OOO

Out of Orbit for a few days....

I am getting ready to go to LOLLAPALOOZA in CHICAGO, where my family lives. I am leaving tomorrow with my son and his friend. I'll be meeting my younger sister. Her whole family will be going, her husband, their three kids plus friends. Par-tey! Y'know ... i spent at least two decades (the 70's and the 80's) going to stadium concerts, concerts at the Allen Theatre, concerts in the park, in the quarry, in bars, you name it. I saw every Jackson Brown tour up through the early 80's. I used to be like that, and my tastes are very eclectic. I've slowed down alot, but I still like to kick it up every so often. I went to Red Hot Chili Peppers with my son and his friend last year. It was great. The headliner at Lollapalooza is Pearl Jam. That was the first CD I gave Harry, when he was EIGHT! Oh, and I would be such a groupie if I wasn't so shy. I always find ways to meet the musicians, y'know run into them casually or something. I worked in a record store in the 70's and use to go to promo parties. I still do it at these little folk venues I go to for musicians who you've never heard of. Its probably embarassing for my friends. I can't help it. Anyway, Lollapalooza, I am so excited. I recognize at least half the bands that will be playing. No posts for a few days. (I am sure my large readership will be sooo disappointed!)

Why oh why did we swallow the fly

I wanted to put a garden in the back of our house where the trailer used to sit. Just a big square garden like we had in Maryland. My husband disagreed. He wanted a raised bed. In Massachusetts, where he was from, they used raised beds for gardening. His brother in Massachusetts gardened with raised beds. Raised bed gardens were superior, end of discussion. He also thought a raised bed would be more accessible, which I went along with. How it ended up being in the front yard near our first tree field (constant reminder to weed from my kitchen window) is a complete mystery.

John built the garden with help from Harry and others. He used 12 foot long, 6 by 6 timbers, tons of them. It was a strip of sorts, maybe 30 feet long by 10 feet wide. It didn’t take long to figure out that the location was not ideal. The bed was built on an incline and so one end had a three feet high wall of timbers, and the other side was the same level as the low part of the yard. John had to buy a truck load of dirt to fill it out.

Oh, and we have this John Deere garden tractor with a tiller attachment. The one thing about John Deere garden tractors; any woman can use them. Install the attachments for the tractor? Easy, just look at the brochure, especially their sales brochures and technical data sheets. Each page has a cheerful, average sized woman riding or working on the tractor installed with one or more attachments, like the tiller or the snow blower. We have one of those too. Honestly, the woman who could install these attachments would have to be able to press at least 200 pounds and have strength in her hands like Lou Ferrigno. I’ve tried and I cannot, and I am only slightly smaller than the woman in the picture, but I digress.

John quickly discovered that the design of the garden was not optimal; another problem being I cannot back up the tractor with this big ass tiller attachment on the back of it, in the narrow strip of garden which is the raised bed. So then he added the West wing. The garden is now a U shape, so I could till riding forward at all times, no backing up required. The whole back side of the U is made up of a 3 foot wall, more bucks for timbers, and he had to order two more truckloads of dirt to fill it. In the process we discovered that it was much cheaper to buy dirt than six by sixes, and I got a center island, which was a closed rectangle that wouldn’t be tilled ever. Here I planted blackberry bushes and asparagus and gladiolas, which I dig up every fall. Of course, after a year of having to mow the grass in the center between the island and the bed I had had enough. So I told John we needed to get rid of the grass. And he did with more dirt. This last year I went out and bought an electric tiller, that I absolutely love. There was no woman pictured on the front of the product brochure, but there should have been.

Last year I got a plaque that I attached to the “wall” of the garden. It says “John’s Folly”.

Side note: Negatives aside, it is a really nice garden and with my new tiller I am starting to enjoy it more.

Awake at Night

Awake at night,
unable to sleep
Water drips, the furnace growls
refrigerator purrs and shudders
a dog barking in the distance outside,
a garbage can bangs
trees rustle in heavy breezes
I know there is a monster
in the woods
beyond my window
slide stepping slowly towards the house.
while a green warty troll
sits, on the floor,
in the kitchen pantry among
the recycled paper and plastic bags.
A silver alien with yellow cat eyes
is hovering above the herb garden
in the back yard, taking survey
of the house from a distance
And if I get up for a glass of water
everything will stop
except the water will drip
the furnace will growl and
the refrigerator will continue to buzz
i get back into bed
and pull the covers up
with my pillows over my head
for emphasis
and they will resume their postures
The monster will begin stepping slowly,
arms extended.
The troll leans forward attentively
jostling the paper bags as he moves,
and the almond eyed alien
will move and sway
effortlessly above the garden.

I used to do this thing "Make Art Every Day" and then I would make up a "poem" and send it to my sisters with a fake link that they could hit to unsubscribe. I do this sort of thing to my sisters or my family all the time. They have suffered my goofiness for quite awhile very good naturedly. I also do some crafty things and then give them handmade gifts ..they are pretty good natured about that too. Anyway the above entry seemed appropriate with the recent story. Truly I am afraid of the dark around here and what goes on at night at the edge of our "yard"...but at any rate..as far as my talent goes...I guess i shouldn't give up my day job eh?

Where it started

We moved to Minnesota twice. I’ve talked about our moves some here. The first time we moved from Chicago. It was early 90’s and Harry was two. It was a company move and we looked at houses in a couple of really small towns on the north side of Rochester, and then for some reason ended up looking out in the rural areas.

Some observations about these small towns (in Minnesota): Every restaurant we walked into looked like a convention of the Klu Klux Klan; very white and wrinkled men in overalls and a sea of john deer baseball caps, and of course the room would go silent for a full minute with all heads turned our direction when we walked in. It was creepy. Our middle aged realtor wore a jacket, one of those flannel lined nylon windbreakers like I wore back in high school, and a floppy wool rain hat. He was over 6 feet tall, so who was I to criticize his fashion sense. He had no clue what might appeal to us. If I commented on a painted door at one place (because it accented something else about the house or yard) he would immediately assume that I would go gaga over a screaming turquoise door with a fake Tudor façade on some other house that was horridly inappropriate with whatever else was going on with the colors and landscape. And there was never any landscaping. They like to mow grass right up to the houses foundation or landscape with gravel all around the house. Bushes cost money. Most of what we were looking at was post WWII ticky tacky anyway. It was a tough choice. We also noticed that inside most homes, floor molding consisted of running the rug up the wall two inches, and every boy bedroom carried a monster assortment of toy tractors and farm toy paraphernalia. Oh and also, every barn had a fabulous old car that hadn’t been run in years under plastic tarp.

My biggest concern, having lived all my life in the city, with city noises, city traffic, and dense populations, was alien sightings and crop dusting. In the city, alien ships don’t land in parking lots, but they do land in cornfields. Every place we looked had a cornfield within the immediate vicinity, so I always asked about the crop dusting because the realtor would think I was crazy if I asked about aliens. The realtor would stare blankly at me for a minute (he probably thought I was insane anyway) and then would just say “NO”. I found out later that they apply most of the chemicals with pull behind sprayers and they sometimes do aerial spraying. We lost a row of trees that way once, and there are a lot of farmers who die of cancer around here, just like in the city. Since I couldn’t ask about the aliens, I researched the topic by watching a lot of movies involving the subject. I also watched anything I could on TV, but for some reason I didn’t watch x-files, too gory. I preferred the TV journalism approach of that show narrated by the guy who used to be second in command on Star Trek, Next Generation. What I learned was that aliens for the most part have only been seen in the Northeast or the Northwest or in the Western desert, and maybe once in Michigan. We were pretty safe. So I am less worried about aliens as I am about zombies (we have about 30 acres of second growth forest), but I haven’t taken the time to do a lot of research on that topic. That’s one I am still working on.

The Piano Lesson

When I gave birth to my son I had great plans for him. He was going to be brilliant and do all sorts of magnificent things. All I needed to do was wait for him to grow up. Well four, I figured four was going to be the age to start.

There is not much you can do with a toddler, but I will say that I read him books from the time he was very small till he was maybe eleven or twelve years old. I enjoyed reading him books, and would give commentary to him on the literary, social, and cultural merit of any book we read (the world according to me of course). I don’t think my son much cared. He wasn’t speaking English yet. He was more interested in the pictures. Some of my personal favorites were, Little Critter’s These are My Pets, by Mercer Mayer. I loved that book. It was geared toward bedtime (yeah) and the mom was always in the background mowing the yard, trimming bushes, or some kind of work, while the little critter boy introduced all his pets. It reminded me of the real moms in the world who worked as part of our job of maintaining the order of the universe. In fact, I don’t remember my mom being around when I was little, probably because she was busy doing things around the house. I also loved the Bugs in Boxes pop up books by David A. Carter. These were counting books and there would be a different number of bugs on each page, like 8 speedy spaceship bugs, or ten bouncing basketball bugs. These books are pretty much a mess because Harry would pick the bugs off the pages, but I still like to bring them out once in awhile to have a look see and count all the cool bugs.

OK, so when Harry was four I determined he was FINALLY ready to start his path to greatness. Music was going to be just one of many critical skills toward that development and I enrolled him in his first serious music class. I found a piano teacher who was good with small children. She was a teacher at the local elementary school. She was very nice. The first two lessons went excellent, just super, but we hit a major snag on the third lesson. In this lesson the teacher introduced black keys. Harry was also required to use his thumbs for one of the little songs he was learning.

When I picked him up from the lesson that day I could tell she was exasperated.
“He won’t do it. He won’t touch the black keys, and he refuses to use his thumbs. There is nothing more I can do. I have tried really. Mrs. Moore, we won’t be able to go any further.” She was genuinely sad about this. Me too!

“Oh Harry!” I looked at my son. He was smiling, happy, and his usual playful self. “Let me see you play your song…” and he played the whole song, but deliberately missed some notes (I could tell!) because it required a black key or his thumb, just like the teacher had said. Harry smiled at me very tight lipped when he finished. I tried to coax and cajole him. We went back over the song. No use. Resigned to the fact, I gathered up his book and his toys and I promised the woman I would call her. This was a major blow. By mid week I did call her. I had given it a lot of thought and some indirect discussion with Harry, and concluded that lessons were too much pressure for him. He needed to mature.

So again, I waited, and then when he was seven, I figured this was it. I told him to pick an instrument. Its time, just pick something. He picked the drums of all things and I couldn’t change his mind. It was all he was interested in. I had played the flute in band in high school. Flutists, you know the personality, usually sit in the front rows and appear very polite and attentive. The percussionists are always at the back of the band, and from my vantage, goofing off, falling asleep and generally getting dirty looks from the conductor during lessons. In my mind they were juvenile delinquents. I was heart broken. Yet deep down, I knew my son was a was a genius. I knew this because he would do things at school that displayed ingenuity and brilliance at a very early age. Like the time in second grade he forged my name on a note coming home from the principal, mid year, for throwing rocks on the school bus. He had only JUST learned to print. Most kids don’t start doing this kind of stuff till High school. (What gave it away for the principal is that the signature had been printed in pencil and then overwritten in pen. Most parents don’t use a pencil and they don’t print. ) I have other examples of pure genius, which would take too long to describe for mention here, but what was happening was clear. It now became my mission in life, hence forward, to make sure that my son used his powers for good and not evil. Its been rough but I think good is winning.

Happy Birthday to me

It was my birthday a week ago Monday! I turned eh-hem, forty nine. A good friend I met through work shares my birthday. She now lives in Michigan. She called me first thing. It made my birthday all on its own, but then I spent the day in the garden weeding.

What is great about this activity is the dog, a very high strung, overly enthusiastic chocolate lab who lives outside, will leave me alone. He has learned not to come in the garden. Although adorable, he’s a royal pain. I love it.

What is not great though is that weeding becomes a major project because it can be so messy. I went through four sets of gardening gloves with all the dampness and mud. I get dirt on my knees and shoes and feet. I am just absolutely caked with it. So once I start I don’t want to stop till it is done.

I was out there for most of the day, and by afternoon, I started getting calls from family members with birthday wishes. John would shout to me from the house. He was taking the call and then telling them I would call back. Then he was coming up to get me. He was doing this while the event was fresh, to avoid forgetting, which would definitely happen otherwise.

When I finally finished in the garden, John was in the kitchen. He announced that he had made calls to everyone on his phone list (HIS PHONELIST), telling them or leaving them messages to call and wish me a happy birthday. He told me this in the kitchen. He had done it so he could get all the incoming birthday calls at once and avoid all this having to go up and down the stairs and outside to give me messages. He has a talking computer and his phone list on the computer is the list of all HIS friends and whatever businesses he might call or need to call in the course of a day. The rest of the evening was spent by me talking to people that I didn’t really know very well. I have to confess he does have some friends that are my friends too, so it was very nice after all. I am just glad I didn’t have to talk to his stock broker (who he left a message for, but never called back).

One more

These are my sister's husbands on the last day of our vacation. They love the surf.

More about vacation

I am in the middle. My sisters are on either side. We made John (my husband) hold the beer can as a prop. After all, a man is a man, and all good men drink beer. It took the whole vacation to get John into his bathing suit, and he went swimming in the pool! Yeah! He's doing a great job for a guy who is blind and has had stokes up the ying yang (amen).

How I spent my summer vacation....

Like this. And, when we weren't by the pool, we were on the beach.

My sisters and their husbands did a lot of fishing in the morning(wives 3 husbands 0). I had fishing rods for our family, but frankly, it was too much work.

Lots of walks along the beach, to the point at low tide,very peaceful, and my son made the following observation: This vacation provided a big change for our family from Chicago, but for us, personally, there wasn't much difference between this and home, except for the beach of course. My son, like his cousins, was in pursuit of the perfect vacation tan. My sister dubbed one of the nieces the President of the PTA - Professional Tanning Association. This sister would have been the Vice President as she takes her tanning very seriously.

By the end of the week, being much less competitive on this front, I had had enough. John and I went over to the Brookview Botanical Gardens and spent a day amongst the marble and granite Sculptures, walking through the "rooms", reading the poetry on plaques on the walls, and enjoying the fabulous green green architecture.

I can't make this stuff up

We lost the car in Knoxville Tennessee. I am not kidding. It was the second day of our trip to Garden City, SC (Myrtle Beach). We were at a gas station just off Interstate 40 in Knoxville, Tennessee. I parked the car at a gas pump and put the nozzle in and all that. Then I told John and Harry I was going in to buy some water. I am in the habit of leaving the pump while I’m fueling the car, doesn't everybody? Well, then Harry said he was going in to use the rest rooms. John didn’t need to go. I actually used the rest room too (I think) and at any rate I met Harry at the counter buying an ice cream bar. We walked out together.

“Harry where is the car?”

We looked. It was gone. We went to all the pumps, nothing in back.
We were freaking, and then Harry pointed. The car was about 500 feet or more away, across the street. It was sitting between an electrical utility pole and the wires that they use to support it. It had rolled across a street, through a grassy ditch full of who knows what, through utility wires, just missing a utility pole, and into an old arborvitae that was cracked and falling over from the impact. There were two guys who looked a bit shell shocked standing near the car. They must have seen what happened. John was in the passenger seat. He was white. I asked the one guy how fast the car was going… he thought maybe 10 mph maybe faster. It took Harry a couple of tries to get it out of the tangle of shrub and grass. Amazingly, while the bumper smelled strongly of spruce, there were no dents. Everything seemed to work. No scratches on the underbody. We still had to go through the mountains and I was hoping we didn’t have alignment problems. John’s only comment when we asked him if he was alright was “I DO NOT WANT TO BE LEFT IN THE CAR BY MYSELF AGAIN!” I was too stressed to do any more driving so Harry drove the rest of the way to Garden City. We found out later
when John was describing the incident to my sister, that John was trying to turn on the air conditioning. He put the car in neutral and turned on the car. The parking brake was up but didn’t work. The car was on an incline so it rolled forward. Harry confessed that in the excitement he had dropped his ice cream bar. We should have bought a lottery ticket.

Being blind's a bitch

My husband lived in Chicago for about twenty-five years, before I met him in ’84. He was already blind. He lost his sight as a complication of diabetes when he was thirty. I met him when he was thirty-five.

The condition is called retinopathy. Diabetics suffer from cardiovascular issues. In order to feed the body, I am not sure exactly what, but diabetics build more capillaries. Capillaries are blood vessels that carry nutrients to the outlying area of the body. Anyway, these capillaries are very fragile, and so when there are changes in blood pressure, they can burst and internal bleeding occurs. It happened in his eyes. There was bleeding, and the retinas detached. This is how he lost his sight. John had a famous eye doctor in Chicago, the same one that treated a famous boxer for an almost detached retina. The doctor tried to save John’s vision but failed. After that, John said, the doctor never charged him for another visit, and John used to visit every year and send a poinsetta at Christmas.

John’s strokes have resulted for similar reasons, and there isn’t much that can be done, except control his blood pressure and maintain a healthy diet and exercise.

While going blind was very difficult, being blind was an easy adjustment. John sold his beloved corvette, but having a love for cars, bought a Mercedes station wagon in its place. He used to spend every weekend in the summer washing and hand waxing all the cars we had. When Harry was little he would help. As a toddler, Harry would not answer when called, or speak when spoken to, so we would tie bells into his tennis shoe laces so John would know where he was. This is one of my favorite photos of the two of them and I miss John and his energetic, “I can do anything” spirit. He is still a fighter, and is hanging on and will never give up. Neither will I.

Its all about consumption...

We're headed off on our vacation.

Over many years, my sisters have been going down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in July. My brother sometimes joined them, but this year, with his kids getting older and different schedules, they are going a week earlier.

My sisters continue to go, together, every couple of years, and for the second time, my husband, son and I will join them.

The first time we came down, it was a whirlwind of activity. Of course when you have that many people, it seems very busy. Lots of time at the beach, and then out to dinner and the bars.

The kids, all various stages of teen hood, go down and hang out at the pier. My son rode in the trunk for one of these occasions. I mean when all the kids piled in the car, there wasn't enough room, so he volunteered to ride in the trunk. The pier was only about four blocks away. It is something my fearless son would do. I wasn't happy to hear what he had done when he told me about it months later. He was about fifteen. That was the same year he and his friends discovered duck tape and, would duck tape themselves to street lamps late at night, and various other pranks which could have gotten them hurt or worse. Hopefully he won't be that goofy on this trip.

The most memorable thing we did on this vacation was ride on a jet ski. I rode with my son and he was jumping all the waves, doing sharp turns and going at death defying speeds. You have to be 18 to be by yourself. He wasn't so I rode behind him. I think I lost two cavities with all the teeth nashing.

The best part about it though, is I get to spend time with my family...

History lesson...

When we lived in Maryland Harry frequently came home from school with chatter about Tyrone, such as something that happened with Tyrone that day, or something that Tyrone said. For instance, Tyrone was going to have five wives. I had no idea how to respond to this. "Well he better get a good education so that he can get a good job!" I always tried to turn everything into encouragement for Harry to do well in school, since Harry seemed to have an agenda that conflicted with the teacher’s. It was a kind of survival mechanism for me.

Harry and Tyrone came from what must have been opposite backgrounds, and yet they were friends. Tyrone was black, and his family attended a Baptist church; a southern boy from a southern family and after all, Maryland was the south. Harry was white, and at the time, we were going to a Presbyterian church, which struck me as stiff and well, white. Harry was most definitely northern, last stop being Minnesota. In fact, Harry had just started using the regional expression "ufdah" before we left town. He and Tyrone made an interesting pair, both just adorably goofy and non-stop action. I would meet Harry to give him a ride home from school. There would be a boy hopping along next to Harry, and jumping in front of me with mischievous smiles. That's Tyrone, Harry would say. Tyrone reminded me of Harry.

One time I worked as lunch monitor. The kids ate their lunch in 10 minutes and then went outside, always incentive to finish as quickly as possible. The monitors would give some kids special cards to go early. Tyrone got one. That day Tyrone gave his to Harry. During moments of chaos the two boys always seemed to find each other. Coming back in they had to sit on a ledge and wait. Before long the two boys were rocking back and forth and knocking each other in rowdy camaraderie. These kids were six or seven and it looked pretty normal to me.

One day after school Harry and I had the following exchange:

“Mommy, were you alive when the dinosaurs were alive?”

“No Harry, I wasn't alive when there were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were the first animals and that was millions of years ago...well maybe 20,000 years ago. I am not really sure, but it was way before I was born.” (Do I have that many wrinkles? Harry was so serious, like he'd been struggling with this for days!)

“Well if you weren't around when the dinosaurs were alive, then were you around during the American Revolution? Was anybody in your family alive then?”

“No Harry, I wasn't around during the American Revolution.”
(American Revolution? What does that have to do with the Jurassic period? Damn, he makes me feel like old! Hey, he knows his history though.)

“Well then Mommy, were you or was any of your family around during the civil war?Was dad around? Or was your mom or dad?”

“No I wasn't Harry. My mom's family came over during the Irish Potato Famine. That was in the 1860's. My dad was in the Korean War. My Uncle was in World War II. Your dad’s family came over from Scotland and settled in Canada. Why are you asking Harry? Is there something wrong?”
(Where is this going?)

“Well no, except Tyrone says my family killed Abraham Lincoln. But my family couldn’t have killed Abraham Lincoln because you weren't born yet and your parents weren't born yet and I wasn’t born yet. Tyrone is wrong. I'm going to tell him tomorrow!”
(It was Black History week. The guy who killed Abraham Lincoln was white. Harry is white. I think Tyrone has figured it out. Nice job with the guilt factor.)

Well, Chicago was great. My sisters were great. My cousin Kathy, my Aunt Mary and my mom were great. We had a great time (no really it was fun and I love them all). It took about 10 minutes into the hello's for my mom to comment on my hair and its lack of blondness. My sister lost the bet. She figured my mother would comment almost immediately.

Traditions

As I child, between my two sisters and my brother, I had the lightest hair in the family. I was the closest thing to blonde my mother would hope to have. In fact, I actually thought I was blonde, until I got my driver’s license at 16. The woman at the counter corrected me, “Honey, your hair is brown.” All through childhood my mom would wash and rinse my hair in lemon or vinegar, and then put me outside to dry in the sun to lighten it. In truth, she used to put me outside a lot, for various things. Like, as a preschooler, when the weather was nice, she would make me a sack lunch and send me outside to eat it. I see myself standing in the driveway feeding my sandwich to our cat who was sitting on top of the car.

My little sister and I are about a year and a half apart. She was always taller than me, and bigger. She was dark haired and I was light. If my grandmother gave us some money for gifts, my mother would buy complimentary outfits for us, but my sister always got the dark vibrant colors because she was a brunette. I would get the dull drab pastel shades. I hated it.

This weekend I am going to Chicago because my Aunt will be there visiting my mom and I want to see her. Its an excuse to get away for the weekend, and my son has agreed to look after his dad. I have alot of grey hair, and I feel a certain amount of pressure, and competitiveness, to look as youthful as is possible for a woman my age, so I usually color my hair before a visit to any of my family. Last night I dyed my hair some shade of auburn brown, and to my horror, it looks pretty unnatural and very red. My younger sister can pull this off marvelously. Her hair is always some unnatural shade of purple or bronze, but me personally, I can't decide whether I made a mistake and if I should "fix" it. I know that when my mother sees me this weekend she'll express some disapointment. "Anne, I think you should be a blonde".

So that being said, I think I'll probably just go with this and see what happens. Ought to be interesting.

Go West

The summer of our move to Minnesota we took a trip with Johnny, Courtney, and Harry to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. It was a driving vacation, literally. We drove nine hours out in two days, took pictures of the family in front of Mt. Rushmore, and then drove home. In between we did the usual stops, the Badlands, Bear Country, Petrified Forest, Wall Drug, on the way there, Sturgis, and the Corn Palace on the way back.

Outside of our stops at all the tourist attractions, hotels, bathroom breaks, and restaurants, we spent alot of time together in the car. We discovered very quickly that Harry, three at the time, and Courtney, fourteen, had to be separated, because they could not get along. I was surprised that a fourteen year old and a three year old could bicker and pick and irritate so successfully. At one point, getting ice cream at some restside stop, Courtney, in a fit of frustration, exclaimed that Harry was the most immature three year old she ever met. We all just looked at each other. Can a three year old be anything else?

The car we were driving was John's mercedes station wagon. It was his baby, painstakingly washed, waxed and and maintained in top condition. He was constantly harping at us about the way we shut the doors too hard. On the way home, he became so annoyed, that he passed an edict that he would be the only one allowed to close doors when anyone got in or out of the car. And so it was that we would stop at a rest stop or a restaurant. Everyone would pile out of the car and into whatever place we ended up. John had to go around to each door and shut it. Then after whatever, lunch, restrooms, we'd pile back in. We would wait for John to walk around to each door and close it. But oops, Johnny forgot something. Out the door he went back into the rest stop. John would have to get back out of the car, make his way around the car (he was blind of course), shut Johnny's door and get back in to his own spot. Then Courtney needed something and out she went. John would repeat the process. Then they were back and John would have to get out and start all over again. This lasted for about a day and a half before John finally gave up, and things were back to normal. Slam, Slam, Slam!

Too many pets

At one point we lived in a western suburb of Chicago. That was where we found George. George would be lurking around the neighborhood, in the bushes and very friendly. With his big wild eyed expression and longish snarley fur, George was a grizzly bear version of a cat. I watched him track an opossum along the fence between the back yards once. George's hair was dirty grey and matted. He could have been mistaken for the opossum in a line up if you just saw their backs. After I saw that I knew George's character was excellent. He had imagination and was fearless. When we took him in permanently, George became very devoted and loyal and he proved an excellent watch cat, making his territory our yard and keeping every dog in the neighborhood at bay, and fearful of walking past our house. We absolutely adored him.

When we moved to Minnesota, we took George. We put him in a huge cage in the back of the Mazda Navajo. And so we left Chicago, dragging a trailer; which had nothing to do with George, but was just really hard for me to maneuver, and I hated it. We landed in the rural backwaters of Minnesota, pretty milktoast as backwaters go and at some point must have realized something was missing. Ah, that was it, a dog! Hello Mudflap, a blue healer/ Australian sheep dog mix, who killed and masticated every free ranging rodent in a 1 acre radius from our house, and would have killed George too, but George steered clear of him. Mudflap didn't last, for shame, tragically lost in a dogs at play incident. Over the course of the next year we adopted an Alaskan husky named Skylar who had a tendency to run long distances (and got hit by a car on the highway), and finally a 2 year old yellow lab, the discard of a messy divorce, from a guy I knew at work. The yellow lab's name was Buster, and Buster was perfect for our family in his own confidant, sloppy, happy, self determined, disobedient way.

When my son was about four he introduced us to Little Black Kitty. I still remember the evening. It was just turning dark, and I remember seeing my son out in the yard in silouette. He was trying to catch hold the cat, who I think was trying to be caught. She was a little black female kitten cat, that eventually came to reside on a shelf in our garage because George wouldn't let her in the house. My son, over the course of a year called her by a lot of different names, but not being able to keep up with his changes we finally just referred to her as Little black kitty and it stuck. We thought Little black kitty was pregnant for at least 6 months, till we moved to Maryland, and the vet told us she'd been spayed, and showed us the scar to prove it. We also had a big furry George like Hamster, can't recall the breed, but it looked like a pale dust mop.


So when we moved to Maryland, we had two cats, a dog, and a hamster, in the Mazda Navajo, and I was trailing another big pain- in -the- ass trailer full of pet supplies among other things. I soon discovered that Buster was my best traveling companion, because he didn't complain, and he didn't need bathroom breaks. I felt like I was traveling in the dryer's lint cage, or that hairy feeling you have after a Veterinary clinic appointment with your pet. You need a shower, and a lint brush for your tongue, if you made the mistake of consulting with the vet in the room, or whatever. I can't imagine what the Vet must feel like after a day at the office.


The great thing about Maryland was that the house was neutral ground. When we landed, George immediately moved to the heating ducts. We knew this about him because he did it the first couple of weeks in Minnesota. We would hear his plaintive calls muffled reverberating through the walls of the house, particularly in the basement. When he finally appeared at the end of a couple of weeks, he really did look like a dust mop. I introduced Little Black Kitty to the house, and she and George eventually, through her female persistence and attention, became fast friends. She was constantly grooming him, and eventually, he was hooked. Trucker 1 became Trucker 2, this time a Golden Hamster, and somehow we acquired a gecko lizard named Lizzy.


When we moved back to Minnesota for a second time, we traded the Mazda Navajo for a Jeep Cherokee something or other in Chicago, but we had Buster, George, Little Black Kitty, Lizzy, and well we lost Trucker 2. While we were packing, actually the day that we were moving, Harry took me into to his room to show me Trucker. Something was terribly wrong. Trucker was curled in a ball and breathing hard. Mommy, what are we going to do? When I looked at the heartbreak in my son's expression, well, I called the Vet. I swear to god the Vet had the biggest Shit eating grin you'll ever see, as he placed the stethoscope on that little hamster's chest and listened, and then explained to me the diagnosis. Trucker had an upper respiratory condition. He was three years old but that equated to 70 years in hamster life. He was an old man hamster. Here was the dilemma. He needed antibiotics. We could drive to Catonsville and get the proper dosage, or the vet could mix something for us. He warned me that an improper dosage could ruin the rodent's kidneys, and that he had never done this before. Since we were moving that day and the truck was loaded, i opted for the vet to mix it there. The vet also advised us that Trucker needed fluids every three hours, and medicine every six. Harry and i nodded. We understood, and i paid the forty dollar bill for a seven dollar hamster. No wonder the Vet could barely contain his mirth. Sadly, Trucker didn't make it very far, barely to Pennsylvania, two hours into our trip. We knew when he died because we smelled this brief foul odor ...a death fart. Even sadder, we had a stop in Ohio, at my mother's, and she wouldn't let me put the corpse in her freezer for the night. We had planned to bury him when we reached our Minnesota destination.

being human

I am taking this just a little out of context, but somebody famous once said "There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant."

Introductions

At present this is all about introductions. This is my husband. What you might be able to tell from this photo is that he has a cane. His left eye is a little funny too. The man is blind. He's not been able to see, at all, for as long as I have known him. What I liked about him when we first met, though, was that he would go with me to the art museum and 1) he would go and genuinely seemed to enjoy it, but only the first time 2) i could describe everything i saw from my perspective, utterly, in my opinion, and unchallenged. I realized that I could do this with just about anything and it was like a great power. It was heaven. He also had a lot of imagination, loved to play, and could be very silly. Still is. We've been married for 18 years. He's had a few strokes. What he's lost makes me sad. He isn't the same person that he was when i married him but he's definately there in spirit, he enjoys life, and he is very loyal to me. What more could anyone ask for. Plus he still cleans up really well...when I can convince him that it is a worthwhile effort. We've been invited to a graduation party on Sunday and it will take a special conversation to convince him to go. I am not sure i will succeed but we shall try.

Food is fabulous

I imagined this when I compare my young son and the mudbogging. In retrospect, my young son looks better in this picture than I remember or imagined. He was a blonde as a youngster. My husband called him “chowder head”. My husband also called my son and his first son, “sunshine!” as in the greeting “hello! Sunshine!”. It was always so sweet. Do you know, from a term like “chowder head” what part of the world my husband originated? (ok Massachussets, not really the world, I just tried to give it some mystery.) I think the red tint on the top of my son’s head was sauce.