Tales from the Shark Tank

In my opinion, there is but one thing to do in Indianapolis on Memorial Day weekend: get out of town. I had arranged long ago to do so, going to visit my friend K. and her family in northern Illinois. Unfortunately, my beloved husband was unable to get the time off from his second job, but after some discussion it was determined that Joseph and I should go ourselves, which we did.

It was a good visit, for the most part, but I guess I’m a bit selfish. I really missed the chance to have some adult conversation, visit the hot tub (off limits for kids), and eat someplace that didn’t have “pizza” in the name of the establishment. It wasn’t going to happen; my son is 7 and K’s is 8. Neither of them is a neurologically typical child. They get on with each other very well indeed, but even with two moms present, they’re high-intensity, high maintenance kidlings. We reminded ourselves periodically that we volunteered for parenthood.

It was a lot of fun, though. K. and I got chosen as “pool mommies” by a whole cluster of small boys, our own included, and played a hilarious game of water volleyball. We taught our boys the rudiments of ping-pong, getting into a pun competition that went entirely over the heads of the children. We pored over maps of the area we’ve been trying to write about, figuring out where exactly to a village ought to have been in the 11th century, despite the frequent interruptions. And we talked. Once we had our kids in bed, we sat in my hotel room and talked until the wee hours of morning. The organic alarm clock got me up way too early, of course, and I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. And I learned that while I had thought that tantrums were a thing of the past, if you overstimulate our little guy too much, he can still manage quite a spectacular show. I must admit, it makes me even more nervous about moving, because that will be considerably more change in a shorter period of time, without being able to tell him we’re going back on a particular day. Tomorrow I’m going house-hunting in the community we’ve chosen. The longer he has to adapt to a new place, the better, I’m thinking.

Today’s been a thoroughly lazy day. I’ve not napped, as my son is out of school now and needs to know I’m awake and attending to him, but neither have I done anything particularly constructive. I have done some serious listening, though. There’s additional news on our friends in South Bend. The second form of chemotherapy, designed to reduce the effects of the cancer if not cure it, was entirely ineffective and has been stopped. The tumors have doubled in size in the last month, and there was no longer any attempt to talk to me on the phone. I thought watching my friend Angela and my grandmother die of cancer had been bad, but they had their minds intact. D. will not; his cognition has diminished perceptibly and will only get worse. This version is robbing him, not only of his body, but of that which makes him himself. The worst of this falls on C., of course. I just wish I lived close enough to help carry some of it for her.

Yesterday, in the midst of moving my housemate, the phone rang. It was a reporter. He had picked up on the freedom of religion case I picked up awhile ago, was doing a story for today’s paper, and wanted to talk to me. He did a classic formal interview, and then got very casual in his tone, just chatting with me, asking me what I thought when I first heard about the ruling. I told him, in my own inimitable style. So of course, it was the ironic, somewhat humorous take that he quoted, rather than the professional version.

Today the phone’s been ringing endlessly, and I’m getting lots of comments in my e-mail. It seems the story got picked up by the national news media. Thank goodness I’ve pretty well given up private practice, since otherwise I’d have to worry about showing my face in that judge’s court ever again. I tremble to think of what some of my colleagues might say about my tone, but you know, it could have been much worse. And next time, if there is a next time, I’ll know to keep my tone professional even when I think I’m just having a friendly conversation.

The grand conspiracy which has been swirling about my house has reached a successful conclusion. The housemate who has been with us for the past 19 months has been moved out lock, stock and bagel. I asked more people than I thought we needed, because I have never yet had a move where everyone showed up. The end result was that I myself wasn’t really needed, because everyone (and a few more) showed up. There are a few loose ends to tie up, and then this chapter can be deemed closed. I have peace in the house. It is an enormous relief.

Thanks to all of you, for your work, for support both physical and mental, and for the wonderful evening’s gathering. The pizza and champagne party in my kitchen was all the more marvelous for being entirely spontaneous. If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that I never have to face anything alone. That knowledge is both wonderful and enormously comforting.

About ten minutes ago, in the process of removing a screen to replace the mesh in it, I noticed that the freezer of doom was still crouching in my driveway. I just went to open another window to air my bedroom out, and behold, there is no freezer. Usually I hear trucks and such, but not this one. It has softly and silently done its work, and the freezer has vanished away.

I have a friend who is a dedicated blogger. It’s rare that she doesn’t write daily. Her last entry was that she was waiting to hear about a job she really wants. That was several days ago. I know it’s unnerving to wait for word on that sort of thing, if I may be indulged in understatement. So all I have to say is that I still have all available appendages crossed for her, and I hope she gets word eftsoons and right speedily.

I have a minor favor to ask of certain of those with whom I am acquainted. If you are going to give my phone number as an alternate contact number on such things as credit applications, please be so kind as to a) advise me that you are doing so – or better yet, ask if I mind, and b) make sure I know where to contact you, so that when someone calls me I don’t have to say “I’m sorry, I haven’t spoken to him in the past year, and I’ve no idea how to get a message to him.” It makes me look like either a liar or a fool, and I don’t like either one. Letting me know is just basic courtesy, folks. You’re all adults here, and I shouldn’t have to be reminding you of that.

I’ve been trying to get rid of as much as possible of the horrifying clutter that has taken over the house and garage for a while now. “Clutter” sounds like small stuff, and much of it is. Some of it, however, isn’t. Among the objects that isn’t is an upright freezer inherited from my grandfather. It worked when it stood in his garage, and my mother couldn’t bear to just throw away a working freezer (even if it didn’t work very well), so I let her send it here. The freezer we have seemed to be on its last legs, so it was a reasonable thing to do. It was duly delivered and set in the garage, and there it has sat for about the past two years, as our old freezer emulated the Everready Rabbit and just kept going.

Finally I decided to freecycle the damn thing if it was working. Trouble was, the clutter had so firmly surrounded it that I couldn’t get at the back to plug it in and make that determination. That finally happened yesterday, and lo, it didn’t realize it had been plugged in at all. I turned dials and pushed switches, to no avail. The thing is electrically dead as a doornail. We have an appliance dolley, so one of my kids helped me get it down to the curb for heavy trash pickup. I taped the door shut at a level out of reach of children and probably of short adults as well, and abandoned it to its fate.

The trash went out. The freezer did not. Hmm. I got on the city website to see if I had misremembered the heavy trash pickup policy. The answer turned out to be that I both had and had not. I had remembered when heavy trash day was, but had missed the caveat. You have to call ahead to dispose of things containing freon, and yes indeed, the freezer contains freon. So I called and gave my address, and got a promise from a nice clerk to send someone out to pick it up. I asked when I should call back if it was still sitting there. She told me to give them a week. I have a hunch the neighborhood association will be screaming considerably before that, and the thing is blocking one side of my driveway, which may make things awkward for Wednesday’s project of moving our housemate out. But whatever comes, until the city comes to get it, there it stands. If the neighborhood association wants it moved, they can send someone to help move it. I can’t budge it by myself, and it won’t fit in my minivan.

I apoligize to my gentle readers for the lack of updates, commentary, and general commitment of words to page, or photons as the case may be. One of my dear friends decided to emulate a tsunami, and like unto that force of nature is sweeping all before her. She is most especially sweeping the woman who has been living with us for the past 18 months out of my house, lock, stock and baggage. Moreover, she has organized many of our other friends to assist. And so it is that I have watched four or five van loads of boxes go into storage, shelves dismantled, and the actual existence of floor in the room being vacated affirmed by empirical evidence.

And there’s more. I told my son’s best friend’s mom that I was to the point of asking to borrow a lawnmower, as I couldn’t start mine and really didn’t intend to grow my own personal tall grass prairie. I was indeed hinting, but she didn’t say anything except “that’s really frustrating” so I dropped the subject. Lo and behold, about half an hour later her husband rang the doorbell. In his hands were some tools and a can of engine cleaner. He said K. had mentioned that my mower still wasn’t working, and would I like him to try to fix it? I’m nominating him for sainthood; he proceeded to spend about 45 minutes arguing with the machine. By the time he was done, it was purring like the proverbial kitten. Then he reset the mowing height so it wouldn’t bog down, explained a bit about care and feeding of mowers, and turned it over to me. I proceeded to tame my prairie over the next couple of hours, while the others packed our housemate’s possessions and loaded them into my van, to be hauled off to storage so there would be room for more packed cartons. My foster brother came in from Louisville and finished repairing my walls, priming them and putting on a first coat of paint.

Tonight yet another friend has come over, picked up the chaos in the family room for me, and run the vacuum while I made dinner. She’s also scraped up the plaster on the floor from the wall repair project, a real blessing since I have a really tough time crawling around on the floor courtesy of seriously abused knees. She’ll be here awhile, as she’s doing her laundry while she’s here. Meanwhile, she’s reading and recovering from playing with a very rambunctious small boy.

I have such wonderful friends, I really do. I couldn’t make it through without them. So here, in a public place, I say thank you, one and all.

After waiting patiently until it became apparent it would never happen on its own, I’m pushing a fledgling out of the nest. Now, there are good reasons for this, among them the fact that we ourselves will have to be moving over the summer. But I hadn’t gone into the details with my son, though I had noted insistent requests that he be taken along when I go look for a new house, and read them as requests for reassurance that we would not leave him behind.

Now I found out where he got some of his ideas. He told his grandmother yesterday that if mom got mad at him, he’d have to move out too. Poor scared baby! I’m glad he said it to someone, though, because now I can take up the subject in terms I hope he’ll understand. And I hope I can get the point across. For my son to be frightened of abandonment is the last thing I expected…and about as desirable as nuclear war.

Like many small children, mine likes to pretend to be the people he sees on TV. Unlike most, though, he doesn’t generally play that he is Robin or any of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He instead pretends to be the personage he finds most fascinating: Alton Brown. Yes indeed, my son’s current passion is the Food Network, and the show to which he is most dedicated is “Good Eats”. He makes books into a stove or oven or whatever he needs, and proceeds to “cook”, explaining the nature of the ingredients as he goes. Most recently he explained to me in earnest detail how to make chocolate, cautioning me not to touch the “stove” lest I be burned because it was hot. It’s a hoot.

Of course, there is a slight problem with reality on occasion. He was quite put out with me yesterday. He wanted me to come be Mr. Brown’s sidekick, and did not approve of the delay that ensued when I had to put out a real fire on my real stove. (No harm done, except to a spoon rest.) After all, what’s important – keeping the house from burning down or pretending to roast a coconut so that it could be split open more easily? At least now he knows what real smoke drifting through the air looks like.

And it just dawned on me…the smoke alarm did not go off, though I was opening windows and doors and turning on fans air out the house. Pardon me; I have to check some batteries.