insouciance (noun) the quality of being insouciant; lack of care or concern; indifference.
One day when I put my hair up in a clip, my friend Kathy said she loved my studied insouciance, and I had to tell her my insouciance was a function of being late for work and not having any coffee.
My French teacher, to my host sister: You need to tell your mother to stop cooking with oil so Amy can lose weight.
My advisor’s husband, looking at my face: Pimples.
My PE teacher, upon seeing me fanning myself at the end of class: Too much meat on your bones.
My dogs just spent two hours running around in the rain with their friend Barley…and now they’re wrestling on the living room floor. I mean, seriously, what do I have to do to wear these dogs out?
When Jordana and I used to ride the Metropolitan Transit Authority together, one of our favorite things to do was to read the Spanish advertisements that ran along the ceiling of the train. Or rather, she would read the ads in Spanish, and I would fall into fits of giggles. See, Jordi didn’t speak Spanish. Her accent was remarkably good, though she occasionally slipped into a French pronunciation of words like en. On one particular ride I remember, Jordana decided to raise the stakes and not only read the ads but translate them too. She read an ad for an ambulance-chaser who specialized in envenenamiento con plomo. That’s lead poisoning, but I like her translation better: “an environment with feathers”. I imagined someone calling up this law firm and saying indignantly, “I need an attorney; my environment is rife with feathers!” After that, she spotted a Washington Mutual ad which boasted “Nuestros ATMs no cobran,” or “Our ATMs are surcharge-free”. Jordana said confidently, “There are no cobras in our ATMs,” and I envisioned the poor bastards at Chase and Citibank convulsing from snake venom, their cash littering the floor.
I miss the MTA, and I miss my Jordi.
Dear Violet,
You’ve always been different from Boone and Redford. You chewed a few things when you were a baby, but it seemed like you got over that pretty quickly. (You’ll still collect my things, but you don’t chew them. I’ll come home these days to find a sneaker, a flip-flop, and a bra in your bed, all perfectly intact.) Redford’s tail conducts a little symphony of joy all the time, a work of varied time signatures and tempos, but your tail has always had three settings: side-slapping with joy, the metronome tick, and between your legs. You’re smart, unlike your brothers, bless their hearts. You memorize places where I put you back on-leash, and from then on, it’s like I have a force field around me when I hit those spots. You won’t come within ten feet of me. Though you don’t always follow the rules yourself, you are The Enforcer and sound the alarm whenever your brother is doing something naughty.
You love having play-dates and slumber parties with your friends: Jackie, Barley, Raven, and Moby. One time, I stupidly left Moby’s food bag on the floor. I walked in to find Boonie sniffing at a giant, slobbery hole in the side. I started to chastise him, but something else caught my eye. You, looking like one of Dr. Seuss’s star-bellied sneeches, prostrate on the living room floor. Sure enough, I took you all out for a walk and, ORP, you barfed up an enormous rainbow pile of Beneful.
From Day One you were terrified of children, and really anyone who didn’t love dogs. You love to swim and dig your nose under the water (I call it The Bulldozer). You love wrestling with your brother. You send me on a total guilt trip when we haven’t been hiking in a few days. You prefer to be rubbed on your chest and belly and will contort yourself on the couch to make it happen. Despite my dismay, you insist on digging holes in my yard when I’m not looking, and then stare at me wide-eyed and innocent when I see your nose covered in red clay and give you a talking to. Redford’s all ADD and will wander away from his food mid-bowl, and you’ll slink over and munch quietly until I yell at you. If he’s being particularly focused one day, you’ll run to the door and arf as if there’s something he should be aware of, just to distract him. When you lie down, it’s in full frog pose. I sent a picture to ihasahotdog.com, so you have been immortalized.
That horrible day, when you popped out of the woods after four hours missing, I thought my body would fall to pieces. I had never experienced relief like that before, which made it all the more horrible when Laura told me Boone was dead. For days, I’d tell Wa, “I feel like I’m dying.” And she’d ask if I was suicidal, and I’d say no, I didn’t feel like dying, I felt like I was dying. The only thing that kept me going was you and your tragic, confused face.
It’s safe to say you’re the best decision I’ve ever made, Violet. You are my rock and my guard dog and my shweetie pie. I love you so much.
Love,
Amy
Dear Violet,
You might wonder how I could’ve written to Redford before I wrote to you. Lots of reasons, I guess. He’s so loud and there all the time. He’s also my replacement dog for Boonie, whom I’m still mourning. Mostly, though, I wrote to him first because I feel like I could fill tomes about you, and it’s hard for me to start. Anne Lamott says to start with a one-inch square and just write about that. I’ll start with how I got you.
My co-worker Taren had gotten Jake the Springer Spaniel-Lab Mix a year prior and was in LURVE with him. She thought I should get a dog. I said thanks but no thanks. Too much of a tether to my house. Sometimes I liked to go straight from work to the gym or out with my buddies and not come home until late. Couldn’t do that if someone was at home in a kennel and going to piss herself.
Anyhow, one Saturday afternoon, Taren called. She was at the shelter and there were these three little lab puppies that I had to come see. I begged off with the excuse that I had just walked 20 miles. (I really had just walked 20 miles; Wa and I were training to walk a marathon.) She mentioned the shelter was open on Sunday afternoons, and I said I’d think about it. I did think about it. That was all.
Monday came around, and Taren offered to go to the shelter with me–good god, she was persistent. I said OK, but I told her I didn’t want her to be disappointed if I didn’t adopt a dog. We went inside, and those three lab puppies sure were cute, right there snuggled up in the first cage. Most of the dogs were arfing, “Take me, take me,” and I died a little inside. But then I turned around and saw you, a pit bull-lab mix, about 5 months old, brownish-black with a white chest and little white reflector pads on your heels. The sheet posted on your kennel said in bold print ‘Cruelty/Confiscation’. You stood up on the cage and stared deep in my eyes and licked my fingers. That was it. It was Thursday before I took you home, what with my having to cry to my therapist about it and the shelter’s being closed on Wednesdays and your having to get your lady-surgery, but that moment sealed the deal. There was no backing out.
Rosie called me on the night I brought you home and demanded, “Nunu, what about the puppy?”
I said, “What about the puppy?”
“What did you name the puppy?” she demanded.
“Well, I haven’t named her anything yet,” I told her.
“You could name her Violet,” she said. I don’t know where she came up with that, but it was perfect.
More anon.
Love,
Amy
So Redford took my mouth guard off my night stand again, and this time he ate it. Not put a crack down the side like the last time, after which I brushed it with my electric toothbrush and popped it back in my mouth. This time he ate it. I found a few little shards off plastic on the dog bed, but otherwise, as Anne Lamott would say, Sugar, Honey, it’s gone.
How could I not notice him eating it? Shut up.
Earlier in the evening, I had dropped some ice, and ice is clear and crunchy too. Course, ice doesn’t usually last 20 minutes, but Redford was quiet and occupied, and you don’t know how rare an occasion that is.
Anyhow, it’s gone.
That means I’ve been sleeping without a barrier between my upper and lower teeth for three nights. Big deal, right? Well, people have told me that when I don’t wear a mouth guard, they can hear me grinding my teeth. Let me say that again: they can hear me grinding my teeth. Now I’ve tried during my waking hours to grind my teeth audibly and I CAN’T DO IT. Go ahead, try it! How hard is that?!
I’ve had a mouth guard since I was twelve. Dentist-made ones, ones I bought at Dick’s Sporting Goods, soft ones, hard ones, ones that cover my top teeth, bottom teeth, both sets of teeth, ones that just sat between my back teeth. None have helped with the headaches or the TMJ. They certainly don’t stop you from clenching. In fact, they encourage it. If you have something between your teeth, the impulse is to bite it. (Get your minds out of the gutter, pervs.) But mouth guards have stopped me from grinding my teeth, as one dentist put it, “down to nubs”.
Redford didn’t eat a $10 one I got off the Internet or a $20 one from Dick’s. No, he ate the real kind. The one I had to go to a different dentist for because he made yet again a different kind for me to try but of course I had to get an exam and a full set of X-rays from him and that’ll be 800 please.
(By the way, I love how dentists’ office people never say the word ‘dollars’. It’s always ‘800’, or for my root canal last year ‘a thousand’. I always want to say, “Bananas? Can I give you a thousand bananas?”)
From my journal:
Sunday, March 2, 2003 10:23pm
My kids are hell-bent on retalliation. Two wrongs, in their minds, definitely make a right. If they are hit, they have to hit back. If someone kicks them, that person will be kicked. If their mother is disrespected, the disrespecter’s mother will be verbally violated.
I was in the middle of the literacy Thursday morning, when someone cried out about an injustice that had been done to them. The other party mentioned that it had been started by the first. So I stopped the lesson, as I am wont to do, and told a story.
That morning, as fate would have it, I got on the late bus (6:57), so it was crowded. I found an inward-facing seat near the back. There are also those five seats that line the very back of the bus, the extreme two seats not giving you enough room to put your feet down and all of them always hot as hell from being right on top of the engine. Well, someone was sitting in each of the end seats, and a construction worker (I’ll call him Man #1), sitting in the middle one (the two seats on either side of him left empty). A guy (Man #2) squeezed to the back and politely said, “Excuse me”, and directed himself for one of the empty seats. Man #1, at that point, exhaled in obvious exasperation, thinking this may ward the guy off. But Man #2 continued to move toward the seat, and Man #1 said loudly, “I’m not going to move onto the middle for you!” (referring to having to straddle the bump between the other empty seat and his own).
At this point in the story, I asked my kids what they wanted to do when people were nasty like that. They were all like, “Hit him!”…”Beat him up!” I said, “Well, I usually FEEL like hitting the person, but generally I’m just nasty back to them.”
Anyhow, Man #2 said nothing, didn’t even make a face–he simply reached down on the floor and picked up Man #1’s glove that he’d dropped. You could see a look of “I’m-such-a-dick” flash over the guy’s face, and he muttered, “Thank you”.
I told the kids, “In that moment, when that guy had the opportunity to be nasty or retalliate and he chose to be kind, HE WON.” Of course, Man #1 was so dead-set on being right that his humility quickly left him, and he spat, “Where’s my other glove?!” Sure enough, Man #2 leaned down and plucked it off the floor and handed it to him. Man #1 continued to make remarks (e.g. “Next week, they’re gonna want to be sitting on your lap!”) until he got off the bus, but Man #2 just read his paper.
Later on in the afternoon, after I’d told this story, Shaneequa ran up to me and said, “Ms. Scott! Shanice just walked by my chair and bumped it really hard on purpose!”, acting out the offense for emphasis. I just looked at her and said, “Shaneequa, be the guy who picked up the gloves.” She paused, nodded, and walked away.
I wanted to cry.
My friend Sasha and I were standing at the base of a rock fall, staring up at the most menacing peak we had encountered in our six-day trek. Another hiker had just told us that we had gone off our trail. Now we either had to backtrack and then follow the trail for god knows how long, or go over this pass, which was next to the highest peak in this part of Spain.
Still incredulous, I said to the other hiker in Spanish, “But the yellow markers said to go this way. A lady yesterday told us to follow the yellow markers to the next refuge.”
She responded, “No, no, the yellow markers mark the way to the highest peaks in the Pyrennes. Your refuge yesterday was on the way to this peak. That’s why she told you to follow the yellow markers.”
I thanked her for her help, and the woman trekked on. Sasha asked me what it was going to be. Were we going to turn back and waste another two hours getting back to the right trail? Or were we going to climb up this sumbitch? I told her that as painful as this climb might be, I couldn’t face the idea of going backwards—it just went against my adventurous nature.
I took a deep breath and started upward. The rocks at the bottom of the fall were the size of pick-up trucks. I leapt from one to the next. My breathing deepened. The higher I climbed, the smaller the rocks became. They began to shift under my weight. By the time I was halfway up, I was trudging through baseball-sized rocks and dirt that slipped out from under my feet. Pretty soon I was on all-fours, grasping at whatever was within reach. I huffed and puffed and wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I dug my feet in and squeezed the earth in my hands.
Sasha and I didn’t speak to each other on the way up. We couldn’t. I was heaving air in and out of my lungs, and I heard her doing the same behind me. My feet sank deep into the earth, and I yelled, “Heads up!” to warn her of the rockslide heading her way. I glanced back. She threw herself to one side, and the rocks continued their race down the mountain. “Sorry…about that,” I said. I had to pause in the middle of my sentence to breathe.
“Don’t…worry about it,” she replied.
I looked up to see how far I was from the peak. It didn’t seem any closer than it had when we were at the bottom! I forced myself to keep my eyes on the ground in front of me and continued my climb. I waited what felt like an eternity and then checked the summit again. How could it still be so far up?! I repeated the process probably ten times. Look down, wait, wait, wait, look up. No closer. The blood pounded in my ears, and I felt like I was breathing through a coffee stirrer.
At last, I got to about ten yards from the top. I stared at the ground. It was now gravel and sand. “Keep going….” I mumbled to myself. I pushed with my feet, pulled with my hands, now raw from clawing at the mountain. “Keep going,” I said again, and pushed and pulled again. Over and over, I pushed and pulled, until finally there was nothing left to push off and nowhere else to pull to. I was on level ground. I turned myself around on my hands and knees to look for Sasha. She was a few yards away. When she reached the summit, we sat up and collapsed into a hug.
I threw my fists in the air and sang the opening measures of the Rocky theme song. Sasha laughed.
We looked down the mountain we had just summitted.
“I’m proud of us,” Sasha said.
I wanted to say that I was proud of us too, but I was too emotional to speak.
