Tales from the Shark Tank

Even after we let Cloud stay downstairs unsupervised, we were still taking her up and putting her in my sewing room at night, just to prevent cat-fights at the foot of the bed – or worse yet, on our feet – at dark hours of night. Things seem to be calming down steadily, though, so we took the next step and have been letting all three cats roam freely at night this week. For the most part, that’s worked fine. I have kept my Spray Bottle of Doom on my night-table, but generally have not had need of it.

Now, there is one problem with grabbing a spray bottle in the dark when one has been rudely wakened by feline curses and does not have glasses on. No, not aim, not exactly. My aim was spectacular, and that at which the spray was directed was indeed properly if briefly soaked. The problem is determining direction. I pointed the spray bottle toward the cats, squeezed the lever and sprayed…..

Myself. Yes, gentle readers, I had it pointed backwards.

I’m wide awake now, with my glasses on, and very glad that at least I didn’t squirt my husband. I’m pretty sure he would have found it funny, but he needs his sleep.

I seem to have lost my “starch” for the moment. I’d expected something like this, but there’s “kind of tired” and then there’s “completely wilted.” I would have to say I fall into the latter category.

Since I have no desire to be a whiner, vintage or otherwise, I think I’d best keep this pretty basic. So in short form: Something over nine years ago, my dad had a small cancer removed from his tongue. Before anyone asks, he’s a lifelong non-smoker and non-drinker, so for him to develop such a thing was just sheer bad luck (and rotten genetics.) Now, long after his docs quit monitoring for such a thing, it’s recurred. Same thing, same spot, rather larger and uglier. He had his appointment with the surgeon yesterday, and I went in for it. That turned out to be an all-day project, but all pre-admission tests and examinations are done. So he has surgery scheduled for October 11th. We won’t know what if anything else he’ll need until that’s done and they figure out if it’s gotten into his lymph nodes.

I would have liked to be with my friend K. when she got her tests, but I still haven’t figured out how to be in northwest Illinois and central Indiana at precisely the same time on the same day. So we called each-the-other as soon as we were done, that being the best we could do. She has been told that the tests for the real big-bad, M.S., did not indicate any such thing, but the docs there still don’t know why she’s having the problems she is. So there will be more appointments, and more testing, and hopefully next round I can get there.

So since all of that has had me pretty wound up, now that it’s waiting time I’m unwinding. Overall, that’s a good thing. But I really could stand to have a little more starch in me. “Puddle” has never been my best look.

I’ve come to treasure ordinary days. They’re entirely too rare in my life. That’s probably true of everyone, but I don’t see “everyone’s” life from the inside, I see mine, with glimpses into those of my friends.

This morning I subbed for the other second grade class, for the teacher my son had for second grade. She’s truly amazing; I’ve come to appreciate just how amazing more and more as I’ve seen other teachers. She was proctoring for the ISTEP test, so I had her class. Unlike the other second grade class, a lot of these kids know me. They have siblings a couple of years older in my son’s class, and they’ve played with him at their homes or ours. So I walked in to a chorus of “Hi, Mrs. D.!” Of course my name tag, prepared by the office in advance, reads “Ms. C.”, so it creates a bit of confusion, but only a bit – and it is Mrs. D. that sticks. Everywhere else in the world I’m known by the name I was born to, and kept when I got married. In my son’s school, I am “Mrs. D.”

But of course, since they knew me, they thought they might get away with a few things, and they were much put out to find I was not willing to be pulled off into tangential discussions of new toys, games, bikes, kittens, or whatever. We were going to do our reading – and science – and math. But that didn’t mean we wouldn’t have fun. So the discussion of desert environments included the difference between the sound a real roadrunner makes and the one the cartoon Roadrunner makes, eluding yet another of the traps and schemes of one Wile E. Coyote. A good “meep-meep!” is great for making second graders laugh. But best of all was hearing a little boy say, as I was getting my purse “Mrs. B., can we have Mrs. D. when we have a substitute after this?”

And then, of course, there is the kitten. She’s about 4 months old now, full of playfulness, much better able to get into mischief as her size increases and coordination improves. Her favorite perch is still my shoulder, but she no longer drapes herself like a stole. Now she’s much more likely to sit up properly, peering at whatever I’m doing and commenting right beside my ear. My husband says she looks like she’s practicing to be a raptor when she grows up. “I’m gonna be a hawk. I’m gonna be a hawk, and I need to practice.” Given that her “swoop” tends to happen as she leans further and further forward to see what I’m doing until she falls into whatever it is, I’d say she needs lots of practice. But she’s mastered the art of being lovable, and that’s the one that counts.

Courtesy of my beloved (and very random) husband:

“You know how on Passover we put a cup of wine out for Elijah? And the way we both have trouble with sleep finding us? Well, maybe we should put a cup of cocoa out for sleep. You know, to lure it? Maybe the cocoa will help its sense of direction.”

I’m substitute teaching again this year, and judging by the phone calls I’ve been getting, I’ll be able to work pretty much as much as I want to. This pleases me greatly. So today I was in a second grade classroom with a student teacher – helpful in terms of knowing tolerances and routines, less so in terms of making my own judgments about the kids, and what constituted trouble.

Any day spent with small perpetual-motion-and-energy generators has its amusing moments, and this one was no exception. Two stand out.

Take the first, during the Pledge of Allegiance:

“…and to the Republicans, for witch’s hats….”

And take the second, as the student teacher led the class in a song:

Miss. T.: “Janie, I can’t hear you singing.”

Janie: “Neither can I.”

No one seems to mind my amusement. They all wave goodbye to me when I leave, and I overheard one boy tell a friend from the other second grade class “Our substitute is pretty hard, but she’s really fun, too. She laughs a lot.”

The flooding that happened a few weeks back, while I was in Illinois, has resulted in an inundation of mosquitoes now. You can’t go out the door at any time of day without getting swarmed. I spray through the screen before I let the cats in, just to keep from getting dozens of the whiny little monsters in with them. And they’re huge; I wouldn’t put it past them to carry off Miss Cloud if a couple of them teamed up. Repellent doesn’t really seem to help much against insectoid clouds like these. I can’t do much about it out here, with forest behind us, fields to either side and (worst of all) marshland across the road. But in the town nearby, they’ve fogged for the things, so I decided to drive over (it’s about four miles) and take my walk through the neighborhoods there.

Main Street (aka State Rd. 2) is completely torn up between the shopping center and the center of town, a stretch of perhaps a quarter of a mile that has utterly disrupted the little town. I parked at the shopping center on the north edge of the chaos and started walking down the street into the nearby subdivision. I had never gone that way before, never had a reason to do so. I found a small park with a playground our son will enjoy, and admired the flowers a lot of people had planted, bright in their end-of-summer glory. I wasn’t just walking past looking where I was going; I was seeing what I was looking at. I suppose you could say I was being mindful. Most of the streets leading off the one I was on are actually courts, with perhaps a dozen homes along the sides and around a circle at the end. They are not nearly as homogeneous as most of the subdivisions being built now. These are the homes I remember being new-built when I was in gradeschool. They are pleasant, middle-class homes, but no longer new or fashionable. I have achieved middle-age in the intervening years, and so have they.

Looking around, down toward the end of one of the courts, I saw a banner hanging on the front door, shadowed by the porch roof but still clear to see if one was looking. White with a broad red border, it had two stars on it. The upper star was gold; the lower one blue. Below the blue star were the crossed swords of the Marine Corps. A service banner, on the door of the home of a Gold Star Mother.

I remembered the first time I had seen such a banner. I was about ten, living in central California. There was an older woman who lived near to the grade school who had such a banner in a window, and a magnificent rose garden that took up most of her front yard. I saw her outside one day when I was out riding my bike and stopped to tell her how pretty her flowers were, commenting that I thought the banner was really pretty too. She very gently explained to me that it wasn’t just “for pretty”; that it meant that her son had died in the war. “A blue star means someone you love is fighting” she told me. “They change it to gold if they’re lost.” I don’t know how she managed to be that calm, explaining it to a child. If memory is accurate I sat there for what must have been several minutes, on my bike, then got off, put the kick-stand down, walked straight up to her and hugged her because I couldn’t figure out what to say. I think that’s what I did, but it may be only what I wish I had done.

That was nearly forty years ago. It was the height of the debacle in Vietnam and the protests about it here at home. Because it gave me nightmares, my parents had stopped permitting me to watch the news, with its coverage showing the body-bags being carried off the transports. The music I heard on my parent’s record player, heard played by my older cousins and my friends’ older siblings on their guitars and by the occasional hippie included Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, written in 1963, fairly new and very popular. Talking to that woman, it suddenly made a kind of sense it had not before.

And damn it all, it still makes the same sort of sense, and it is still just as topical. The gold star service flag I saw today was of exactly the same design as the one I saw in 1968, with the same meaning, representing exactly the same futile expenditure of lives because someone was looking for “victory with honor”. To me, at least, that implies something considered and dignified. In the end, there was nothing dignified about the withdrawal of American troops from Saigon, only a mad scramble to get the last few out alive. I expect that something similar will happen in Baghdad, with a similarly horrifying aftermath once the lid our people are keeping on the pot is removed and it all boils over. I was ten when I learned about those flags; now I have a son who will that same age in a few months. I have no answers. I am only heartsick at the needlessness of it.

How many times must the cannonballs fly,
Before they forever are banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Our rabbi called this morning to ask if I would be in town and present for Rosh Hashonah services. She got another call almost immediately, and I gather must have had to put them on hold as well, because when she came back the following conversation ensued.

“Is this Tiffany?”

“No, it’s Alisa*. I’m not a jewel, I’m a joy.”

She laughed.

I love it when people get jokes like that.

*The English translation of Alisa is “Joy”.

It was quite the adventure, this holiday weekend. Son and I went down to Indy to visit grandparents and go to the wedding of our friend E., the woman who introduced my husband and me to our son’s birth-mother. So we drove down on Saturday, arriving later than intended (note I did not say later than expected), and so instead of going to my folks’ house went directly to my in-laws. Bless them, they let me know they could babysit, so I took them up on their kind offer and went promptly out for the dinner I’d been invited to, staying out fairly late and having a marvelous time.

More catching up with friends ensued at the wedding, aided by the fact that the bridal party was running on SCA standard time. I don’t believe I have ever seen E. that purely happy, which is always a good thing to be able to say at a wedding. And it was small enough that one could have a good conversation, or several. We even had a bardic circle out on the patio behind the reception site. I love those – a half a dozen like minded people who will sit and talk, until something reminds someone of a song – whereupon harmony breaks out. It’s great fun!

Sunday night I was up most of the night, for reasons that shall remain unspecified in consideration of another’s privacy. It was morning before sleeping happened, though, and I was very proud of our son. He doesn’t like to be on his own, but when the situation was explained to him he asked for paper and a pencil and kept himself busy planning train sets for the entire morning. He lays those out very carefully in advance, planning exactly what pieces he will need to achieve what he wants. The end results are truly amazing. The kid won’t be 10 until October, and he’s already thinking like an architect. Wow.

So Monday afternoon we spent with my folks, and Monday night we headed home, getting in an hour later than we should have courtesy of the slowest Pizza Hut I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. (Not that I ever consider a Pizza Hut encounter particularly fortunate, you understand, but it was my son’s reward for an entire weekend of behaving very well even when bored or left to his own devices. He earned it and then some!) And then Tuesday my dad was back in the hospital, for an infection in his other foot. It had proceeded quite aggressively, but fortunately it also seems to be responding well to IV antibiotics, and they’re talking about springing him tomorrow with the antibiotics to continue via daily trips to an “infusion center”. That’s a Good Thing(tm) because it keeps him from staying in bed through the entire period of treatment and ending up back in the nursing home.

So here I am, checking in with my folks daily but staying home and taking care of some of the things I’ve neglected here for the past three or four weeks and pausing to giggle at the antics of my kitten. Her latest discovery is that leek greens poking out of a grocery bag come attached to things that are bigger than she is, but that if she nibbles at them she can get aa good mouthful. My hands were busy, so I didn’t get them away from her quite as promptly as I might have liked. But I cut off the parts she chewed, and the tough ends of the green get thrown away anyway. And little Miss Cloud is as strange as either of my big girls. Sophia likes ginger-coconut stew. Tornado thinks sweet potato is a gourmet delicacy. And now Cloud likes raw leek greens.

Would I could get my son to try things as readily as my cats do. I guess sometimes a brain the size of a walnut is an asset. It makes it impossible to overthink whether to try something that smells good.

J. “Am I going to be ring-bearer for (friend’s) wedding?

W. “I tend to doubt it. Not everyone has a ring-bearer, and even if they do, (bride) probably won’t want a ring-bearer who’s taller than she is.”