Rodent vandals

There’s a new bird feeder outside my window, with an Arlo camera trained on it, as my husband’s long battle to keep the squirrels out of his birdfeeders enters a new and deadly phase. The new feeder is hanging from a length of copper tubing mounted to the fence, and angled so that the feeder is too far from the trees and the fence for the squirrels to reach. But the squirrels are determined and daring. 

Why a new bird feeder, you might ask? We had to replace the old bird feeder because a little black squirrel knocked it down. How do we know that a little black squirrel is the culprit? Yes, that’s right, we have video footage of the little black squirrel sitting on top of the fence, calculating its trajectory before taking the flying leap that took down the bird feeder and a good-sized tree branch. The squirrel escaped unharmed after stuffing itself on the scattered bird seed. I am that squirrel’s biggest fan. I’m not saying that I would deliberately sabotage my husband’s squirrel defenses, but I do continue to oppose this unwarranted prejudice against squirrels. I don’t see why the birds should have everything handed to them. I don't see why the squirrels can't get a break. 

*****

Even with the rather extreme heat and humidity this summer, we’ve had few thunderstorms, but we’re making up for it now. It’s Tuesday, the second day in a row of thunderstorms. We need the rain, but I also need to go swimming. Me vs. nature: Nature wins, every time. 

Really, that’s true for anyone vs. nature, but some of us, like the person I’m married to, will try to fight the inevitable. In brand-new Arlo footage released this morning, a small black squirrel (the same one? A new one?) leapt from the fence and landed on the new bird feeder and hung on for a few minutes before finally dropping to the ground. The new bird feeder is slippery, and the little ledge where the birds roost, stuffing themselves on free birdseed, is nothing but a narrow wire, so there’s not much for the squirrel to cling to. But my husband is not the only one who’s not giving up. That squirrel is going to keep trying, and I’m here for him. He’s an underdog, just like USA Men’s Gymnastics, and look what happened there. 

*****

I’ll continue to root for the squirrels but I draw the line at raccoons, especially the agile and daring variety of raccoon that climbs trees and hangs upside down and then digs right into our bird feeder, which is there for the birds. And the squirrels. My husband got up in the middle of the night to chase the raccoon away after an Arlo notification on his phone alerted him to its presence. Later footage revealed that the stupid raccoon came right back and stuffed itself on bird seed. The bird feeder is still in place, but it won’t be for long if this fat-ass nocturnal rodent keeps swinging from it. Bird feeders are not designed to hold ten pounds of obese trash panda. So we’re going to the mattresses. My husband bought a humane trap, and will take his prisoners to the woods adjacent the Turkey Branch Parkway. This of course will avail us nothing except for new raccoons, but my husband will never stop fighting nature, no matter his win-loss record. 

American Wiseacre

 I do love when I discover a new author - new to me, that is, because my “new” authors are often quite old if not dead. This one is very much alive, and not all that old, either. 

*****

After finishing a book of essays, I had planned to return to my now-beloved Margery Sharp but then I noticed Elizabeth McCracken’s Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry in my library, and decided to read it instead. I felt like reading another novel and didn’t realize until I started it that Here’s Your Hat is not a novel but a short story collection. Short stories are just as good, though. Apparently, I’m in my fiction era. 

Elizabeth McCracken was quite young when she wrote these stories, which are populated with quirky American archetypes - circus performers, aspiring Quiz Kids, old vaudevillians, clannish large families, con artists, even convicts. McCracken’s older characters - usually the parents and grandparents of the narrators (the stories are almost all told in the first-person) - remember the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression and World War II.

This collection was published in the early 90s, a time of modern attitudes and rapidly emerging technology and major social change and political upheaval. But McCracken’s frame of reference remains firmly rooted in the American 20th century, which most of us didn’t imagine would ever end. The 21st century isn’t even foreshadowed. Neither McCracken nor her characters seemed to have any idea of what was about to happen. I certainly didn’t. 1993 was a long time ago. 

*****

I don’t know if Elizabeth McCracken ever read Flannery O’Connor, but it seems very likely that she did. O’Connor’s influence is evident in these stories, most notably in the elegant and stylish and accomplished mothers who are ambitious for their daughters and the daughters who disappoint their mothers by being rough around the edges or unconventional or uninterested in marriage and children and social status. That’s another American archetype - the mismatched mother-daughter pairing of a no-nonsense, relentlessly upbeat, stylish and beautiful mother, and the daughter who rebels against all that perfection. Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher are the best real-life examples that pop into my mind, but there are many more. 

*****

During the first year of the pandemic, I watched “Better Call Saul,” an episode or two a day, with my then 16-year-old son. Almost every night, at the end of the virtual school and work day, with dinner cleaned up and the house in order, we’d sit down together for our daily BCS episode. My husband and older son soon began to watch with us, and we all looked forward to that daily distraction from the disaster that was the year 2020. 

As I have written before, Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is a character who could not be imagined anywhere but in America in the 20th century. My sons are both as American as can be, but they are also young. “Who is Karnak?” they would ask. “What’s ‘Let’s Make a Deal’?” And I would explain. But it was more than TV and movie and other cultural references. Jimmy McGill was the embodiment of the brash, confident, almost reckless optimism of 20th century America, and there is no way to explain him to a person born in the 21st century. Sometimes, you literally have to be there. And I would explain that to them, too. I’d explain how when I was young, some things were very much as they are now, but other things were just so different that it was as if we’re living in another country altogether. I guess Elizabeth McCracken knows this now, too, 30 some years after she published these stories. 

*****

I started with McCracken’s earliest published work and just finished with her most recent novel, The Hero of this Book, described by one reviewer as a love letter to McCracken’s late mother. It’s a beautiful book, and defies categorization, though I suppose if I had to place it in a genre, it would fall under A for autofiction. The first-person narrator of this novel is a writer like McCracken remembering her brilliant, charismatic, beloved mother. The narrator's mother is disabled though she hates the word and refuses to yield to pressure to accept help, use a wheelchair, and stop moving. She understands that motion is life, and so she won’t stop moving. She walks slowly and she falls down regularly but she gets up and walks again, one slow and hesitant step after another

McCracken’s alter ego, a successful author, recalls her early work - stories about elderly confidence artists, circus performers, wannabe child prodigies, convicts - the stories of Here’s Your Hat. She continually breaks the fourth wall, addressing readers directly, challenging us to figure out what’s truth and what’s fiction. It’s the Epimenides paradox in fictional form - “All writers are liars. But I’m a writer. And I’m telling the truth.” McCracken even mentions the paradox, making the comparison explicit. She is the Cretan (not cretin lol) in this scenario. 

And McCracken’s brilliant, funny, beautiful, self-assured, and infuriating mother is the titular hero of this book. “An American wiseacre,” McCracken calls her. I can think of no higher praise and no better epitaph. 

May you live in somewhat uninteresting times

I saw a crape myrtle in bloom yesterday. My own crape myrtle is still green. Our neighborhood is full of crape myrtle, and as beautiful as they are, they are also a reminder that summer is at its peak and that we are on the downward trajectory toward fall and winter. July 4 was just over a week ago, and it seems like a distant memory. 

It’s Friday, and I’m so relieved, and not because the work week is over. I like working, although I love time off, too. I’m relieved because I had to tackle several unpleasant things this week, things that I had been dreading, and that are all done now. I had to go to the dentist to have two old fillings repaired, and it didn’t hurt a bit. I had to attend a mid-week social gathering among people I barely know, and I had a pretty good time. I had to make some phone calls and run some errands and deal with repair people - check, check, and check. My list is all crossed off. I handled my business. 

*****

It's Saturday now. We're at a summer swim meet, watching my niece and nephew swim. We know a few other families at this pool so we have plenty of swimmers to cheer for. 

We missed my nephew's first event because we are new alumni parents, still reveling in the freedom of unscheduled Saturday mornings. We still love summer swimming, but a summer swim meet is even better when you roll in at 10, like a gosh darn boss. “Oh, nice of you to make an appearance,” the people say. Why yes, it is nice of us, isn’t it? 

*****

Sometimes a summer rainstorm clears the atmosphere, pushes out the heat and humidity and leaves the world feeling refreshed. Sometimes it does the opposite. It rained on Thursday night and on and off yesterday, and today is blazing hot and jungle humid. The air is hard to describe - it's somewhere in between solid and liquid and vapor. Dense. Heavy. Sultry. Definitely not a day for handling business.  

*****

It’s Sunday now, and we’re just home from another swim meet; this time, the Swim Reapers against a bunch of other alumni swim teams in a Sunday morning meet. Once again, we missed an early event because once again, we pulled up at 10, because we can. It was already 90 degrees at 10 in the morning and I stood close to the pool to take advantage of the splashing. Between my niece and nephew and our friends’ kids and our son’s club and alumni meets, we are attending more swim meets this summer than when we were actual summer swim parents. 

And that is all good because attending a swim meet as a spectator is a top ten favorite thing to do for me, and because we all need to get away from the TV and radio coverage and the Godforsaken social media speculation on yesterday’s assassination attempt. The 2024 election just nudged the 2020 election. “Hold my beer,” said 2024 to 2020, smirking. 

*****

Despite Saturday’s events, this weekend was oddly relaxing, even restful. We did everything we had previously planned to do but the heat forced us to slow our pace and take breaks. The next few weeks will be busy and demanding and this weekend was the calm before the proverbial storm. Or maybe it was just calm amid the storm. Maybe that’s the only kind of calm we’re ever gonna get anymore. It’s still ferociously hot and will be so for the next few days, and then it’s supposed to cool down a little bit. The weather, that is. I’m afraid that things are going to feel pretty hot for the next few months, no matter what the thermometer says. Oh to live in less interesting times. Oh to experience precedented events. 

Chalk art

My summer days, at least the weekdays, are pretty much the same as any day any time of the year. I start work, either in the office or at home, at about 7:40 AM. I finish work a few minutes after 4, and then I shut down my desk, or I drive home. But summer evenings are very different from evenings any other time of the year. On every other evening, I do kind of boring adult stuff - housework, laundry, errands, gym, volunteer work, etc. It usually feels like a second workday - no big deal since my workdays are not too hard and I like doing stuff, but I do always feel like I have to keep to a schedule and that I can’t, or at least shouldn’t rest until I have fulfilled all of my responsibilities. An occasional dinner out on a Tuesday or Wednesday or an occasional weeknight Capitals game are nice breaks in the routine, but other than those little breaks, I do pretty much stick to the routine. 

Summer evenings, however, are quite different. I still run errands and clean stuff and cook stuff (though not as much of the cooking) but the late sunset makes the evening feel free and unhurried, like I don’t have to race the daylight. The pool remains open until 8:45 PM so I go swimming at 7:30 or 8. The water is often cold at that time of day, but it doesn’t matter. Cold or warm or anywhere in between, swimming is freedom.  

And summer weekends are just brand new, now that I am no longer a summer swim parent. Two wide-open days - I hardly know what to do with myself, really. 

*******

On the 10th and last of a streak of cloudless rainless hot sunny days, I came home from work and did some routine household chores, and then I went swimming. 

When you arrive at our neighborhood pool, you check in at a desk in the breezeway of a small mid-century pool building that has locker rooms and a guards’ office on one side of the breezeway and the snack bar on the other. A concrete walkway continues past the building and through the grassy grounds down to the pool deck. I stepped carefully as I walked down that walkway, to avoid stepping on and spoiling the gallery of chalk art flowers and dolphins. The flowers and dolphins are the work of young swim team members, who decorate the pool on Friday nights to welcome visiting teams on Saturday morning. The drawings remained bright and clear on the concrete after five days. 

I swam for a bit, and then watched the second annual neighborhood cornhole tournament, in which my son and one of his best friends repeated as champions. The other boy’s mother and I were pretty invested in their victory. Once a sports mom, always a sports mom, I guess. The tournament was over before 8, so I got back in the water to swim some more. Getting in and out and back into the water is something I do only when it’s really hot. It was a rather perfect summer evening. Then the heat finally broke a bit, with a late evening rain and thunderstorm that lasted into the night. The rain refreshed the real flowers, but it washed the chalk flowers away.

*****

It’s sunny again today, and the grass in our neighborhood looks green again. It hadn’t turned brown yet but it was starting to look a little pale and colorless. We’re in what I think of as the middle phase of summer. Early summer lasts from Memorial Day until the beginning of meteorological summer, which started last week. I guess you could call those weeks pre-summer, especially if you still have children in public school. Now it’s fully summer, schools are closed, and the summer swim season is well underway. The water is warm now. Last weekend it was close to too warm but it cooled a bit after one cool night, and it will be cooler still today after last night’s thunderstorm. I’m swimming almost every day. 

*****

I’ve been trying to build my endurance and increase my swim distances, and I’m back up to 800 meters in the pool, pretty much without stopping. That’s just about half a mile. I’m slow but I have never cared about my times, and I’m not about to start now. One night, when I was maybe two laps in, a 17-year-old boy took the lane next to me. He had missed swim practice and was doing the team’s set on his own. He lapped me consistently, as well he should because he’s a 17-year-old competitive swimmer and I’m a middle-aged lady if we’re being really optimistic about my potential lifespan. I mean, I’m not going to live to 118, God willing. But even though this disrespectful young whippersnapper easily doubled me in pool lengths, he got out of the pool before I did. So I outlasted him on both ends of that set. And that means I won. 

*****

Every year, I have the same conversation, usually with multiple people. Sometimes I start this conversation, and sometimes someone else initiates, but the upshot is the same: Summer is great and everything but the moment July 4th comes, it feels like it’s winding down, no matter what the calendar says. 

Just a few days before July 4, I had this conversation for the first time this summer. I don’t remember who started it, but people kept entering the chat, as they say on the internet. One person said that on July 5, we’d start to see back-to-school advertising. Another person complained that the stores would be stocked with Halloween candy and decorations by mid-August. I said that July 4 felt like the first stop on a freight train to Labor Day; and that once Labor Day was over, it felt like there would be no further stops until Christmas. The very next day, I received an email notification that preorders were being accepted for the University’s annual holiday ornament. The train’s not even stopping at Labor Day anymore. All aboard. See you in December.

*****

As much as I love summer, it’s too hot these last two days even for me. Very hot, and so densely humid that I just don’t understand how the air is even holding all that water. But it is; it’s just holding on to it and not letting it go. Days that in other summers would almost certainly end in Old Testament thunderstorms just continue sunny and bright until almost 9 PM. 

I’m lucky, of course. I work indoors in an air-conditioned office and I drive my air-conditioned car home to my air-conditioned house. And then I walk around the corner to the pool and I swim until my eyes burn and my fingers are pruny and the chlorine permeates my skin. 

It’s so hot that everyone is getting in the pool now. People who normally sit on the deck reading their books are now in the water up to their necks. People who normally swim laps are just splashing around, floating, treading water. On the day after my 800-meter swim, my shoulders hurt and so the next day, I swam like a child, flitting back and forth in the water, floating on my back, swimming in zig zags and circles and straight lines through one of the shallow “wings” of the pool. I didn’t do any headstands or somersaults, but I could have. 

*****

It’s now about 10 days since that first thunderstorm. Other than a 30-minute shower late in the day on July 4, there’s been no rain; just blazing heat and intense humidity. My husband is out watering the tomatoes. He’d water the grass if I let him but I won’t. The forecast for the next few days is pretty much the same as it could be for any day in July in the DMV - hot, humid, chance of late-day showers and thunderstorms. Meteorologists here could pretty much take the month off, post that forecast on repeat every day, and they’d be right eight times out of ten. The swim team has its last home meet this week, so the chalk art will be back, at least for a little while.