The Wet Spot

This is the story of Z, the Hero.

The Dog House was cursed by angry gods of water and sewage at some point, and now whenever I am here, there is . . . wetness.

On my watch, the finished basement has flooded three times, the ice maker has sprung a leak and flooded the kitchen and living room twice (for which the previous Scottie was soundly chastised until I realized no matter how full his little bladder, he could not have made a mess that covered so much square footage), the outside water faucet has gone wonky once and backed water into the guest bathroom, the garbage disposal has broken twice, the city sewer has threatened to fill the house, the fountain that aerates the pond has broken multiple times, and all three toilets at one time or another have had issues. It is uncommon for me to stay here and NOT have to get out the wet vac, so you’d think I’d be prepared.

But no. Very late last night Z and I were up wet vaccing the master bedroom, bath, as well as the basement underneath these rooms because the toilet overflowed while we slept.

I was rendered completely useless, like one of those idiot women in the movies who wrings her hands and moans “ooooo…..oooooo” while a burglar pummels the husband. She could whack the burglar with a frying pan, but no, she stands, quaking, and saying oooooooooo. I’ve been staying in this house since I was in high school, yet suddenly I had no earthly idea how to attack this problem. I momentarily considered grabbing the dog, locking the door behind us, and spending the rest of the next two weeks at a dog-friendly motel.

Z though, he was amazing. He immediately leapt out of bed and came up with a plan. He knew the practical things to do, like turn the water off, and also the clever things like where the wet vac was because two years ago he was here when there was another water crisis. He exerted the majority of the strength needed to move the giant dresser. While I was wringing my hands and toe-dabbing at a small duck pond with a hand towel, he did the wet vaccing and managed to keep up a steady stream of dog-directed conversation. Hello you. What are we doing up in the middle of the night making all this racket and interrupting your sleep, eh? Eh? And all of this while wearing his underpants and a pair of the owner’s paint-splattered cowboy boots.

I don’t mind telling you I discovered whole new ways that I love him last night. He worked up a sweat, scrubbing and emptying wet vac buckets, and I stood there, toe-dabbing the carpet and staring at these excellent legs and strong back and capable hands and I felt a little like I’d woken up in someone else’s life. Who was this man who could take care of business and how did he come to be in my life?

It would be nice if I could report that after an hour of this work we tumbled into bed and all was right with the world. As it turns out, though, the dinner party we planned for tonight very nearly had to be canceled because at five minutes to five (you know, when the plumbers are just clocking out) the city sewer was thinking seriously about backing into the house. Toilets gurgled and made the dog bark in Amityville Horror style and though the water was clean, it was only a matter of time before it got ugly. This was beyond even Z’s scope of plan-making and problem-fixing, so the big dogs had to be called in and paid overtime to flip a little valve that turned the tide.

The party was excellent. Z and I and the Scottie made good hosts in our fake house and our guests were entertaining and none the wiser that just a few hours before we'd considered telling them they'd have to drive up the road to use the facilities at McDonald's if they needed to. For most of the night, I had this desire to flood the bathroom again just so I could see Z in his underpants and cowboy boots, slaving away and affording me the strange joy of hand-wringing.

Z Minus Eighteen

It has been a long, hot summer, and I don’t mean that in a sexy kind of way, or even a melodramatic, Tennessee Williams kind of way. No. I mean it in the It’s not so much the heat as the humidity kind of way. It’s been miserable for the last two months and with some kind of protective shield around my section of Wayne County that has left us impervious to rain. The reservoir is nearly empty, the flowers look like they’ve just barely survived some holocaust, and everywhere Grapes of Wrath style clouds get kicked up by the teensiest of movements.

I’ve been having my own internal Dust Bowl as well, as evidenced by the lack of blog entries, lack of ready-to-publish fiction and essays, and lack of completed creative projects of the knitting, drawing, and gluing persuasion. I’ve been busy going places and seeing people and teaching students, but it’s always a little disappointing at the end of the summer to see all of the things not accomplished in what previously seemed like a vast expanse of time.

The Scottie dog is back from his cowboy adventure out west, and since his parents are gone on yet another trip, we’re figuring out how to deal with the heat together. Since we’re both of Celtic lineage, we don’t LIKE the heat. He seems to have complete confidence in my ability to turn down the thermostat, which is unfortunate. To make us both more comfortable, I decided that we’d start walking in the early morning instead of the late afternoon. The squirrels are much juicier and unsuspecting in the morning, and it has made the Scottie dog quite happy. The only problem is he still expects his afternoon walk and keeps giving me these meaningful looks in attempt to remind me that walking should take place at 7:00 p.m., not 7:00 a.m.

Z is in transit after two and a half months in Zimbabwe, where he has been dealing with astronomical inflation, food shortages, petrol shortages, power outages, water outages, telephone outages, and crap television programming. To celebrate his imminent return, I went out today and bought new underwear, three tops, and a new set of jersey knit sheets in Shrek green. The closer South African Air Flight 207 gets to America’s shores, the more sure I am that the drought is about over. The sky is clouding up as I write this, and it’s a welcome sight.

Heredity

What might be wrong with me:

Brain tumor
Stroke
Heart attack
Multiple Sclerosis
Alzheimers
Diabetes
Blood clot
Arthritis
Cataracts
Deafness
Spinal Stenosis
Pulmonary Fibrosis
Chronic Pulmonary Lung Disease
Leukemia
Lung Cancer
Skin Cancer
Breast Cancer
Ovarian Cancer
Cervical Cancer
Uterine Cancer
Esophageal Cancer
Tonsil Cancer
Mitro Valve Prolapse
Lou Gehrig’s Disease

What’s really wrong with me:

Headache
Heartburn
Hangnail
General Malaise

Wild Mouse

For something like twenty-five years D.B. and I have been taking trips together that usually have an amusement park destination. Sure, we’d like to see Graceland and the Grand Canyon and Mt. Rushmore, but if we can’t find a thrill ride within an hour’s drive, we make other plans.

We both attribute this obsession to our divorced childhoods and our divorced fathers who took us to King’s Island once a year. (Though technically, D.B. went with both parents and while he and his little brother ran wild thru the park, the parents argued and hollered and discussed the terms of their impending separation and subsequent divorce.) Also, The Brady Bunch filmed an episode there, and to this day, if either of us sees that it’s on, we call the other, shrieking, and we watch as the family races from one side of the park to the other, not riding rides, no, but trying to track down Mr. Brady’s blueprints that Jan misplaced. We watch from beginning to end and wonder why Jan wasn’t just sold to the gypsies because she was a hindrance to good times for everyone, including Alice.

There is no rollercoaster too terrifying for us. We like them big and we are not purists who insist on wood or thrill-seekers who only want the insane gymnastics that steel can provide. Mostly though, the higher and faster and more certain the death, the happier we are.

Only here’s the thing: I really only like the little ones now, the ones that kids under 48” are allowed to ride. There are several possibilities for what caused my change of heart, but here are the most likely culprits:

1. I rode Mission Space at Epcot three years ago and my life flashed before my eyes as Gary Senese narrated my few seconds of supposed weightlessness.
2. I turned 40.
3. I am suggestible now that I’m middle aged, and those warning signs about back trouble, heart trouble, high blood pressure, and pregnancy convince me that I have all four conditions and should walk myself immediately to First Aid and rest on a cot.
4. I’m not really keen to die now that I’m in love. (For the record, as far as D.B. is concerned, it’s all about Mission Space and my age. If he thought I let a man come between me and our good rollercoaster times, he’d never forgive me. He’s barely forgiven me for becoming a part of a couple.)

It has been difficult to hide this recent development from D.B. Last year, when I was just beginning to lose my bottle, our schedules didn’t allow for a trip, so he was none the wiser. This year, I carefully planned a trip to a city with only a teeeeeeny amusement park that I knew I could handle: Rochester’s Sea Breeze.

Sea Breeze is cute and historical and not really a thrill park. It sits on the edge of Lake Ontario and is adorable. How could historical or adorable be scary? Well, to a normal person it wouldn’t be, but to a 40 year old hypochondriac lover of Z who once nearly had to use a Mission: Space barf bag, it’s all scary now. The wooden bobsleds were the tamest and even those seemed like they could hurtle me into the lake. The old out-and-back jack rabbit coaster that was smaller than the kiddie rollercoaster at King’s Island jiggled my brain around in its casing so severely that I was sure brain damage was a possibility, and the tricked-out wild mouse that spins and loops and twists, well dear reader, it scared me so much I couldn’t even get on it. Do you hear this: I, rider of standy uppy and hangy downy and steepest and twistiest coasters all over the country was scared away from a wild mouse.

The end of an era is upon me. I will now be forced to divide my life into two neat halves: before and after the wild mouse. From this point on, it’s just museums and garden shows and watching, I don’t know, birds. The horror.

Barrista

I’m dogsitting without the dog. He’s on a cowboy vacation in Montana with his parents. This morning some impertinent neighbor called to demand to speak to the owners about something. She can’t be a good neighbor, or she would have known they were gone. She insisted I give her their phone number and then asked if I cleaned houses because she needs someone. I don’t know why this last question irked me so much. It’s not that I’m above housecleaning (though certainly I do it rarely enough) and I think being a house cleaner or maid is a worthy enough job. But there was something about the superior tone in her voice that set the mood of my day. I’ve been wondering if I can isolate which neighbor it is and then leave a flaming bag of dryer lint on her front stoop.

Because the owners’ housecleaner was here this morning and because I have something like 400 papers to grade, I decided to go to my town’s only real coffee bar. I know as a writer and lover of literature and free thinking I’m supposed to embrace the idea of the coffee bar as if it were a country where everything is good and pure and where you do not need a passport. But here’s the thing: I kind of hate them. Other than the wireless access, I don’t really get them. The wares are overpriced and I hate being confronted by those insufferable tip jars, begging money for extra slow, snooty service. There are flies buzzing around the two-day old baked goods, no matter how upscale the coffee bar in question. The furniture, though cozy, is always stained and looks like it had a life somewhere else (in the Merchant Marines, perhaps) before becoming a coffee bar sofa or chair. It is, inevitably either jazz or Ani di Franco on the sound system, and both unnerve me.

And also, I have no use for coffee. It shames me, as a writer, not to be a smoker, a real drinker or a lover of the java--fatty and sugary foods are as good a vice as any, but they are not literary. To me, coffee is a poor substitute for a delicious carbonated, high fructose corn syrup soda. But if you order one of those in a coffee bar— heaven help you. Judging from the curl of the barrista’s lip it is clearly the equivalent of public urination. In fact, I suspect public urination would be more acceptable as it would seem somehow French, and thus sophisticated in its own way.

Today was no exception to my bad coffee house experience. First, the person behind the till was a former student. He’s a talented writer and has a wicked sense of humor, but he hasn’t been to school for two years and was lamenting the frustrations of the life he is stuck in because of bad blood between himself and Sallie Mae. I wasn’t in counseling mode, but I did my best job of suggesting possibilities for finding his way back to school, but he clearly only wanted to lament the state of his life and wasn’t interested in problem-solving.

I ordered a bagel and a Coke. He grimaced. Ugh. “Do you not like latte?” he asked. I confessed I’d never HAD a latte, but that I didn’t like coffee. “I’m making you a latte and you’ll like it,” he said. This seems to be standard operating procedure. I am Sam I Am and the barrista is determined to get me to like whatever potion he or she has created--in a box with a fox, and on a train in the rain. He charged me for the bagel and the Coke, and while he was going thru the complicated motions of making a complimentary drink I didn’t want, I filled up my plastic cup with the sweet nectar that is Coca-Cola. Only it was just carbonation with no cola syrup. I mentioned this to him and he said that oh, yeah, he needed to change the tanks. So I took my drink and pretended that latte was indeed the perfect drink, though for me, it is only something I could tolerate at dinner party where I didn’t want to be rude. It IS better than coffee, but what I wanted was my morning Coke. My former student made no move to change the Coke tank and started a conversation with another person. I took my empty Coke cup, my latte, and my bagel (flies already hovering) to a table and started working. I could just tell there was no way those tanks were ever going to get changed and they didn’t, though I was there an hour and half.

Then a mother arrived with two ill-behaved children with giant bows in their hair, and they were met by another mother with two only slightly less ill-behaved children, one with a giant bow in her hair, and the crying and whining began. It occurred to me that I might actually learn to LIKE coffee bars if they were like REAL bars and there was an age limit on who could enter. I’m not anti child. I love children. Somedays I even want a small quiet one of my own, but these bow-laden princesses pretty much put an end to the grading and the latte drinking. I never did figure out if their shrieks were of joy or pain, though when I took my last drink of latte and nodded my thanks to the barrista, I nearly joined them.

Wages of Sin

Lord, I am heartily sorry.

I have been shamed. Not more than twenty minutes ago, I was clutching a book to my chest and having a cry because the book in question seemed so good and true. The shame part comes in because I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks publicly decrying the author as superior and unkind to her townsfolk and completely unable to string together a satisfying non-fiction narrative. And this after five years of being more silently contemptuous of her, in no small part because she was writing about Indiana during my era and she had the gall to have a nickname too close to one I had.

Also, I once went to a workshop she led and was annoyed beyond repair by the way people gushed over her when she was a mediocre teacher at best. So talented, so clever, so unique, they said. Bleh. I began to loathe her. I began to feel she had stolen away some title I deserved. The fact that I have not written a memoir of my Indiana girlhood for critics and readers to gush over did not alter my sense of injustice. The fact that I loved her fiction did not strike me as being a contradiction when I would curl my lip if someone dared mention the name Zippy to me.

So anyhow, I was fairly surprised when I slammed shut She Got Up Off the Couch and promptly burst into tears. All I can figure is Haven Kimmel got something right—some alchemy of description of a blizzardy Hoosier winter or growing up in the 70s or loving common items shrunk down to miniature size—that made my heart shift positions and not turn so bitterly against her.

I feel much better now that I have confessed that sin.

Other things that have been disturbing me today: I think Paris Hilton is robbing me of quality time with Z.

Since Z, I have a laundry list in my head of things to tick off until I see him again. In fact, when he was here last month, healing me of terminal hypochondria, I even happily ticked off his departure because I knew that meant I would see him all the sooner.

My shrink would say, “Why do you think you are this powerful—to speed up time?” and I’m not sure why except that my maternal grandmother soundly chastised me once for
wishing away my life, something I should never do, even if it was for a truly good thing, such as I wish summer vacation were here. (That one, I still contend, is not bad because life in the confines of the public school system was not worth living.) My grandmother’s belief that I had the power to fast-forward thru my life must have made an impression, because I do. I do honestly believe that when I see Z on Tuesday morning at the airport, it will be in no small part because I thought so long and hard on how to get through the minutes more quickly until I could see him again.

But then there is this: not only have I been wishing away my life, but it occurs to me, I’ve also been, with my desire for speedier clocks and quicker reunions, wishing away other people’s lives—Z’s, my mother’s, my aunt who dreads the passing of time because it removes her further from her recently departed husband, my other aunt who is now—with no thanks to me—down to about nine thousand heart ticks of her own—and so on and so forth. I’m pretty sure this makes me a selfish, bad person.

And the wages of such a sin is this: this flagrant speeding up of time that I have caused means that at the end of those paltry few days I’ll have in Seattle with Z, he flies off to Zimbabwe for…oh, I keep hoping there will be some papal dispensation that will make this untrue!…two months. No nightly phone calls; no reliable, multiple-times-a-day e-mails; no possibility of a mid-way weekend meeting place if the Travelocity deals are superior. Just me, my suitcase of abandonment issues and the void sprinkled with occasional emails when he has electrical power and occasional phone calls when I can manage to punch in the international codes correctly and the phones on his end are actually working, and daily news reports of how things in his homeland have slid so far past “pear-shaped” that they aren’t even in the fruit category anymore. That’s what I have to look forward to for not taking heed when Grandma told me to stop wishing.

No. I must require of myself and insist that others—including Paris Hilton who is no doubt in a hurry to get out of the L.A. County jail—QUIT WISHING THE DAYS AWAY. I believe if we are all united on this front time can be slowed to a crawl and Z will never leave my shores for his native ones. I’m not sure what the pay off will be for Paris or how she can be convinced to cooperate, but I’m working on it. Her money, power, and connections give her an unfair advantage in persuading the earth to rotate a bit faster, so I’m hoping she’ll see reason & find peace in her current unfortunate circumstances.

Signs and Wonders

Two weeks ago I saw my father, which in and of itself isn’t odd, except for the fact that he’s been dead six years. When I saw him, sitting in the garage of my step-mother and her new husband on the occasion of her 60th birthday, I thought, “Oh. Good. Dad is here. I haven’t seen him for awhile.” On closer inspection, the balding head, supporting the reading glasses, the golf clothes—including the shirt with “Firestone” emblazoned on it, which is where my father worked when I was a small child—these elements did not add up to Dad. Instead, the details belonged to a minor player in my step-mother’s new family, and as it turns out, I was the only person who thought he momentarily resembled Dad. In fact, I seem to be the only person who recognized the man was even there. No one spoke to him. He sat, sipping a drink, and looking benignly at the May sky. He was a breathing ghost.

Because I’m a little bit of hypochondriac, who feels pains and finds lumps on a weekly basis, I feared Dad’s presence was some indication that I was going to be visiting him sooner rather than later on that great golf course in the sky. Then Z came for a long weekend of bliss, which miraculously caused the aches and swelling nodules to disappear. He’s magic, my African. The Great and Powerful oZ.

When I see the unbelievable, or even just the remarkable, I need to assign meaning, though sometimes I get it wrong. Six years ago, on the way to the hospital for the lung resection that was meant to give my father more time, I saw a turtle in the middle of the road. A road where there have never been turtles before. I took it as a positive sign—his recovery would be slow-going, but he would make it and we could bond in ways we had never previously managed.

Three hours later he was dead.

What to do with that turtle? I didn’t know, but other turtles kept popping up in unexpected places as I grieved, as I traveled alone through Ireland, when I met and said goodbye forever to Z (even though I didn’t believe it was really that kind of a goodbye). Here a turtle, there a turtle. I had to reassign meaning, and what the turtle began to mean when I would see one is this: You are exactly in the place you are supposed to be; quit borrowing future pain. You are at home in the world.

This weekend the Scottie dog and I hosted a Memorial Day party for my paternal side of the family. Cousins have come in from the Great Lakes, from Kentucky, from Ohio. We’ve spent time feeding our stomachs and our inclination to connect. None of us grew up together nor do we have many shared childhood memories. We were all raised very differently in different towns, but in our young adulthoods when the first round of weddings and funerals brought us together, we discovered similar interests and deep affection for each other.

The cousins all come together happily and fall into and out of conversations and group photos and long-standing jokes like a litter of middle-aged puppies, but the dwindling older generation cannot do the same. The stress of having everyone together makes them behave irrationally and sometimes badly, fretting about the exact time of dinner and what “out law” is in attendance, and which of the 40something children has misbehaved, looks unhappy, or has generally disappointed. We, their offspring, get questioned as if by Interpol, and we know no matter how carefully we answer that the information given will be used later, or sooner, to add kindling to some grievance that will be publicly aired or disseminated through the grapevine.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s too emotional for my father’s generation to see the family as the upper tiers peel away and fly up to heaven, making way for new babies and new sets of out laws, and so other little mini-dramas must be constructed. Maybe it was some injustice done to them during their post-war childhoods. I try not to judge too harshly. After all, I don’t know what it is like to lose a husband, through a heart that has gone bad physically or emotionally, thru treachery or inertia. I don’t know what it is like to get the diagnosis that your own heart has about twelve thousand ticks left in it and this is probably your last family party. So the Scottie dog and I leave them to their outbursts and hope the grandkids tumbling into the creek or putting on a play or the happiness of their own children in concert with their cousins will soothe those demons.

Before the party started, I got a disgruntled phone call from an aunt. Something was upsetting to her, and because this party was for her and her faulty heart, I was upset because I wasn’t delivering the perfect party, conceivably her last. At that moment, I was ready to call the whole thing off. Who needed the strife? Have your own party if the potato salad here is not to your liking and so on and so forth.

My mood did not improve when I drove out of the driveway, right past a snake. I hate snakes. HATE. I, who believe serial killers and child molesters should not get the death penalty, want all snakes to die horrible, painful deaths. No amount of debate can convince me they aren’t bent on evil or that the planet would not be in better shape without their presence.

I drove past that snake and was filled with rage. How dare this snake sun himself (reptiles are always male in my book) on MY borrowed driveway, as he plotted some sort of trespass against me? (How dare my aunt be annoyed at me when I was offering up my borrowed house for HER party.) I looked him in the snakey eye and I said out loud, “You, you little bastard, will die if I get back and you are still here.” I went on to the grocery and shopped angrily and was probably rude to the check-out girl whose red, white, and blue fingernails disturbed me. I was still angry as I drove back up the driveway, and I was determined to deal justice to that snake with my Goodyear tires.

He was not there. He’d slithered off to make some other person’s blood run cold. What was in his place? Yeah, that’s right, a turtle. Just sitting there and, I SWEAR, sniffing flowers. Not only that, but he paused and looked at me with his wizened face—combination dinosaur and Dali Lama—and I think he said, “Chill out. It’s all good.”

And it was.