Tales from the Shark Tank

I really don’t have that big a garden. Four feet by four feet, containing two cucumber vines, four tomatoes, a couple of potatoes, thyme, basil and a collection of marigolds and moss roses. I can weed it in ten minutes, and water it with the hose – no sprinkler needed, it just doesn’t take that long.

But small as it is, I have an abundance of those cucumbers and tomatoes. My basil is bushy enough that I could (and probably will) make several good batches of basil. My harvesting basket is full, and so is the mixing bowl, usually used for bread, that I poured the excess into. It’s colorful, too, since half my cherry tomatoes are pear shaped red ones and the other half pear shaped yellow, and both are incredibly prolific. I’ll probably take a quart over to my girlfriend, since she didn’t get a garden in this year and they won’t keep until I next go in to Indy. (Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll have more by then.) Judging by the number of green tomatoes and blossoms, they aren’t slowing down any time soon either.

My son wants to try to make homemade ketchup, and I may attempt it. These are salad and slicing tomatoes, not sauce tomatoes, so I don’t know how it will go. On the other hand, I might as well try it. It’s not like I don’t have the tomatoes to spare.

A good friend, the mother of friends of my son’s, is going through a divorce. It’s badly needed; domestic violence has been an escalating issue. And, being both Listener par excellence and legally trained, I’m squarely in the middle of it in a way I’ve never before been. It’s not that I haven’t seen such divorces professionally, but this time I’m seeing the details, listening as she tries to figure out how to reorganize and simplify her life, as she tries to figure out what really is important and what’s just a petty detail that won’t matter in the long run. I’m seeing first hand, not just hearing, about how this is affecting her children, because as she’s talking to me quietly in her kitchen, my son is playing with hers in their living room. I’m seeing the increased volatility of the child with Aspberger’s, and the closed withdrawn watchfulness of her neurotypical son. No matter how many presentations I’ve heard, no matter how much I’ve read, nothing has had the visceral impact of seeing the changes in people I’ve known for nearly five years.

In talking to her attorney, I realized how long I’ve seen this coming. She started telling me how her husband – a long-distance trucker – would try to tell her that she had no need to go out, no reason to be anywhere but at home waiting for him when he happened to blow through or call, that her only business should be taking care of the house and kids, and that her friends were a stupid distraction. I discussed it with my own wonderful husband, and we gave her a key so that she would have a place to go if she needed it regardless of whether or not we were home. That was almost 4 years ago. She didn’t think anything of it other than that he was being a jerk. I saw the beginnings of a pattern, and hoped profoundly that I was wrong.

Unfortunately I wasn’t, and now I understand how it creeps up on people. It’s gradual, that attempt by one partner to control the other, and always presented as being triggered by the perceived misbehavior of the abused spouse. It might even sound reasonable at first. But “I’m afraid other men will find you attractive” becomes “you’re having an affair”, with the “proof” being that there are men’s phone numbers in the personal Rolodex. Yeah, there are. The fathers of your kids’ friends. Or their Little League coaches. Or the furnace repairman, or the roofing contractor you liked after your roof took storm damage. And the accusations turn into fights, then shoving, then kicks and slaps and threats to bring a gun and shoot you. It wasn’t until she got knocked down in the kitchen that she realized where it was going. I’d seen it coming for a year and a half by then.

Even in the abstract, this has always made me angry, but now I’m seeing the terror this man is causing, and it makes me sick. My friend is one of the strongest women I know, and I’ve seen her shaking, in tears, so frightened she couldn’t figure out a course of action, certain that her husband would find her no matter where in this vast continent she fled, as if he were omnipotent and had all of James Bond’s gadgetry to boot. I’ve been the friend she confided in, and am now the one she asks if something she’s considering is reasonable, or if she should do something now or wait. She can’t handle more than one day at a time. Keeping track of the long view is my job, for the moment. I will be with her in court when she goes to get the restraining order made permanent next week, probably as her primary witness, certainly as her moral support and spine. I’m not her attorney, thank heaven; I’m her friend. I’m finding that’s a whole different job.

Joseph and I went to see Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore today. I expected a kid’s movie, and indeed that’s what it was. It was also the sort of delightful show that appeals to kids on one level and adults on another level entirely.

Remember Dr. No? The Spy Who Loved Me? Goldfinger? Jaws? Pussy Galore? The satellite that would Destroy the World? The bald villain (can’t recall his name) stroking his white cat? Toss in a pinch of Batman and a couple of other movies. Now mash them together with dogs and cats as the spies/ protagonists and villains, with parallel spy agencies (the feline agency is called MEOWS), moving through the human world trying not to be noticed, and you’ll begin to get an idea of the movie.

The reviews I’ve read have pretty universally panned it – weak plot, gratuitous swooping about, trite, lacking any message, etc. Okay, I agree; all that’s true. And it’s all beside the point. Those folks are taking it way too seriously, certainly far more seriously than it takes itself. It intends to be campy and silly and playful. It intends to make its audience laugh, and it succeeds. Basically, it’s amusing fluff because that’s what it was written to be.

So my boy and I laughed all the way through, though usually at different things. He kept asking me why I was laughing, but I really couldn’t explain. We both walked out glad we’d gone to see it, rather than feeling like it was time or money we’d never get back. It was nothing but pure escapist entertainment, and y’know what? Sometimes that’s exactly what I want.

My girlfriend just called me. She came back to Indiana because she needed the support system she has here. She got a restraining order, and at least superficially her husband has been abiding by it. Life’s been mostly quiet for her since he got served. And now she’s started questioning if it was really that bad, if she was really in fear of her life, or if, as her husband kept telling her before the judge put a stop to it, she’s just been crazy and hysterical and blowing it all out of proportion. This, after she’s told me she turned off the landline so that the jerk couldn’t leave vicious, threatening messages on the answering machine where the kids would hear them and be terrified again. This after she hid for 24 hours while he prowled the area trying to find her.

So I told her what she’d told me. I reminded her that she’d been crying and shaking, that she’d been scared by a 2 hour delay to be able to drop the dog off for boarding. I reminded her about the times she called me after he’d shoved her around, using accusations he’d cooked up in his own warped mind to justify it. I reminded her that he’d kept calling all night long while she hid. Essentially I told her that yes, it had been that bad, and pointed out that now if she backed down she’d not only be dealing with his irrational suspicions, but his rage at being “messed with”, escorted out of the house by the local gendarmes. In less than ten minutes she was crying again, but she was agreeing that indeed, she’d been minimizing how scared she and her kids had really been.

I knew this would come, and that I’d have to remind her why she was doing what she’s doing. I know there will come times in the future when it gets rough and she needs to be assured that she is strong enough to see it though. I know she’ll need to be told that what her husband is saying about her isn’t true – that he’s lying to her and to himself about her. She’ll need reassurance that she deserves better than his violence.

We’ll give it. When a person has been told they’re worthless often enough, they usually need an external spine. So as my husband put it, the evening after the sheriff finally got the jackass served, we’ll be her exoskeletons.

A couple of weeks ago someone finally opened a gym in the tiny town 4 miles away. We took a look at it and promptly joined. The difference between a 40-50 minute round trip and a 15 minute round trip is the difference between actually getting some good out of the membership or not. It’s small, but it has all the essentials – strength machines and aerobic equipment, weights, a way to stretch and so forth. The couple who own it also know what they’re doing, which is a great help to people to whom physical conditioning of this sort is a complete mystery.

The day the owner introduced me to the strength machines, he gave me some guidelines for how to tell when I’d done enough, also advising me that I should see what felt possible, and then back it off a step so that I didn’t overdo it. If a 30 pound weight felt right, use a 20 pound weight; if it felt like I could do 15 repetitions with only a little strain do 12, and so forth. He also told me that the first week or two I was likely to feel utterly flattened on occasion, and that it meant I should back off a little more, working at a lower level until it didn’t flatten me and then adding one iteration. As he said, if it takes me a month to get to the next level instead of 2 weeks, nothing is lost.

He was right. I spent a couple of days in Indy dealing with Mom-stuff, came back last night, and went to the gym again today. Tonight I do indeed feel like a truck ran over me. I’m glad he warned me this would happen, because with the warning came the assurance that it wouldn’t be like this forever. If he was right about the first part, chances are he’s right about the second. I’m counting on it.

I am done experimenting with different types of hair color. This time it wasn’t even a different brand or shade, just a new formulation from the same brand I’ve been using for (murfle) years, allegedly in the same Light Auburn shade, that develops in 10 minutes instead of the usual 30. I liked that idea, so I figured I’d try it.

The first thing I found out was that a splash on a hard surface stained faster than I could grab an already prepared wet paper towel and mop it up. There is now a bright burgundy stripe on our toilet seat. That’s not a huge deal, as toilet seats are inexpensive and easily installed, but it was a salutary warning.

The next thing I found was that the stuff was more like paste in consistency than anything, which made it difficult to apply using a bottle with a small nozzle. I persevered, but it was frustrating.

The third thing was that it stained skin as readily as painted wood. That’s wearing off already, but my hairline is still, shall we say, a trifle garish.

And then there’s the color. Burgundy. Deep, clear, dark, iridescent wine. I can’t look at myself in the sun too easily, but I suspect I fluoresce. Not quite the thing for a middle-aged matron, y’know?

I have once again proven my coolness quotient to the adolescent contingent, though. At temple this morning for a bat mitzvah, one of the girls from the Hebrew School looked at me and said gleefully “You dyed your hair! You made it wine-colored! Hey!” to one of her buddies “Mrs. Deer made her hair PUNK!” and then back to me “You are SO COOL!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was a complete accident.

I love walking in early spring. The avian construction crews are out in force. You can hear them from first light until dusk. They work in teams of two, consulting and sometimes squabbling about building sites and quality of materials. The sparrows build condominiums in a single tree, and a pair of red-wing blackbirds create a fork to support their architectural opus by incorporating the tops of adjoining tall grass stems from last year or this year’s marsh-willow stems into the walls. High sturdy forks in the old oak and maple trees hold huge edifices of large sticks. Some of those were built in previous years, and need only to be restored and relined with dead grass to provide a safe home for young red-tailed hawks and other feathered hunters.

I can see all this activity and industry and its results because the foliage is still very new. The leaves are just unfurling, and they’re tiny. The grasses are just starting to sprout, and while they’ll be four feet tall by the time the blackbird nestlings hatch out, the dry remains of last year’s grass doesn’t conceal much, at least if I’m looking. So when a small brown chirpy swoops down and grabs a clump of grey fur I’ve combed out of Sophia’s coat, I can see it as it bobs and flutters to a landing in a mulberry tree and carefully tucks its treasure into a tiny cup of woven twigs. It kind of tickles me that huntress’s shed fur will keep the next generation of her prey warm, but that is the nature of things.

The feathered housing boom will go on a little longer, but pretty soon now it will give way to maintenance and then the full-time job of feeding those gaping little beaks. I’ll be watching that too, now that I know where the nests are. It’s a good thing those little bird-brains don’t have room to pay attention to anything but the task at hand, or they might get very annoyed at my invasion of their privacy.