Wild and domestic

I drove home from work on Monday night, anxious and panicky about the annual spring onslaught. Every time I thought that I had an organized list of things to do in my mind, I'd remember yet another thing that I had to do. I arrived home at 6:30, feeling completely overwhelmed and not nearly equal to the tasks at hand. Sometimes, all I can do is wait for the panic to subside; but sometimes, exercise helps. With 45 minutes or so of daylight remaining, I decided to take a walk.

I was about two blocks from home as dusk began to fall, and I saw what I thought was a medium-sized red dog running across the street about half a block in front of me. And then I realized that dogs don't have big fluffy tails. It was a fox. It stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me for a second, and then it kept running.

Crap, I thought to myself (as opposed to thinking to other people, I guess). They're not still supposed to be out in daylight, are they? I mean, it was getting dark, but it wasn't dark yet. What if it's rabid? What if it's aggressive? Should I turn and walk the other way?

No. If I'm brave enough to walk right past a snake (yes, I know that it was an imaginary snake, but I didn't know that until AFTER I decided to walk past it, so bravery credit still applies) then I can be brave enough to walk past a fox that has, after all, already run away. Unless it's lying in wait, ready to ambush me.

A stick! I have no hope of outrunning the thing, but I can fight it off with a stick. My neighborhood is full of trees, so there's no shortage of sticks, and it took me only a minute to find a nice stout stick with a sharp, pointy end suitable for fox-poking. Nothing in my entire life has prepared me for hand-to-hand combat with a wild animal, even armed with a stick, but it was better than nothing. I walked the rest of the way home without incident.

*****
I have a crazy neighbor. You'll have to take my word for that, because I can't share much detail. In addition to being crazy (or perhaps it's a symptom or manifestation of his craziness), he keeps his house in a state of disrepair that makes "ramshackle" a kind description of the place.  Unsurprisingly, he has a problem with rodents, including raccoons. Being crazy, he decided to set traps to catch the raccoons.

Crazy or not (crazy--trust me), he's a competent raccoon trapper, because he caught one right away. Then he called my husband.  In all fairness, everyone calls my husband. He's can fix almost anything, and he's very good in a crisis. And although my neighbor is a batshit raving lunatic, I share his conviction that a trapped raccoon in one's backyard is a crisis. I don't, however, agree that the solution to that crisis is to call the neighborhood police officer and expect him to immediately come and shoot the raccoon with his service revolver.

See? I TOLD you he's crazy. After my husband diplomatically disabused him of the notion that police officers can moonlight as raccoon hit men, crazy neighbor decided, as a crazy person would, to leave it in the trap until it died. I'm no friend to rodents, and raccoons are among my least favorite of these vile creatures. But leaving it a cage to starve in the freezing cold is beyond the pale. I told my husband to call animal control. He sighed. "I will," he said. "But he'll give me a hard time about it."

"Why?" I asked. "They'll come and take it and release it on the Henson Trail, and he won't have to deal with it. Problem solved."

"That was what I told him to do," my husband said. "He didn't want to release it, because he's sure that it will make its way back."

Again--Crazy. The man has two broken windows and a gaping hole in the siding on one side of his house alone. When the snow came (yes, snow, on March fucking 20th--Maryland weather is an asshole), every raccoon in Silver Spring sought shelter in his house. He's lucky that we don't have many bears around here, because there's nothing stopping one from hibernating in his garage.

*****
As the rest of the week passed, I had no interaction with the animal kingdom, until today (Saturday). My 13-year-old is taking care of another (not crazy) neighbor's cats for the week. Our neighbor dropped off her keys on her way out of town; she had already fed the cats but encouraged my son to stop by to visit and give the cats a treat.

Both of the cats are old; 15 or so. The male, an orange tabby, has been with my neighbor since he was a kitten, and she told us that he is very friendly and comfortable around strangers. The other cat, a gray and white mixed breed, is new to the household. My neighbor adopted him when her friend became too ill to care for her. She told us that the gray cat is skittish and afraid of strangers.

The cats were exactly as advertised. The male tabby, Enu, is a cat-dog. He ran to the door and greeted us happily as we entered. Kelly, the shy cat, ran down the basement stairs as soon as she saw us, and she never appeared again.

Enu followed us eagerly around the house. We petted him and fed him treats, changed his water, and checked the litter boxes, and got ready to leave. The cat followed us to the door. "Don't let him out," I told my son.

"He likes to go out," my son said. "I almost forgot--Mrs. V said to let him out in the yard for a few minutes."

"OK," I said. "But let's make sure that the gate is closed."

I no sooner said the words then the crazy cat took off running and got right through the barely cracked front door before I could close it. I ran after him.

Remember that this cat is 15 years old. He's also obese, probably morbidly so in cat terms. I hadn't expected that an elderly, overweight cat would be a flight risk, but trust me, this geriatric feline fat-ass could run like the damn wind. But then he stopped, right in the middle of the front yard. He didn't appear winded; I think he just wanted to drink in the sunshine and freedom for a minute.  So we waited as he scampered around the yard, sniffing at trees and rocks like a dog.

"OK," I said to my son. "It's time to go. Let's bring him in." The cat allowed me to pick him up, but he started to fight me as we got nearer the house, finally breaking free and running back across the yard.

Remember again: This cat is about as old as cats get, and in serious need of diet and exercise, at least one of which it was getting by outrunning me (which admittedly is not hard to do). I chased him across the street, and managed to direct him back again to his own front yard. Fiendishly clever, he ran under the car and then catloafed, tail contentedly wagging, keeping time like a metronome. He knew that I couldn't get to him from where he was, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew. We had ourselves a cat-human standoff.

The cat, smug and compact, was obviously enjoying himself tremendously. Every part of his body, from the serene face to the paws cozily tucked close to his body to the rotund torso to the thumping tail seemed to ask "What now? What are you going to do?" And I didn't know, other than to either crawl under the car (no) or to just wait him out. And then I heard a rustle.

My son had run back inside to get the bag of treats. "I just remembered that Mrs. V said to shake the treats, and he'll come back in." And he was right. Between the freedom of the outdoors and a delicious cat treat, there was no contest. Fatso couldn't resist the siren call of food, and we got him safely inside.

*****
It's Sunday night now. The rest of the family are on spring break, and I'll be joining them on Thursday. For now, it's three days in the world of people with (I hope) no unwanted encounters with the animal kingdom, wild or domestic.

Birdwatching

It's Tuesday. Last night, I was watching the Capitals vs. Winnipeg with my sons, and I left the room just in time to miss the world's greatest hockey player's 600th lifetime goal. Disappointing, but I got to watch the replay, and it was almost as good as seeing it live.

As I watched the game, I was imagining, for some reason, a character who becomes a hockey fan late in life. After choosing his favorite team, he realizes that he also needs a least-favorite team, a hockey nemesis, as it were. This character is not based on me, of course, because I have the moral clarity to know that the only hockey nemesis that anyone ever needs is present in the form of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the most evil franchise in the worldwide history of professional sports. My character, lacking such moral clarity, chooses the Winnipeg Jets as his nemesis.

"Why Winnipeg?" his family and friends ask him. "What did Manitoba ever do to you?" He doesn't deign to justify his choice or explain his reasoning. He just glares at the TV as his team plays Winnipeg. "Fucking Winnipeg," he snarls, every time the Jets score. That eventually becomes his catchphrase: "Fucking Winnipeg."

*****
Who knows where that came from. Anyway, it's still Tuesday. Speaking of fans, I'm not a particular fan of Rex Tillerson, but he did call Donald Trump a fucking moron on a hot mic, and for that, he'll always have a place in my heart. Godspeed, Rex Tillerson.

*****
After I finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I read Havana, which is so far my least-favorite Joan Didion non-fiction. In some ways, it reads like a period piece, with its very Reagan-era preoccupation with Latin American revolutionary politics. Like lots of other literary intellectuals of the 20th century, Didion seems to have had a blind spot about Communism. I mean, I'm sure she's right about totalitarian ideological rigidity among the Cuban exile population in Miami in the 80s, but she doesn't say much about the conditions in Cuba that gave rise to their extremism. Like many other writers who wrote about Latin America in the 80s, she (rightly) condemns Somoza, but gives Castro a pass.

I couldn't decide what to read after Havana. I have a pretty large backlog on my Kindle, but nothing was calling out to me, so I decided to re-read The Thinking Reed, one of Rebecca West's best, and that's already a pretty high bar.  It's just as good as I remembered.  The book takes place in France in the years between the two world wars. One of the principal characters is an immensely wealthy French industrialist who, despite enormous success and power, completely lacks the inclination to abuse or take advantage of the poor or powerless. "Though his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world." I have noticed that not every rich and powerful person is like that.

The best part is that it's been so long since I've read it that I really don't remember how it ends. So I'm torn between wanting to rush through it to find out (again) what happens, and wanting to slow down a bit, so that it won't be over too soon.

*****
Thursday: Have you ever cleaned behind your refrigerator? If not, then I don't recommend it. Leave it alone. Nothing to see. The less said, the better.

It had been a long time since our kitchen had been painted, and so I talked my husband into doing it. The paint looks beautiful, but the kitchen is now in a horrifying state of disarray that makes me wonder, just for a minute, if the dingy walls maybe weren't so bad. I don't like disorder. And I have to pretty much leave it as it is for now, because he has to finish the job tomorrow. Horrifying. I'm hyperventilating just thinking about it.

*****
It's Saturday morning now. The kitchen is back in order, and you could eat off the floor behind the refrigerator. Well, you could, but I don't recommend it. I mean it's clean, but it's not perfect. It's still a floor. So don't eat off it. I'll give you a plate.

*****
And now it's Sunday, and I have just a few pages left of The Thinking Reed.  When it's over, the weekend will be over. More importantly, I'll need to find something else to read.  Too bad that Comey's book won't be out until next month. I continue to be torn between actually feeling sorry for Trump's unfortunate staff, enduing threats, insults, and firings via Twitter; and wondering what they expected when they chose to serve a bullying, vindictive, mean-spirited, draft-dodging, pants-on-fire lying coward.  By the time the Comey book is released, there will probably be at least two or three more firings. My money is on McMaster and Sessions, but it could be anyone, I suppose.

Putin just won re-election by a landslide; and somewhere, a sparrow is probably falling. If it's a Russian sparrow, the richest and most powerful man in that country is claiming innocence and feigning outrage that anyone could accuse him of shooting down a sparrow, even as he continues to hold the gun. If it's an American sparrow, it has been subjected to weeks of poking with sticks, as its eventual killer decides if it would be more fun to shoot it out of a tree, or to just set a cat loose on it. I'm losing the thread on this metaphor, so I'll end this episode of sparrows here. Until next week...

Lost and found

*****

When I'm stressed or worried, as I am now, I lose stuff, and forget stuff. So this morning, I lost my keys. I looked upstairs and downstairs (I was staying at my sister's house after a family party in Philadelphia; my house is a one-level 1969 ranch house that does not have stairs), in my coat pocket and in my handbag, and in my shoes, and in my suitcase; and under the furniture, and even in the car. No keys. My sister's dog, who loves me, followed me around the house, looking puzzled. Is it a game? Do I look inside the shoes, too? Is she taking me for a walk? Does she have bacon in her pocket?

Then I remembered that I have a Tile, and I rejoiced. Problem solved! I'll just open the app, and it will point me toward my keys, and then I will have my keys, and they won't be lost anymore!

Tile helpfully told me that the last place my keys had been seen was on the Schuylkill River Trail in Philadelphia. I was at my sister's house in Phoenixville, and if I hadn't driven my car there from Philadelphia, then I might have been fooled into believing that my keys were inches away from the murky waters of the Schuylkill. But I knew that the keys weren't in Philadelphia, because my car, which I had driven back to the suburbs, was sitting happily in the driveway.

Bluetooth, I thought. I bet the Bluetooth is off. But it wasn't. It was on. But the Tile kept telling me that the keys were last seen on the Schulkill River Trail, and that that would be a good place from which to commence a search. So helpful. The high-tech equivalent of "where did you have them last?" Yes, that's what I'll do. I'll go to Philadelphia, and start from there, working my way outward in ever-widening circles, gradually covering the entire world, until I find my keys.

I remembered, after one more desperate sweep of the house, that the boys and I had stowed our overnight bags in the cargo hold of the car, so I looked, and there they were. Thankfully, the car hadn't locked. 15 minutes later, a Tile "we found your keys" notification popped up on my phone. I was shocked at the temerity of this useless piece of Bluetooth-dependent plastic's outrageous claim that it had "found" the keys, when it was I who had hard-target searched for them in every farmhouse, outhouse, doghouse, and henhouse in the county.

"Bitch,  you didn't find anything," I snapped at the little gray square dangling from my keychain. "You would have been more helpful," I said to the dog, who looked insulted.

*****

I suppose that keychain and henhouse should be written as two words, because Blogger is flagging them for spelling. So now I have keychains taking credit for finding themselves, and computers telling me how to spell, which is particularly galling, because my spelling skills are outstanding. And I'm really good at finding stuff, too. You have to be, when you lose stuff as often as I do.

*****

It's Monday now. This might be it for the week, because I think that work is going to take over my life for the next few days.

*****
And now it's Wednesday. Work has in fact taken over my life, but I have a few minutes while I wait for the chicken to finish cooking in the Instant Pot.

I was going to just leave this post as it was and call it a day. In fact, I should have written it in one sentence: "I was really depressed and anxious, and then I lost my keys, and then I found them." The End. But that's not how I roll, or write.

I read the sentence "I write every day" on a blog that I follow, and that was inspiring enough that I wanted to be able to say the same thing about myself. So here I am, writing again.

*****
On Friday, the very day after writing about writing every day, I didn't write a thing. Actually, that's not true at all. I wrote all day long on Thursday, but not here. It's very early Saturday morning now. My four-year-old nephew stayed overnight last night, and he woke up before dawn, as four-year-olds tend to do, especially when they're excited about hanging out with their teenage cousins. He's playing now and waiting impatiently for the boys to wake up. "Can we wake them up now?" he asked me a minute ago.

"Later," I said. "They need to sleep for a little while longer."

"OK," he said. "How 'bout five minutes?"

I'll hold him off for as long as I can, but I have a feeling that two teenage boys are about to wake up a lot earlier than they want to.  For now, I'm going to end this heated mess with a piece of valuable advice: Don't run an iPod Nano through the washer and dryer, even if it's a little dirty. No good will come of that. This advice might or might not be the outcome of personal experience.

Keeping it real

I just finished reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which should have rightly been titled Slouching Toward Bethlehem, but who am I to tell Joan Didion that we're not in the U.K. and we say toward and not towards. We're not, and we do. But that's one of the few criticisms that I can offer.

Well, that's one of the few criticisms of the writing, anyway. Nobody writes like Joan Didion, and if I could explain what makes her writing special--the combination of intimate personal detail with seeming cool detachment, the combination of ambiguity and moral clarity, the sharp social and cultural observation, both micro and macro--then maybe I'd be a better writer.  But I can't explain it, so I won't try.

Even the best writers write some silly things, though. In "Notes from a Native Daughter," an essay about the Central Valley of California and her native Sacramento, she writes about the ruins of a huge estate that had once belonged to a Sacramento woman and her husband, a European nobleman. All that remained of the once-grand estate was a house trailer occupied by the couple's only son and heir. Commenting that the young people of Sacramento, the "children of the aerospace engineers," would never know about the grand estate and its occupants, and that they would grow up believing that "the Embarcadero....has about it the true flavor of the way it was," she laments that they "will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one..."

When I was young, I read United States, a book of Gore Vidal essays. I don't remember much about it other than sharp writing and meanness. Gore Vidal was mean. But I think I remember a similar mournful thread of complaint about loss of authenticity in material things; paper napkins rather than cloth, paste rather than diamonds; and tiny, prefabricated suburban houses instead of stately Newport cottages. From Vidal, this kind of complaint reads as nothing much more than mid-century East Coast American snobbery. From Joan Didion, it reads as real sorrow over an actual loss. In both cases, a huge point is missed; that point being that either everything manmade is authentic, or nothing is. Either every aspect of our past is manufactured, or none of it is.

*****
Unrelated: Why are Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin wearing "You Can Play" lapel pins? I just looked it up, and found nothing. And now I have a strange desire to collect lapel pins, or maybe even to wear one.

*****
It's the next day now. There was an additional point to the Joan Didion/Gore Vidal thread, but in typical fashion, I have forgotten it. So I'm going to let it stew for day or so, just allow it to marinate until it all comes back to me. Meanwhile, my 13-year-old made a special point of coming to find me and tell me that my favorite SpongeBob episode ("Tentacle Acres") was on TV. We watched it together. Like most SpongeBob episodes, "Tentacle Acres" is about original sin, which I think is a pretty profound observation, so don't ever say that you don't get deep philosophical insights around here. Joan Didion should call me, because I have more where that came from.  Meanwhile, still nothing about the pins. I'm really eaten up with curiosity about this.

*****
I'm going to Philadelphia again this weekend. Another family party at the Canoe Club. The Canoe Club has been there for a long time, but I didn't know it when I was a child, so it's not part of my past. The stadium where I watched the Phillies play is no longer there; it was demolished in 2004. The parish school that I attended has closed, though the church remains. John Wanamaker's flagship store is now a Macy's, and Strawbridge & Clothier is gone. There are lots of other places from my Philadelphia childhood and youth; some gone forever, and some changed beyond recognition. Children who are growing up there now will have their own places. If they're young, they probably think that those places have been there forever, will be there forever, and will never change. Their parents know better. But it's all real, as real as anything built by people can be.