Ambushed

in·sid·i·ous \in-?si-d?-?s\adj. (Latin, from insidiae ambush)

1. gradual, cumulative, and treacherous in effect

2. developing inconspicuously, with seeming innocuousness, as to belie its grave effect

That’s the thing about depression, isn’t it?

Dear Grandma

Whenever I get a new cell phone, I scroll through the ring tones to find the absolute happiest one, and that’s the one I set for family members. On this latest LG phone, it’s a jaunty piano tune called “I’m Fine”. My phone sang out that cheery melody yesterday morning, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be ironic if it were Mom with sad news?” Sure enough, it was her, and she said you had passed away Friday night.

It wasn’t a surprise—a few days ago, the hospice lady said you probably had less than a week—but now I find myself so tremendously sad. I’ve had episodic crying bouts, sudden and forceful, over the last week, strangely not after the strokes or when you were so agitated and tried to pull out the tubes or when they transferred you to hospice care. It was when Mom said that she, Grandpa, Uncle Matt, Cousin Jan, and the minister stood around your hospital bed and sang your favorite hymns. And every time I’ve thought about that moment since. That image just gets me.

I’m going to miss you. You were my grandma. My friends and cousins have always referred to “Grandma (insert name)” and “Grandma (insert other name)”, but I never had to differentiate. Granny Scott died when I was 2. I don’t remember her. You were it. And the truth is we were never terribly close, yet you loved me and I loved you, and who you were in the world, how you occurred to people, was truly lovely.

You were kind and gentle and warm and humble. You were active and thoughtful and social and thrifty.

I remember when recycling became a phenomenon in this country, my first thought was, “Oh, right, what Grandma does.” I thought you had invented it. After all, a Cool Whip container was good for ten years of food storage, and then the kids were allowed to fashion it into a water-balloon launcher; tin foil got rinsed out and reused; you darned socks. I guess a lot of people who lived through the Great Depression were thrifty or careful, but I didn’t know. I just knew you, and you taught me how to reduce, reuse, recycle.

You were surprising too. I was chatting with you one day when I was about to graduate from Carolina. At that point, I had watched you make Grandpa’s bed and serve him supper for my whole two decades, while he did the handy-man stuff. You were the picture of early 20th century gender roles. You knocked me over when you said, “I didn’t want to graduate from college because I didn’t think there was life after basketball.” Turns out you were point guard at Pembroke.

I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. You cross-country skied, you swam in Buzzards Bay every day from June to October, you learned to windsurf when you were 58. But you darned socks!

Grandma, I’ll think of you often. Swimming laps off Churches Beach in your swim cap. Sitting in your special spot at the table on the porch, savoring your blueberry cake while the rest of us would sit, envious, wondering how you could makes yours last that long. Singing, your voice soft and sweet, in the church choir. Sipping your gin & tonic—well, your tonic with a splash of gin—on the deck, and looking out over the harbor. Sailing Tursiops, and when the breeze picked up, your holding onto the tiller and the main sheet and defying your ever-vanilla mouth by saying, “Damn.” Twice!

When Nate heard the news that Great Grandma Flora had died, he said, “I don’t like dat.”

Me neither.

Damn.

Damn.

I love you, Grandma,

Amy

“Give three cheers for Cuttyhunk—          our spirits all are free.”

Deuteronomy 25:11-12

I mightily offended a friend of mine yesterday.

This friend is a born-again Christian, but she also has a snarky wit.  (I’m making those things sound like mutually exclusive qualities, aren’t I? Well….) Moreover, she has an easy laugh, even about difficult topics. We’ve had any number of theological discussions. She has always been understanding and generous in the face of my doubts.

When the topic of acceptance of homosexuality came up, her argument was that she couldn’t “pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe in”. So I posted this internet meme that’s been making the rounds on Facebook and tagged her. I thought she’d find it hilarious. I certainly did. My favorite part:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

My friend accused me of trying to persuade her not to believe in God, being disrespectful, and antagonizing her.

(…Naturally, I freaked out that SOMEBODY WAS MAD AT ME—ACK! and apologized profusely. She accepted my apology, and then a funny thing happened.

I got pissed. A swirling rage gurgled up inside of me, and I had no idea what was generating it. So I sat on it for a day. Here’s what I came up with:

I was really offended—oh, the irony!—by her accusations. I mean, I was upset that she could even interpret my action in that way. She clearly thought that I had malicious intent, and I was taken aback that a friend of mine could believe that of me.

At that point, I had some very middle-schooly thoughts.)

My point was—my POINT was, we do pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe in. Lots of people smarter than me have said this before, but the Bible was written centuries after the death of Jesus Christ (a dude I believe existed, a dude I believe was totally righteous, a dude I believe wasn’t the son of God—sorry—but you can believe that! Rock on ’til the break o’ dawn!) by folks who may have been inspired by their Creator but who were also products of their era and geographical setting.

Thus, we might-could extrapolate the messages presented in the Bible and apply them as appropriate in our own time and place.

Anyway.

I really did think she would laugh.

Is It My Perfume?

OK, I’m in. I closed on my 747-square-foot manse on Friday afternoon. Signed, sealed, delivered, it’s mine.

I was walking the dogs around my new neighborhood in the afternoon rain on Saturday, and guess what I found. A stray dog. He was a big, black, Shepherd/Scaredy-dog mix, skinny, faded collar but no tags, not fixed. He and Redford got along swimmingly. (See what I did there, with the rain and the swimmingly.) The stray followed us a couple blocks back to our house and into the back yard. He took a biscuit but only at ten paces from me.

I called Animal Control, but of course, they were closed for the weekend. The message said for animal emergencies to call 911. I figured that my temptation to adopt yet another dog was an emergency. If I kept him until Monday when the office opened again, I wasn’t gonna call. I was going to have three dogs. In my might-as-well-be-a-mobile-home. The four of us would have had 186.75 square feet each.

When the animal control officer came, the poor monkey kept circling the shed and darting away from her. At one point, he ran up onto the deck and poised himself to jump over the railing! I managed to grab his collar, and the officer got that loop-on-a-pole around his neck and rassled him into the truck.

I wanted to call out, “Wait! No! Forget it, I’ll take him,” but I bit my tongue. The officer called me about 20 minutes later—between you and me, I think she might have had a little crush on me—and told me he was fine and calm once he got to the shelter.

Man, I hope he finds a home. Him and my gentle beast from a couple weeks ago. (I haven’t had the balls to call the shelter and check on that little guy.)

I’m not a praying person, but if I were, I’d be on my knees tonight.

Dear Violet, Part 4

Dear Violet,

You are a booger. You are made entirely of boogers. I just love you.

I love it when you sit up, prairie-dog style. You look so regal. And beautiful. Not many people comment on your beauty. They’re too busy ogling your brother. Believe me, I know what it feels like to have a brother who’s better-looking than you. But you are so, so beautiful. Your face is so solemn, and you have those eyes, those dark eyes that blend into your face in photos, but up close in person—uh, in dog?—they’re deep and brown and soulful.

I love it when you start breathing heavily with the anticipation of petting, “Hol hol hol,” which shifts into a light, stoned-eyed panting as I rub your cleavage.

I love that you don’t pee on yourself, which is more than I can say for your brother. Redford has decided that sometimes he likes to lift a leg, others he’ll crouch, and most of the time, he wants to do something about halfway in between, which results in his pissing directly on his front foot. No, you’re always careful in your bathroom habits. You have a bladder and bowels of steel, sometimes waiting 20 hours to go, just because you hadn’t found a spot that suited you, or because you’d been on leash. You really prefer to have privacy. I don’t blame you. I’ve never been one of those bathroom-door-wide-open kind of girls.

I hated to start crating you again a few months ago, but after years of not chewing, you ate the shit out of my L.L.Bean clogs. All of ’em. So now you’re in the kennel when I’m not home. I kind of miss coming home to find a warm, furry indentation in my bed, sometimes decorated with a bra or flip-flop, and you, wide-eyed, feigning innocence.

I hate that you’re still terrified of your Uncle Erik. I have no idea why. You’re even more scared of Erik than you are of Nate. Nate was the one that I found, at age three, kneeling in front of you, you who were pinned up against the kitchen cabinet, quaking, and when I asked Nate what he was doing, he said, “I wath petting huh eyebaw.” Why is Erik the one that makes you tuck your tail and run off to the far side of the yard? He’s never petted your eyeball. Wa says it’s his manic energy. Maybe it’s that; maybe he reminds you of whoever earned you the Cruelty/Confiscation label at the shelter. I don’t know.

I hate that you limp A LOT these days. And it’s not your hips this time. I think you’ve got some shoulder funk, mama. A few hours after hiking or other off-leash adventures, you walk around and your little head jounces up and down. You look like a carousel horse. The months of glucosamine have done nothing. I’ve got to take you in to get x-rayed. Please, god, let it be easily treatable. I need it to be easily treatable. For one thing, I can’t afford an expensive procedure, but mostly I need you to be healthy.  I need you to be healthy for a long time. I need you to be healthy for at least ten more years, because I can imagine my life up to about ten years out, and if that life doesn’t include you, I’ll just hate it.

Because I love you. Booger.

Love,

Amy

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like These

Yesterday at 3:00pm I learned that I would not be closing on my new house at 4:00pm. My buyer’s bank had screwed the pooch on her paperwork, thus she had not yet bought my old house, therefore I did not have the 10% that I needed to put down on my new place.

Fantastic.

This, after I agreed to pay twenty-eight hundred bucks for her closing costs. This, after I replaced the water heater and the sub floor that the leak had rotted through for over a grand. Then the $985 termite treatment and the mold guy who came and said, “Well, I don’t see any mold, but I’ll spray the stuff they probably think is mold.” For $125. And after that, when I, like an asshole, put a kitchen chair cushion in my washing machine, and it shredded it to bits and blocked up the pump. That’ll be 80 bucks for a service call, thanks.

This, after packing up all my shit over the past month and renting a truck and getting my crew to schlep it out on a 100-degree day last weekend. This, after living out of a suitcase at my lovely friend Erika’s house for four days.

They think they’ve got her loan package redone, and they think we can close tomorrow.

They better think that shit into existence because I don’t know how much more I can take.

And as if I wasn’t stressed enough…Erika and her girlfriend left for the beach this afternoon, and when I came home, I accidentally set off their house alarm. Christ Almighty, it was like I was peeing on an electric fence while someone smashed wine bottles in my ear canals. Like, it actually physically hurt.

I called Erika in a panic and somehow finally got it shut off. Right then, E’s friend came to the front door with her dog. My dogs were going buck-wild so I stepped onto the stoop. And the door shut, thipp. Locked. My key—the spare key—was inside. My phone was inside. My wallet was inside. Most disturbingly, my dogs were inside…with all of Erika’s lovely things. Things they could shred in a hot second.

I fucking lost it. I sat on the steps and sobbed into my hands.

One of E’s neighbors was lovely enough to look up a locksmith’s number and let me use her phone. The dude said he’d be twenty minutes. I called my sister and asked if she’d come sit with me to wait, and she left her 8-year-old and her 5-year-old and her 9-month-old at 9:00 on a weeknight to come listen to me boo-hoo and rub my back and say Shhhh.

The lock man arrived. Sixty bucks and three minutes later—two of which I think he was just pantomiming so it didn’t look like he was getting paid sixty dollars a minute—I was back inside. And the only thing Redford had eaten was my sneaker.

Well, hell, what’s another fifty bucks on new Nikes?

No Wonder My House Was Filthy All the Time

A week ago, I flopped on the sofa, feeling melancholy about leaving the house. My house, my first house. The bead board, the crown molding, the 18-inch square tiles in the kitchen. The screened porch, the porch swing. The yard, my Amish-built shed, the fence, the butterfly bush, Boonie.

The heat recently—my god, the heat: unrelenting, punishing, angry. The air conditioning slowly evaporated beads of sweat off my upper lip. The sun slanted through the panes of the west-facing window in the living room. Violet lay frog-dog on the hard wood. Redford stood in front of the couch, jovially commanding affection. I patted his butt. The beam of late-afternoon sunlight suddenly became swirlingly opaque.

And I thought, “That’s a lot of dirt coming off my dog.”