Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Vernon’s Workbench in the Garage
The lights in the garage flicked on and off three times. That was the signal that Greta was going to bed. He could feel her looking at him through the window of the kitchen door. He didn’t look up.
Vernon flicked the light over his workbench twice to answer. That meant he was staying up a while to work on the toaster that wouldn’t give up its toast, it just kept toasting and toasting until you pulled the plug out of the wall and then went after the toast with a sharp knife. It had been irking him for months, having to do all that just for a piece of toast. Greta didn’t care. She ate coffee cake for breakfast.
Vernon had taken the toaster apart. His dad taught him how to do this, well, not fix a toaster, but how to take things that didn’t work completely apart and put them back together.
The toaster parts – the outside panels, the inside baking racks and all the little springs and levers – were spread out on the workbench in orderly piles like a kid would organize Legos before building a ship.
Vernon liked this part, the part where he could see all the inner workings of a thing, all the inside riddles laid bare on the table. No mystery here. Only mystery was what was broken and how to fix it. That could take hours. Vernon sat on his wood stool and pondered the parts.
Bertie the neighborhood cat leapt on to the workbench. He did this often, because Vernon kept the garage door open when he was working, and every time, Vernon would shoo him away, lift him up and drop him on the floor, but this time he didn’t. Bertie meowed, screeched almost, and Vernon was so startled that he jumped off his wood stool, knocking it over. Then he saw Bertie’s tail. It was mangled at the end, bloodied and bent, like it had been crushed by a tire or caught in a heavy door. Bertie paced back and forth over the toaster parts, dripping blood on the racks and the springs, while Vernon watched, not knowing what to do.
He wished he had gone to bed with Greta and then he wouldn’t know about the cat’s tail or have to do anything about it. No one would know if he shooed the cat outside and then closed the garage door. Was it his responsibility to take care of the cat just because he came in the garage with a ripped-up tail? To fix the cat like he was a toaster? He didn’t think so. He had his limits. He knew that so he wrapped the cat in a clean paint rag and took him inside to Greta who had been sleeping but turned to look at him when he turned on the bedroom light.
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Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash
It Looks Like a Round-Up but It’s Just Thursday
The sound of the lawn being mowed by someone not me is delicious.
Later, I’m going to make myself a bowl of instant mashed potatoes and that will be a travesty but also delicious considering my current food choices.
This morning, I found my dog after he’d disappeared at a big dog park, and other people were looking for him (he was that lost), by going down a dense overgrown path to the river where he was standing very far away on a little slip of land in the river chewing grass like a lost horse.
The discussion in our writing group turned to the perfect sentence today, so a writing friend read one that he had been working on for some time and it was, indeed, beautifully constructed and quite compelling, leading me to think I should be more deliberate in what I write and not always be in such a hurry.
I’m revising a story about a dad and daughter who go fishing and how the dad’s expectations of the daughter’s toughness is both good for the daughter and very wearing to their relationship, a subject I know quite a bit about, especially the part about getting a hook out of a northern pike’s mouth while someone watches.
The NFL Draft is tonight which means New York strip steaks and double-baked potatoes for those of us not eating instant mashed potatoes, not the first time life’s gone on without me.
Goodbye to #15
My husband used his favorite flashlight to look in my mouth.
I warned him that where the dentist extracted my upper left molar this afternoon might look bloody. And so, before clicking on his flashlight, he said, “What if I throw up?” He is notoriously weak-kneed when it comes to blood and gore or stories that might imply later blood and gore. For instance, he didn’t want to know the details of how the dentist went about wrenching the molar out of my mouth, instead he regaled me with details about the handyman’s visit while I was gone.
I don’t mind. I just wanted him to look in my mouth and tell me that what I imagined to be a gaping, dripping wound looked okay. He said it looked neat, very clean, with a tiny little clot in the middle. (Is this more information than you usually get about dental care in a blog?) And even though he usually tells me everything is fine or looks fine or will be fine, I believed him, mostly because his description was so surgical and precise.
Marriage is these things. It was always these things but now seems more so.
After the session at the dentist, I walked to a pharmacy next door to buy some ibuprofen. Then realizing we had some at home, I walked around the store, marveling that they sold only over the counter and prescription drugs together with a pretty extensive wine and beer collection. This seems incongruous, though very Milwaukee, and I inspected the wine labels while I waited for my husband to pick me up. He’d texted that he was still talking to the handyman, so I’d have to wait a bit. I looked out the big windows on to the street, wishing for our truck to appear. I wasn’t in pain or upset, but feeling thin and weathered, like I was listing in some very ephemeral way.
“It’s important,” the dentist said, “you’re losing a part of yourself.” This impressed me that she would think about my #15 tooth in this way, but she was right. I thought about this while I waited in the pharmacy with people coming in and out and regarding me as an older lady in a hoodie. And then my husband pulled up in front of the store and we went home.
Question to the WordPress Community
It is slightly unnerving to see that someone is reading all my posts since the beginning of my blog in 2010. There are over 3,000 posts.
I appreciate new readers, for sure. But I’ve never had a new reader read all my old posts and so I wonder about that. Is it curiosity? Appreciation for my amazing writing? Or AI come to visit?
If anyone has any experience like this or thoughts about what’s happening, please share.
My blog is my fifth child so I’m very protective of it.
The Zoomies: A Rhyming Poem!
Zoom meetings I have to chair
Have me pacing here to there
All the faces in little boxes
Scare me down to my purple soxs
Nervous nose runs but many tissues
Keep me focused on all the issues
Camera-off spectators love to lurk
Swim by themselves in the chat murk
40-slide PowerPoints roll my eyes
Presenters love how they’re so wise
Important to be cordial and oh so kind
Never tell anyone we might have whined
On Zoom
For hours
In a hard chair
With cold coffee
Bad Dirt: The Side Garden
I don’t have good dirt. I have bad dirt. And because I’ve done nothing about this terrible situation in almost forty years, the bad dirt has gotten an attitude. Now, it acts like cement might if it was poured around ancient irises and holly plants, embed them for posterity, keep them as in amber for when the tour group comes past our house looking at the fossilized remains of life in the 2020’s.
I called a landscaper to come beat the bad dirt into submission, load it into a truck and replace it with dirt you’d want to sleep in naked. She’s also going to assess how near death my plants and shrubs are, euthanize the iffy ones, and go shopping with me for replacements!
What took me so long? I grew up thinking I’m supposed to do things myself. This includes cooking, cleaning a big house, shoveling snow (though I started to crack on that a few years ago), raking leaves, mowing the lawn, fixing my own computer (no joke), using a toothbrush on the grout in the shower, you know, all the things.
So, is calling my landscaping friend an accommodation to age, which would certainly be warranted, or is it long-awaited triumph of common sense? Or, as I think about it, a shedding of my Michigan upbringing where nuts and bolts were kept in Jiffy peanut butter jars screwed to an overhead panel and people painted their own houses standing on extension ladders that buckled in the middle and no sock was ever too worn out to be mended and dinner for five could be made from a can of salmon and some Saltines.
My father would have dealt with the bad dirt in year one. My mother would have huge purple irises erupting everywhere. I called the landscaper. Finally. Oh well.
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The Lifeline of Social Media
For years, I couldn’t communicate the way other people communicate. I couldn’t talk on the phone, and I couldn’t navigate most conversations outside of those with my husband and a very small group of other people whose voice pitch and tone were discernible by my terribly flawed hearing. Communicating in a group was impossible. I became mute.
Moreover, every situation where I was expected to communicate – to hear and respond appropriately – was paralyzing. So, whenever I could, I’d opt out, either totally as in not go, or invisibly as in completely intellectually detaching from what was going on. I lived in my head most of the time. I liked it there. No pressure.
So then came Facebook. People talking in print with pictures. Chatting. Telling jokes. Campaigning for office. Showing off what they made for dinner. Complaining about traffic or the snow or the guy across the street. It felt like a non-stop coffee klatch to me. Homey and informal and lighthearted. Facebook got me out of my head by giving me a way to be a person in the world.
Now, after two cochlear implants, I can hear, not perfectly, but ten lifetimes better than before. And I do talk to people on the phone and hold my own in a group. The utility of Facebook has changed for me. Now, it’s not the coffee klatch as much as it is a way to connect with people across racial and ethnic lines, watch and align with positive community movements, highlight the work I’m doing with Street Angels and the Commission on Aging, and learn things about people and places I would never otherwise know. Not be stuck in the last slice of life I heard.
Social media – I’m glad for it. Grateful.
All True Sentences Friday Round-Up
Someone in pink pajamas and a blue fluffy bathrobe is walking up and down the street in front of my house talking on the phone. Hemingway said to write the first true sentence. Well, there you go.
I sat in the presence of Sister Helen Prejean today. Sister Prejean’s prison ministry led to her lifelong opposition to the death penalty. Today, she led the audience through the first time she was asked to witness an execution. She told of holding hands and praying, one way glass, and victims’ families. Her latest book, The Death of the Innocents, chronicles the paths to execution of two people that the evidence exonerated but the legal system was unable or unwilling to reprieve. She told these heartbreaking stories, sprinkling in memories of growing up and finding places to relieve us with humor. It was an extraordinary hour.
Trump’s punishment is to be made to sit still in a courtroom all day. His discomfort radiates. That he can’t be on the phone or eat or play golf or talk. It has to be driving him crazy. No one has ever made him sit down and sit still before. A lifetime of indulgence is what led him to this moment. Pity.
My hideous cough is over. This means I won’t be writing any more horrible short stories about fairies that come in the night offering to slay a baby in order to stop the world’s coughing. (I notice that didn’t pick up too many likes.) However, gardening season is upon us which is a whole other form of futility and defeat for which there is no cough syrup.
My husband got me buffalo wool socks and gloves for my birthday. This is because he loves all things cold or arctic or both. With the buffalo wool socks on, I could walk across the Russian tundra in deep winter to meet Yury at Varykino, never feeling a single sting of the freezing, merciless cold on my tender feet. I am ready for what’s next. So ready.
About Turning 76
Today was the dreaded day. It was okay. Better than okay. Here’s why.
100 Word Story: Night Visitor
Brenda’s cough woke her up. She heaved and hacked, phlegm tangled in the back of her throat.
“Want some relief, honey?” Brenda looked around for the voice. Tinkerbell floated in the air, waving her sparkly wand.
“If I kill a baby somewhere in the world, everyone could stop coughing forever, including you. Deal?”
Brenda choked on a new cough coming. “What? That’s crazy.”
“Compared to what?” Tink zoomed to the overhead fan. “Crazy is as crazy does.”
“Go!” Brenda erupted, using her slipper to smack at Tink, fluttering near the window. Another cough exploded from her ribs. Wings flapped nearby.
__________
Photo by Dinu J Nair on Unsplash
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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