scene. First we couldn’t find the fish. Then we located him under his castle (no idea how he managed that). And following our locating of him, the tears began to flow from Andrew and Lucy. Brady does not care one whit. He has a bit of his father in him. Jenna walked away like nothing had happened. And Andrew and Lucy are planning the funeral, which will take place this evening.
Following a poignant service and a 12-nerf-gun salute, we will flush him to join his brothers, Dennis 1,2,3, and 4.
Rest in peace, little walmart goldfish. Rest in peace.
———————-
There are other fish stories, perhaps for other days. Because who doesn’t love a good fish story?
At some point over the weekend, I said to myself, “I’ve got to get back on track.” Maybe it was the open sleeve of Trefoils in my hand that I was double fisting into my mouth. Maybe it was the complete lack of energy I had for anything I needed to be doing. But that voice in my head said, “Get back on track.” And then another voice corrected that first voice.
“You can’t get back on track if you were never on track in the first place.” Touché.
You have to lay track to be on the track. The bad news is, I never laid the track. The good news is that I usually realize this in February and quit until the following year. This year, in February, I’m just going to lay some track and go on my merry way.
I was talking about it later with Todd. Brady, Lucy, and Jenna were all in room participating in the conversation. I was talking to Todd about my goals and why I believe I’ve failed at them for, oh, a decade. Within the last 2 years, he got healthy and has stayed healthy. I didn’t jump on his track while he was laying it. I just watched from the banks with a trail of Smarties wrappers at my feet and cheered him on. Good job, babe. Way to go.
Shoot.
During our conversation yesterday, he started talking about the voice in his own head and how he used it to meet his goals.
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Brady?” He asked at one point. In ways, they are the same person. Brady laughed and said,
“I know what you’re talking about.”
Todd’s inner voice helps him meet goals. Brady’s makes internal snarky remarks. About everything. Mine waits for the other people to leave the house and tells me to go grab the box of Trefoils.
Lucy raised her eyebrows at all of this and said,
“I don’t have voices in my head.”
She probably doesn’t.
At any rate, I talked a big game about Discipline being the word of the year and then didn’t have enough of it to make the actual plan. I emphasized controlled and habitual and then didn’t control a thing or form a single habit.
It’s amazing how much sugar I’ve had since I dropped sugar.
I have been writing more. I set a Monday-Friday goal and have met that consistently with a few misses when sickness or holidays jammed their thumbs in my business.
So now what? What’s my plan? How do I lay the track?
For one thing, I have to have accountability. Real accountability. Having some person in cyberspace to text about my diet doesn’t work. Telling the kids to keep me accountable hasn’t worked yet. Because they are all out of the house for 7 hours every day. Girl, I can do some damage in that 7 hours. Dropping sugar doesn’t work if I don’t replace it with something better.
The habitual part has suffered greatly, so yesterday I started laying the track.
Track 1– Make a meal plan for the week, complete with ingredients and shopping list. I made the entire week’s meal plan yesterday. There are probably people reading this who can’t believe a week’s meal plan would be a challenge for someone. It is for me. It’s the BIGGEST problem. I don’t think that way. I hate grocery stores. But planning on Sunday for the next two weeks is what is needed. So I’m holding myself to it. So far, so good.
Track 2 – Drop Diet Mountain Dew. It makes me want sweets and it keeps me from drinking water. I’m using my new Adidas water bottle to encourage the better habit. I’m likely to be quite grumpy for awhile. Maybe my posts will take on an angry tone. Or be about starvation.
Track 3 – Buy a bike. I love biking more than any other exercise.
Track 4 – Get a personal trainer. The only one I can really afford is unemployed, doesn’t have a resume, and is only 11. I don’t know if she’s any good. I’m her first client. But she’s already got a notebook she’s writing in about me and she made me promise to walk or run with her today, after 3 p.m. Not before. After. I kinda think I’ll like her. She’s perky.
Track 5 – Supplies. The fridge is full of yogurt, fruit, and healthier options. The girl scout cookies are hidden in Andrew’s room. He’s very pleased with this new turn of events.
Track 6 – Mindfulness. No more fistfuls of anything when I’m not really hungry. Log everything. Make it count.
Track 7 – Daily Lists. I love lists. At worst, they give me a false sense of accomplishment. At best, they help produce actual accomplishment.
Track 8 – Do the first things first. That includes the hateables. Don’t sit down and spend 90 minutes writing if dinner isn’t planned or prepped and it still looks like a bomb went off from breakfast. Make the daily deposits on exercise, housework, goals, and laundry. Then write. Smarties are not a reward. Diet Mountain Dew is still off the table.
Track 9 – Accept agony. This one is Todd’s. For ten years, I’ve been trying to find the easy way to do this. Somehow if I tweak enough things, I will make it fun. Easy. It’s going to be hard for at least a little bit. I accept this. I hope.
Track 10 – Lay new tracks as you see them. Readjust when necessary. Never quit.
Well, that’s 10 tracks. That ought to propel my train about 20 feet forward and get me safely to March 10.
The good news is now I have track laid. The bad news is I have a caffeine headache bigger than my to do list.
Snappshots.com 