Tales from the Shark Tank

I’ve taken stock recently. I’ve sent out enough resumes to deforest half the Amazon, most of which simply vanished into limbo. I’ve called everyone I could think of, and they don’t know of jobs either. I’ve begun hunting in IT, but I have to convince those folks that just because I have a law degree doesn’t mean I’m technologically illiterate. I’ve applied for paralegal/ clerical jobs just to have a paycheck, and can’t even get in the door on those. Perhaps they’re right; I’m likely to have my own opinions on what needs to be done.

And none of it is going anywhere. I’ve not gone looking for something like retail on the grounds that there’s very little point in getting a job that pays little enough that most of my income would go to daycare. I’m working on things that will pay eventually, but that doesn’t help now. I know this too shall pass. I’m just hoping it will happen before my rope completely unravels.

You know you’re a parent when your nightmares are of arguing with the Powers That Be that your child’s poor showing on a standardized test is due to the fact that the administrators wouldn’t give him time enough to accomplish the physical act of writing, and that writing speed is not a measure of either intelligence or academic prowess. The terrifying thing is that because my son differences are not immediately visible, I may well be making that argument some day. Not in first grade, thouogh. They don’t administer the ISTEP (Indiana State Testing for Education Progress) in first grade. For today, it’s only a nightmare.

There’s about a foot of fluffy white stuff outside right now, having arrived in glory on Wednesday night. I knew it was deep Thursday morning when I looked out my window. My usual measure of “deep” is when I can’t see my raised beds in the back yard. They had indeed been rendered invisible, and remain so. But I was intrepid and forged a path to my van and then out of the driveway. Of course, back in again took a fair lot of shovelling, but I can live with that. And it’s cold. I knew it was interesting when the predicted low for today was 11 F., and the actual temperature was zero. Bleah. Phooey. Stay inside and bake!

But it’s still lovely to look at, if a bit on the bitter side for walking in. And inside we’re warm and safe and reasonably well. Small Joseph is enchanted with an inflatable globe, especially since I pointed out roughly where we live to him on it. He’s beginning to get the idea that we live on a planet, and that big as it is, it’s still finite. I much prefer that to his watching the holiday specials on Cartoon Network, though some of them were funny. And so was my son…hearing a character say that Christmas was Jesus’ birthday, he turned around and said “No, Mommy. It’s Santa’s birthday. That’s why he brings presents!” Yes, for so long as he believes Santa is real, for so long will there be a little heap of things under the dining room table. (No tree, of course)

But all in all, I think that’s what today has been. A present from Santa, a day other people are observing and we are not, but on which I could not be obligated to go out or go to the grocery or talk to other attorneys or the mortgage company plaguing my client, not because it’s a weekend but because there is no one there and everything is closed. Sometimes, having the world turn off for a day is the greatest gift possible.

Clearly I cannot be first to welcome David Salo to the Land of Bloggery. That’s ok. I’m delighted that the person for whom Dorothea was establishing a blog turned out to be David. I commend his addition to the Blogsphere, Beyond 360 to your attention. Like David himself, it will make you think. And who else would think to do an analysis of cartoon cave-man linguistics?

I don’t know when I got lost, but I seem to have found myself again when I wasn’t looking. I guess I kind of snuck up on myself. See, way back in the day there were people I talked to nearly every day. I was involved in a lot of things, friendly with a great many people. And then somewhere along the line I retreated within myself. I stopped calling. I wrote less and less. I let everyone go, and when I noticed what was happening I wasn’t sure how to fix it, or where the time would be found.

Now two people I talk to nearly every day are going on vacation at the same time, and I realized that I was going to miss the interaction tremendously, that it has come to be part of my life to socialize. I started writing again first, but now I’m talking, and not just to those two. I talk on the phone. I email. I stay home more, logically enough; I’ve a little guy. I can’t go out on impulse nearly so easily. But those are little things. I’ve got myself back, and I am unutterably grateful that my friends never let go of me entirely.

Not long ago my mother asked me why I do the things I do. Why do I take people under my wing, help them out in small ways and sometimes ways that are not so small? “People just don’t do that”, she said, genuinely mystified by her daughter. What I said to her was that what “people” do is not of great concern to me; to me, this is the right thing to do. She accepted that answer.

But I’ve been thinking about that, and the fact is that many of the people I know do what I do, in varying forms. One of my kids has a girl who does not get on well with her stepmother (her mother died when she was 10 and her dad remarried a few years later) living in her guest room when she’s not away at college. My kid is not wealthy, by any stretch of imagination. She’s still finishing her professional training. But “this is what people do”, she says, and she and her husband are. Another of my kids is gathering a work crew to help a woman with cardiac trouble whom none of them know clean out her mother’s house so it can be sold and an estate resolved. I told the young woman who is putting it together that there was a problem; she went looking for the solution on her own. “I like to help” she says. “We all do.” I have friends who have given house room to people who couldn’t afford a place of their own for a couple of years in a tiny three bedroom house. I have friends who have given up one of their precious weekends off (they had 4 together a year) to help move someone else’s parents. I have friends who anonymously purchased several bags of groceries and left them on the front step of another friend who had been injured, couldn’t work, and was very proud. They did that every week until the woman was back to work. I was aware of the conspiracy because it was my job to call and tell them when her doctor’s appointments were; that was when they would leave the loot. She actually asked me about it. I believe I asked her in turn how I could have seen who did it – I had been with her at her appointment. I have a dear friend who has given me a key to her house and told me to use it as a retreat any time my heart desires. She asks me occasionally to stay overnight when I begin to stress out visibly. As much as she treasures her privacy, that is a priceless gift.

So Mom? The folks I know take care of each other in very much the same way I do. They may not have much themselves, but what they have they find a way to share. People really do do that.

An interesting exchange took place between friends in my living room this evening. I was reviewing a contract, and commented that while I understood that the fine print (really fine: about 5 point) was primarily boilerplate, I was reading it anyway. One friend commented that “the devil is in the fine print”. Another responded that she’d always heard it as “G-d is in the fine print.” And my housemate topped it perfectly, with an image of a Greek god and and horned, tailed, bright red demon fencing between the lines of the document. I’d love to see someone illuminate that in a manuscript of some sort. If I could draw, I’d try it myself.

Not that there’s time for it, but I need to beat up on some more bread dough, before I do something like that to my son. It’s not that’s he’s a bad kid at all. But today I don’t have the patience generally ascribed to a fruit fly, and well, he’s being a kid and then some. Right now my housemate has him, and I’m hiding in my room for a few minutes. How on earth do single parents do it?

Like many people, I get a bit stressed around what are commonly known as “the holidays”. This is, of course, in complete despite of the fact that the holidays generally referred to aren’t mine. In fact, the sheer in-your-face prevalence of the holidays that aren’t mine are a large part of my stress. Now I have found ways to subvert the paradigm a bit. There is, for example, a Chanukah wreath on my front door. It’s a standard model wreath with a Star of David woven into the center of it in cream and gold cord. It shows up very nicely against our dark grey front door. There are also the tiny satin-glass balls with letters on them spelling out “Happy Chanukah” in both English and Hebrew which Joseph has hung all over my ficus tree. I said “no Christmas tree.” I said it repeatedly. But I have this eight foot ficus tree in my dining room year round, and it has branches. Yesterday evening while I was recovering from the day, it got decorated. Oh, well.

But as December wears along and more and more Christmas music invades my cosmos, I felt the need to indulge in some baking therapy. For me, that involves yeast. Lots of yeast. Almost half a cup of it, all told, along with a grand total of about 15 cups of flour and assorted miscellaneous other ingredients. Now, usually baking half a dozen loaves of bread leaves me with the problem of what to do with it when I’ve no mind to open a bakery, and I’m as likely as not to be baking again in a few days. But hey, it’s the holidays! So a rasberry filled loaf is going to Joseph’s bus driver, who changed the route so he could catch the bus at the end of his own driveway. Another is going to his teacher, just because she’s wonderful. There’s a poppy seed filled loaf that will go with me when I go to a pitch-in on Saturday, and another for the family. There’s one plain (if you can call sweet dough with half a stick of butter, vanilla and cardamom in it “plain”) and one with chocolate baked in (Good chocolate, not Nestle’s chips) because Joseph wanted them like that and I like to make my son happy. And a friend who was delivering pizzas in a dreadful neighborhood just got a different job, paying better and with benefits and more rational hours in a very nice area of town, which means I won’t have to worry about her being robbed or worse.

Chanukah is past. Joseph got a gift every night but understood this time that all good things end, even holidays that result in a gift every day for over a week. I love giving him things, because he’s so enthusiastic about getting them. Everything is his new favorite, and stays that way. He just weaves them all into his playing. I’ve quit getting him things that have batteries, because those are the ones he loses interest in. The ones he makes go himself or fits into his stories are the ones that last. The current front runner? A bag full of polished stones that he can use as cargo for his trains. It’s a joy to watch.

So the chaos mind is being tamed, one batch of dough at a time. What beating up on dough didn’t account for, the exercise bike I found at the thrift store did. I’ll be a diligent lawyer again tomorrow. That’s quite soon enough.

A friend of mine, via mass e-mail, recently apologized for a prospective gap in communication. Her cat was potentially very ill, and she couldn’t focus on anything else. She asked that people think good thoughts for him, if it wasn’t too much to ask.

That’s been on my mind since I read it. How could it be too much to ask? Because it’s for a cat? Most people I know who would ask support of that kind wouldn’t hesitate an instant for a sick parent or child or spouse. But love doesn’t know such boundries and isn’t restricted by species. And that’s how a request such as hers comes across to me. “Help me. Let me know I’m not alone. I’m scared of losing someone I love.”

I’m thinking we place too much emphasis on self-reliance, if this is too much to ask. Self reliance doesn’t mean standing alone, and it doesn’t mean never admitting fear. It certainly doesn’t mean doing those things when a beloved life is at stake. And anyone who thinks that it does is much diminished. Donne had it right. “No man is an island.”

Certainly my friend is not. And neither is her cat.