Twelve days, part 1

I'm not a huge fan of Christmas for the normal reasons (too commercial, too religious in a way that doesn’t suit me, too much shopping, too many tired miserable mothers trying to please everyone), plus it’s just so dark at this time of year. Truly, it is light-ish for a short short while between about 9 am and 3 pm. I know, we score in June, when, if you put on your raingear and are able to stay up late enough, the lights on my tree will be even more stunning than pictured below, if you can fathom that.

But I thought I’d try to celebrate the season better than I did last year, when my only nod to Christmas was to pick a branch up from the side of the road where it fell in a windstorm, and decorate it with tinsel and lights. This year, I’m trying to be more festive, beginning right now, by celebrating all of the gifts, real and imagined.

It turns out I have a bit of catching up to do. I’ll try to do 12 days; we’ll see if that pans out.

On Sunday, which I think will turn out to be Day 2, depending on whether I do any back tracking to consider R.'s sports injury, I received my first actual gift, a bracelet and some tree decorations from Joey. R and I picked him up hitchhiking the other day and he immediately gave me the gifts, which I will photograph later. I know! R. thinks it’s ridiculous to get excited about this because a) I don't usually wear plastic wreath jewelry, and b) well, R. seemed to think he was going to give those particular gifts to whomever picked him up, which may be true, but didn’t lessen it in any way. I am unable to fit into the tiny Christmasy bracelet.

Fa la la

What do you think, the tasteful solar LED display, or the neighbors rather garish electric lights? (Oh, was that leading the witness?) I'll let you figure out which is which.

The week ahead, ish.

Preramble:

Okay, I got a comment about last weeks’ horoscopes from one of my faithful readers that I would ever so hate to disappoint. The comment was that there was too much focus on the waxing gibbous. Um, okay, but this information comes from the stars, so if you don’t want mention of the sky, you should probably read something else. And speaking of the moon, we sure did see a lot of it last week, and it was especially lurky, don’t you think? Which is the one good thing of how we’re all stumbling around in the dark this time of year. And not to distract too much from the timely predictions that follow, but I’d like to say that my pathetic solar lights twinkle very, very dimly for about 20 minutes each evening before they exhaust the tiny bit of charge they get from their placebo solar panels. It is a very subtle, tasteful display that I will try to capture on film. And now, the predictions:

Aries (3/21 – 4/19): You should help me with these horoscopes. Oh wait, it’s astronomy you’re interested in. It’s always science science science with you people. This week, focus on scenery for once. Take that eye protection off and look around for a minute. You’ll be amazed.

Taurus (4/20 – 5/20): Wake up! Oh, you are awake? Sometimes procrastination is solved by creating a little passion for the task. Try taking a look at Jupiter, which is a hundred times brighter than Capricorn this week, and see if you can summon a little enthusiasm.

Gemini (5/21 – 6/21): Seriously, a tattoo? That just smacks of mid-life crisis. I think you’d look better in a red car, personally. Don’t you need some advice? Or don’t you know someone who does? Don’t forget about Cortnee, khortnee@gmail.com, who, as you may know, is a Gemini too.

Cancer 6/22 – 7/21: Does it bother you to have an astrological sign that they named a life-threatening virus? That doesn’t seem fair. Who would do that? The other signs aren’t named “flu epidemic” or “pestilance”. But they also named the tropics after you, so plan a trip there. If I were the boss of the astrology, instead of just a medium (is that what it's called?), I would definitely give your sign a beautiful name, like Emily.

Leo (7/23 – 8/22): I know! It is ridiculous, what you must do each week. Make those talented siblings cook for you. The moon is teaming up with Mars and Regulus, so watch out. (Yes, Regulus is an actual thing in the sky, not a real star, but more of a spectroscopic binary.)

Virgo (8/23 – 9/22): We all have that thing of, “oh, wait, did I say that out loud?” Don’t worry, it’s not just you, don’t feel bad. (Well, everyone except for those Taurii, who don’t say much of anything.) Keep saying what you say, everyone wants to hear it.

Libra (9/23 – 10/22): With more than a hundred galaxies out there, odds are, you’ll find your people. As always, this is a good week to learn semaphore code. And fix the damn heat already.

Scorpio (10/23 – 11/21): Must I say this every week? Drive carefully! (How many cupholders does one person need?) Hang on, days will be getting longer again. Call right away if the abyss gets any closer.

Saggitarius (11/22 – 12/21): Of course these are real horoscopes. Sheesh. Would someone clean the blood off the keyboard, by the way? (This is not an idle request. It can’t possibly be good for us, either psychically or astrologically. Not to mention it’s just gross.). It is crowded out there. Get stuff delivered, stay in. With the waning moon, it will be even darker than usual. Make something yummy.

Capricorn (12/22 – 1/19): Don’t feel jealous of Jupiter, even though it’s so dominant this week. Make a nice plate of cookies and take it over there. (Drop some by here, if you have extras, especially if you make those round buttery ones rolled in confectioner’s sugar.) Oh, and your week is looking good! I see something up ahead, I can’t quite make out the details, but it’s good.

Aquarius (1/20 – 2/18): You should definitely bring lunch for your favorite astrologer one day this week, it is written in the stars. Spica is a few degrees left of the moon, which, well, that's where you live too, right? At any rate, it bodes well for your next date.

Pisces (2/19 – 3/20): This might be the hardest week of your life, but each week following will get a tiny bit easier. Focus on the exhale. And that zit on your nose, that’s the least of your worries.

Why a blog?

I’ve been asked by a few people why I have a blog, which is a fair question. It's because I like to write. I like to write, but I also want to be read. Writing little stories privately isn’t as satisfying as writing with the idea that someone will read the words.

There’s a beautiful quote from Natalie Goldberg, “The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.”

That sums it up. Writing is a way of savoring the little things that happen that make me laugh, or wake me up from my rut, or remind me of just how great life is, as trite as that sounds. It’s a way of gently breathing life into the mundane, being aware of the amazing stroke of good fortune I’ve had, to be alive when I am, amongst all of the interesting and kind people I know, with the particular children I was lucky enough to get. And sometimes I forget that, but not when I write.

So, thank you all so much for reading.

cobbling

The other night, R. was talking about how boring his sister M. is. During the conversation, though, he remembered that she’s actually very fun.

“Oh, we should totally record this conversation and e-mail it to her.” He runs upstairs, rummages for about 3 seconds, and comes back with a digital tape recorder that I gave him several years ago. It seemed amazing that he located it, given what he calls his “looking disability”. Example: the other day, I came home and he had a small cut from “cobbling”. (You might want to see the movie, ‘Away We Go’, it’s sweet and quirky and the lead characters are attractive in a normal way, not an over-the-top manufactured way. I don’t want to spoil it, but the relevant bit is that they call whittling “cobbling”, which caused R. to want to be 'the kind of son who’s cobbling on the porch when you get up in the morning’. Um, okay.) At any rate, he has this cut and says, “We should definitely keep band-aids around.”

“We do have band-aids,” I respond.

“Right, maybe we do, but not where anyone could ever find them.” I notice that he has some scotch tape or something on his finger.

“R, I’m pretty sure any random person who’s ever been in a house before would be able to find them in about 30 seconds.”

“That’s not true, mom. Go try it, I’ll time you.”

I walk into the bathroom, open the top drawer next to the sink, and pull out the band-aids. Seven seconds.

“Mom, seriously, no one would look there.”

This might be a trait that comes down the paternal line; his father doesn’t know, for example, what goes in the top drawer of a dresser (socks, underwear, things like that =normal; shoes, car parts, silverware = unusual), and I mean that in the least judgmental way possible.

He starts taping: “Hello M. For a bit of background, I think you’re very boring, but it’s not all your fault. We’re going to talk about this a little bit on tape.”

I’m thinking about how this is going to go down, like when R gave me the most helpful tip a few weeks ago that my pants made me look fat. “Oh, R., is this the proverbial, “those pants make your butt look big comment?” “Not just the butt,” he responds. “It’s the whole pants area.” I have to say, as disappointing as it was, I’ve really been enjoying that turn of phrase, “the whole pants area.” I told the boys at work, who laughed pretty hard, and now each time I eat, they do this motion, palms together, horizontal and then fanning out, skyward and landward, and just say, “the whole pants area.”

So thinking about the pants area comment, I was a cross between enthusiastic about Riley's creativity, and nervous about how it could go, sibling-wise. Kidney donation-wise. "Hey, R., maybe we could do this on the weekend when we have more time."

“Yeah, Mom, that’s totally gonna happen. Hey, guys, I can’t hang out this weekend. See, me and my mom are making a fake radio show for my sister. Yeah, so, kinda busy, you understand.”

At any rate, don't give up on the blog just yet. It's not gonna be all about pants. Something is bound to happen...

Joey

Yesterday, I picked Joey up hitchhiking for the first time in a couple of months. I had started to wonder if something bad had happened, which would have been quite plausible. But he was fine, in fat, he was more coherent than usual.

I met Joey, if you could call it that, on the side of the road a few years ago, but he wasn’t hitchhiking -- I thought he was dead. I was driving home on a hot summer afternoon, and saw a body next to the roadside ditch, positioned exactly like it would be if it had been pushed unconscious from of the back of a pickup truck.  Face down, arms sprawled into the gravel.

I drove past, thinking, no, I didn’t just see that, there really wasn’t a body, hands over eyes singing "la la la", but I turned around anyway, and there really was a body.

I pulled over and stood near him.  “Hey, you okay?” (I know. That’s the dumbest thing ever to say. Like this dead person is gonna say, “yeah, I’m doing great, just relaxing here for a bit with my face in the gravel.” But even with a dead person, you have to start somewhere.) I tried to make my voice firm but maternal, and talk to him in a “you’re gonna miss the bus” sort of way, but got no answer. I called 911, and they asked me questions. Can you tell what happened? Is there a car or a bike? Is he breathing? Is he alive? I couldn't answer any of her questions, so she said I probably had better not touch him.  I was relieved to comply.

Because of the topography, I could hear the ambulance coming all the way from town, their sirens ricocheting off the forested hillside. As I stood there, a neighbor pulled up.

“Is it Doc?” she asked, almost sobbing.

“I don’t know.”

This neighbor, whom I barely knew, was always on the edge of tears.  I noticed her walking a lot, around and around in a loop, with and without a dog. This was before her son, 40-ish, died of alcoholism, and her husband died of cancer. None of it had happened yet, but I think she could see this stuff on the horizon, and always looked like she had been, or was about to cry. Although we’d passed each other on walks and said hello for years, I didn’t know her. We hadn’t yet had that day, a year or so later, when I ran into her at the grocery store the day after her husband died. She was having a meltdown because the clerk wouldn’t exchange the unopened package of Depends that her husband wouldn’t need anymore, and I somehow got enlisted to assist with the transaction.  The clerk was unnecessarily rigid about refunding the money for her dead beloved's unused diapers.

“I don’t know who it is,” I repeated. She ran over to the body, and peeled the face off of the side of the road, while I watched, cringing, hoping there wasn’t already a spinal injury.

“Oh my god, it’s Joey!” she cried, and dropped him, letting his face slam down on the gravel roadside.

“Is he dead?” she asked me again.

It seemed like a strange question, because she was the one who had just touched him, but I just said I didn’t know. “I think I’d better move your truck.” She had leaped out of her enormous dodge pickup, leaving it running in the middle of the curvy road, door open.

When I returned, she was still yelling. “Joey, listen to me. Get up right now. Do you know where you are, Joey? Your mother would not be proud of you.”

When I saw the face, I recognized it. It was severely disfigured to a degree that made it difficult to look at: a local man who had tried unsuccessfully, 20 years earlier, to commit suicide by shooting a gun off in his mouth.  He lived through the incident, which left him with extreme facial scarring and speech that is difficult to understand.

My neighbor kept shaking him, which kind of scared me, because I thought that could be bad if he either had been pushed out of a truck, the way it looked, or if he were on a bad drug trip, which also seemed plausible.

“Joey, get up. Have you been drinking?”

“I had a little sip of vodka,” he replied. But it was hard to understand, partly because of the vodka, but partly because he has no back of his throat.

“I don’t even want to get up. I got nothing to live for, no one cares about me,” he slurred.

Judy looked back at me. “What’s your name again?”

Betsy.

“Betsy cares about you, Joey.”

I got a little nervous then, because I really wasn’t very sure at all how much I did care. I definitely cared in a generic way, like, I certainly wish you no harm kind of way, but I wasn’t so sure I cared in a specific, ‘sure, Joey, I’m your reason to live, we can get together for popcorn and stuff’ sort of way.

At about this point, the volunteer firemen pulled up, four of them in a jeep, and leaped out. “Joey, get up. What are you doing on the side of the road?”

I realized I was the only one around who didn’t know Joey by name, who didn’t already know that if he were lying in a ditch, it was because he was drunk. I was busy processing thoughts of sheesh, if his life was hard and depressing enough to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger before, just think of it now, with the inability to communicate, the extremely disfigured face, and the alcoholism. I would drink a lot too, if that were my story.

I left after the firemen arrived, and heard later that they took him home and put him to bed.

Since that time, when I see him on the side of the road hitchhiking, I pick him up. For a while, I was giving him a ride about three times a week. (For some reason, hitchhiking is still a main form of transportation on this little hill for a lot of people. I’m pretty sure that’s not true everywhere.) He doesn’t remember our first meeting, but I feel a strange responsibility for him now. 'Betsy cares', the woman had said, which was a lie that day, but is, surprisingly, true now. Yesterday, when he hopped into my car, stinking of stale cigarettes, alcohol, and something else unwashed, and slurred his greeting, I was glad to see him.

When I drive him home from town, he’s usually drunk and incoherent. But he talks nonstop, and I try to understand what he’s saying. He goes on for several minutes in this chatter that I can’t make out, and then invariably says something that I can, like, “You, friend, you understand me.” I nod as if it were true, but sadly, I not only don’t understand him at any meaningful level, but I have difficulty even making out the words he’s using. When he gets out of the car, he always pounds gently on it three times, and says, “thanks friend. If I see you on the side of the road, down on your luck, I’ll do the same for you.”

When R. is in the car, he always comments to me later, “Mom, if you’re ever so needy that Joey is in some kind of shape to help you, we’re screwed.”

But yesterday, I drove him in to town, which is always better, because he’s not drunk yet. His speech isn’t quite as garbled with alcohol, and his mind is more clear. I learn that his elderly mother has completed her chemo, and has taken the 3 grandchildren on a tribal canoe trip out on Puget Sound (Hey, how do you like that name change to the Salish Sea, btw? I think it’s pretty.) with the Tulalip tribe, although they are Snoqualmies themselves. Joey said he’d kept the house clean, and done the dishes, and fed the cats and dogs. He said he was glad that his mother got to go on a trip because she's been through a lot, and that they’d built a canoe out of a giant cedar tree. I couldn’t tell if that happened at some time in the past, or if they built a canoe just for this particular journey, which seemed to be what he was saying, but was also seemed implausible.

When he got out of the car this time, he told me that the Snoqualmie Casino has been good for him and his family, and that his mother has insurance now, so when she cracked her kneecap, she got it treated right away for free. And he said that the Snoqualmie food bank and medical center is now open to everyone in the valley, not just Native Americans. We’re all Americans, he said. We all need help. He was almost out of the car when he turned back and said, “oh! Come by the food bank on Wednesday. Gobble gobble! We have a turkey for everyone who needs it. Gobble gobble,” he repeated. I told him thanks, but fortunately, I didn’t need a turkey. He said he wants to give everyone that gives him rides a turkey, though, so if I come by, I can definitely get one. We all need help, he said, before he did his ritual of pounding on the car three times, and saying, “goodbye friend. If I see you on the side of the road, down on your luck, I’ll do the same for you.”

If the pants fit.

It’s a little disconcerting, but people keep talking to me about cats. I know. One of my readers wrote to me, “you mean you don’t have cats? I just always assumed you did.” And one of the excellent 14 year olds I know sat down next to me the other day and out of the blue started talking about crazy cat ladies. I did learn some important stuff from her: if you have one cat, you just have a cat. Two cats, still okay, you have a cat, and the cat has a companion. Three cats, and you’re crazy. Okay, got that. But why did she bring this up with me?

A short time later, I had coffee with one of my favorite people, I., who, unprompted, started talking about, yes, cats. The conversation started off to be about procrastination, and we both had a lot to say. But then she said, “for example, I haven’t even been to your blog yet.” I was all, wait, that’s what people do when they are procrastinating. It’s something you find yourself doing when you’re supposed to be doing something else, like writing that letter to your ex-sister-in-law or doing the dishes.” But anyway, without having been here, she started talking about Emily, the cat with locked-in syndrome. Emily follows the conversation by shifting her stare to the person talking, but never says anything. That seems creepy to me, but I guess they like it.

But why did she bring up the cat to me? I do confess that Emily is a good name for a cat, not one of those ironic or literary names that says, look at me, I am so smart that my cat is named after some obscure character from one of the great works. (Okay, I just googled ironically named cats, and there’s a lot out there, but I ended up at a website that had a list of literary names for your pet. But they were names like, “Harry Potter,” with an explanation of where that name comes from. Um, if you have to look that up, I’d say you’re better off naming the cat Fluffy, but that’s just me.)

But here’s the real point. Yesterday at work, while I was on the e-mail with T., (do you like how I called it, “the e-mail”?) Anyway, the co-worker we’ll call J. came along, “Betsy, what size is your inseam?” “Um, why do you ask?” Because, I have some Carhart overalls that don’t fit anymore, and I was wondering if you’d like them.”

Does that seem weird to you guys? Seriously, when you have pants that don’t fit, do you go around asking your co-workers their pants size, or do you just put them in the goodwill box? I brought this up to J. “Um, couldn’t you just put them in the giveaway box?”

“Oh, but these are Carharts, really good ones, I just thought you might like them.”

“I dunno,” I said, “I have enough trouble with the whole cat impression problem without wearing the used logger-brand overalls of a 60 year old man,” which, unfortunately, seemed to insult him. But you see my point, right?

I wrote to T. about this as it was unfolding, who thought it was the funniest thing ever, and replied, “oh, I just wrote the most hilarious response, but it turns out I’m way too sensitive of a guy to write it to you on County e-mail. I am still wondering what it was, and I’m sure it was very funny.